A recovering me saying hi to all of you via my camera phone... (Obviously a lousy self-portrait ). Hey, I'm not Mr. Van Gogh, ok?
Do you believe in the power of love? Oops, wrong heading! hee hee hee There! At least I got your attention, right? Well, nothing much. I'd just finished my final Japanese language exam and would like to say hi and thanks to you all who were kind enough to send emails or call. With the power of your positive vibes, I recovered fast. Although still basically frail and tired and having a few more diseases to tackle, namely fibromyoalgia (don't trust my spelling), I'm struggling along just fine.
Life is short and so full of exams, my friends. The real ones and the daily ones. I still have to be the one who give exams to my Chula students on the 24th. May the forces be with them! Oh, how I enjoy designing my exam for others!
Then, on November 20-21, I have my ธรรมศึกษาโท exam. You know, the same one like the Thai monks' นักธรรมโท. But theoretically, and I repeat, theoretically, before that I should have gone up to defend the title of my dissertation at Ram U (what a nice abbreviation for my school, eh?) by Oct 31, the Halloween.
And as if life is not beautiful enough, I am taking the Japanese equivalence of TOEFL exam on December 4. Don't cry for me, Japan. Luckily, like all things Japanese, the system is quite rigid. You have to climb up the corporate ladder. So what I would take would be like the primary school, grade 1, kind of language exam. (Or so i think!) Only 100 kanji (Chinese-based Japanese letters) and 800 Japanese words, plus some basic (that's what they think) grammar. Did I mention the listening comprehension, too? Ooh, this would be the most interesting part. Because although I recently invested in subscribing to the NHK channel and found out that I'm pretty hopeless, to put it nicely.
Anyway, life goes on, until it ends. Wow! This is the one for the quotation book! So my friends, if I die please help put this quote and my name in the quotation book for me, too! Wait, why do I have to wait until I die? May be some editor will see this quote and quote me someday and I'll be famous and win my Nobel Prize for Literature. No, the Nobel Peace Prize sounds sexier, don't you think?, considering the list of previous winners. You know, Dalai Lama, Henry Kissinger, etc...
My best wishes to all of you to the trials and tests you have to go through in your own daily life, my friends. For me, I have plenty. And, believe me, it's much more difficult than my Japanese language exam. Last, but not at all least, I don't know how much longer I will live, folks. So, if you haven't don't so, please book your vacation to spend some time to >> meditate in Chiangmai << with me. It's probably the last thing I can do in this life to thank you as a friend for everything you did for me in this life and previous lives, about which both of us conveniently forgot.
Time is running out. Tick..Tock...Tick...Tock...Tick...Tock....
