Month: October 2008

End of term

Term ends in a week and a half. This Friday, I meet my classes for the last time for “reflection and review” (comically abbreviated as “R & R” on the timetable), and then I just need to go for some closing dinners, write some reports, supervise a camp, attend some meetings and hand things over to my unlucky successors… and then I’ll be done here.

Holy shit. That’s way too soon. I need to thwack a few more misbehaving students on the head with my large plastic file, or else I’ll leave here with a severe sense of underachievement. 

I’ll probably do some “R & R” of my own on my brief teaching stint here at some point (summary: I don’t think I could have had a better first posting), but for now, I need to find me some students to thwack.

Reunion Book

I received my Fifth-Year Reunion book in the mail this week. I’d been getting (and ignoring) reminders over the last few months to fill up a personal-updates page online, which would then be printed and sent to everyone in the class of 2003.

iPod nano: Thinner than a reunion book.
iPod nano: Thinner than a reunion book.

The first thing I did when I got the book — after marvelling at how heavy it was, then attempting to kill a cockroach with it — was to check if my ex had submitted a page. She had, and after reading it (semi-disinterestedly, I’d like to claim), I turned to where my update page should be, as if to check if I’d submitted something and completely forgot about it.

(I hadn’t.)

Many of my best friends from college hadn’t submitted their pages, either. Maybe it’s because we know we don’t need to catch up in a book sent out five years after graduation; more likely, it’s because we’re all ridiculously lazy, and that’s why we got along so well in the first place. Anyway, I’ve been very lucky in having been able to see them pretty often, thanks to the work trips (three in just over a year!), and many have come to Singapore.

In hindsight, it would have been terribly amusing to send in a whole series of Chicken comics to put on my page. Maybe someday I’ll write a blog post answering the questions posed (“favourite Stanford memory”, “life after Stanford”, “current life motto”). Or maybe I’ll be too ridiculously lazy to do it.