I have a very bad reading habit. I have the tendency of reading multiple books in parallel. After I started a book, reading it half way, sometimes even just the first few chapters, I may get distracted by a new book. Then I will put down the old book and start the new one. I just count the number of books that are reading in progress, I have 8 books pending to finish. I am not abandoning the unfinished books, I will still read a few chapters from time to time, until I got distracted by another book again. I just finished a book that I started 2 years ago. Here are the books pending in my reading list:
1. Asimov’s Guide to the Bible
2. Dimensions of Moral Theory
3. Free Culture
4. A History of Christian Thought
5. Philosophy of Bullshit
6. A Good Book, In Theory
7. Philosophy of Law
8. Contemporary Political Philosophy.
The oldest book stuck in the queue started almost 7 years ago. My reading pipeline is so full that I really should refrain myself from the temptation of new books. I should focus on the books in hand and just be content with what I reading. Interesting though, I only have this problem with non-fictions. It is easier to concentrate when reading a fiction. It has the element of a story to keep my attention until I flip to the last page or it’s so boring that I give up.
In 2008, I absented from the Toastmaster most of the year. I have many excuses, like getting marry, travel to India, working on project with ridiculous schedule etc. I went to the Toastmaster year end party before X’mas, mostly for the free pizza. I found that I do miss the enjoyment and satisfaction of delivering a good speech in front of a crowd. Today is the first Toastmaster meeting in 2009. The theme of the day is goal setting. The president of the club try to re-energize the club by having a mini-workshop. During the meeting, he asked the members to think about what they want to archive in club this year.
I am not making any process in my ATM speeches. It’s over a year since I did my last speech. My goal of this year is finishing off my “Humorous Speech” manual and achieve the ATM credential. There are only 4 more speeches to go, my plan is to give one speech every two months. This club has its annual humorous speech contest on Oct. I am going to deliver my last speech as a contest entry. Since I am long time Toastmaster, I feel very natural speaking in front of people. This year, I am going to focus on my pronunciation and the use grammar in my speeches. These two problems are the biggest challenges for most ESL speakers need to overcome.
I had my first ski of the season today. I have been itching to go skiing in the Christmas holidays, but the weather condition is pretty bad for the past two weeks. The weather forecast for this weekend looked good, it said it would be +5 degree rain. I seize the chance and went to Whistler with my friends. The weather was pretty good in the morning, we have some fresh powder snow over the week. The snow base is not enough, there are still rocks and tree tops on some runs, so we have to stay in groomed runs. It’s not too bad for the first ski, since I haven’t ski for almost a year. The lack of train makes my legs get tired easily and I need to recall the muscle memory. We should take it easy today.
However the weather turns bad after lunch. Its windy and getting cold. It is so cold that we rather ski further down the mountain to take the gondola up instead of taking the lift chair. We only had 3 runs in the afternoon and decided to call it a day. The traffic coming back is very bad. We left on 3:30p and took us 3 hours to arrive Vancouver. It was already snowing in the city. Many cars got stuck in snow and blocked the traffic. The rear-wheel drive cars are very annoying. The driver don’t realize their car can’t go up slopes in snow. Yet they still try their way up and blocking off everyone behind. I finally arrive home at 9p.m. safely. If I know it’s going to snow this afternoon, I would probably stay home instead of go skiing.
Next semester, my life begins getting back to normal, I am talking another philosophy course. I had class with this professor before, she is really demanding. In her class, she forbid any students using laptop, even for taking notes, because she think anyone with a laptop would be distracted by surfing the web. The course work load was normal, but her lecture expect us to do the reading before coming into class without explaining much background details. I didn’t do very well in that class, but that’s OK, I won’t really care about my grade.
My first class is staring on Monday and the professor already sent out email to the class to assign next week’s reading. I don’t even have time to buy the textbook yet. Luckily the textbook is available online at Google books, so I have to read the two assigned articles on my laptop this week. The work load of this course is not too bad, just two essays on top of the exams. I did introductory political philosophy last year, I thought the intermediate course would be more or less the same. However, I already found I am learning new ideas on the first two essays. The previous course taught about the all the -ism in political philosophy, this course talk about political theories, which is one layer deeper than the -ism.
這部電影改篇自F. Scott Fitzgerald的短篇小說﹐不過除了保留主線的構思外﹐劇本由《阿甘正傳》的編劇重新操刀。這套戲給觀眾很強烈《阿甘正傳》的感覺﹐也是以回顧主角的一生作為故事的主線。《奇幻逆緣》的故事很平淡﹐只是敘述主角一生的遭遇﹐出世母親難產死被生父遺棄﹐幸得在老人院工作的好心黑婦收養。童年時遇上一生最愛的小女孩﹐不過兩人半生兜轉才走在一起。主角年少時行船工作﹐在西伯利亞的塞凍搭上有夫之婦初戀情人。二次大戰爆發被徵召入伍﹐在海上見盡生敵死別。戰後回老家安頓下來﹐幫養母打理老人院。機遇下再遇上小情人﹐情路岐嶇最終有情人終成眷屬﹐還生了一個可愛的小女孩。豈料在女兒一歲生日那天﹐主角拋妻棄子一走了之﹐去了第三世界浪流。直到臨終前再重遇變了婆婆小情人﹐一起入住老人院走過最後年。主角的經歷普通到無可再普通﹐唯一特別的地方是他一出生便是個八十歲老人﹐年紀越大越返老頑童﹐由老人變成中年再變回少年﹐到最後變成嬰兒﹐在婆婆的懷抱中入睡死去。
