Stole this off Ms Teo's blog. Have fallen in love with it.

Circe's Power

I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
look like pigs.

I'm sick of your world
that lets the outside disguise the inside.

Your men weren't bad men;
undisciplined life
did that to them. As pigs,

under the care of
me and my ladies, they
sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell,
showing you my goodness
as well as my power. I saw

we could be happy here,
as men and women are
when their needs are simple. In the same breath,

I foresaw your departure,
your men with my help braving
the crying and pounding sea. You think

a few tears upset me? My friend,
every sorceress is
a pragmatist at heart; nobody

sees essence who can't
face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.


- Louise Glück

Told some of my schoolmates-to-be that some of my friends think that engineering is a cheapened form of science. Mostly i get the response that i should always 'do the things' i'm 'passionate about and not care what others say'.

Actually, I agree with my friends fifty percent. Engineering stands for pragmatism; it is about getting physical products to improve the quality of human life physically. Science, on the other hand, is more idealistic; it is the quest for truth about the world.

The other fifty percent of me says, 'What's wrong? We have to keep alive before we can find out the truth.'

My real dream is to be a philosophy professor. Or an artist/writer. Or an art/literary critic. But, like I told some people, girls like me are so cynical that we're pragmatic. We don't see a point in fighting the system too much. It'll grind us down anyway =p

P.S. Now that i think about it, should have explained the whole engineering vs science thing properly. Shouldn't have left people thinking that my friends are idiots. =(

Think many adults have this assumption that one's worth is directly proportional to the magnitude of one's suffering. They're always going on and on about the unpleasant things they had to do in their youth, and complaining about the many advantages in our lives.

While I do feel sorry for their plight, i'm no longer in lower secondary where naive students write long touching essays on the nobility of our ancestors (how noble is one who keeps pettily harping on oneself anyway?). It's not our fault that we're so lucky. Having advantages is not a sin.

By the way, i think that there're many western-minded people (including my subconscious self) who think that one's value is proportional to how different one is. You see, if one is different, one is actually thinking for oneself, which in turn means that one is living life consciously, instead of going through it like an insentient android. Sentience is what that gives human beings value; it's what that distinguishes us from animals and inanimate objects.

But of course, as a christian, i know that all humans are of equal value. There's a difference though, between knowing it in the mind and in the heart.