10 August - first month in Perth, 5 months and 26 days till the day you'll see me at Changi Airport.
I got my first tutorial paper mark this morning during history tutorial. Basically, u've got to write a tutorial paper linking the arguments of all the readings in that particular week / topic. There are 12 topics in all, and u have to submit 4 papers as assignments... i.e. u do 4 topics out of 12. Of cos, u can do more than 4 to get a better mark since only the best four are considered. I did a tutorial paper on Orientalism (Week 3 Topic) and i got a 7.5 / 10. Not too bad for a start eh :)
For distinction in any unit, u must get 70% at the end of the day. For high distinction, u must get 80%.
Other marks received so far:
Anthropology online library quiz - 66.8/100, Anthropology online Culture of Poverty Quiz - 6/10, online Economic Anthropology Quiz - 8/10. Anyway, these anthropology marks don't really matter much because as long as you do the quiz and pass it, u'll get the 1% of the total score allocated to each quiz. :)
Gee. I'm actually passing my quizzes.. and i always used to fail them in JC.. cos they were all mathematics quizzes and i'd always just do a random guess, fail it and the maths tutor will interrogate me in front of 32/02. but that was maths, this is the humanities and this is me now.
UWA has a symposium on "Islam, Terrorism and Democracy" tmrw and one of the speakers is actually the first journalist who interviewed Osama in his caves in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.. looking forward to that. And this same guy gave a lecture today on his experiences in Iraq and our lecturer Dr Yasmeen was asking him, "so where is osama now?"
He said: "If I told you, you'd go and get your $25 million reward asap."
Dr Yasmeen is funny.. she thinks that Osama has cute eyes, that Gorbachev is so god-damn sexy (she actually said that during the lecture when she was talking abt the Cold War..) :)
I always get freaked out during PS tutorials because everyone is fighting for the chance to say sth wise and I'll be silently sitting there hoping to formulate my thoughts.. today's tutorial was on "Why did the US attack Iraq in March 2003? Use the various approaches to study int'l politics to answer this qn"...
Then towards the end of the tutorial I asked, "Can we draw any parallels btwn the situation in Iraq now and that of the former Yugoslavia? Like, the Kurds are trying to form their own state, Iran is helping Shi'ite militants in terrorist bombings in Iraq cos they wanna form their own state that is friendly towards Iran.. since Iran is predominantly Shi'ite... like, that happened in Yugoslavia too. SU collapsed, communism disintegrated (i.e. no more iron rule = compare to Saddam Hussein) and the various ethnic groups (Bosnians, Serbs, Croats) rapidly found themselves in a bloody civil war..."
And the tutor (Liza) was like, "Gee. i don't think any academican has ever written sth on the comparisons btwn Iraq and former Yugoslavia. Sounds like a very interesting possibility to me".
Yeah. I'm happy today. Going back to cook pasta... :)