yo there

Je pense qu'il y a un raison pour la douleur. Oui, pourquoi y a-t-il la douleur? Je sais pas. Mais j'espere seulement qu'il y aura un jour quand tes yeux ouvront.

Chinese is over. *sigh* And now holidays can begin proper! Haha, yes, I am absolutely thrilled. This is partly because of the Holiday Plan but it is also because of the thought that in a few months time, a certain bride will be wearing my design and it will be amazing because nobody designs like me. All right, cut me some slack, I'm still a little child as compared to the gods of design. I'm sure I will in time, look at my designs and feel an overwhelming urge to bury my head somewhere but until then, I believe that slowly, I am building up the momentum to roll over the current design gods to make way for me. Of course, accompanying this is a recent decrease in my interest for studying. I may be an academic in certain ways but I will never live amongst books. It is simply not my way.

Did I mention also that I revel in being ugly? It is a beautiful thing, to be ugly. I refuse to take care of my chapped lips, I refuse to cut my hair or even slather on wax unless a strange whimsy catches me. No, I will not do anything to take care of my appearance other than keeping myself extremely clean. I think it's a sort of frustrated admission that I'll never look good enough so I might as well look as if I don't care. Yes, I can be so schizo sometimes I confuse myself.

Speaking of which, while I would like to go on and on about the inanities of my life. I thought I ought to raise up something of a higher order because it irks me sometimes that I can oscillate between the intellectual high (!!) and the facile low with such a metronomic pace. I suppose all fashion designers will have their moments.

The Cold War did not have its origins in the mid twentieth century and no, to the extent of my personal belief, I cannot see the Cold War as simply a struggle between a Communist Soviet Union and a Capitalist America. This is because I believe that the Cold War was actually the final phase of a much larger conflict which actually has its roots in something so simple that I was sort of miffed when I thought of it. Go back to the 17th century when Russia was one of the greatest nation on Earth, besides China of course. Poised at the eastern flank of Europe with the Ottoman Empire to the south, she was a continual threat to Europe as we know it today. The fact that the great Russian empire arose from a tiny city called Muscovy is clear evidence that yes, Russia was clearly expansionistic as it was imperialistic. This then brings about my main point, that the Cold War was essentially the final phase of a struggle between Europe and Russia. No, it transcended capitalism and communism. After all, both Europe and Russia showed itself clearly able to put aside their ideological differences in the face of greater danger which I believe points to the notion that ideology was never a clear concept set in stone. No, not the protectionism and trade unions of the United States, I mean, come on. Anyway, so what we have here is a Europe that was often fractured and quarrelsome that was also often taken advantage of by Russia. Witness the dismemberment of Poland-Lithuania, the various leagues created out of rival European states such as Anglo-Britain and the Germanies to stand before the Russians and then the Cordone Sanitaire. I would then like to bring about a final idea: the Cold War would have been fought anyway even if the United States did not exist. This is because more than anything, the Cold War marked the period when an anachronistic conflict amongst the West could be brought into the modern era and the only reason why it infected the rest of the world was because of the fact that the West did control most parts of the world then. So yes, I believe that the Cold War would have been fought between Russia and say, Italy, had she been the strongest Western power then. The only difference would be that Russia of course, would have won.

Now, I also believe that the Cold War was intrinsically the evolution of a hitherto cultural conflict into a security clash. And guess which great power is next? You got it. The dragon will rise, to use that cliche. If not in my life then the next. It'd be really interesting to see the tables turn on english-speaking people the world over when they struggle with the chinese language instead.

C'est tout.