que sara sara

in the past month, i've attended two weddings of people whom i'm not close to. the detachment felt is weird esp since weddings are meant to be a once in a lifetime thing. nevertheless, i was touched by both ceremonies. at mr ng's wedding yesterday, it felt like morning assembly all over again. with the readings, hymns and all. it was short and sweet though. anw, the bride is very pretty. and sh kept trying to take pics of her cos she was assigned to take photo evidences to show yz.

never commit evil deeds. or else bad karma will follow and that you will be plauge by fear and paranoia. just ask my ASM.

i'm supposed to be starting sch in two months time and suddenly when everything has been confirmed, i dont wanna go back to sch. -whine- i'm spending my time experincing quite a number of intriguing activities. just for fun.

which explains why i have yet to replace my lost NRIC. or finish reading all the books i aim to read. or start figuring out the marticulation procedures. priorities priorities.

is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains".

History
In the 1950's, Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT) and Manfred Kochen (IBM) set out to prove the theory mathematically. Although they were able to phrase the question (given a set N of people, what is the probability that each member of N is connected to another member via k1, k2, k3...kn links?), after twenty years they were still unable to solve the problem to their own satisfaction.

In 1967, American sociologist Stanley Milgram (see Small world phenomenon) devised a new way to test the theory, which he called "the small-world problem". He randomly selected people in the American Midwest to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts, several thousand miles away. The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation, and general location. They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient.

Although the participants expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it only took (on average) between five and seven intermediaries to get each package delivered. Milgram's findings were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase six degrees of separation. Playwright John Guare popularized the phrase when he chose it as the title for his 1990 play. Although Milgram's findings were discounted after it was discovered that he based his conclusion on a very small number of packages, six degrees of separation became an accepted notion in pop culture after Brett C. Tjaden published a computer game on the University of Virginia's Web site based on the small-world problem. Tjaden used the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) to document connections between different actors. Time Magazine called his site, The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, one of the "Ten Best Web Sites of 1996".

In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, continued his own earlier research into the phenomenon and recreated Milgram's experiment on the Internet. Watts used an e-mail message as the "package" that needed to be delivered, and surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries), Watts found that the average number of intermediaries was indeed, six. Watts' research, and the advent of the computer age, has opened up new areas of inquiry related to six degrees of separation in diverse areas of network theory such as power grid analysis, disease transmission, graph theory, corporate communication, and computer circuitry.

extracted from Wilipedia.

i've to face it. my body and mind go on overdrive when i dont have enough rest. which means that my body screws up and i think too much. in fact, when i put those thoughts into words, i'll go "huh?" two days down the road re-reading them again.

why is it that i have so many things left undone? i just have this incredible urge to vegetate but it is an impossibility. because (a). after vegetating, i'll probably regret doing nothing when i could have done something; (b). i actually have a schedule planned for the "things to be done/people to meet". failure to adhere to the schedule will result in pangsei-ing people or not meeting deadlines. talking about deadlines, when i've finally decided to understand the marticulation procudures of smu, the site refuses to let me access it. how great.

spontaneity now is sms-ing people and telling them," hi so-and-so, i'm free for lunch/dinner on (insert day) next week. wanna meet?" on the day itself, i may end up feeling vegetative and not want to go. i do enjoy meeting up with people and they are all the more precious since most of these meetings are during snitches of time. BUT i still miss being able to be spontaneous.

guess what? my mum promised to sponser my university wordrobe (although she has yet to say how much. which means i should innocently try to find out the exact figure to prevent any nasty surprises later) and GSS is on but i have no time to shop. at least for the next week. how ironic. and shopping without my atm card (which i lost together with my wallet) is going to suck.

there's still so many things that has to be done. of course there is. blogging about the lack of time to do the things i need and want to do is not going to make things done. what makes me think otherwise? so why do i wish that i can sit around and do nothing at all?

i'm damn lucky not to get into trouble with my parents. considering that i reached home at 3 plus am when i promised i wont be home late. then again, i can be a smart ass and say that 3 plus is early in the morning. so far, they havent mentioned anything yet and i presume i'm qt safe. meaning i will do it again. hahas...

not like i get much opportunity to meet deb at normal hours though. cos our shifts always end up qt diff. i didnt know what struck me to arrange to meet her for supper at midnight when she ends work when i was supposed to end at eight. it felt logical to meet her for supper at that time. in the end, i did end later cos one part-timer was not feeling well so i covered for her and worked till ten. technically i wasted less time in between.

btw, both our managers are such similar people that it's kinda scary. it sounds totally out of pt here but i'm sure deb knows what i mean. in fact, the only reason why the two of us were in orchard searching for a currently non-existent deli was because of them.

oh wells... supper was fun. despite the fact that we're both pretty stoned/tired from work. deb, i'm glad that you can not be vague abt work related stuff with me. i think you'll explode after keeping so much things to yourself. fortunately (or unfortunately), i dont have the same prob. cos i believe in confronting pp regarding the issues. perhaps a bit too much. i do realise that people can have very low tolerance level towards the truth. even if knowing the truth is for their own good. i wonder what will happen if people are more open to honest feedback? but i guess not everyone is matured enough to take constructive criticism.

anw, i'm actually enjoying myself at work although the job itself can get REALLY repetitive. it's always the people who make up the place and livens the experience. i will definitely miss my colleagues when i quit to go back to sch. shucks! when do i get attached to people so easily?