Occasional cases

The haze did clear up by a lot this afternoon, so despite the unrelenting heat, I stood outside the library and took lots of deep breaths. T'was nice not to feel like you're being smothered.

Although now it has resurged and it's making me cough just a bit. Well, it was a nice little respite. I was starting to forget what a blue sky looked like.

This may be just my singular experience, but the only people who want to take the TOEIC that I've only ever come across are Japanese people. Everyone else (ELT or EFL learners, I mean) take either the IELTS or the TOEFL. Apparently you get career brownie points if your company knows you got a good ranking on the TOEIC. Meanwhile, I'm at the 'but the TOEIC is such a lame test!' stage. (It really is! It has questions that test, lemme see, your ability to match a photograph to spoken descriptions, the same type of question and answer thing for grammer and vocabulary you get on the TOEFL except easier and then reading comprehension on things like mock emails, posters, and the like.)

(Ok, I will concede that it is less lame now that since they've added a speaking and writing section to the test.)

A student came in today so I talked to her about what she wanted to achieve: better general English skills aka all-round improvement, or improved TOEIC scores. Guess what she chose. Look, standardised tests are no doubt very useful to have, but really, isn't it more productive to use your precious time - since you work such long hours (7am to 10pm every day is just crazy) - to improve your English overall rather than drill yourself on test-taking skills? Even business English would be more interesting!

Not to say that you won't learn something whilst doing the preparation for TOEIC as I can see I'm going to have to do a quick run-through on basic grammar, etc, but the starting and ending point is TOEIC. So this necessitated picking up the TOEIC preparation kit at Kinokuniya. Have just been looking through it. (Lame!)

Also stopped by the school library to get a book on bankruptcy law. Because my knowledge of bankruptcy law can be summed up in one scientific term: zero. So basically I ended up lugging a textbook, the TOEIC kit, another novel that caught my eye and another knitting magazine. Lugging books is not an advisable activity in this haze, right? *feeling self-aggrieved, even though it was self-inflicted*

Hm, maybe I was a tad too quick in picking my username. But I can't think of a cool name so this will do.

Well, I'm in my thirties, prone to reading and currently working in a place I like to call the imaginary paper. Tho' likely that's coming to a close, so that means the almighty job hunt has begun again.

I daydream too much and am fantastic at putting out invisible 'keep out' signals, which also means that in real life (RL) I'm timid like whoa and actively avoid situations where there's people. In the rest of my free time I surf the net, so I've decided to post links here in lieu of personal bellyaching. That'd give me a useful record and resource for further net-surfing times. (For some reason I never mastered de.li.cious.)

And also books. My besetting sin is buying books, and as penance I have to keep clearing up my shelves and desk to find space to stash them. The ease of buying books online is hell making things even more difficult, but then I had this problem back when I was skulking (still do) around secondhand bookshops, so.

Okay, links next post.

llo