Don't ever want to look at another male face again. 

This is what Psychology – specifically, three hours of face averaging – does to you.

New Year's day came and went. Can't remember a time when it had ever held less significance to me. Time flows onwards boundlessly, and years, months, days, hours and minutes are just human attempts to exert control over this faceless mass which bears us inexorably onwards towards death. Death, how's that for a morbid way to start the 'New Year'? 

Time is one thing, and the new year another. The New Year celebration is important. It keeps us moving forward. It gives us hope. It lets us believe that no matter which gutter we've managed to get ourselves stuck in, we can put that behind and start anew, blissfully ignoring the fact that we're probably still crawling around that same hole. We make resolutions to keep ourselves happy, reassure ourselves that whatever fictive future we have fashioned for ourselves can and will be realised. 

All these man-made conventions we've created to cling on to our sanity. Such necessary delusions.

I have always tried to be objective, by which I mean I try to looking at things from a distance, examine the various points of view held by the various agents, and if necessary, decide which seems the most logical or reasonable. Perhaps what I mean by 'being objective' also involves looking at an issue, (and here Catholicism seems the most pertinent one) and trying to view it as one who is not a Catholic. By looking at it as such, I can criticise and understand the criticisms levelled at the church by those around me. I have mentioned before that if I hadn't been born a Catholic, I would probably have ended up as a very objective agnostic. 


But what if there is no True Objectivity? To be objective would be to view the world and its issues through uncoloured lenses, to be impartial and to see only the cold hard facts. Perhaps the Cold Hard Fact is that a person can and will never be able to do so, his view already coloured by the all-pervading philosophical paradigm that prevails in his generation. Or any paradigm, really, ideological and scientific alike. 



What is True Objectivity then? Is it looking for What The World Really Is, or the ability to see it as it Truly Is? In other words, it's a search for the truth. Is this the same Truth that so confused Pilate? It must be prepostorously paradoxical then, to subscribe to one camp to seek its version of the truth, hoping that it is The Truth. Perhaps that was what paralysed poor Pilate in his unenviable position. If there is one certainty at all in this verbiage of alliterated 'P's (yes, it was good fun), it is that this is precisely the point where faith kicks in.

The York CaSSoc (Catholic Students' Society) decided to embark on the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge to raise money for the charity organisation we're supporting this year. The challenge is to complete the three highest peaks in Yorkshire under 12 hours, with the total distance spanning 26 miles (or 42km, i.e. a whole marathon). 

I thought it'd be a pretty good idea to go – I'd get to visit all three peaks for £10 (the cost of the minibus we hired), it's for a good cause and I love hiking. As my Scottish friend put it, it turned out to be the "worst and best day of my life" – not quite so dramatic in terms of 'best' and 'worst', but it encapsulates the two extremes quite accurately.

I was under some misguided notion that I'd be able to do quite well, after all, I handled 22km in the Killarney national park fairly decently. We started off well at 9am with the hardest of the three peaks, Pen-y-ghent. It was a very steep ascent up, but we were fresh and chirpy and scaled the scramble (where you literally climb up on hands and knees) to reach the summit quite easily 1.5 hours into the challenge.

The descent went really well; I think we were all very glad for the downhill slopes after the steep ascent, so we were down and off the peak in half an hour. We proceeded to make our way to the second peak across the rolling grassland, but got unexpectedly bogged down by the bogs (that was intended :P). It was a period of cursing, swearing and squealing as we got caught off guard one by one by the slippery mud. I still think I got the worst of it though – my entire foot sank into a bog hole filled with mud and water, and my shoe got soaked.

After the unexpected detour off the proper route in our attempt to circumvent the bogs, we finally made it to our self-designated lunch spot. We then headed off to a little pub for "The Loo with a View", and set off to Whernside across the viaduct. Six hours into the hike, we arrived at the base of Whernside – the highest peak in Yorkshire.

After three years of almost zero lower body exercise (I skipped all my PE lessons in JC), this was the point when my natural stamina basically died. It was a gradual ascent throughout, very much gentler than Pen-y-ghent but in my opinion (the others really didn't think so) a lot harder to sustain because it was a steady climb uphill. I began lagging further and further behind the main group with another girl; there were two others even further behind us, and soon we lost sight of both groups completely due to the fog that was the cloud. I began taking short breaks every few steps uphill, and I seriously began contemplating giving up since we still had one more peak to go and the summit was nowhere in sight. I don't think I had ever come so close to facing the limits of what I could and could not do; I hate having to admit that I've got to give up. Damnit, I hate even having to admit that I'm below average. I think one of the themes of the lifeskills' camps in Nanyang was 'Shattering Limits'. That was nothing compared to this. OBS was nothing compared to this. 

Apparently, I can survive six months of nose-to-the-grindstone studying for the A levels, but cannot endure two weeks of studying for first-year university exams.

Brilliant, indeed.

This is my way of celebrating the feast of the Epiphany:

Journey of the Magi - T. S. Eliot

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Coming after the recent Andrea Bocelli concert, this is hilarious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BDVvB7Xx1w

I've found a way (actually I didn't exactly 'find' in the strictest sense of the word, it just literally appeared two days ago) to eat nonstop, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You see, I've recently acquired a hole in my mouth (and no, by 'hole' I am Not referring to my mouth itself) that stores food while I'm having my three main meals, then dispenses it with a frightening regularity during those few hours between them. This even goes on when I'm happily in bed waiting for sleep to take over.

It all started about two weeks ago when I discovered a knob emerging from my upper gum. The knob was very eagerly pushing its way out, so within a week it expanded to an entire side. I took that as a Sign from above (pun intended) to visit my dentist.

A few days and three injections later, I was left with a gaping chasm that laced my food with droplets of blood.

Now, almost a week later, I have a free food storage facility right in my very mouth! Admittedly it does dole out the food at the weirdest of times but what can rival such convenience? 

We're all rather familiar with this concept, aren't we? Especially after studying Beloved - Did Denver not depend on the gaze of others to gain a sense of self? Yes yes, a person can only attain some sort of self-definition when he fixes his eyes on his own reflection in those around him, measuring each ounce of self-worth against the qualities of another human being. That is subjectivity, after all. Perhaps that is why they say, "No man is an island", that tired old phrase that is often quoted in support of communal living and of the formation of  society. Alone, man has no identity, no self-hood: "There is a loneliness that can be rocked...Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name?"

Perhaps that's why humans are inherent gregarious creatures. Kristie and I have toyed around with the concept of friendship before:
Picture a spider web. Every friend, each acquaintance is one thin silk strand, reflecting one facet of you. All connected, they form a complete picture - your entire identity. The trust and love shared in each relationship forms the glue that links the disjointed thread fragments together, forming a cohesive and beautiful whole. And of course, with the absence of love, these pieces fall and shatter - they are incoherent; they no longer make sense. They are scattered, the web is pulled apart, leaving you a broken person.

From this basic concept of how one's identity is moulded and formed, we discover another theory explaining the birth of the myriad of civilizations in the history of mankind. Since each separate web inextricably forms a matrix for others and is itself the product of another matrix, the collective identity becomes a gigantic network of individual webs intricately linked together. It is this collective identity, then, that forms the foundation of the unique culture that ultimately defines a civilisation. How would one explain the rise of so many different civilisations and cultures? Within each gigantic network, as people study their reflections in each other, they interpret them in a manner particular to their community, such that certain features of themselves are collectively emphasised. This distinctive manner of Seeing thus shapes the development of each culture.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "One of the most wonderful things in nature is the glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity." With our eyes, we look, we See, we create.