I have been confined to the house. This is because I am sick. Last night I was huddled in a swaddle of blanket, tissues stuffed up the nose and pouring over Ouran Manga. I also emptied my cup of water frequently and made excursions to the bathroom every 30 minutes.

Yes, I have hit a new low in my life. I have also just secretly eaten a packet of ready salted chips, locking the door to my room as I committed that cardinal sin. I only call it a sin because my parents can't get over the fact that I'm not really sick now - just drugged - and thus unable to go for the !nk party tonight. So my act of rebellion is to eat chips behind closed doors. Yum chips. Actually since the brand is Waitrose it should be crisps instead. Yummy ready salted crisps.

This is partly brought about by the sad state of my love life (read: it does not exist), a suffocating school schedule and a wonderful state of mind that is equal parts stress and 'cannot be bothered' mentality. I shall now proceed to elaborate on these points further.

1) 'sad state of my love life (read: it does not exist)'

The only thing I have vaguely romantic in real life now is the presence of this junior in !nk, initials D. C. (come on, I'm sure you can guess who!) who whenever he talks to be me always sounds like he is flirting. This would actually translate to more points if this person wasn't always talking to people like that, including the senior male editors. I don't know, maybe he's an exceptionally horny bisexual. Emphasis on the exceptionally horny bit, because in order to flirt with someone like me I think the person must be really desperate.

For the past week, I have been rereading the entire Ouran Host Club manga series (including rewatching the pilot episode). For the uninformed, the Ouran manga (as well as the Love Hina and other random manga I have at home) was a remnant from my pre-indie fag days. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy manga anymore because evidently I do - I'm just in the process of being able to mould everything into a congruent image of myself. Anyway as I read Ouran again, I am once more reunited by the stream of emotions that comes with being involved in something and my old crush on Kyoya Otori. Yes, I am that pathetic. This mades me want to continue reading more manga, so I ended up staying a little bit more later than usual every night to read before sleeping (though blame must also be accorded to Guterson's Snow Falling Over Cedars). This thus made me sick, because I was not getting enough sleep.

2) 'suffocating school schedule'

On the night of The Dark Knight, I returned home to a frantic call from Malcolm because we had yet to do our History presentation. After quickly showering, I logged on even though I was seriously dying from the exhaustion. Then, I had to struggle through cyberspace and work out another Biology practical proposal because the last one got rejected while trying to be helpful to Mong and Elliot who were doing the presentation with me. So while I was reckoning with all of this, my exhaustion passed and I was in a state of nirvana tired-but-unable-to-sleep-anymore. This thus led me to read, eating into even more sleeping hours.

The rest of the school week also felt rather tedious, with little to dissipate the monotony and pointlessness of everything. This was especially compounded by how there was so much free time in school, leading to frustration building up because that time was essentially dead time, a dead weight loss, because I cannot do work when there are so many people around. I couldn't really read either because class was so noisy (which led to me hiding outside class with Snow Falling on Cedars almost every break I had). I literally felt time seeping through my small hands.

Economics also posed another problem. Other than being the one subject I most hate, it is also the most frustrating subject because of how it is taught. Yes, I like the Indian Preacher, but damn if I don't enjoy the grueling sessions of non stop past year papers grilling. It makes me feel stupid, frustrated and bored. I don't use my mind in class except to think about how pointless everything is and how frustrated I feel.

The two different points of frustration for me then converged into a mass which demanded exceptional bummishness at home. So I started rereading Ouran this week. This then led to me sleeping later, so I fell sick.

3) 'wonderful state of mind that is equal parts stress and 'cannot be bothered' mentality'

I think most of you know what I'm talking about. This is the feeling that you get when you know you have a mountainload of work to do and feel stressed out, leading to feelings of being burnt out and thus not caring for your work leading to sub-par work which then leads to more stress and bla bla bla.

This thus results in a feeling of avoidance of work and of frustration. So I end up reading Ouran manga. Ouran manga this keeps me awake at night, so I sleep less and fall sick.

So to sum it up, Ouran manga is something else that is bad for my health.