School is obviously bad for my health: I was fine the entire month when we had holidays, fine when there was hardly any school beyond the examination hours and now not fine when school has just reverted back to the normal hours. Now I'm stuck with a stuffy nose, which is still better than the constant noisy sneezing and runny nose I had to endure with earlier in school I suppose.

During the weekend I finished Yoko Ogawa's the Diving Pool which I had the fortune of stumbling upon in Kino in May. I don't pretend to be the best reader there is around - most of the time when reading short stories I am greeted by a unmistakable sense of loss when the story has come to an end: a 'wait wait wait, did I miss something here?' For the Diving Pool however, the feeling that was most pronounced in me was a sense of creepiness, of nerves tingling from suspense and vague horror: I felt like I actually understood the stories properly.

The book which I am currently reading now is Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting - prompted by the book's appearance in Arjun's bookshelf and Johannes' expressed desire to read it. I must say, I have never come across so many unsympathetic characters gathered into so few pages before, unsympathetic characters that one can relate to at the same time. Everyone in the book is either an asshole, an alcoholic or a junkie and the tales spun using colloquial language are so wonderfully authentic in their feel and their (vaguely warped) sense of humour. I have not actually finished the book yet, but this is one book that I have quickly grown to love. It is well worth the trouble of navigating the colloquial English!

On a more random note, there were three disposable chopsticks in a sealed chopstick packet that I was given by the Beef Noodle hawker when I da bao-ed my lunch. I found it mildly fascinating.