am i having fun indeed...

I am in a bad mood.
And while yes, it might be due to my mood swing tendency tonight, it is largely to do with my project group mates and a series of events recently.

Before we go into the bashin'n'thrashin (of me or anyone else), let's take a look at my duties in the project group. For simplicity's sake, let me just use ONE of my project groups as an example.

QL's Duties:
- Create project flow
- Oversee project flow
- Lead discussion
- Designate duties
- Research
- Edit report/presentation
- Present
- Teach anything the others do not understand
- Discipline project members
- Resolve conflicts/complaints
- Answer to any doubts/opinions by others
- Conduct survey
- Design survey

Others' duties (a consolidation)
- Follow deadline
- Design product (draw)
- Present by reading from the powerpoint slides
- Try to join in the discussion hopefully by doing something other than repeating what QL said
- Conduct survey
- Prepare a draft of a report that will have 80% corrected anyway due to poor language

Does it sound fair? To be fair to me, I allocated the tasks to others such as designing the survey (and credits to one of them who tried her best to give me a decent draft). Unfortunately, due to reasons whatsoever, they were not delivered. In fact, most of the time, I find myself doing extra to cover for the others. Now you might be wondering, why am I being so nice? The QL you know is probably a much more ruthless guy who will make sure something unpleasant happens to anyone in the project group who even dares to attempt such an act. But keep in mind that I am here on a short-term exchange, and hence, I do not see the point in losing my temper over this and becoming an asshole. Moreover, while I do not mind teaching on the pretext that I already understand the concept myself, I do not like it when there is no effort shown and mere requests of "please be specific and correct the mistakes" are made. That sounds rather to me to be "Please do my work. I am not needed in the group. Please kick me out." Angsty QL.

Updates include people submitting work at the last minute and when I provide feedback that it is wrong, they tend to want to blame me for it. because i did not give feedback earlier. because i did not comment earlier. Well, DUH. When the work is submitted to me 12 hours before the deadline, how am I supposed to have commented earlier? When explanation was provided a week ago, and a public "Any questions or doubts to clear up?" went unchallenged, I am supposed to be on my heels for one whole week to look out for any doubts and answer them immediately like a 24-hour hotline would? Frankly, it is a case of a nice guy turning into a convenient tool. And quite hilariously, I meet with people offering an argument of how they are really busy. Well yes indeed, people have their capacities. BUT, you-who-is-taking-5-classes is expecting me-who-is-taking-10-classes to father your part of the project, that is absurd. The only salvation is that after being corrected, my groupmates will take pains to correct their work, even if it means going late into the night (a trait I highly suspect I am guilty of too).

Perhaps you might say I am asking for too much. Perhaps the argument that "I am not QL, therefore I cannot" will be put forth. But please try to think about it and for goodness' sake, stop using me as a lousy excuse because QL was not born with all these abilities and ample help and time was given prior to task allocations.

The happier part of this entry is, unsurprisingly, on karaoke. On a totally random day at a totally random timing, I skipped part of my group work for one of the projects and will be making up for it by doing an individual fieldwork for that part to try to cheer a friend up (only to find out that while I have been keeping people in my mind, others have obviously not been doing the same). Oops, no more venturing into the dark ranting side. So anyway, karaoke!!

Sang a few songs, and I tried the ugakara system, whereby you pit your karaoke score for that particular song against everyone else who uses that system in Japan! I won't be holding back, but instead be proudly and arrogantly and snobbishly boast that I got into the top 4 for Kobukuro's [White Days]. Perhaps it might be that people have not been singing that song much, but I guess a score of nearly 89 is a score to be proud of :) Time to aim for higher heights!

Japan really has interesting (or in some ways, odd) functions. Besides the normal 高精度採点 (high quality scoring), they also had the グラビア採点 (gravure scoring). For the latter, what happens is that instead of the usual movie they use, it becomes a movie of a gravure model (in other words, a sexy but not necessarily pretty woman). If you sing well, you will be treated to a nice (?) video of her along the beach or some random place, depending on the theme. However, if you were to be musically challenged, you will find the video getting CENSORED (ROFL). We tried to hit a score of 100 just to see what it will get us but unfortunately, the highest I could go was nearly 90 (my score peaked at 99 at one point in time!!). Another interesting observation is that irregarding our vocal abilities, singing English songs seem to be able to yield a higher score. I wonder why *grinz*

Ok, time for project research. It's on DENTURES this time round. Cya folks