Not blogging is the obvious thing.

I have been given temporarily a Nintendo DS Lite from Benton, who tells me to hold onto it so he cannot play and study/do homework better. Thanksfully, since I have kind of given up on giving up games for Lent (well, changed it to reduce playing games for Lent – see later), it actually has been beneficial to have as it helps put me back on track (surprisingly enough) instead of drag me deeper into lack of focus.

I went to Games night last Friday. That wasn’t bad, although I wish I could have stayed longer. I could not do so because there was a church retreat the next day.

The retreat was pretty nice, with the English group speaker being no one other than the recently ordained (one year ago) Fr. Justin Huang, who also went with the SFX/Corpus Christi joint group to World Youth Day 2005 in Germany.

The topic that Fr. Justin talked about can be summed up into how to find happiness in God. It was done in three sessions. The first talk was on things we need to have to be happy, which he called fruits of the Holy Spirit and consist of the following: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, and chasity.

The next session analyzed why we turn away from God. There are two reasons. The first is obviously sin, which we can resolve by doing a complete and integral confession, which requires one to confess all their mortal sins, along with the number of times the mortal sin was committed. The other cause is disorders in our lives, with the orders being the Four Levels of Happiness. Disorder occurs when either one of the levels are missing or they are sorted in the wrong order.
The final session was one focused on how to turn back to God and, hence, become happy in Christ. Unfortunately, I did not last that long (it was a pretty long day after all) and somewhat dozed off while listening.

After most of the retreat was over, I decided to go to confession. Some things troubled me, such as the burnout stage that happened a while back and my gaming Lenten promise which is in tatters.

It was one of the better confessions I’ve had. It kind of put things back on track, such as how to deal with stress that leads to the eventual burnout and resolving the guilt from breaking the gaming Lenten promise. With some internal searching during confession when Father asked me questions, I realize that I am quite a perfectionist, always wanting to get something exact, which in turn leads to my procrastination, which causes a good chunk of my stress.

To deal with it the stress, Father suggested I go and do something else like go for a walk. He also suggested I take part more in church things. As well, when I asked about how to keep the promise to give up games, it turns out that I only thought too short-sighted and failed to fill in something to the time freed up from giving up games. He, therefore, recommended that I just reduce my gaming time instead of outright outlawing it for Lent, giving my own nature to game.

It’s strange how the better confessions are the ones where I’ve done an examination of conscience with the list of questions to ask myself in front of me and where there was no screen, but a face-to-face one.

But yeah, I certainly feel better now after that and quite refreshed, to say the least. I’ve managed to clear off my JAPN homework stuff this week and actually found time to study for the classes. I guess I could do better with the other classes though, especially CMPT 307. I really should go and talk to Binay, but I’m not really all that sure what part to ask for help with. My problem is that when I look at it, it makes sense for the most part, but when confronted with it in an exam situation, it just does not come out, although I could probably use some help with that recurrence relation stuff.

I’ll see.

And no I don’t mean the game.

Tis the time when stuff starts getting silly and I start to wobble around with how much I am going to care. I don’t know why, but it seems like there’s so much to do that I cannot do schoolwork and such properly anymore.

It started off like an excellent semester. I was on the ball. My homework was done in good time. I actually found time to study Japanese.

I don’t know what happened. Now, every Japanese class starts off with me going “I’m so screwed..”. I don’t have the assignment(s) for the class done, I haven’t studied well, which will hit me most in the quiz marks. For my computing courses, I can’t study properly. My midterm review for both algorithms and networking simply consisted of looking at the stuff. No application of topics. No doing practice test questions, despite the availability of those things.

There’s also Scouts-related stuff. Since I am the group’s contact for PJ ’07, I have to get on the ball on that. Needless to say, I haven’t been on the ball at all with that stuff.

I felt stressed with no way to reduce the stress, given my giving up of gaming for Lent. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore and played some Eternal Silence and checked out some Half-Life 2 mods, including Goldeneye: Source and Empires. Guess it was a futile attempt that’s currently toying with my psyche.

At least, despite all this, I started to work on my work assignment.

I need to de-stress some, but not take it to the extreme and slack off and not care for the rest of the semester.

My CMPT 307 midterm is on Monday, but I don’t believe I am anywhere close to ready. My sleep has been averaging 5-6 hours for the past week (sleep at 3-4 AM, wake up at 9 AM), and such.

Since giving up games for Lent, I have been able to do more work, but lately, the time I generally save pushes me to have some relax time when I am done, which usually is at 12 AM. Instead of playing games, I watch anime and drama (well, really just 金田一 (Kindaichi) season 3 because that’s all I have while I am still looking for seasons 1 and 2) and read Wikipedia.

I should head off to sleep now and study the best I can when I wake up. Hopefully I can study AND finish my CMPT 471 assignment so I can get the 10% early hand-in bonus..