"If you're going through Hell, keep going.": microwave

About Me.

Background

My name is Michael Rivera and I am a Filipino-Chinese, 18-year-old student living in Canterbury, but originally from Hong Kong. My parents divorced when I was two, and when I grew up, there were two sides of me: the wild, outdoorsy, gutsy side, and the conservative, intellectual, scholarly side. I spent two years living beside a beach in the countryside. It was then that I learned how to swim, how to fish and how to ride a bike. I love the outdoors, especially when having barbecues and hiking. Outside of that time, my more studious side of me reads, writes, and has a great interest in a broad range of subjects including: television and film, travel, anthropology, human cultures, linguistics, food and drink, psychology, philosophy, literature, forensics, Greco-Roman mythology, European history and politics, South American culture and geology. My deepest love goes to, well, my best friend. But the love that exists just a tiny fraction below that amount of love goes to television series, beautiful beaches, lime margaritas, and books considered classics.

Feel free to e-mail me if you have anything you want to share, suggest, criticize, inquire or comment on! :D

E-mail: scylla.michael.charybdis@gmail.com

(Click this sentence to see my complete profile.)

Saturday, October 3, 2009

88 - University is nice

University life is not that radically different from the life I led back in Hong Kong. My friends all tell me how great it is to finally live beyond the smothering, overly restrictive hold of their parents, how wonderful it finally is to be free. But I've always had kind of a free lifestyle (whether that's a good or bad thing is unclear), so I don't really feel much change. I've always been able to do whatever I want, eat what I want, make friends with whoever I want, without anybody ever telling me what I should or shouldn't do.

This makes my journey of life a big trial-and-error process. That's the way I don't necessarily prefer to live my life - simply, it is the way I have done so, to feel accomplished after logically working out a suitable solution to my problems, and to feel humbled and enlightened when my thought-up solution turns out to be not that suitable.

So far, I have been eating a lot of microwave meals and junk food in the past two weeks. Whenever I sense a sore throat coming, I purchase a ready-to-eat, dielectrically heatable soup - which should be healthier, and good for my throat. I drink it, and the soreness wears away. Laundry has been easy, I've just followed the instructions on the box - no white clothes coming out colored is a WIN for me. Ironing has gone successfully as well - thanks to instructions and tutorials on Youtube and DIY websites that I simply Googled. And lecture theaters have been easy to locate. I was always good at reading maps. And having a good directional sense in the absence of one.

Life is nice. I decide what I eat. I'm learning what I want to learn. I truly have my own room, which I decorate and keep clean myself. I join the clubs and societies I have a passion for. I might get a part-time job soon - bartending or waiting, of course. I have so much time to do whatever I want, to read, to watch television series and review them, to write, to explore this new place, and to just think to myself - there has been a lot of time to myself. This amount of independence is certainly a step above what I had in Hong Kong.

And it feels incredibly good.