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vendredi, décembre 24, 2004

Shooting stars

i wonder if there are such things as xmas resolutions..ben said no..but here are my resolutions.. i hope they don't work like wishes, in that if you tell a resolution it won't come true anymore..

1. don't be envious and don't compare
2. dress nicely (rem what joan said: i've only been seen wearing 3 different shirts)
3. do something and stick to doing it (i've dabbled in music, tarot, lyrics, french, get rich quick schemes that fell true, learning latin which i haven't started)

typing this while talking to ben. he says you're supposed to tell people the resolutions so that u can be reminded by others.. i got resolutions mixed up with wishes. i thought you weren't supposed to tell your resolutions otherwise like wishes, they won't come true.

somehow i feel like a little girl again, asking ben about wishes and shooting stars. i've never seen shooting stars. and it seems everyone around me has seen them. apparently shooting stars are dying stars...making a wish on dying stars..perhaps i'm feeling in a little girl mood and ben is just humouring me..i wonder if any of my wishes have ever come true. that's the problem when you wish for so many things, you can't remember half of them and probably use up your wish quota for your entire life in a few days when you're young. i was with someone at taka one of the days, i forgot with whom, maybe hans. and the person said "are there anyone who grew up thinking santa exists?" oh i remember.. it's jiahui.. i always thought santa existed and thought the reason i never saw him was because i never had a chimney and never hung up stockings cos ditto fireplace. though i don't want the star to die, ( i don't want anything to die) i want to see a shooting star. [this statement is insightful.shows how selfish i am] it's always nice to talk to ben, haven't spoken to him in a long long time, discounting "hi,how're u".

after christmas i shall start reading antony and cleopatra..

"The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description."
Antony and Cleopatra, II. ii

the epic love story, i believe.

but back to shooting stars.. i wonder why we make wishes on them. in ancient china, they were considered bad omens, and so were they in Elizabethan england..

"Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction."
Julius Caesar I.iii

The "exhalations whizzing in the air" are shooting stars, portents of doom. yet the modern world today see shooting stars as rarities that grant wishes. i must do some research on them. *pause*

What is a shooting star?
Ask your own question!

Question
The space between the planets in our Solar System is filled with meteoroids, small particles ranging from a fraction of a millimeter to tens of meters across. Most of the small meteoroids are probably particles given off from comets and their long tails; others are crushed remnants of collisions between asteroids, the thousands of rocky minor planets found mostly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

As the Earth travels around the Sun, it collides with many of these meteoroids. When one hits the Earth's atmosphere, typically with a speed of 10-70 kilometers per second, friction slows it down at about a height of 100 kilometers, and heats it up until all or most of it vaporizes. Such events cause streaks of light in the sky, which we popularly call "shooting stars," otherwise known as meteors. Most meteors we see at night are millimeter size with a mass less than one gram. Larger meteors sometimes survive their passage through the atmosphere and hit the ground; these we call meteorites. These constant collisions add about 40,000 tons of material per year to the Earth's mass. Some meteorites are composed of iron and nickel and are heavy; others are made of stony materials like silicates.

On a clear moonless night one can see 5 to 15 meteors per hour. At certain times of the year the Earth travels through some space where the density of meteoroids is large and on those dates we experience meteor showers. Two of the best known are the Perseids (August 12) and the Geminids (December 4) when one can see a "shooting star" per minute, under clear, dark conditions!

You could still make a wish when you see a "shooting star."
http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/education/ask/?quid=208

but i still don't know who came up with this tradition of wishing on shooting stars.. anyone who knows pls tag or drop me a line..

somehow i can't get away from the world of literature. i wouldnt want to continue studying it for the next 4 years of my life, but i would want to continue writing papers and theses and submitting them for correction..poor mr rajesh is going to get lots of essays if i can't find a job. at least then the "complete works of william shakespeare" that i bought at a sale for $9.90 won't go to waste.

shooting stars..

i wrote a song today, with a few lines jiahui gave me a long long time ago.. starts:
"baby won't you take my hand
there's so much i want you to see
i wanna sing, i wanna dance, i wanna hold ya in my arms
i wanna laugh, i wanna cry...."

sounds schizophrenic though, or severe complex disorder (sounds cheem but i dunno if it exists)

shall send it to jiahui when she goes online. wonder how her job is going....

1 am. party later at night. guess it's time to go to bed.
this is probably the lnogest blog ever.. special thanks to ben for talking to me about shooting stars and resolutions..