Well, I'm still 18 but I could have used a reminder or two about not eating shoddily prepared street food at the beginning of the year. Would have saved me a lot of heart- (and tummy-) ache.

Getting myself an entry-level diving cert.

During the wee hours of morning, when everyone has gone to sleep. My class schedule does not permit me pulling all-nighters for no reason any more, so I've been experiencing fewer and fewer of these episodes. But when I'm sitting on my desk, poring over the finer points of using monads or logging hours into Skyrim, I feel that if I could just push back the dawn I'd be able to accomplish anything.

That said, I don't know if I should miss that feeling. Deciding to not be true to my night owl nature has bought me company in the mornings and so I think it has been worth it.

I, Robot was my reading gateway drug. Count me in (I'll join in as soon as I get my internet set up.)

Erm, about food...We agreed to take turns cooking for each other. I live (or will live) in the slum parts of the city and the nearest source of fresh grub is the wet market a 5-minute walk from our future unit. I've never bought anything by myself in a wet market before. This'll be a challenging first few months for us, I expect.

I guess you really can't account for everything.

We actually had a sit-down on things we should watch out for, but I expect there's still a lot of surprises down the road for both of us. My only worry is if we didn't catch all of the big ones.

You mention reciprocity. I understand that people tend to discount the efforts of others when it comes to doing shared responsibilities like washing the dishes. How can I avoid this? I don't want to get into a fight just 'cause we refuse to recognise each other's efforts and I know thinking rationally becomes more and more difficult to do the more tired you get (whether from school or just life in general). From what I hear, tallying chores is one of the more common points of contention between couples and I still haven't found an acceptable solution to that problem.

Erm, about that last point...I'm two years into a five-year course and I've transferred dorms more times than I can count. It's just that this would be my first taste of more freedom and more leeway than what in-campus dorms usually allow.

An inevitability. I like that. Reminds me of Ted Chiang's short story, Story of Your Life. Basically, he espouses there are two ways of looking at perception: the sequential, cause-and-effect one and the Dr.-Manhattan-esque I-know-what-will-happen-but-I-can-only-watch-while-it-does one. What do you mean by "do what's fair" though? I don't really trust my judgment when it comes to these things because I am aware I have lived a rather sheltered life. I'm a suburb kid, unlike my SO, so I figured there's a lot of things that I was made oblivious to while growing up.

Anyway, the reason why I asked this question is that I have observed that whenever I go through big changes, I also change in a big way. I usually don't survive unscathed. I still haven't found a "core" personality I can anchor myself to and I'm kind of getting tired of dealing with new things and new unknowns and new life goals. So basically what I'm asking is, is there a way to ensure some measure of stability while going through these phases? I can foresee maybe four or five more big changes in my immediate future and I would really like to be prepared for them.