English Summary Is Not A Piece Of Cake

Playing Dota has became an almost nightly ritual for me, and sad to say, it seemed to be my only form of entertainment after work (argh, the curse of being a single antisocial guy).

But while I enjoy playing Dota, I hate playing with strangers over the internet for they quit midgame far too often and cursed/swear too much for my liking.

So, mostly, I will be waiting for enough of my Dota Khakis to come online so that we can have an inhouse game and most of the time while waiting, I will be checking out whether my friends have updated their blogs.

I was browsing through my neighbor's blog when I read her latest post about her having some holiday assignments for her art classes that has not been completed yet. For those of you who do not know, my neighbor is a very talented artist whose specialty lies in painting nightmarish drawings and thus, my interest was piqued when I learnt that she was working on another potential master piece.

And seeing that she was online on msn, I immediately messaged her inquiring about her master piece. It turns out though that she was stuck while doing her English summary (which she claimed was damn hard) instead of working on her art assignment.

Now while I have to admit I am not any good academically (I sucked in both mathematics and science =.=), I being somewhat of a bookworm, have pretty good confidence in my written english.

I being a nice and friendly neighbour that I am, of course offered to help. And as I was also exceedingly kind hearted, I offered to charge her only $10/hour for my tutoring services. She haha-ed my offer but still brought both her english and mathematics homework over.

And as my sister was helping out our neighbor with her mathematics homework, I proceeded to read the English comprehension that she has to summarize.

Now, the comprehension was about trekking in Nepal and apparently, she had to summarize in her own words why people choose to trek in Nepal. There is also the restriction that the summary must be under 150 words.

While I was going through the comprehension, I realized one thing, it -is- really -very- difficult to pick out the important points in the passage and to rephrase them in our own words.

And while we were working hard using the ever trusty Thesaurus to help us convert those points to our 'own' words, I learnt something my English skills, I am better at embellishing and exaggerating then in summarizing. If you read through my posts, you will see that there is actually there is actually very little content hidden under all those nonsense I am crapping about.

By the time we finished her summary (actually it wasn't quite completed, for I was really stumped by it), it was around 11pm and this 45 cents pen was the payment for my effort...

The Pen glowing in holy light...

I sincerely hope that I have not helped my neighbor to fail her English summary...

P.S.
In the course of helping my neighbor do her summary, my neighbor had reminded subtly that I still owed her the sushi I promised to treat her for her birthday. Actually, she was not that subtle, what she said was, 'Hey, you still owe me sushi.'

And of course, as everyone knows that I am a man of my word, I will definitely treat what I owed. In fact, if my brilliant tutelage caused my nice neighbor to fail her English summary, she will be having her sushi at Sushi Tei instead of the 99cents sushi that I was intending to buy her.