If You Take A Little Trip Around Singapore Town

...then you would be doing better than me! I was in town today for I believe the first time since that night's dinner at Chijmes with Elden and Wesley. Or, at any rate, in town with (a) friend(s), not with my parents, not alone en route to the NLB, not stuck with uninteresting people like myself. My disorientation with town, stemming from the nerdiness of my regular schedule and my penchant for staying at home and rotting, became all too apparent in one awkward impulse today. I asked, "Uhh is Library@Orchard still around?" Beat me for no-lifery! It's not bad enough not knowing the absence of something torn down 2 years ago. This something had to be the closest you could get to a nerdy venue in town. Utter uselessness.

Sometimes I wonder what I shall do after the IB exams and the HATs and the UCAS applications are through. Having lived with so much academic work for the past 2 years I am not sure if i can adapt to having days of just not studying. They would feel odd, feel as though something was distinctly lacking. The frustration of being put through so much work might find its recourse in the fact that for once I am doing work I am not being forced to do. Oh dear. I would really have no life then. Perhaps I should keep wondering.

What To Say

My Oxford interview is off limits. If you want to know about it ask me directly; it's not going up here. The cause for this post's brevity is precisely that. I do not know what I should say about it. It was 20 surreal minutes and it was over.

Now to the cut and thrust of studying for IB. Where do I begin? I have barely 2 weeks to cover (everything again if I want to) what took me 3 weeks to do prior to Prelims. Hmmm......

One Way Ticket (Because I Can)

If I were Paddy Clarke writing this in my stream of consciousness this post would be four lines long. Really short. Symbolic of how I have too much else to do. Of how I'm mildly confused and overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what's to come my way soon. Soon.

Oh well here it goes. The next five weeks will make or break me. It is in some sense a fight to the finish. Fight. I have grappled with IB for 21 months and have spent countless hours reading up beyond my syllabus in anticipation of an Oxford application. Yes, these things take commitment. They take commitment (someone who'll go the distance). Not that I don't regularly give that. I do. In everything I do. IB exams will be done some 5 Thursdays from today. In that time, this is my to-do list. 23rd October: Oxford interviews, in preparation of which I will be meeting some close acquaintances tomorrow for an intellectual discussion (over some alcohol possibly) on things in general, things we could discuss at our interviews. That would be nice. Good friends and a glass of wine. 5th November: History Aptitude Test for Oxford. That is in the middle of 4th to 20th November: IBDP Exams. It is daunting. The tremour is palpable. Something I can feel. At the very least there is my class (clique really) trip to Hong Kong for 5 days (21st to 25th November) to look forward to. Fun and excitement. Pretty things. It's always nice to have the sweet parts at the end, like your desserts. But for now, though, it needs to be serious business. Fun has to be the last thing on my mind.

It's good, after all, to be focused. I mean there's no point panicking, or going around being defeatist and crying out "How do I live with all this stress". Everybody has to go through trying times in their lives and it is our imperative duty to give it our best shot. It does not matter if we do not succeed. What does not kill us makes us stronger. I believe these tribulations are placed in our lives for this very purpose. Call it fate, if you will. Say it's written in the stars. But it is true! These things come as part of life's natural trajectory. Like Sun gives way to moon each day. And you know, deep down, that you can't fight the moonlight. Okay I'm digressing. Yes okay. I will give my utmost because I am only ever going to get to do this once, as with all things. There is no turning back time and no amount of regret makes up for a past underperformance. It helps to work hard, it helps to be on the side of angels and it helps to have faith in myself. It is now time to look straight ahead and stride confidently into the most challenging (academically anyway) 5 weeks of my life. Because I Can.

(If you haven't realised I don't fully mean all that I said. The nice narrative is just a nice foil for something else I am doing here. I am paying a tribute, well sort of. If you don't get it, well, go figure. You evidently don't know what good music is!)

Phonebook

This post would have been made two nights ago (when I'd really have meant it) if I hadn't got all dizzy and tired from drinking at Shaoyi's. It could have been made last night if I hadn't spent all evening out at a Turkish restaurant having my birthday dinner. But it will only be made now, late though it is. Sometimes that is the story of life; that things are done, things are realised too little too late. But perhaps the beauty of it lies therein, because the mixture of regret and wistfulness gives the emotion a profoundness that makes it lasting and residual. It is something you cannot so easily let go of, and hence you will hold the subject of your wistfulness dearer to your heart.

Crying in the cinema while watching a romance movie is one thing. For starters, that is vicarious. Crying because of something you are yourself involved in is quite another. Before Friday, I hadn't done that for so long I'd lost count of how many years it had been since the last time. Certainly, I had not counted on spoiling my clean sheet on my 18th birthday. Think about it: effeminate behaviour on the day of your attainment of manhood. Maybe it was ordained to be that way to make it all the more special. What happened was undeniably Romantic in that it defied any form of rational or causal understanding I retrospectively applied to it. My mind oscillated between joyous gratitude and regretful sadness (purportedly at two extremes), without stopping anywhere in between them on the emotional scale. In a way the teardrops were a magic carpet allowing me to bypass everything in the middle as I oscillated back and forth (you only cry at emotion's extremes, yes?), although the thought of doing that must defy any sense of progressive or positivist logic.

It had seemed normal enough. I opened my fridge when I got home to see a Hilton cheesecake. I found a new Samsung phone on my bed. I wasn't surprised, nor do I particularly enjoy being surprised. My parents cannot keep secrets properly. I was even looking forward to the class party (don't quite know why, never was I that enthusiastic about 6.14). I managed to disintegrate a mere hour later, remain that way for a further hour, and then compose myself again to trip to Shaoyi's house. I am still trying to figure out how everything happened. I am not the type to cry. Certainly not for sentimental reasons. How did I do it that evening? And, following which, how did all that emotion that coursed through me dissipate in 48 hours?

My old phone was really falling to bits and so it made sense to switch immediately to the new one. This is where it began I guess. The data (contacts etc.) I had were stored in my old phone and not in my SIM card, which meant I had to transfer everything across. I had had the old phone for some 4 years and going through the contact list I spent 4 years adding to but not subtracting from was bound to be a nostalgic process. Indeed it was. I saw, one by one, excruciatingly, the names of all the old friends and classmates I had lost touch with. People who had once been part of my thoughts, my feelings, my actions, my life, who now were reduced to one-dimensional memories. I didn't waste my time transferring their details of course, but something then hit me. What if of those people whose details I was transferring, more than half would be consigned to the dustbin of memory when I next switched phones? All the images of fun, of meaning, of friendship reducing themselves to the impersonal expression of a name. I recalled all the "keep in touch"s and "friends forever"s I'd written during the day, and stared at the names of all my P6 friends I'd said the same things to 6 years ago. I barely knew them anymore, these people who once told me "Don't forget me when you become rich and famous". I promised, but apparently I didn't even need that long to renege on it. The collective sum of those old friendships lost overwhelmed me. The fear that it would all happen again with my current crop of friends weighed upon me. Then the tears did flow.

It took me a while to get round to the fact that these are friendships I will be in a position to sustain. We will all leave school together but there's nothing stopping us from talking to one another. What gave me this realisation, though, was the dawning upon me of relationships for which the opposite is true. Man learns in binaries, you see. I scrolled down my contact list and stopped at the name of my History teacher. Seeing next to hers the name of my Primary 6 form teacher, I then realised. It is my relationships with my teachers, the teacher-student relationships, that imminently cease to be. These are the things that really were broken when school closed. I had left, but they remained as part of, as fixtures in, the school. I pondered on the nobility of their role. Every year graduating students invariably experience this nostalgia and sadness because they are really leaving for good. Yet the teachers have to bear witness, a part and not really a part of the experience, with their own emotional bonds and their professional capacities at odds with each other. They are left out of the moment by the sad fact that next year it will happen all over again. This day of special significance is one whose feeling they are almost unable to partake in. Each year they send their students, the finished articles of their labour of love, off to better and brighter futures. Each year ends with them knowing they return to the head of the circle to start all over again, any progress the previous year chalked off like the wrenching off of an old calendar. They witness their students moving on to better futures that eluded them in their own lives. And yet they witness it with joy, with satisfaction, with not a hint of jealousy or sadness. How awesome that is! I mentioned earlier about romantic love in films and how its nobility makes you feel touched and want to cry. But that sort of love is incomparable to the one teachers have for their students. With romance you love only one person because of certain features the person has or because of certain things the person has done in the past for you. Teachers love their students. Period. Unconditionally, for the simple fact that we are their students, for that we only share one bond with them - a common humanity. The simplicity of it all is profoundly touching.

And yet on the last day of school we went canvassing for one another's "autographs" or signatures in our yearbooks. We went around as though we'd never be the same with our friends again. We got it wrong. It's the "Teachers" chapter whose final fullstop had been penned, it is them who deserve the spots of remembrance in our yearbooks. Pity I realised too little too late.

This Is The End (Of The Innocence?)

The ultimate extent of school's symbolic significance will not dawn upon the majority of us until we are well and truly past it and into the next stage of life's undulating trajectory. The school has been a playground in which to run, to climb, to fall, and to get back up again. It has allowed us to make mistakes and learn from them. But the time has now come for us to reluctantly leave this playground, to walk away from the slides and see-saws our enlarged frames can no longer fit comfortably into. It is time now to walk undaunted into the brave new world, anticipant but fully aware that any slip will carry with it greater ramifications, any fall larger and more painful scars. And yet there is this tremendous sense of hope and of promise that our six years in this hallowed institution have ensured we have acquired all the necessary skills to stand us in good stead to face the blizzard of real challenges. After all, one unforgettable lesson cliched ad infinitum has been that The Best Is Yet To Be. And hence I stare at the obstacles before me with defiance. To the degree of half a right angle, and beyond.

I watch with chagrin as my peers around me start turning sentimental, each one a domino precipitating another emotional "collapse". Look up, my friends. The future is bright. Not exactly orange, but gold. And rosy. Once we get past the 'blue' of our moody departure from our beloved school we will realise the other colour in that marriage is gold. In a way it certainly symbolises how we will always be fondly swept over by lapping waves of nostalgia and yet still stand fast in our quest for golden glory in whatever fields we choose, knowing full well we are the best advertisements (and pride) of our school. Life can take us out of the 121 Dover Road compound, but it can't take this special space out of us.

Perhaps this ability to remain upbeat and optimistic (and not really sad about leaving) stems from the fact that I have never felt attached enough to my class (6.14, in case my detachment from that class has manifested in my general behaviour to an extent you don't know my class) to wince and cringe at the excruciating cracks of bonds of friendship seemingly being broken. In any case, and honestly, they don't. It's just the artificial and metaphorical construct of a class that is destroyed. We are still friends with those we choose to be friends with. In fact such an event as parting should be almost cathartic in its relief. Finally your choice of friends is entirely discretionate; no more having to pretend to befriend a particular person just because he is in your class and you need to maintain workable relations. Sounds good to me.

Sometimes I wonder if I would actually be saying all this if I had had to leave the school as a member of 4.15 back in 2006, or if 614 comprised all 27 members of 3/4.15. I still look back at our brilliant experiences in fond remembrance. It was fun, hilarious and happy being together but those words are erroneous understatements. Defining the essence of that class became so difficult that in end I guess we settled for the nebulous "good times" vague enough to mean really nothing and indistinct enough to be readily applied to all situations; hence its seemingly all-encompassing totality. You know we ought to have had a real farewell that year, out of character though it would have been for our non-committal class. We took solace in the fact that nothing was really "over" since we'd all see one another again along the corridors the following year. And yet that same feeling, that essence which evades verbal definition, just slowly ebbed away from neglect and want of attention, like a dying and withering plant. The paradox is (and would have been) this: If we had held a formal farewell to acknowledge things coming finally to an end, then perhaps they wouldn't since everyone would have a summary piece of what the two years meant etched into their memories. Without one, however, even this fundamental memory is denied and when realities tear us apart nothing is left and the centre cannot hold. It is a pitiful bluff to suggest that in not acknowledging that "it is over" then it simply is not over.

I realised all this at my class's pseudo-party this afternoon. I realised I was a bit reluctant and sad about leaving the scene of my memories behind, but that the memories I treasured were not shared with those classmates at the party with me, but with the great friends from 4.15. None of them were like "best friends", but they were good. Really good. All of them. I don't know if I would feel the same way about 6.14 if I gave it two years, but I seriously am sceptical. SL2/HL3 is another matter altogether. It may stand as only a small portion of 6.14, but that little class feels like everything to me. Everything that these two years have meant, now mean and will be meaning in the years to come. Don't get me wrong, there are wonderful classmates in 6.14, but it's just a pity, I think, that my paradigm of what a class should ideally be was so permanently shaped by the experiences of 4.15 that nothing any of you mustered could live up to it. If it's any consolation then if in the last four years my best class has been 3/4.15 then 5/6.14 must come second. (Like no s**t, really).

The Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side

I like complaining. I like comparing. I like compounding my misery by believing in my own exaggerated concoctions. I attended the English Paper 2 review this morning and my goodness the stuff I heard was out of this world. I felt enlightened, felt empowered, felt exactly how I'd envision every literature student would want to be made to feel by his inspiring teacher. (I have thus far been using a literary device!) Except, I had a grievance. Those two inspiring teachers weren't mine. They were someone else's, some people else's, some class else's. And why! Why am I stuck with a teacher who doesn't seem to possess their faculty for penetrating analysis, for stimulating discussion, for troubleshooting students' essay-writing problems? Life doesn't seem fair.

Then again, I like reflecting, I like rethinking and reexamining the emotions I feel in the "heat of the moment". Then it hit me. If everybody looked at what they do not have and complain the way I do, the world shall be such a nasty place to inhabit. In compensation for this run-of-the-mill teacher I have had the moderating endowments of a competent and knowledgeable teacher for the other part of the subject and (like an advance gift of a tributary mission sent ahead of the "real deal") one of those two aforementioned gentlemen for this part in question last year.

In addition, why did I not realise the absolute brilliance of my History teacher last year, the man who encouraged his students to think for themselves, who instructed them to challenge their "known"s and sacred cows, who supported them with a near-omniscient listening ear? Brilliance further emphasised by the contrasting alternative. If you know what I mean. The songs I have in my iPod become fairly ordinary after awhile (unless Bon Jovi and LeAnn Rimes combined to sing them), but songs whose intrinsic value (I am so sorry to impose such a Romantic or Modernist conception of intrinsic worth and objective being on a poor song - and again I am sorry to Romanticise the concept of a song as in "poor song" - not Daniel) are at best equal to those in my iPod but which I do not have in MP3 version always seem the most enticing and valued. And why? If I were to be Reductionist (and use the scientific method which is too simple for us Humanities scholars - note the choice of word) I'd simply say it's because I do not have these songs and demonstrate the natural human tendency to cherish dearer what I cannot have. But somehow, that's true. I am hunting for a Dan Hill CD since I am starting to like his songs. What are you gaping at? 70s/80s songs are the best. Unless they're in Mandarin. Again I am perilously close to a subscription to the belief that what is in and of the past should be valuable and treasured. The Romantic view of the past is innately Victorian. Go figure.

This, And Not My English Paper 1, Is Rambling

If all your blogs were lined up along two panels facing each other and creating in between a corridor or walkway, a casual stroll through it and past them would show me a million complaints about poor Prelim results. Hey, who are all of you to complain? You all improved, by whatever margins. I didn't. Benchmarked against 40, it seemed impossible to improve. Being me, I refused to believe that. Meaning devastation when revelation came, crushing in its light impersonality. My first non-7 for English. Being kept off my pedestal for History. Having to share it with a member of the weaker sex for Physics. Oh God Physics why Physics? That is a guy's domain for crying out loud. See the time has come when mere 7s do not satiate me. Let me now move into Relativism.

The reason why some other people can be happy with scraping a 6 is that (some of you tend to put the word "because" here in place of "that", which is no good), very simply, their scores have up till now been well shy of that. Not so with me. 7s do not suffice, I want annihilation. So, how do we define "good"? The apparent emotional entity at work here dictates that we each impose our own standards on the objective scale (grades) to determine goodness and progress. In this case, the scale isn't quite objective for it glosses over the fact that the same part of its range can mean different things to different people. That's not to say that it is inaccurate or that it is a-sequential or anything like that. It's just that it would be too reductionist to say that one interpretation of a fact or standard should fit all. Even in this individualist and postmodernist context in which truth is determined by the individual, we see an active pursuit of a, though individually-defined, goal or objective, and not the renunciation of all semblance of objective or progress that modernists disdainfully accuse postmodernists of. It is centrism (the unyielding validity of a central direction) and not progress that is jettisoned by relativism.

I think it is ridiculous team planning to have 3 Premiership quality rightbacks (I say this without fully believing it; I still think Belletti is crap) and 2 Premiership quality forwards. Scolari will now learn. But what a bummer of a season to have with injuries. It's barely October and we've lost 3 for the long-term. In any case isn't it queer that it's always the players you value as really crucial that get injured? Why can't Florent Malouda get injured? Why can't Belletti be the one out for 6 months?