Note to Self
Deadlines left:
5 Nov – Tennyson Presentation
6 Nov – Euro Lit Essay 2
11 Nov – 19c Test #2
12 Nov – Asian-American Lit Essay 2
13 Nov – Film and History Essay 5
13 Nov – School Ends
Time till school ends: 24 days
Things to do: 6
Average: 4 days each, assuming a non-stop work rate, cessation of all life and repression of all human desire for rest and relaxation.
Yay.
please don’t try so hard to say goodbye.
a little encouragement goes a long way. in school, at home, from a friend, from a stranger. have you encouraged someone today? say a kind word, will you?
my days are bleeding into one another. my nights run into the days, my days, still days. it seems as if night never comes for me, insofar as night is darkness, and darkness is rest, and rest is the absence of work, movement and thought. how critical to us is rest? and how grossly inappropriate then, for us then to define rest not in its own intrinsic right, but only in relation to another concept?
i dig my heels in, hoping and praying that my pain redeems me. but my unreligious throat remains slaked, my tongue can say no prayer. pain is the means to an end, and unwittingly the end in itself. i have distractions, and i have either had, or found, great friends for whom i am endlessly thankful for. but at the very end it seems like i love chasing that which has no end, that which has is elusive and intangible. because that which is elusive and intangible purports, by its very definition, no rest, no finish line, and no goodbyes.
i would bear all the pain in the world anew.
because pain will pass, but so will you.
picture by nicole, who does it better than i can ever introspectively do.
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chanced upon a friend’s old blog entry, and she has huge lofty dreams in academia. so do i, as people close to me would know. but mannnn, huge difference is that, she’s got everything all mapped out. grad school application, to-do lists and everything. she knows her dreams, which sound crazy, but then again wussy, achievable dreams are not much good are they?
i want a Ph.D. so that i can have a ‘Dr.’ in correspondences to me. so that i am enabled to write, teach and live somewhere where i am not forcibly conscripted, where the weather’s not perpetually a million degrees and where the crisp red autumn leaves, the first fall of snow and the spring winds are not just concepts i read about in poetry. and so that i am paid decently. is the pragmatism not depressing, especially from a literature major?
well of course i love lit too, but my area of greatest romantic interest and hopefully specialisation, the 16th and 17th century, is already inundated with canons and critics, and more papers published than a million middlemarches meshed together. people who know literature often point that out to me, and to them i confidently reply that ‘i shall maybe find a new slant on the renaissance’. that’s just smokescreen-speak for ‘i don’t know’, and i’m still waiting for that new great idea to hit me. someday.
and, grad studies is a bit of a luxury as far as my family is concerned. i have access to rather moderate means, and perhaps unexceptional ‘expectations’ (heh heh), but i highly doubt i could get through grad school in some nice glamourous country without at least some self-funding. so i’ve got to make my own way, and half-kowtow to my government paymasters (much as i hate this place). as we speak i have some tiny amounts of money invested in some managed funds, for the express interest of saving for grad school. it sucks to have to fend for myself so young in life, but in a nice positive way it is also greatly empowering.
and these days i live with the growing fear that my life would peter out and be ordinary. just another one of those teachers who teach and hate their job, and return home, wherever it might be, to debts, to a whiny wife and mundane middle-class mediocrity.
or maybe it’s just that none of this semester’s modules really fire me up. last semester, i had great dreams, and really enjoyed myself. this semester, *cough* i could not even muster concerted attempts to finish a number of books. and so it is just one deadline after another, before i get my head up again.
i can’t laugh, and i can’t sing
i feel slightly guilty that i haven’t been writing here.
i want to. but i have so much writing on my hands now, during the school term, that anything more than 140 characters just seems beyond my very limited powers.
they’re DEADlines for a reason
to all of the zero people who would be interested:
DEADLINES
24 Aug – Film and History Essay 1 (500 words)
4 Sept – Film and History Essay 2 (500 words)
15 Sept – Singapore Studies Essay 1 (1,500 words)
18 Sept – Film and History Essay 3 (500 words)
1 Oct – Asian-American Lit Essay 1 (3-4 Pages)
7 Oct – 19th Century Lit Test 1
9 Oct – Film and History Essay 4 (500 words)
14 Oct – European Lit Essay 1
20 Oct – Singapore Studies Essay 2 (1,500 words)
26 Oct – 19th Century Lit Essay (3,000 words)
26 Oct – Film and History Major Essay (2,000 words)
6 Nov – European Lit Essay 2
11 Nov – 19th Century Lit Test 2
13 Nov – Film and History Essay 5 (500 words)
hip, hip…?
read memorise chant forget read memorise chant forget
being a science student even for one night sucks ass.
spit in my face, you scientists.
it’s too late to apologise
to crash for a paper cause you didn’t study, don’t care or cause it was really difficult is one thing. to shoot yourself in the foot, then have the rotting with gangrene foot stuffed to the mouth with a stupid mistake, is another altogether. and it kills arrrgh.
and i can’t even afford non-discounted ben and jerry’s to weep to.
will now pray very hard to the god of bell curves to improve my exam chi. cause when a person says yes, his chi says yes. unless you screwed up your exam.
the week that has been…
…has been characterised by endless mugging and anxieties about exams. at least since wednesday anyway. oh and of course, a rather credible result for chelsea against barcelona.
sunday -
airport study with val. which was nice, but it’s still, studying. happiness rating: 6/10
monday -
i really can’t remember. happiness rating: 2/10
tuesday -
trudging through elang notes. which sucked more than one can imagine. happiness rating: -3/10
wednesday -
elang exam. barcelona 0-0 chelsea. happiness rating: 6/10 (nothing to do with the paper, really)
thursday (today) -
renaissance exam went well! brit lit was not too bad either. happiness rating: 7/10
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It’s really funny how Barcelona and many corners of the European press are STILL whining about Chelsea being defensive. I know sometimes I do that when Chelsea meet teams that are less interested in playing football than conducting defence practice and come with parked buses, but it is always the prerogative of the superior team to break down the inferior one no? And Barcelona are superior to Chelsea, make no mistake, and going to the Nou Camp to try beat and beat them at their own game will just be plain stupid.
As luck would have it, Barcelona will now go into the second leg shorn of two top centre-backs Puyol (suspension) and Marquez (injury). More than a slight glimmer of hope for Drogba and gang to batter our way through, that is what I smell. Of course, this would not have mattered if Chelsea had been “positive”, “brave” and “plucky” and went on the attack in the first leg, only to be ravished and lose 3-1 or something.
So, while grabbing an away goal (which wouldn’t have been deserved but football runs like that) would have made the night almost perfect (oh Drogba!), kudos to the entire team for a result that would not have done any damage to team spirit, morale, togetherness, Cech’s confidence and, as circumstances would have it, Chelsea’s chances of reaching Rome.
seeing signs
postcolonial studies has screwed with my mind so bad, and i see orientalist binarisms everywhere. for example, seeing the singapore girl (i.e. stewardesses) in the kebaya is no longer ‘hot’ or a fetishy figure anymore. but a deliberate attempt on singapore’s part to pander to western orientalist notions, exoticising the concept of the “asian” beauty.
and thus i feel sad/angry/indignant for my own kind of people.
whoops.
and it always happens like that
felt genuinely quite shitty in the afternoon but couldn’t tell most usual people. but in the cold light of day, all is still good. and i should be happy. and so i will. because i say so.
the movement in my limbs is now severely constricted.
tomorrow: confessions of a shopaholic.
it’s been a really REALLY good week. with chelsea, kaiser chiefs, the end of elang crap for now, soccer and pretty decent grades for two essays. amidst all the demons that are, i’m happy to say, slowly but surely falling around me. but of which three remain, stoutly and bravely staring me in the face.
i recoil in fear.
schooooool
work at school never stops piling up. it’s like the snow that pummels your backyard, and just when you thought you’ve swept it away it piles up again in an hour or so. it never stops snowing over here, and at times i feel so snowed under.
but yes, so far so good. two tiny tests, two good results.
but like a long and hard premier league season, winning the first two games in a season of 38 ain’t gonna win you the title. all the matters is the remaining 36 games now. and putting it all into a cruder, colder perspective, it’s 12/500 that i’ve secured. good for a bit of optimism, but hardly the cue for any jubilant celebration.
i realise that i might slowly be coming to love academia, and i want so badly for it to love me back.
