Such Sweet Nothing

right kind of wrong

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:27:00 GMT

So...

Today, I wrote a summary of a speech that didn't exist (yet).

Next week, this time, my trip would have started. I will be in Europe. A UNESCO World Heritage Site filled trip...

And results draw close.

I'm scared and busy and excited.

Real Life Week 1

Sun, 12 May 2013 10:41:00 GMT

So, I'm out of school.

- I dare not post a reflection on my four years in NUS- because I'm (morbidly) afraid that I might have failed my last module and have to retake. It'll be hugely embarrassing. What can I do but wait till 4 June. I really am very nostalgic/ sad/ reflective. But this shall all have to wait.

I would pray if I had anything close to time to breathe easy in my new post-school life.

- OL life: I'm very stressed currently. New situations/ changes generally stress me out. I take a long time to adapt. Everything is new, complicated and new. People are friendly. But people being too-friendly stresses me out. I have a hard time explaining this to other people; they sort of think I'm being ungrateful for people being nice/ reaching out to me. But I'm not, I'm really not. It really helps to have friendly people who ease me into this civil service thing. It's all a bit of a shock...

On day one, they sort of simply took it for granted that I would lunch with them and we just carried on. It's nice. But it's also awkward. And I also feel a little bit like I'm "working" during lunch hour too? And also, I'm beginning to feel like they might not understand me-- there are these... unstated assumptions about impending marriage and childbirth- as normal. And a million other things. Maybe we're all just at different stages in our lives, I optimistically think.

Binge eating comfort food at my cubicle- because I need to feel just a slightly bit better when the buttery taste explodes in my mouth.

To sum up, I'm very nervous about graduation and post-graduation life is very overwhelming currently. I'm hoping these things will resolve themselves in time.

This Place (a draft)

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:14:00 GMT

I went back to campus today- to pick up my last essay assignment (A good ending- what more can I ask for. This module has, in general, been a bit of cheap thrill. I've enjoyed it and I have learnt things- I have been pushed, as a history student. Literally, written two essays on the edges of history as a discipline itself.)

I felt strange. To be there, the place I have been in for so many mornings, so many afternoons, so many late nights. It's like I'm suddenly a stranger, after so long. I have a strange feeling like I'm being expelled from... home.

I know people who are going to continue school; some, who are continuing on in the same school. It is a strange feeling. I feel envious. But then again, I'm also excited to get out. It's all a mess, inside. I feel pushing everything down because I have to study (and that's simply going to hell you know. I have such terrible study inertia now. Finally out of steam after four years.)

I went back, to another home yesterday- college. (I figured I would remember the night more than any grade on my sciencey mod...) I am incredibly blessed, to have had this accident.

I will no doubt have more melodramatic thoughts on 29 April. Will write "This Place" in its final form then.

kick in the head

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:22:00 GMT

Overnight A: Year 4 is rhetorically asking me why I worked so hard for 4 years.

Well, it's a happy tragedy; I wouldn't have changed a thing even if I knew I would be where I am today.

1 more paper, 1 more exam, then the end of the thing I have loved for sixteen years.

everything you heard is true

Sun, 7 Apr 2013 18:12:00 GMT

Everybody knows I'm hung up on you.

Uhm.

"Post-HT writing block/ inertia/ can't-really-give-a-shit/ I don't want to embarrass myself in class" feeling REALLY SUCKS.

Urgh. Please. I want to do this, right, by my standards.

Am only living for the fouryearsworthofpain comfort food episodes that are waiting for me just round the corner: CRABS. CHIRASHI DON. BRUNCH FOOD.

the afterlife

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 16:16:00 GMT

This is a little premature, but pretty much, I'm emerging from HT-life.

There is still the anxiety of counting words with the department, with printing and with binding-- and making the final deadline. But everything is pretty much locked down at this point...

It's amazing how little time I have to catch my breath. Already my next deadlines are pressing against my throat. The boyfriend says they don't matter and I should take it easy. But we both know I'm going to throw an inordinate amount of work into it. Part of it is just that it's who I am. Part of it is plain nostalgia-- I am leaving school, and truth be told, I have loved the work part of school, so of course I'm going to freaking embrace the last scraps of it I have left.

"A supermarket poll reported by the Times of London (January, 2004) revealed that Britain's top 10 favorite smells were: fresh bread, frying bacon, coffee, ironing, cut grass, babies, the sea, Christmas tree, perfume, and fish & chips."

My kind of people indeed. I wonder what the French prefer.

New affairs, new subjects. I'm emerging from the blood bath, thankful that it was so fucking fantastic but ready to move on.

holding my breath

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:14:00 GMT

My supervisor is the best. I don't care if he means it (but I think he does).

Today was essentially the last meeting before The Deadline. He said these two things to me:
1) Don't make any drastic changes.

2) This is not a B+. I'm willing to bet money.

People take more extraordinary leaps of faith- "I do", "I love you", "There is a God and He loves me". Right now, "This is not a B+. I'm willing to bet money" is my definition of faith.

dog days

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:04:00 GMT

I'm really very on edge these few days.

Comments about how my topic is dry and how my supervisor is not really competent have not been and will not be well received.

I am not having kids. I am not having kids. I am not having kids.

Who would have thought it would be Year 4 that sold this conviction to me. So why are you not a graduate mother? Year 4.

(Do I really have to include you in my acknowledgements page, do I?)

Fuck off.

had I known, how to save a life

Sat, 9 Mar 2013 22:59:00 GMT

I think perhaps I would have snorted in year 1, if you told me that 3 years later, I would write 5000 words a day (and then some).

I'm reaching a point where I wish I had juniors, to pass on what I now know about this thing called undergraduate life.

Sniff sniff sentimentality and half-dreaming of my acknowledgement page mixed with stirrings of ohfuckamigoingtobeabletodothis.

There is incredible zen sometimes when I simply accept that it's too far gone for me to do anything now.

Okayyyyyyyyyyyyy- back to the painful labour known as thesis writing.

sour

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:06:00 GMT

I'm frustrated again. I don't like it.

I will not do this to anyone else, I keep reminding myself.

Have had it, with the insinuations that I better take this job because no one else will hire me anyway.

I will never have a child. I will never adopt.

Bryan says I am too naive to assume a world where parents don't hurt their children this way. I concede that. But it doesn't change my rationale for not wanting to do onto someone what has been done onto me.

I will never have a child. I cannot do it.

things to come

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:22:00 GMT

1) Job interview tomorrow: If nothing, it's sorely needed experience. I'm doing that thing again where I pour a bucket of water on some spark of hope. Can't really explain it in full. But I certainly want this job more now than I did a week ago. In a I-could-really-like-doing-this way. A quiet excitement. Deep breaths and "just be yourself, except maybe smile more".

It feels like I'm on a cusp. That feeling your stomach gets when you lean over a cliff. That feeling.

2) May/June: Milan! And definitely Venice again. <3. This will come in handy in a few weeks' time when I am dying from thesis writing.

The timing means I will be there when the results hit. Italy should go a long way to curing any depression. I will eat buckets of gelato either way- and that's never awful.

aflutter

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 21:51:00 GMT

My heart's in a flutter over Europe again. Browsing through Airbnb apartments like there isn't a thesis due...

Why I am not having children, ever

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 18:38:00 GMT

About 7 years ago, you told me I was being elitist/ selfish by opting to get a degree, instead of a diploma, which would cost you a lot more. You told me I didn't need a degree to get a job and I only wanted it for vanity etc. I disagreed.

We were both right. I stand by what I said, I do need a degree in my society; but you were right too, on some level, I just wanted it cause I love the work involved.

And now you are ever so happy I'm graduating. (You were so upset/ angry when my sister applied to and was rejected by universities. You considered sending her overseas to get a degree. And now you're happy she's an undergraduate- and you're trying to convince my brother in polytechnic to make it to a university when he has absolutely no damn intention.) And you insisted you wanted this all along. (I wanted to scream, I wanted to scream- NO YOU DIDN'T. YOU TRIED TO STOP ME. I FELT SO TERRIBLE CHOOSING TO GO TO JUNIOR COLLEGE.)

Several weeks ago, I told you I wanted to apply for a second degree, in law. You didn't protest. You simply calculated the cost and kept repeating it to me in a shocked voice. And then you said okay, why not.

And now we're back to shocked. And the deadline is now.

I am never having kids because I don't want to do to them what has been and is being done to me. I don't want to fuck up their lives. I truly believe you never intended to or want to fuck up my life; but you're doing it anyway. It's called the generation gap or whatever. I never want to do this to someone else. It stops now.

wondrous and multicoloured

Thu, 7 Feb 2013 07:37:00 GMT

Feel extremely behind time with the thesis. Makes me sweat just thinking about it.

I love my topic; I have all of about two drops of belief in myself... full steam ahead and life doesn't matter anymore, including you.

At the final stage you tell me that this wondrous and multicoloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realise then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

Okay... back to my work of art in progress.

"why do you wake up at 5.25 in the morning?!"

Sat, 2 Feb 2013 17:36:00 GMT

Because scholarship is discipline. Period.

I'm exhausted. The work cycles I put myself through are tiring.

Bryan says... I make my own luck, in terms of my academic work. I asked him if that meant that I worked so fucking hard that God gives me the consolation prize of modules/ topics that I have great affection for-- for the times when only this can keep me going. He said essentially, yes. If it's true... this God isn't so bad to me after all.

3 days to Firing Squad Day.

"I'd take a bullet before I take love". http://lipstickandchapsticks.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/weight-of-her-love-by-nathan-hartono/
- Not usually into this. But this is local and lovely. Very soothing for such a long day spent standing up.