I don't mean to brag, but a B in math is something to write home about, seeing as how it's been a while since I've passed anything math-related.

That being said, I don't feel like I've done anything to deserve this grade in any respect ; Not only did I just hit the mark, everything I didn't study for pulled a disappearing act on exam day, and my progressive preparation consisted of lazing around thinking "I'll do it later" to lazing around thinking "It's too late to do anything about it", which can only mean god, Jesus, Allah, Shiva, Vishnu, Thor, the Monkey God, Odin, Superman, Mike Shinoda, the Iron Chefs and that guy who sang "Karma Chameleon" were pushing me in the improper direction of a decent grade.
And even with their combined strength, I still only managed a B. It's time to go look for more celestial beings, cosmic entities and lucky charms.

However, if the theory of people only having a given amount of luck throughout their lives is true, then my situation would be similar to that of Wil E. Coyote of Road Runner infamy ; Always chasing, never catching, but also never failing to end up flat-faced.

Coming soon : Wilfred's first foray into LT5! Or, how Wilfred went back to failing maths.

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An issue that has been popping up in numbers recently is that of people feeling hard done by, accused, insecure, suppressed and arrowed. I understand that the 5 terms used have 5 different connotations, but they all stem from the same cause.

The current trend in reading now seems to lean towards self-helps books. You've probably seen a ton of these by now. They're the books with intelligent-looking people on the backs. Now, the reason these people are able to earn/fraud money is simply because of their ability to appeal to the masses ; That is, the "help" that they offer applies not only to one person, but to thousands, and maybe more.

So, why does a book that is theoretically filled with generic comments become popular? The answer is because no matter what people say about everyone being different, their own unique little snowflake(yes I know that I have mentioned this before, cut me some slack here) or weird in their own way, there is always a certain amount of genericness/genericity/generite within everyone ; That means that when it all boils down to nothing, everyone is as alike with one another as they are different. There is a theory about everyone being born the same, and evolving into the different beings that are the components of society due to social conditioning and family development, among other factors.

How often have you read a piece of advice from a random person and went "That is so true!", "Me too!" or "Wilfred is my new god!" ? You probably have at one point or another, even if the person quoted is sitting on a deck chair under a yellow umbrella sipping a cold drink on the warm beaches of hell. This, again, is due to the speck of homogenity that exists within all of us. Even if time and space separates us, the amazing part is that such gems of advice can still be relevant in today's context, which again suggests that through our lives there is still a part of us that remains the same as everyone else no matter how far away or nong....I mean long ago. That being said, the biggest difference is in how much this homogenous tumour within all of us is allowed to grow ; Some allow it to grow so they can do stupid things like play the social game and "fit in" and some keep it small so they can maintain their uniqueness, but it's never cut off completely.

Which means that much like everything else is life, there is no stark constrast or uncanny resembelance, rather, it's a huge grey area. And we all know that treading the grey area is dangerous. Don't believe me? Go jump in a bucket of wet cement.

That being said, if anyone feels that any of my posts were specifically targeted at them, do me a favour and stop being so self-absorbed. I'm not spending half an hour writing content based on ONE lousy person. The bad advice on this blog is meant for everyone.

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On a side note, skipping school is pretty fun!

So, as it turns out, school has to start again today, and as apathetic as I feel I am going have to work given my embarassingly bad lit, oddly terrible maths and shameful econs state of affairs. I would mention GP, but when I finished whining about it and looked up I'd be looking at an audience of skeletons.

Which is why I really don't want my results back, partly because I roughly know the outcome already, and also because it means I now have an actual reason to study. With the fact that Jonathan Leong doesn't suck nearly as much as the trainwreck that calls itself Sylvester Sim, that's two things that have changed over the past couple of years.

On the bright side of the morbid state of affairs, it's only for a week, which means only one week of Violet jumping down my throat, grabbing me by the scruff of the neck, holding me a gunpoint with a super soaker, leaving pig's heads on my door, sending in death notes signed with blood through the mail and threatening me with unlimited episodes of Care Bears to give her an essay once every two days like the teacher by day and serial killer by night that I wouldn't rule her out of. She'd probably make a better Elektra then Jennifer Garner and then some.

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Sometimes I wonder what people come here for. There are people who come here for random advice. Some come to see what goes on in the beehive that is Wilfred's mind, only to realize that all the bees are slacking off, and some come to read bad jokes and worse reference to pop culture. Now, it would be hard to promise both and continously provide them, given both the indiscretions that might occur and the difficulty to provide good advice and try to be funny at the same time. Today, however, I am not here to make any jokes, so feel free to access your search engine of choice and search for short videos and articles of clothing regarding "iPoop".

For those who haven't gotten it yet, "iPoop" is a pun on "iPod".

For those who didn't realise there was supposed to be a joke at press time, thank you.

Having walked under a ladder, crossed the path of a black cat, broken a mirror and listened to Mandy Moore songs en route to going out, there was no way I was going to enjoy good luck ; Hence I was unlucky enough to see someone wearing a shirt with aforementioned bad pun on it. Ever since, every time I thought back on it my ire of it has grown ; Not really so much because it was so excruciatingly mind-numbingly stupid and senseless, but because there were equally dumb people(as the one wearing the shirt, of course, not me) who actually thought the shirt was funny.

As much as I would like to take time to rail at things like horrendous and altogether shameful dress sense, one has to realise at some point of time that such things, much like poverty, pollution, football scandals and the stupidity of famous people, can never really be stopped, but just remain dormant and unannounced for some time before reemerging, like a butterfly from a coccoon, a caveman from his secret hiding place or a legendary sleeping Pokemon.

The point here is, multiple people can be doing the same thing, but they do it for different reasons. When students do homework, there are people who do it because it's supposed to make you better at what you do, that is, study. There are people who do it because it's fun. These include people who like maths, nerds, China scholars, mental patients and retarded foxes. That being said, "stealthy as a retarded fox" is not the same compliment as "stealthy as a fox." Then there are those who do it so they can shut their teachers up.

What this implicitly means is that no matter what people are doing, it isn't always a true reflection of their inner selves. Much like people in Marvel Comics never know when they're near a mutant, you're almost never going to know just how much you can trust any given person. And the deeper you sink into a contrasting delusion, the more idiotic you're going to feel when it turns around and smacks you in the face. This would, obviously, be intensely frustrating and at times infuriating, and quite frankly it pisses me off when people are obviously doing things to attract attention and the like, and it's even more stupendous that there are people stupid enough to fall for it and happily play along.

Trust is an issue most easily abused, due to the fact that sometimes the synergy between the mind and the body is unceremoniously broken. And you'd wonder why I hesitate to trust people with certain things all the time. Since all people can be trusted with some things,some people can't be trusted with anything and nobody can be trusted with everything, there is need to be careful where you place your trust.

This is Mount Everest. Standing on the border separating China and Nepal, it is the highest peak in the world. Snowy and steep, it is difficult to climb, to say the least. Yet, there have been humans, so minute in comparison, that have risen to the occasion and conquered this monument of nature in a testament to human strength and willpower.

This entry, however, has absolutely nothing to do with that.

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In life, one of the most-repeated mantras go something along the line of "Learn from your mistakes", "Be clever, learn from the mistakes of others", "Fool you once, shame on me. Fool you twice, shame on you" and "England will win the World Cup."

If such statements were true, then I would've spread a wealth of knowledge through the world, since I make more mistakes in a day than Jessica Simpson would make in a Primary 4 science test. The opposite, however, seems to happen, since I appear to make people around me dumber by the second, to the point that their IQ drops lower to whatever Paris Hilton can count to. I would've said Jessica Simpson again, but I don't know how good her maths is. I mean, she has to be good at something. And besides, I've seen people fall for the same trick countless times, and I'm sure you have too. If you've done it to teachers, they've fallen for it. As a result, such statements prove to be questionable in truth, dubious in nature, irrelevent in usage and always useless. Ecspecially the one about England.

In fact, the reason that people don't learn from their mistakes is that they don't realise it when they're making them. This is because of other terms such as "Luck is given to those who need it" and "God helps his fools, donkeys, retards and Wayne Rooneys", which mean that every person, no matter how evil, annoying, crappy, unlucky, will still stand to enjoy a certain degree of success in life. Which also means that you can lead a life littered with mistakes and still get along fine. This means that you can go on a happy streak of success only to come crashing down like Bush's foreign policies when Lady Luck decides that hauling your ass out of the gorge time and time again is hard and unpaid work and just decides to let you fall.

Edit : Firefox just crapped out on me, so I lost half the post at this point. So everything after this is retyped with frustrated fingers and may hence sound unreasonable, angsty, brainless or downright boring. Think Xiaxue.

This isn't to say that it's completely the person's fault, and he should be condemned and banished to a eternity where all he does is eat apple seeds and listen to Numa Numa over and over again. After all, when you succeed, you're obviously doing something right, so changing the way you do things would obviously endanger that. As a result, when encountered with a similar dilemma, the brain (or in some cases the vacuum) would send a message in a bottle, smoke signals and light flares to the other parts of the body to recreate a similar scenario to deal with said problem. This, however, isn't an excuse to be stupid, however tempting it may be.

This is where memory and alertness comes in. Since we assume that there is always room for improvement, and if you disagree you are a pompous prick who proves me right anyhow, you would then be able which part of the procedure, procure, cedure or manicure actually served as a setback rather than a boost, a lift rather than a scramble, a boon rather than a screwup, a Steven Gerrard rather than a Craig Bellamy, a cameraman rather than a Lindsay Lohan, a tomato rather than a tomato said in Chinese. You get the idea.

Which is why it's kind of sad that people waste no time in incorrectly pointing fingers at whatever they don't like to blame their failure on, failing again in not recognising that the agonising part may or may not be a necessary evil. After all, seeing ugly girls make you appreciate the pretty ones around more. In a way, unless the pretty girls have minds about as cognitive as a leftover car from the Flintstones.

Note to self : always write in notepad first.

There's a big hole in my pocket. If there wasn't, the money wouldn't be able to go in.

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What brings people together? What gets people talking?

I'll tell you. It's a common interest. Common interests bring people, who otherwise have nothing else in common, together. JCs have their socially insecure people, England has their football fanatics, Japan has their workaholics, Korea has their gamers... well, maybe not, since they don't get together in real life. Much similarly, you and I both have a common interest in words, me in writing them and you in reading them, though I doubt anyone enjoys reading this anymore, the dust bunnies on my cbox a wonderful testament to that statement. Indeed, the power of something appealing unites people, unites groups, sometimes even unites a country. You know it when people declare holidays to watch their country play in the world cup, a privilege us losers in Singapore are likely to be privy to anytime in the near future.

But now that we have our very own basketball team with a grand total of 2 local talents....

Nah.

Common interests, however, while serving as a unifying factor, can also be a social trap, generating strange amounts of awkwardness when people start to lose interest or it just dies down. I'm sure the Italian man-in-a-suit didn't have much to say to the Pizza boy other than "Keep the change" two months after the world cup - You can only laugh at the stupidity of one balding Frenchmen for so long, after all. And when awkwardness ensues, there are two outcomes - dialogue and silence.

To start, let me say it that I hate it when people feel an overwhelming urge to move their mouth muscles. If you don't feel like smiling, just don't smile. And when you feel the urge to "create conversation", think twice. It gets rather irritating when people open their mouths just to break the silence or fill an imaginary gap in the conversation. It's okay if you're bored, but conversation should flow naturally, not be forced. You may not know this, but some people actually like silence, given how the world now is saturated with sound, such that in the absence of sound you actually feel a ringing in your ears while your eardrums recuperate from a day of endless chatter and meaningless listening.

This isn't to say that conversation is totally bad, it's just overly excessive. Even after we end our days sometimes we have to deal with the little voices in our heads. People all around play dumb talk-related gossip games such as Skulls and Crossphones, Pitch-a-Bitch and 2 Fake 2 Furious. The only reason bad sayings like "actions speak louder than words" and "the most important things are not said with words" only come about because of the sheer volume of words such that actually getting down to filtering out the true meaning becomes a hassle. If I could walk around with earplugs on while subtitles flash at the bottom of my vision I would ; That way I could choose to ignore them just by looking away, but nothing escapes your ears.

Case in point : Exams, where unlucky arts students always sit closest to the doors closest to the idiotic junior student population. During the lit paper, us students had to deal with varied distractions such as uproarious laughing from guys and incessant giggling from girls, the national anthem blaring over the system, and random gossip conversations while twits jiggle past the hall.

Silence, on the other hand, has found itself in an awkward position as of late. The way people make noise you'd think silence is an unwelcome concept in today's society, since it gets broken as soon as it arrives. Yet, when silence is wanted, it never really seems to arrive, because people have an aggressive urge where their mouth is concerned. I'm convinced that some people would be doing pullups with their lips if they were allowed to. In fact, silence is so rare that the only time we have it is when we slumber, and even then the sandman and his dreams dictate that the silence can get deafening.

Having said that, it's not all good. We all know about comfortable silence. It's the type that we feel irritated at when people flap their jaws to break it. There's also awkward silence which people feel the need to shatter completely, only to be lambasted by others. In other words, like many other things, no two people feel the same two silences, and that is the source of my irritation, but then again, if everyone felt the same things, it would not only be a boring world, but a communist one as well.

The story of my prelims.

Having tried to bring myself to actually study for Maths and failing miserably an hour before the exam, instead ending up laughing at the antics of the cross combi people, which basically consisted of saying stupid things at the top of their voices in the library.

I came out of the exam thinking "hey, that wasn't so bad!" Yeah, not so bad if you don't think about the questions I couldn't do, the questions I could do but probably got wrong anyway, and the mucus icicles(mucusicles?) forming in my nostrils in the general shape of the convergence of my nose hairs, yeah, it wasn't so bad.

That being said, I'm not sure if finishing over half an hour before the paper ends and reportedly swinging your legs freely in all sorts of directions is a sign of overwhelming confidence or underwhelming mediocrity. Sigh. I'm losing the writer's touch.

Before I actually get down to writing this entry, let me just tell all those complacent, fair-weather Manchester United fans out there :

Arsenal >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Man U

Note that I do not support Arsenal. That being said, their foreign players actually speak better English than actual Englishmen.

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It's exam season, and all abound are fast food joints with more muggers than diners, a relatively empty Orchard Road(I know this because I have already failed the rest of my prelims kthx) and shelves crying out in agony if they have to bear any more weight from unncecessary paper. Well, it's the case for me anyway, since my room is so messy that if you replaced all those papers with clothes I'd be living in a floordrobe.

But one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb, a Singaporean woman on Miss Universe and a man in a lesbian club, and ticks me off occassionally is how people can complain that "I've studied a lot but I still can't pass!" Variations of this include "Me fail English? That's unpossible, I read so much!" and "It's not like I didn't study, I don't deserve to fail!*whine whine whine*

It becomes irksome after a while because such people obviously don't put any perspective into their thoughts whatsoever. I mean, as A level students you obviously have to acknowledge that a significant amount of preparation has to be put into your studying if you do hope to get a decent grade, amount of effort varying on your starting intelligence. For such people, times ten. Even after you factor in things like luck and paper difficulty, there's a limit to how much it can deviate. By a significant amount of preparation, it doesn't really mean picking up a pile of notes two weeks before the exam and attempting to memorise it, because memorising does jack in real life, though one clever enough to adjust during exams could get away with it. It means more than that.

You could say "I studied at place X from 11 to 6 today, I think this mugger thing is latching onto me!" and have it come across as a fairly impressive statement, depending on delivery.(many people have yet to work on this aspect of speaking, including me) But if your idea of so-called "studying" means dilly-dallying and reaching there late, singing along to bad tunes on your mp3 player, stoning at your notes at regular 15-minute intervals and looking up and having a half-hour chat with your equally "hardworking" friend every quarter-hour, then how much do you think you've actually studied? It's like eating a burger without a patty, going for a lesson without listening to the teacher(which admittedly happens a whole lot) or joining the police force without taking breaks.

In a similar vein, you might have covered half your sylabus(I'm convinced that's wrong spelling)in half a day, but then your comprehension would also be half-baked, you probably won't get half the marks you want, in which case you should be picking flowers, cutting purses, or accompanying equally short people on journeys to toss a ring into lava, or whatever it is halflings do these days.

And people wonder why they can't pass an exam for nuts. If you studying methods aren't effective, you might as well slack off ; At least it's a form of twisted reprieve when you don't meet your imaginary goal.

This is why perspective is important ; It's also why one event does not automatically lead to another. You could say that you've done 6 hours of no-nonsense studying, but without your notion of "studying" and "nonsense" it would be near to impossbile to conclude how comprehensive said knowledge actually is. Without a given amount of perspective nothing is for sure.

That being said, perspective isn't something you want to have in bundles and bundles. Not only does it not help you pass mindless math/science exams, it also intrisically makes you assume the worst in people. This isn't to say George Bush has a ton of perspective to spare, it does allow you to see the good in some situations as well.

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-Fs written all over my papers, followed by an "ail" rather than a "antastic" or an "abulous!"
-Studying for the actual A level paper after the $2.99 trial period, coincidentally the same amount of marks on my papers
-Having to actually go through the exam
-Getting strange purple bedsores from sitting/lying in a place too much.
-Flies as a fixture on my head for neglecting personal hygiene while studying/lazing
-Probable decaying of my innards
-Reduction of brain cells to negative digits

That's basically the gist of the next few months till this cursed period is over.

Not exactly what you'd sing to "These are a few of my favourite things!"

You know how when you walk out of an exam hall thinking the paper was fine, only to have everyone else moaning and groaning about how hard it was? You know how you sometimes feel like everyone around you is incredibly dumb? You know how it isn't better to say anything under such circumstances?

I think that's how the people around me feel.

Let me just say that I don't go into exams with the intention of failing ; It's not the kind of twisted sado/maso/playdough chism you think it is. I don't derive enjoyment from being way behind on the information curve from everyone else. My dreams don't involve showing up for classes with my pants down or not there at all. It's just that in times of utter hopelessness one cant help but laugh.

Of course, when I miss that elusive passing grade by one mark, count on me to be frantically searching for it. I'd search under the table, on the floor, above my head. I'd do that Bugs Bunny routine where he lifts up rocks and searches holes in trees for stuff that cannot possibly fit there. It would probably kill whatever token sense of humour I had in the first place, which means that no matter what happened I'd be left wanting.

This probably means I should be studying harder, but with so many distractions around, pleasant or not, it's getting really hard.

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In life, we'll probably all have a bunch of regrets : That girl you never asked out, the guy you rejected, that goldfish you fed too much, that one test you didn't study for, that child you named Suri(what a terrible name!), that bad sequel to Dumb and Dumber, not a good movie in the first place, that you directed.

So how do people deal with regret, among other negative emotions? Some people resort to infernal screaming at every single opportunity as a method to relieve the proverbial weight on the shoulders, trading it for a strain on the throat. Of course, this doesn't get you everything you want, but that doesn't stop people from trying incessantly, which gets on my nerves and intraveinously pumps anger-inducing drugs into my system.

I, however, straddle the thin, pixelated line between being a bottler or a leaker. I try to keep things in as far as possible, letting small actions be my course of relief. When that fails, however, the tension builds in my blood and you see those popping vein lines that consist of three strokes commonly found on anime/comic characters. So when you do see me in a lunatic fit, screaming at the top of my lungs, it's probably for a good reason. That, or no reason at all.

The reason this tends to be easier is that people who scream and shout are deemed by the supposedly liberal Singapore society as "weird", "crazy", "siao" and "trying to be like Adam Sandler". And in a cramped world like Singapore the expanses of the world consist mostly of society, so anyone who feels like ranting and raving in public would at the same time feel like the whole universe is pointing a finger away from that path.

So, uh....yeah.

Ah, yes, double paper days. It's amazing how two papers can behave so differently and still leave me with an incredibly mediocre number of marks.

I locked eyes with Maths. It didn't like me. In fact, it pushed me to the ground, kicked sand in my eye, poured acid down my throat, made me listen to bad Mariah Carey songs over and over again, broke my legs so I wouldn't be able to get away and stomped on my writhing carcass for added effect while taking some 90 marks away from me. None of this is a lie; I think I really did lose 90 marks this time. That being said, I don't mind banishment to the container classrooms.

The good thing about that, though, was that I can now spot whatever's going to come out for paper 2 and promptly get it wrong. DE and Numerical methods are almost a shoo-in; I suspect that somewhere down the line us innocent students will have to do dubious things like integration by parts, vectors by sectors, absurd surds, running from the Indianapolis police, hocus pocus, gotta focus, or you'll draw the wrong locus.

Lit, on the other hand, traded the brutality of maths with complete desertion. It went of to do great things like pilgrimages to faraway lands, open up North Korea and co-star with Jessica Alba on a bad autumn flick that still wins an Oscar because the only other Nominee was Snakes on a Plane. As a result, my answers were a little confused, half-baked, somewhat disorganised and totally irrelevant.

This is where I go "ooooohhhh shit".

I opened the paper, took a quick glance at the questions, and started cursing several deities. It wasn't just God and Allah. Odin, the Easter Bunny and Mister Miracle were probably in that list as well.

Two hours and seven sheets of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Maritan language with a pinch of Sanskrit and a dash of ancient Chinese characters later, the rest of the paper was pretty much a blur.If you stood up to go get some chips and came back, the paper probably would've been over. If the paper were a basketball player, he'd swoop down the court so fast the cameras wouldn't be able to keep up. If I stopped to think during the paper I'd be handing it up before I even had the chance to scratch Wilfred "fail econs" Lau under the "Name" section of the paper. But not before I got sent to the hospital with a brain hemorrhage.

As you can see, the tone has been set, and it likens itself to a low humming of inevitable doom.

Humans are becoming more and more lazy in recent times, as shown by the rise of internet language, where "lol" has replaced "haha", thereby saving one alphabet and letters in friendster profiles mysteriously go missing like women and children in a slave-trading country, which is an oxymoron, since typing in alternate caps is shit tiring, much like doing battle with a Hwa Chong prelim paper.

Very soon, this laziness will translate into our speech as well, as medisave, medishield and medifund have basically been compressed into what we call "3 Ms", people talk in short, curt and inevitably occassionally rude sentences, as opposed to overflowing, time-wasting, over-the-top, under-the-bridge language of shakespearen times.

Who can blame laziness on the youths of the world when even the adults are slacking off? Adults reading this, don't try to deny it.

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What do you do when you have a paper in eleven hours and your studying so far has been limited to 10 minute intervals with 5 hour breaks in between?

A) Invent a time machine. While obviously the best option, being not much more than a student with an O-level cert and much less than a renowned scientist means that this will be an uphill task. Which creates another dilemma, which means going in circles. Which is what econs feels like right now.

B) Try to study. Realistic, yes, but inevitably bound for failure if the rumour that studying is a progressive effort turns out to be true. Hence may be self-defeating and ego-bruising. Stay away.

C) Run around in circles screaming your head off.

D) Hibernate. Both C and D are performed with the mindset that flogging a dead horse would give you a squishy pink pulp rather than a ride. Which obviously makes the most sense.

Obviously, I won't do any of the above, instead choosing alternative methods of loafing around for the impending, inevitable, inconceivable and in-something else doom.

This is as laughable as my mangling of the English Language.

And when I get my paper, I will look at it and say "this is awkward", or rather switch to a compressed version, "this awk".

Whine report on said econs paper coming soon.

Ah yes, the first paper of the prelims begins tomorrow. The first interval of any event normally becomes the tone setter for the entire period. I've answered questions intelligently and failed, wrote out of topic and passed, and I've done papers in a manner similar to that of a barnyard animal and managed to not fail. And the strange thing is that the trend continues for the rest of the papers, chinese notwithstanding.

Let's just hope the GP paper was a minor blip in the plans. If it isn't, well, I can stuff some grubs into my mouth, smell my armpits and go find a banana, since it would prove that I'm an tropical primate with about as much capacity to make intelligent decisions as Beyonce. Her last name is Know-les for a reason.

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"It's too hard!"

These would be words you'd expect to hear from a woman leftover from the Victorian Era working at an ice cream parlour, and even then, the term "it" would be ambigious, and you wouldn't be sure whether she was referring to the ice cream, the act of scooping the ice cream, or making enough money to buy catnip for the 200 cats she has in the old house on the top of the hill.

However, these words could also be uttered by a Frenchman trying to squeeze an orange, a blonde attempting primary school maths or Dracula taking a bite out of R2D2 and getting a mouthful of microchips and wires.

Different people have different measurements of difficulty and varying thresholds of tolerance. Mine is limited to traveling within a 2m radius from my bed, which should explain why everyday seems like such a struggle.

What's yours?

A while back, while packing up after class, a classmate randomly turned to me and said, in a very serious tone no less,

"From your blog I can see that you are studying."


The chortle I attempt to suppress nearly tears my larynx to shreds.

In fact, I actually spend more time weighing my options on what to study that actually getting down to it. Literally! I held my Theory of Interest Rate Determination and Production and Cost notes in either hand and moved them up and down, looking for some kind of sign from above. Then I did the same with the rest of the lecture notes at my disposal for about an hour or so, until I decided to scrap the entire thing and go watch some television instead. Even with so much resources at the tip of my finger, yours truly will always find a way to not be prepared.

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Sometimes I'm thankful for my classmates. Note the keyword. Thanks to them the construction going on next door and the jets flying overhead don't seem as much a distraction as they should be. Not when you have a living, breathing police siren sitting within a 10-metre radius of you every free period. She probably inhales through her ears, which would then explain how it can go on for entire periods.

That is all for today.

In the road of education that leads to the university, I would say right now that I'm slowly, but surely making the transition from "idiot who has to walk because he forgot to pack fuel" to "hapless roadkill caught in the headlights".

---

While I was unknowingly doing a great impression of the late Steve Irwin in wrestling with my GP paper, only to be devoured by it like King Kong eats planes, it struck me. Not in the same way I'd be struck if I sauntered up to Mike Tyson and said "Yo, what up, nigga dawg?" complete with crossed arms and cool pose, but it still hit me like a notion that won't seem to let me go.

Nothing will ever go according to plan.

Sure, you can go into any given exam with the mindset of decimating the paper with spur-of-the-moment super powers, but in life, not everyone will walk into an ice cream shop and order Chocolate or Vanilla. Once in a while, a tall-nosed Englishman will walk in and ask for butter pecan. Once in a while, a cowboy will mosey in and ask for buffalo wings, only to realise he's in the wrong place. Once in a while, a korean will wander in looking for Kim Chi flavoured ice cream, or ice cream flavoured Kim Chi, not necessarily in that order.

Everybody has those "once in a while" moments of his life, one of unnatural and possibly unnecessary tension, one of indescribable emotions. The moment could be just a few mere seconds. It could span for years and years, thereby betraying its title of "moment". It could come once in a lifetime. It could come every 28 days. It could never come at all. You'd know when you're in it.

Monday's GP paper didn't go much differently from any other GP paper, that is, me writing confused words on a piece of paper while whining and grumbling to the little angel and devil on my shoulder, who are too busy arguing to even listen. But what was different was that I was having a "moment", and a bad one at that. The feeling at the time was that of doing something with full knowledge of not even coming close to succeeding. More on the moment next time once I feel like it.

In this case, if I had a plan, it had gone completely awry. However, if the plan was "walk in, sit down, close your eyes, wake up 3 hours later, get up, walk off", I'd have walked away a happy man, knowing that everything had gone according to plan.

Someone used to say "expect the unexpected". The biggest problem with the statement is that doing so would kill off human emotions, since we wouldn't be feeling surprise and the joy/anguish that comes with it. However, my other problem with the statement is that if you made everything expected, then nothing would be unexpected, in which case you wouldn't expect anything at all, since you'd be expecting nothing. So, the perfect way to go about being both prepared and constantly surprised in life would be to expect nothing.

However, the human mind rarely thinks in such a way. Somewhere in the deep recesses of our brains, or the space for rent in between the ears for some people, we learn to come up with our own projections and conjurations of what would happen. This is where expectation, anticipation and the rest of human emotions come in. When you expect something good and it happens, you are happy. Do the rest of the permutations yourself.

One would obviously make an argument of how emotions teach us how human we really are, but another one would argue that not having emotions would make us better humans instead.

So which do you prefer?

Last Satuday I was at Eastpoint, home to multiple badly placed Old Chang Kees, Manhunt 2006 and not a movie theatre. There was a kids' singing competition being held there. If nothing else, I can now live with the knowledge that there are roughly 50 less people that like Chinese music, and that the notion of "Little children should be seen, not heard" has been reinforced exponentially to the power of infinity. You could almost hear the glass panels creaking in agony while multiple patients in nearby CGH suddenly go into sound-induced spasms, however that occurs.

On a slightly more important note, however, it got me wondering what parents these days are thinking, yet again because of the upwardly bratty trend in kids these days. I've seen pornstars more conservatively dressed than some of the girls up there. Though this would bring up the question of where I've seen pornstars in the first place, that is not the point. It could be me, but I don't exactly see why parents these days see the need to dress their kids up to look "hip", "cool", "sexy" or "like Najip Ali", because if nothing else it tells the entire world about the inadequecies of parents today. Do they really need it? I mean kids are kids are kids, and there's no way you can magically get them to age faster and grow a goatee at the ripe old age of 6, so quit it already. There's a fine line between looking decent and overindulging on your children.

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I went to my very first soccer match today. Even though it finished 0-0 and at the same time affirmed that Fs and myself go together like Japanese cartoons and big robots/short skirts, depending on the cartoon itself, there's something wonderful about being able to scream vulgarities in public and not get stared at like a raving idiot.

As for the game itself, not that it wasn't exciting, but those Chinamen treat Singapore like their very own portable Yellow River. I was mildly surprised that the Chinese player didn't bow down asking for forgiveness from Chairman Mao at the sight of the Little Red Book(read:red card) that was shown to him.

It was also rather damaging to my self esteem when a Mainland Chinese approached me and asked me how to get to the football match thinking I was one of his compatriots. He even asked me if I was from the Mainland or not, I was rather tempted to tell him that if he stood in the middle of the road and waited long enough the football match would come to him, but oh well, hindsight is always 20-20. GAH. On a side note, it could just be me or these China people have an awful lot to say when they herd together, if they generated a drop of saliva for every word they spoke they'd be heralded as a greater threat than the melting polar caps. At least they melt to create generally clean water.

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My happiness
is slowly creeping by
now you're at home
if it ever starts sinking in
it must be when you pack up and go

I apologize in advance for the incoherence and difficulty of following this entry. Blame it on an extremely screwy GP paper and Snakes on a Plane.

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They say that a "trial by fire" is the one determining process by which "the weak are weeded out", "only the fittest survive" and "the boys are separated from the men". The previous statement has concluded my paper 8 practice for the rest of the prelim period.

So how does one actually go about passing these trials of fire, and actually realising it when one is upon him? There are so many tests in so many different areas of life that any chef wanting to "Go Cajun" has the opportunity to be original. It could be when the biggest exams of your life are nigh, when the family is going through some troubling times, or when you need to keep from bursting our laughing while watching Snakes in a Plane. Which incidentally is one of those movies in the same "So bad it's laughable" vein as Mortal Kombat(the title that spawned bad Internet English before it was even created) and Street Fighter:The Movie. But never mind that.

My idea of a trial by fire would be being strapped with lap cheong(taiwanese sausages for the uninitiated) and being thrown into a pit of hungry dogs, or even worse, a plane full of snakes, in which case I'd have to cope with the pain from the snakebites as well as try not to die of laughter. Simple? Hell yes. Pretty? Heck no, but if all of us were pretty, then it would stop the supermodels from being so super, which is basically all they have going for them. Sounds like a plan to get rid of useless people, but what the heck.

Sadly, however, life isn't that simple ; Throwing someone into a plane with snakes does not automatically make him a stronger person, seeing as how snakes seem to bite people randomly on random places. Instead, our proverbial tests of life try us in different areas of our lives, and supposedly to live a full life we have to pass most, if not all, of them. Of course, some of these tests can be easily bypassed with a condition here and a little acting there, i.e NAPFA tests via being PES C, but that really isn't the point. Really.

The point is, these tests of life, more often than not, are simply little pieces to a bigger picture If you like a full picture in 2000 different colours, with obsolete concepts like romance, rivalry and politics thrown in, together with a tiny plane with snakes in the background, then yeah, go ahead, throw yourself at everything in sight, but don't come haunting me when you die of stress at the ripe old age of thirty.

Me? I like a pictures slightly discoloured at one end, vibrant at the other, to remind me that there are constantly two sides to every coin, two sides of every story, two snakes on every plane(which, incidentally, would be a really good terrorist idea, which means that I'm growing into my role as the shifty-eyed baddie in a Hong Kong mafia film.) A few missing pieces would be nice to, since it would give me a purpose in life.

Which would then bring me to the issue of how no one should be able to project the perfect picture of somebody else's life, simply because black and white areas of life are obliterated. While you're young, good and evil are relatively simple, clear cut concepts, much alike putting snakes in a plane and making a movie out of it. As one gets older, however, the only thing that remains clear is that nothing is really as clear as it seems. Superman and Batman are both good guys, but it's clear that they don't see eye-to-eye on methodology. Superman is the big, brawny fellow, crashing head-on into every villain he encounters, while Batman acknowledges that he isn't as strong as Superman, can't fly, doesn't have heat ray vision, doesn't look good in Red Spandex, so he has to resort to other methods to defeat his villains which Superman would've deemed unhonourable.

However, in a world where the highest awards are handed out to the people with the best works, rather than the people with the most original works, the ends sometimes do justify the means of going down the trod and beaten path. The whole "crisis on a constrained space/mode of transport"(Phone Booth, Speed) and "terrorised by animals"(Jurassic Park) angles have both been done to death already, but that doesn't stop Hollywood directors from mashing the two concepts together, sticking in a good actor and making a brainless action flick.

In addition to that, some people actually do want to be evil because of the perks that come with it; Kingpin and Lex Luthor were rich before anyone could do anything about it. Anakin's lines got cooler as he got closer and closer to the dark side ; Either it's the evil working, or he's a late bloomer. These villains were doing what they felt was right for them, they just saw less of a need to care for others.

In short, while it's nice to be unethical and yet original at times, one also has to acknowledge that if a path has been laid out by someone who has succeeded, going down the path can prove a less risky endeavor where passing the tests of life are concerned, as long as you know what your most important tests actually are and what it means to pass them.

Now that Joakim got booted out of Singapore Idol, there really isn't anyone to bitch about on the show, which makes it not worth watching anymore, since people watch the show almost so they could find something to bitch about to other people, since bitching is the ultimate form of making one feel better about himself. Not that it was really worth watching in the first place.

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I got onto a cab yesterday, told the uncle where I wanted to go, and off we went. And by "off we went", I actually meant "blast off".

If I didn't know I was in a taxi, I could've sworn the driver was auditioning for the next Initial D/Fast and Furious/ Herbie Fully Loaded movie. Okay, maybe not the last one. If the windows were open my hair wouldn't be on my head anymore. I looked at a petrol station, and by the time I realised I was looking at a petrol station it was some 30 kilometers behind us. You get the idea. I glanced over and the speedometer, and it said..... zero? Hello, how many ways are there to break a speedometer? One possibility is that it exceeded the limit and went to zero, which at the time, actually felt like the truth.

For a while, I actually contemplated opening the door and jumping out of the cab, but then the friction from the tyres might make me disintegrate into a pile of white powder, thereby starting an anthrax scare in our very own Singapore. Well, until they find the eyeballs anyway. Either that, or the remaining forward momentum would carry me into, say, Uzbekistan.

Without a means of escape, I decided to just doze off and hope that I make it there on time. In one piece would be nice too, though I'd expect to wake up in front of the pearly gates of heaven(if one exists anyway), or at least a bus stop to my next life as a tasmanian devil.

My heart cried in joy yesterday as I reached there in one piece.

Oh well, at least it was somewhat cheaper than the average taxi ride, though I suspect that was Queen Latifah masquerading as a driver.