Basket.

On Sunday I returned home from a fun day and night at Sean's house, and the first thing I noticed was that there was now a considerably vaster amount of space than there used to be. It took a few moments for me to realise what this meant - my notes were gone. For me, that was the most potent symbol of the end of an era: thirteen years (everyone forgets pre-primary, with us being the last batch to go through it) in the mainstream Singapore education system is now at end. I feel like getting a t-shirt that says "Thirteen years in the Singapore education system and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".

As I predicted, the weekend was great fun. Mr Loh's wedding (the first thing that I can call him is still "sir" and probably always will be, although technically I can now call him "Aaron") was... well, what can one say about weddings? At least it wasn't as boring as I thought it would be, or as the last church service I attended, which was nearly four years ago. And the cake box was amazing. Just for its design and the copious amounts of work that must have gone into creating it, I'm keeping that thing. It's contents didn't taste half bad either.

After that, it was over to Sean's house for a nice class gathering and barbecue. The food was good and in great amounts and mahjong was fun. Then, as I was forewarned, I was septuple-teamed by the guys (resistance would have been futile, so I didn't bother with much) and flung into the pool in shirt and pants. It actually felt kind of good, very cooling. And Sean's maid was nice enough to wash and dry the sodden mess I had to peel off later for me.

The night that followed was quite a madcap affair. We sat around talking for a while as a glass of peach tea mixed with gin was passed around (I consumed more alcohol that one day and night than I had the past seventeen years; previously I had stayed teetotal, but I didn't want to be a spoilsport here). Then we played cards (with the forfeit involving the consumption of yet more alcohol), tried to watch some stupid American b-grade horror film, swapped racist/dirty jokes and renditions of the college anthem that would have made Jesudason do more than merely turn in his grave and finally, decided on walking to Chooi Mei's nearby residence to acquire the VCD of From Hell.

So I ended up walking in an utterly quiet HDB estate at 3am holding a Scrabble board. As I said at that time, life doesn't get much more surreal than this. We never used the board though, as during the movie people started dropping left, right and centre. Myself, I don't remember very much of the first half of the film, so I must have dozed off there. By the time it ended, it was 5.30am and the birds were calling. I grabbed an hour of very fitful sleep (no idea why I couldn't sleep well), then got up for a few rounds of cards with the similarly insomniac. We then generally waited around for the rest to get up, and by 10am we were on our own respective ways again.

Yesterday I was out again, with Yihong back from Australia. We wanted to watch Shutter, but after a bit of a scramble from Cineleisure to Lido then to PS because of a lack of good seats, we had to settle for Saw instead. Not a bad film at all, I'll admit I was fooled by the ending, though I should not have been because I did harbour suspicions as to why they ever showed the (supposed) killer's face. Better than a few I have seen, certainly. A night out with a good friend is always nice, too.

Today I stay home for once. Trying to finish two novels at once and making good progress. Life is good for the moment, but I still get bored a lot of the time. maybe it isn't so bad after all that in a while I won't have to decide what to do with my time.

So today my last A-Level subject paper ended, and we went out and had quite some fun. Lunch, library, movie et al. Good times.

Today just happened to be the day PSLE results were released, and my youngest cousin was one of the thousands receiving their scraps of paper all across the island. So she scored 238, which I quite genuinely think is a decent score, not outstanding, obviously, but good enough for most purposes. And then my mother is going on about how people can be so happy with results like this. I wisely keep my mouth shut. It isn't my business anyway.

Later, I am reading the newspapers and I come across this report with 3-year-olds learning to sculpt clay or something. What caught my eye was the report stating that one of these infant prodigies also learnt Chinese, gym, dancing and some other nonsense which I can't remember.

Good lord, the kid is three fucking years old. THREE. It probably can't even walk very well yet. And it is already being sent off to enrichment classes, and so many of them too. What the fuck has the world come to? This is just silly. "The best possible start in life" - this is actually giving your child the worst possible start, in my opinion. Whatever happened to giving your children a carefree childhood? It's going to have plenty of time, indeed, plenty of things to learn later. But look, the child is only three years old and you pack it off to so many courses already? It's insane. It's just plain stupid. Give your children a break, won't you parents? It is sheer madness to try to cram so much into one so young.

And thus, leading on to my main point (fuck, have been writing too many Lit essays lately) - why must we stress ourselves and our so-called "loved ones" so much? Why can't we learn to live with lower expectations? The best, always the best, never settle for anything but the best. Determination and drive is all well and good, but why can't we stop a moment and smell the flowers? Why can't we lower our goals and be happy for once with what we have achieved? Once you get past Primary 4, does it really matter very much whether you are EM1 or 2? PSLE results - the fuck is going to care about them once you get into secondary school. No one is going to bother about how many As you got for your O Levels or what your bloody L1R5 is once you get into a junior college. In the big scheme of things, do these all really matter? The answer is no.

Please - think of the children. Or think of yourself, for those older and more sentient. It really isn't worth it to push oneself so hard, to just neglect everything else with singular determination, just to grasp flimsy success. It doesn't last. It isn't worth it. There are plenty more important things in life, and one does not always need four As and two S-Paper distinctions to attain those.

Two more papers, technically. Effectively one, since I can nary bring myself to give much of a damn about S-Paper on Friday. After that I have some time to have some fun.

Weekend's already booked solid. It'll be exhausting (but the good kind of exhausting, not the exhaustion that one feels after attempting to cram two years' worth of Econs inside five hours). Next week brings more activities. I must try to saturate myself with fun before I get conscripted, and as things look currently, that is just what is going to happen.

A-Level results? We'll worry about that in three months. I'm confident of my minimum goal, which is to do well enough to enter NUS. Go ahead and be shocked, but contrary to my perceptions of several years before, I believe it to be a decent educational institution that can provide one with a solid tertiary education. But we'll see; no one can predict the future with any certainty. After all, as late as June 1914, practically no one in Europe expected the soon-to-come conflagaration that was to burn away ten million lives in four years.

Tommorrow the first part of the post-exam activity programme kicks off with the customary class lunch after the last A-Level subject paper, following which we will look for a wedding gift for our wonderful ex-CT Mr Loh. Good times.

Tommorrow can take care of itself; I live only for today. Or for the moment, even.

So, we are one week to the end. Five days, actually, because I don't much care about that last little S-Paper next Friday. Enjoy myself when it is all done, then prepare for a new life.

We'll worry about the results in three months.

Examinable Mathematics

2nd January 1993 - 16th November 2004

"Twelve years of hurt."

10.56 am was when it all ended, finally. If I had my way the last day would have been quite a bit earlier than this, but that doesn't matter now. I do not have to worry about a single more Maths exam, ever. It is all over.

An ulcer is ravaging my throat currently... it hurts to do most of the things I usually use my mouth for. Such a vulnerable, yet much-used, area. If we had a creator, the mouth must have been his crowning work of sadistic genius.

Just count the number of ways one can get hurt there. Bite down too hard on a lip, accidentally chomp on your tongue - it's a world of pain for several days at least. But no, there's worse - wisdom teeth, for instance. I've heard horror stories aplenty. Swallow an animal bone by accident while eating - I've vomitted blood, literally, up along with it. Not to mention split lips, from cold weather or hot, or cold sores; everytime you open your mouth, it's naught but searing pain.

Think about how the mouth is organised - teeth, strong and sharp, encased in a soft and vulnerable cavern. It's a recipe for disaster.

But really, none of this would be so bad if it wasn't such an important organ. We use it for chewing, swallowing (with the throat) and talking, mainly - all definitely functions we can't do without. And usually when we do these things, the wound is exposed or scraped against other objects.

Eating salted peanuts with multiple tongue ulcers - try it. I promise it is great fun.

Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat dies at 75

Let us leave it to history to judge this man. Rest in peace.

There are plenty more to remember this day: on November 11, 1918, the armistice that ended the "War to End all Wars" was signed. Triggered by the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914, by the Serbian anarchist Gavrilo Princip (a member of the shadowy terrorist organisation the Black Hand), World War One was to be the most destructive ever seen in human history up to that point. Ten million were to perish in 1914-18 alone, with countless more maimed; the conflicts this great upheaval was to trigger caused even more suffering - one example being the Bolshevik Revolution. By the time it was over, three of Europe's great empires no longer existed: Austria-Hungary was dismembered, Imperial Germany had collapsed into anarchy and subsequently became a weak republic and the Russian Empire was convulsed with civil war, destined to end with the formation of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that would come to dominate most of the remainder of the century.

June 28th, 1914 was truly a day that changed history. Remember those who fought and died in their thousands the mud of Flanders, who unquestioningly went "over the top" against ghastly enemy machinegun fire, who had naively believed in August 1914 that they would be home by Christmas but who ended up dead and unidentified in a foreign land.

Rest in peace.

I have been so caught up in other things that I missed an anniversary - fifteen years ago yesterday, the Berlin Wall fell, effectively if not officially reuniting Germany after forty-five years of schism. A potent symbol of the end of the Cold War, the fall of the wall also signalled the collapse of the Eastern European puppet regimes of the USSR, which variously had already occured/were in the process of occuring/were to occur. The USSR itself was to follow that path in 1990-91, crumbling into its original fifteen component republics.

Then, the Cold War was ending, and a New World Order beckoned. Talk about false hopes. Everything is perfect until humanity is factored in. The equation balances before you add the most unpredictable variable of all - human beings.

Indeed, I have already convincingly argued more than once that two superpowers is better than one, any day.

The eve of a day that I have at alternate times hoped never to come and hoped to come quicker. Mathematics, Paper 1 - half the percentage. I am surprisingly confident as of this moment, and buoyed by the fact that I will be, after tommorrow, halfway to being able to finally throw away the subject that has inflicted on me so much pain over such a long period of time.

Forgive more pedantic exultation, but the time is finally, finall, FINALLY near when I can stop caring about obtuse mathematical concepts I have no use for and even less interest in. Let those who love their pages and pages of numerical proof and forumlae go ahead and do them. I'm out of here.

I've never liked the subject. From Primary 1, when I got Band 3 (65) for the fucking end-of-year exam (if you remember, that is an awful grade to get for primary school) to the O-Levels (in Sec 3 I failed fully half my Maths tests and all but one of my Additional Maths tests) to the A-Levels (a sterling record thus far, counting only Common Tests, Promos and Prelim, of OOEED; I haven't passed a lecture test since last May). I hate to look at numbers, cold and rational. There is one answer - no argument. You don't get it, too bad for you. You don't get it after hours and hours of effort, too bad for you. The numbers will not change and the answer will not change. It will remain, staring balefully, mockingly, back at you.

I see no use for it. I see no meaning in it. So what if I can integrate x^2cos2x? So what if I can sketch y = (7x^2 - 3x)/(3x^3 + 3)? What is the use? I couldn't care less about where the minimum point of the curve x^2/3 + 6x - 7 = 0 is. It seems that these things exist only to vex me and make my life so much harder.

Second rant in as many posts on this subject. Apologies if those reading get sick of it.

Twelve years of hurt. It ends soon.

It is three days after GP, and I'm having a bit of writer's block down here. I had it during the exam as well; beginnings are always a pain for me. But we'll never know for sure, so for now at least, be content.

There is more than enough to fill the days currently. I get myself through every Maths paper with the thought that in less than two weeks, it is goodbye forevermore to examinable Mathematics. After November 16, 2004, I will no longer be obliged to cast my eyes upon another Maths question (unless, God Forbid...), no longer be obliged to find the angle between the planes ABCD and DEFG, no longer be required to discover the general solution of 15 sin^2 x - cos^3 x + 8 = 13, no longer have to know what is the integral of some beastly polynomial like (14x^3 - 4x^2 + 5x - 7)/(4-4x^2)^1/2 and, best of all, not need to know what is the volume of some silly imagined solid created by purely theoretical cycles about a theoretical Cartesian plane.

Twelve years of hurt. It ends soon. I just know that it is going to feel good. Damned good.

Aside from indulging in such enriching activities, I fill the rest of my time with the computer and my oldest pastime, reading. Just today I found our ancient copy of Jurassic Park in a musty cupboard (I was actually hunting for some other books) and realised that, despite having watched the movie about five times (or was it six), I hadn't actually ever read the book. Without further ado, I began on it. Today, I also created a roughly-scaled map of Singapore in SimCity 2000. It took me over one-and-a-half hours and I am very proud of it, although filling it up with the appropriate landmarks is proving even more difficult than building a model of the real world island based on a blurry maps (some of which do not even show the reclaimed areas). Jurong Island was a real bitch to make, and I had to make myself not bother with some of the more insignificant among the firty-eight (if I remember correctly) islands and islets that litter the ocean surrounding Singapore Island itself.

And that has been enough to bring the day almost to a close. What was that Maxine Hong Kingston's mother said about time in old China being so much slower than in the laundry? Indeed, a sociological topic of some popularity has been why time seems to go by so fast in urban life but so slowly in rural areas.

Well, then.

Well... the day before The Great Examination (as some have termed it in the finest Dickensian style) begins. I didn't think that the night before my A-Levels, I would be blogging. Then again, I never did give much thought to the fact that this day would ever come...

But it is here, and we must make do with what we have. The best to us all for tommorrow; it all has to end some time - may it end well.

Since I haven't much else to write, I'll let a far better writer - Neil Gaiman himself, no less, with a piece on cities - entertain this night.

http://patcoston.com/co/text/ruminate.htm

And the US election, for those who bothered, is as yet undecided. Bush leads 254-252, with Ohio still labelled as "too close to call".

Good luck once more to us all.