A levels are finally over.
But the earth still continued rotating as usual. The sun didn't disappear even for a second. The rain continued pouring with religious frenzy. Nothing seemed very different yesterday after the paper. In fact, save for the fact that the school was utterly devoid of J2s within minutes of the ending of the paper, nothing seemed noticeably different. I just feel numbed after the examinations. Like everyone else I've been studying intensively for, what, a few months? Since after Block Tests 2 in July. And now it's finally over. The hundred of hours of mugging, trying to get back to my academic form. I didn't make it in time for prelims, but I think I should have made it for A levels. Then again, I won't know until next February or March. It doesn't really matter, actually. I am absolutely not regretful of spending my time on things other than studies last year and this. It's my own choice.
What's the point of life if all you care for is just perfect grades? I think with hard work anyone can do it. Well, enough hard work, and hard enough work, that is. Many people seem to think that my relatively good scores for PSLE and O levels can easily, and conveniently, be attributed to my 'intelligence'. That's crap. I did well (enough) for PSLE and O levels not because I'm smart -- I'm not smarter an than average guy -- but because I worked hard, and worked hard at the right time. My grades in Sec 3 were like shit. And my grades last year and this, especially this year, were just as bad. I can show you my grade transcripts if you don't believe.
(And no please don't flame me if you disagree with what I am saying.)
Sigh. But we shouldn't let grades define us. I mean twenty years down the road, no one will give a damn about whether you got full marks for that Maths or Physics Block Test paper in J1 or 2. Maybe your A level cert will still carry some weight, in the mechanic processes of job application, etc. Hey, did you get two Distinctions for your S-Paper? I don't care. (In twenty years' time, there wouldn't have been S-papers for 19 years anyway.) I guess what defines us is our personalities, our characteristics, our weird quirks, our strengths and weaknesses, our past history and experience, our friends, our acquaintances, and our enemies. If you're nice now, you'll probably stay nice later. There's no need to fret, really.
The past few weeks have been a roller coaster ride. One that makes me (horrifyingly) reminiscent of those doomed roller coasters in the amusement parks in Final Destination 3. (It's a retarded movie by the way, don't watch it if you haven't.) Will I crash and die a gruesome death in the end too? I don't know.
Actually now I really don't know why I'm applying for all those overseas universities, or even scholarships for that matter. Yes I am very aware -- perhaps too much so -- that it's advantageous, even important, to study in a prestigious university if I want to rise quickly in future, and do work I like, and to get at least a decent paycheck out of it. Then again, is it worth going halfway across the world for all that, when I'm possibly jeopardizing what I have here? There are some things in the world that money can't buy, and I don't want to lose anything like that. To be really honest, I will be a little sad if none of my applications are successful. But I won't be devastated.
I will never, ever step into politics in the future. Actually I don't want a lot of money. I just want enough money to lead a stable, comfortable life. What's the point of having so much money if you aren't happy? If you need two armed bodyguards everywhere you go? An ex-classmate of my dad got a scholarship into MIT, and went to work at NASA. Whenever he returns to Malaysia, where his hometown is, two bodyguards will follow. That's an entirely different life, I think. I don't ever want to work in any secret service, or contaminate my life with spies, treason, and that kind of thing. It ruins lives and everything in them.
I mean, what's the point? I don't think I'll be happy with that kind of lifestyle. If you can even call it a lifestyle.
I guess that I just want a balance between work and personal life. Obviously, the higher you go, the harder you'll fall. The inescapable truth is that it is just so easy to screw up in life. Make a mistake and you'll go down....well not entirely down, but make a serious enough mistake and you'll go down so hard that you'll never ever rise again. Some people make their mistakes early in life; others make them later. Some people get demoralized in life at a young age. I must admit that studies can be really stressful. Coupled with other things it might just blow you over the edge of the cliff and then you just...poof! disappear from view and plummet into the depths of clinical depression and suicide. (That, sad to say, has happened to one of my friends before.) Ah what on earth am I talking about.
(I just had dinner. Somehow I still feel hungry despite having eaten twice in the last four hours. Actually I'm kind of full. But I'm hungry as well. Strange weirdness happens after A levels.)
Sometimes I have this uncomfortable fear that I cannot communicate something to someone else. Personally I think that technology isn't very reliable although we rely on it. Like if my phone crashes I can spend up to two hours just trying to send a single message to someone. I can type the message over and over again, repeating letter for letter, like 54 times. Sometimes I feel really pissed off because I can't read a message which I have received, when I know it's from someone. And sometimes when MSN just randomly crashes...
Let me quote two thought-provoking paragraphs from The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie:
"Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, Chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand, from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.
Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song. These are the occasions when the bolts of the universe fly open and we are given a glimpse of what is hidden; an eff of the ineffable. Glory bursts upon us in such hours: the dark glory of earthquakes, the slippery wonder of new life, the radiance of Vina's singing."
I find this very...intriguing, for sake of a better word. Why do we spend so much time thinking about life and how things work, actually? We often hear that humans have some kind of incurable curiosity. But where does this curiosity come from? Of what use is trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, or fathom the unfathomable? What is the use of philosophers? Actually, if you think about it, philosophers have caused plenty of trouble in human history, whether directly or indirectly. Some of them have, through their worldly (and...wishful?) thinking, influenced much bloodshed and sufferings. Take Karl Marx for example. Thanks to his rather Utopian ideas, some of which have been implemented in various forms to supplement certain individuals' fundamentally flawed desires, hundreds of millions of people have suffered in one way or another. Marxism, communism, and all the other derivatives...well cynically speaking thanks to them the world isn't as populated now as it might have been.
In general, ideas and philosophy have caused mankind to suffer. Actually, if you have a burning passion for something, why not just keep it to yourself? Must you really be so opinionated and so forceful as to impose it on people around you, even if you think that you are right? Trust me, if you were living in "civilised society" in the 1600s you wouldn't want to express your ideas so freely as to oppose the Roman Catholic Church. You wouldn't want to be like poor Gallileo, placed under house arrest for months, and then eventually hung (or was he burnt at the stake?). Well maybe if you want instant death you can go back to Iraq before Hussein was dethroned and scream some artificially-decreed blasphemies into public. You should probably get a bullet in your head within a few minutes.
Does that remind you of George Orwell's 1984? It might, although it might feel a little detached from reality, far-fetched, even ludicrous at times. But no story is a complete lie. Every bit of fiction has its roots somewhere in fact; fiction is devised by us, based on our experiences and imagination, and we are (hopefully) real people. Society is oppressive, however you think about it: there is no true freedom in the world, since freedom is subjective and (in economic jargon) the consumption of one man's freedom limits the freedom of another. Democracy? Yes. That's the current "in" idea; who knows what the future may bring? Communism probably won't return, since capitalism has been deemed significantly more successful, but we may just have some strange new idea coming into play in maybe the next millennium. Who are we to think that our ideology is the best compared to all others? Even religions do have some level of tolerance for one another, in the present. I dare not speak for the past.
What are religions? I think there are at least two ways to answer this. Let's dissect religion using common sense first. Here are my own arbitrary definitions based on my own limited common sense. Religions are a path for people to seek spiritual enlightenment. But if you go by that definition, with spiritual enlightenment as the ultimate goal for each individual in religion, then there is some paradox involved. Let's say someone isn't born into a particular religion. Then how does he/she know that it's so important to seek spiritual enlightenment in the first place? What is 'spiritual enlightenment' in the first place?
Ah whatever. More next time. Rambling...
I want to be a guardian force xD haha.
