Wednesday, April 11, 2007 @7:56 PM
today at 1650 hours, i stood at dr ang's pigeon hole on level 6 of AS5 and slipped in the last of the essays I will ever write as a literature undergraduate at NUS. it was the final assignment i will ever hand in as a student of the department. when i finished my essay this afternoon at 1500 hours, i feel strangely happy. in fact i was so happy that i skipped my way to bus stop, it has been a long time i ever skipped.
yet, i feel reluctantly happy. because the end of this semester is different from the end of the all the other semesters combined. the end of this semester is the end of my career as an full time student. NIE does not count. this is the end of what 16 years of studying. woah. i am kind of amazed at myself, for being able to endure for so long. haha.
these last four years in university hasnt exactly been a fun or smooth ride. everytime someone tells me that i will miss the times i had in university, i stop and think for a while. yeah i will miss certain things such as hanging out at AS7 and doing stupid things. i will miss laughing with the gang. but i dont think i will exactly miss the experience of uni life anyway. from not wanting to be in NUS to finally graduating, i guess i have managed to pull through it all. i have to acknowledge that if i had bothered to do my essays a few days before the deadlines, to read through the first draft i write and not hand it in. i would have done exponentially better than i am doing now. but having said that, in exchange of my grades, i have gotten so much more out of life.
my last year in university mirrored my first year in it. not exactly happy time or a happy experience, in fact a large part of my freshmen year and senior year was spent in depression. serious depression that had opposite effects. in my first year, my depression caused me to binge on food, unhealthy food. the amount of coke i drank that one year alone is kind of scary. hahah i ballooned so much it wasnt funny. but this last academic year was different, i guess because it was the last year of school i kinda threw myself into work and got myself so engrossed in the different works i have been doing that i have not been able to get properly. yeah okay find, i admit i lost weight, i was inclined not to believe it unless the check up at Raffles Medical confirmed it. by the way, i grew taller by two centimetres and i have a picture of my lungs somewhere at my work station in the council. haha.
the second and third year of uni were relatively uneventful. haha i remember my second year was the one where the kids all performed spectucularly at JGs. hehe the one semester that i did not regret doing badly for. it was in my second and third year of uni that i got to know the gang and got to know them better and it is amazing how we have become such fast friends over the last two years of uni. haha. if there is one thing i would not forget i would not forget how we are so self-entertaining. and no, if anyone ever calls us weird, we are not. eccentric yes, eclectic yes, self-reflexive yes, self-entertaining yes. strange no. abnormal no. hahah. but yeah, we are one of a kind.
So standing or rather sitting here in front of the computer, i realise that i have the blessing and fortune of not having to worry about my career. it is good and it is bad. i am rather ambivalent about it. but i guess it is a happy problem.
so yes, this is the end of my four years in NUS. from the first paper 500 words on psychoanalysis on texts (i remember i wrote on Franz Kafka's
The Trial) to the last one 4000 words on metafiction in
The Athenian Murders and
A Void, the gang and i have come a long long way. with the last essay hand in, i guess it is perhaps time to say goodbye.
