the workaholic’s nightmare.

I finally got all my end-of-year results back.

trente-huit. More than I expected so I am really thankful to God for allowing my efforts to pay off.

Now that my mental acquisitiveness has been satisfied as soon as the last subject grade was given out, I am trying to divert my short-lived attention span to the looming suicidal month ahead of me. I have been anticipating for a month like this to come, because like DUH, I’m in IB, but yeah. But I didn’t anticipate that it would be NOVEMBER this year. Actually, I have been anticipating this kind of moment in my life wherein I would have to choose between (a) committing suicide and going straight to hell, and (b) committing myself to one more year of hell in the IB and then (hopefully) finishing the course with  flying colours. After much contemplation, consultation and divine intervention, and a bit of cost-benefit analysis, I have decided to stick with the latter plan.

I love doing work, but with this sudden exponential increase in workload, I feel like  my sanity is going down the drain. I feel like bumping my head on a durian shell and going on a naked rampage on the streets. Watch me.

IB work + school stuff = November.

OK BREAK IT DOWN!

NOVEMBER IS THE MONTH THAT I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR.

Next month’s menu!

1. CAS Reflections, Meeting with your respective CAS supervisor by 7 November 2008

2. Theory of Knowledge Essay about the future of History as a Science

3. Submission and consultation of the second Economics commentary (for IB assessment)

4. DEADLINE OF THE EXTENDED ESSAY OUTLINE ON NOVEMBER THREE! and I bet 90% of my batchmates don’t even know this!

5. Memorize lines and songs for Act 1 Scenes 9 and 11, and Act 2 Scenes 1, 5 and 6 for the Sound of Music school musical

6. more DREADED and DREADFUL REHEARSALS for the month

7. Grade 11 Camp, 21-23 November (WTF #$%$#^%^!!)

7. SOUND OF MUSIC, 24-25 November

8. Music concert on 26 November? (to be confirmed)

9. French Student Idol, 29 November (oui bébé, nous allons chanter des chansons françaises!!!)

see I can’t even count properly!

GIMME MORE, GIMME GIMME MORE!

This coming month is so fucked up.

Oh pardon me, it’s a Sunday on a holiday and my brain is not working properly.

Once upon time in facebookland, I catch Village Woman performing sacred village ritual. She come around sing ritual song. She brandishing and stroking rattan stick on top of green ritual table, hitting offertory balls incredible precision accuracy with “piak! piak!” sound – unparalleled masterstroke, feat beyond imagination of human… shooting into ritual pits like size of Jose mouth (facebook profile must see), tunnel through wood my nature friends call mahogany very thick sacred, leading to offertory reservoir, where they be ready collection to make happy the angry gods.

For the benefit of your eyesight,

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Holiday. Any sort of holiday at any time of the year. The longer it takes, the more boring it gets. The more repetitive and unalluring life becomes. The more reason for me to go back to school. Insurmountably though, that as another school term commences and progresses, the feeling of wanting the next holiday to arrive builds up. Every school day becomes a day of wishing and longing for every school day to just be a holiday instead. 

Why am I so hard to please.

And yeah, Jose, I was just kidding.

 

ROWLAND IS GOING TO DIE BECAUSE OF STARVATION.

Three years. and counting.

I have long surrendered myself to the fact that my memory sucks big time; that the only things I can remember in life are those things that I find absolutely necessary for school examinations; and that memories that are worth to be cherished could simply just disappear like a piss on the roadside – it evaporates like water into the atmosphere, but leaves a mark and a smell just strong enough for me to trace out its mere presence.

It didn’t even occur to me that today actually marks my third year of existence in Singapore until my friend sent me a message. As far as I could remember, I was crusing 30000 feet above the earth inside Singapore Airlines with four other Filipino students I have never met before, and then after three hours I found myself stepping into a new country. The day before that, I could remember my mother wailing and crying outside the airport as if she was going to lose me forever. It was also the first time EVER that I saw my dad shed some tears. My brothers were still young at that time, so probably they did not really have a bit of inkling how that separation meant for mum, dad, and I.

It was hard to adapt. I was so young, and I was already living on my own. I gained freedom and power over myself, but I lost the comfort of home and the company of my loved ones. It was a lopsided trade-off that I had to bear. I had to wash and iron my own clothes. I had to wake up to the tintinnabulating cries of my alarm clock. I had to eat boarding school food. I had to do my own grocery. I had to travel on my own. It felt as if the whole world turned upside down.

My secondary three and four years were a cornucopia of horrible, wonderful, and memorable events. It was such a perfect blend of emotions and experiences and a homogenized mixture of happiness and sadness that I can’t really say if there were moments were I felt only one of the two at a specific day. I went to an exciting school filled with students filled with so much enthusiasm, team spirit, joy and happines. Yet I never actually remembered myself in that institution feeling the same way as my classmates and schoolmates. The school has this culture that has the power to make those who want to be cherished feel truly cherished, but I was wondering why I did not feel that way at all. It was a good two years, just that it wasn’t exactly as memorable as I hoped it would be. But like what I said, those two years were a perfect blend of emotions and experiences. I stayed at a ramshackle boarding school that in itself, is a useless, lifeless concrete structure standing atop of a small hill, a building that exudes an aura of despondency and disconsolation to anyone who observes its lonely majesty over the horizon. Nevertheless, it was a place that was filled with the most exciting and interesting people I have met in my life. From a distance, it was an amazing sight to see these people gathered together, interacting with each other, eating together at the dining table, sharing unified and opposite views. From a distance, in the eyes of a local student, most of them were simply geeks and nerds, people who didn’t have a life aside from studying from dusk till dawn. As a living testimony, living with them has proven this conception to be a misconception. Each of them was such an interesting human being in his or her own way that made the boarding school such a colourful place to live in. Some of them were indeed geeks and nerds, but they weren’t just simply geeks and nerds. They were unique and interesting. I don’t know. I just felt very exuberant and jolly and satisfied at the company of my hostel mates. And that has made my two years worth remembering.

And now, I’m on my third year, and life in Singapore has gotten better. I guess my mum was always right. It takes time for anything to settle down. Well, I knew it would take time to settle down, but I never expected that it would take me only until now to keep myself calm amidst the unrelenting storms in life. Life in my new school is so much better. I have finally felt a sense of belongingness and pride within my new school. There are so much more privileges in my new scholarship that sometimes taking a time off from my studies to do less sensible stuff makes me feel awkward and guilty. School has been so much stressful and fun at the same time. Boarding school life has lost a little bit of euphoria since i’m now living in a condominium and I have less companions in the house. Well, I believe everything has to be balanced out. And God does it really fairly.

I’ve been wondering if these three years were worth it. It always comes into my mind the fact that if I didn’t leave the Philippines at all, I would have been in my second year in university by now, and in no time would be graduating and getting a decent job and earning a decent pay to repay my mum and dad who have almost immolated themselves just to raise up my brothers and I.

I hope these years have beeen worth the time and money sacrificed. Because I’m not like many young people in this country who are so much blessed in life that they need not to worry much about what lies ahead in the future. Though I am one of those I would considered privileged to savour much more of any successes they achieve in life, because for them, reaping the fruits of success would mean the whole world for the people whom they love.

Happy three years, Rowland.

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I can’t possibly post every single picture I have, but, oh well, here goes some of them.

 

Oh yeah, and this may be of interest to you:

Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are.  Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart.  Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow.  Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so.  One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return.  ~Mary Jean Iron

Nov 13, Indoor Stadium.

If you have been an avid stalker of my blog since I moved to WordPress a few months ago, then you would have noticed some changes. Firstly, I have changed my blog title into “highways of my life,” which is actually a title of a song in the 1973 album “3+3″ by the Isley Brothers. Secondly, I finally changed my blog theme from something white to something dark brown. Thirdly, I added new links on the sidebar which you might find interesting.

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ANYWAY!

RIHANNA IS COMING TO SINGAPORE. Just a little piece of information I would like to share.

More details here.

It’s a boring sunday evening.

Tsao Hui told me that she attended her aunt’s 50th wedding anniversary. The first thing that came to my mind was, “wow, fifty freaking years.” I mean, with all these discombobulating divorce rates ballooning simultaneously with obesity rates around the world, who wouldn’t admire such a couple who has spent fifty years of homogeneity and intimacy and true love? Well, my mum and dad have been together for a long time now, and I am a huge fan of their almost nineteen-year old sacrament of matrimony. I have seen their ups and downs, and I know that making a marriage really work requires more than just dividing the house bills and ordering the little rascals around to do their household chores, or driving them to school every morning and giving them allowances, and seeing their report cards with grades written in red ink instead of black.

I may still be young, but hey, I can already start my own family and father a child or two if I wanted to. But of course I wouldn’t be doing them because that would mean that I would have to stop school and that wouldn’t be really a nice idea since school is just getting more and more interesting. Plus, I haven’t really enjoyed much of my teenage life yet – I haven’t been boozing around – ehem- or hitting the clubs yet, or attending a few gym sessions a week, or making out with a girlfriend on a saturday evening, or driving my friends around the town in a brand new car. Argh, see what the media does? See what gossip girl does to you?!

Stupid teenagers.

 

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Man is the cruelest animal.  At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1892

GG.

OMFGG Exams are over.

Time to continue my GG marathon.

Waiting for my dinner to arrive.

I swear, I’m really, really excited now.

Ok this may sound really nerdy and horrifying to normal human beings who might be reading this, but i’m like an electron excited by this weird wavelength of joy and euphoria and hope – and perhaps a little bit of delusion and disillusionment – but, yeah. As uncertain of its own position and existence, and as repulsive towards its own species, I feel like I’m this electron being excited from some awkward transition between two Day-orbitals (pun intended) which split into two different Day-levels by some wavelength which I have already described in the first few lines of this note. It seems like today and tomorrow were originally intertwined as one, but somehow it was split by a phenomena no one knows or will ever know, and now I’m in this electronic transition from here to there, from mugging to sitting for exams, from Today to Tomorrow. It is a good feeling, knowing that this litany of exams is finally coming to an end. I’m sure that not everyone feels the same way but who cares.

I have gotten the hang of circling around this gargantuan nucleus I call IB for almost a year now. But to be excited a bit further from it is quite cool. Anyway, I don’t know if electrons do feel happy about jumping around from one energy level to another, but from this presumed analogy, I think they do. 

Anyway, dinner’s here and I’m going to stop blabbering now. 

And it’s maths paper 2 tomorrow. Not chemistry. Yeeehaaa

 

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Anyway, here are some random pictures taken at some random morning

 

 

a part of my self-confidence has eroded.

71% for maths paper 1. Good but not enough. Below my class average of 73%. Ok, I know I’m greedy and hard to please. So what.

And you, you annoying piece of shit. You’re so full of yourself. I don’t hate you but you’re making me. Go away, please?

English is the sex.

 

How would you feel if you intend to have a well-deserved afternoon siesta, but you’re disturbed by a bunch of gas-guzzling brontosauruses digging away the land outside your house, turning it into a barren wasteland? How would you feel if there is dust in the air seeping through your nostrils, sticking on your skin, accumulating on your butt crack, and landing on your birthday cake?

 

Argh.

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Anyway, the final English Paper is over! *blows up firecrackers*

I’m happy because number one, I think I generally did well for today’s paper (well the extent of “well” is inversely proportional to the amount of effort put into studying), and number two, it’s the second last paper, and number three, I only have to worry about one more paper.

Do you know that feeling, the one that you feel when you’re almost done with something that you really want to get rid of in your life?

One more paper left. Mathematics HL. It’s going to be the toughest.

 

Ok, umm, basically, your study table should ideally look like this by the time you have finished sitting for your second last paper. Squeaky clean, right?

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Aftershocks.

Hi. I’ve been getting bored updating this blog – perhaps oversimplified wordpress templates can’t really wholly please dirty, perverted, muddled and imaginative human minds for so long. Anyway, these past few weeks have been relatively more stressful than any other week I’ve had so far this year. Firstly, I had to extract the essence of 500 pages of my maths textbook and drink it like chicken essence – you know, when you position your index finger and thumb in the shape of a clothespin, and squeeze the nostrils tight to prevent the olfactory nerves from working along with your taste buds as you swallow liquified cock (male chicken), or hen (female chicken),  - in ten days, in order to do my IB Maths Internal Assessment. Okay, I know typical human beings should not be doing these kinds of things, but I guess being atypical is typical within the IB world. And then secondly, EXAMS. End-of-year exams. The good thing about these examinations, is that they’re not a dreadful as the JCs’ promotional exams (since the shit inside you won’t be scared out of you by the prospect of being retained in JC1) or as hyperventilating and exhilarating as the counterpart IB school’s – you know which school I’m talking about.

Anyway, to summarize my oh-so-enjoyable week:

Sunday – Tuesday: STUDY STUDY STUDY!

Wednesday: English SL paper 1. Wrote two pages of literary crap. I think I did quite well. Essay wasn’t so much well-organized, though.

Thursday: Mathematics HL paper 1. Disaster. A cataclysm of undecipherable questions. As expected.

Friday: Chemistry HL paper in the morning. Chemistry rocks. Economics HL paper in the afternoon. Comme ci comme ça.

More exam papers next week.

Anyway,

there comes a point in time when everything you have written inside an exam hall seems convincingly worthy of getting the allocated marks. And then, at the moment you grab that precious time to meditate about the swift chain of events, where a year’s worth of learning had been mercilessly compressed into a 2-hour 20-page examination paper, you begin to think, “Oh. Damn. Oh well.”

Generally, I think I did way better for Chemistry and Economics than for Mathematics, which is like, umm, expected, since Mathematics was written in Greek. or Latin. Maybe French?? I wasn’t really sure. There is something about this subject which frustrates me so much. No matter how much similar the math questions you practice are with the exam questions themselves, when the paper is set in such a way that the questions are twisted in a slightly different way, your brain refuses to twist along the same degree of insanity. And to think that I practised maths every single day for the past two or three weeks…

Well, perhaps the best possible explanation was that I sat on the tenth chair of the second column from the left. Whatever that signified.

 

 

Joyeaux anniversaire.

I am very much aware of the fact that this post is outrageously late, but never mind.

Eighteen years ago, I was a fully-developed foetus who got fed up of having to be fed through a cord that looked like a telephone, a tapeworm, or an epidydimis, I don’t know, and who got tired of having to live for nine months upside down. Imagine being upside down for nine months! Duh. Many thanks to the amniotic fluid which provided me with that buoyant feel inside an aquarium-like environment at the course of my embryonic and foetal stages of life. And yes! I’m eighteen now. Gosh, I can’t believe I’m nearing the point of “maturity,” or so they say. Now, I’m not so much ashamed of myself, as a teenager incarcerated inside this very awkward adolescent physical framework that resembles, in a little odd fashion, a rattan vase. And I could vividly remember the shock of my life when I got my first few auxiliary hairs on some parts of my body – I thought I was turning into a monkey, and I panicked. But now, having hair looks okay because all eighteen year-olds – boys and girls – have hair in their faces and armpits and legs and arms and chest and genitals and other parts only you yourself know where.

Anyway, I just want to greet myself a very happy happy eighteenth birthday! Finally, I am now of legal age to:

VOTE in the Philippines

DRINK alcohol

GET MARRIED

HAVE SEX (thanks for the gift, hahaha)

DRIVE A CAR

 

GET JAILED

and

BOOK HOTELS ONLINE!

 

And don’t worry mum and dad, I’m a good boy and I will not do any crazy stuff that an eighteen year-old is very much eligible to do.

And thank you for all my friends who remembered my birthday – through your memory, your diary, your planner, or most probably through your facebook and friendster notification – I truly appreciate it!