In Continuum.

B-Side

Here it goes again. School has started for me all over again, very much the same way it did nearly four months ago back in May. Little has changed in school actually, perhaps just the addition of the fresh meat in school. I admit, calling them fresh meat is a little harsh on my part. After all, I was very much like them merely four months ago, fresh out of the army or whichever life that they were living before school started, and unknown to all the inner-workings of the school. The way the new birds flocked into the school entrance on the first day of school, gave the lot of us a sense of pride in ourselves, knowing that we know much more than they do in everything. I know that I have been in this school for merely a couple of months, but I've grown to know and learn so much in the time spent here. To see the newbies come in felt exactly like what a Corporal would feel when he sees a bunch of freshly shaved Recruits coming into his camp. The sense of elation cannot be described.

So school started again, the way it should start at the beginning of an average semester. The lot of you are probably wondering how short my holiday has been, because I've only just blogged about the school ending a couple of entries ago. The truth is, this holiday lasted for only a little more than two weeks, and that is the kind of holidays we get in my school. That is because we are squeezing a four year syllables into a three year window, which means that everything has to be finished in a shorter period of time. Our holidays are thus compromised, and we get more semesters in a given year as compared to our American counterparts. While most students may moan and groan to this system, the lot of us are actually rather thankful for the short holidays. I mean, I cannot imagine myself going through the three-months holiday like NUS, and still stand up straight by the end of it to have the same drive for school. I am the kind of person that needs a momentum, a continuum in the way I work. Three months is simply too long for a holiday - for me anyway - and two weeks just seem to be a perfect amount of time to turn my brain off for a while. Besides, as Jonathan so aptly described, the holidays with our friends are simply more tiring than school itself. Because school is - believe it or not - fun. Not that holidays aren't, but there are so many things to do that it becomes tiring after a while.

Stepping into school on Monday, I had little of the disorientation I had on the first day of school back in May. I knew where to go for my lectures, I knew where to meet my friends, and the dozen greetings on the corridors were welcoming enough. It was nice to see old faces, and at the same time meet new faces in the psychology lecture. Shem was so eagerly telling me just how many girls there are in the new cohort this time around, claiming that the ratio of girls to boys is at an astonishing number of five is to one. I had little interest in that statistic, since quantity does not necessarily equate itself to quality. Besides, I have already vowed to my 'monksmanhood' for the next three years, in view of my grades and studies. So that's a goodbye to my love life, and here I am watching it spin a million times before disappearing down the toilet.

It feels like those old cassette tapes we used to play in the past, before CDs took over in the mid nineties. For the younger generation that has never touched a cassette tape before, it sort of works like the VHS tapes with all the movies in them in the past. After you finish playing the music on one side of the tape, you eject the tape and flip it to Side B in order to play the rest of the album. I don't remember the capacity of the tapes being very big in general, unless you buy cassettes with longer tapes, then you get a longer recording. The total amount of information that can be stored on the tapes are divided into two, with equal amount on both side A and B at the same time. To me, the first semester of school just felt like Side A of this giant tape, while this semester is Side B of everything else. The last semester ended, and the mechanisms inside the radio ticked for you to change sides. You flip the cassette over, and you press play all over again. So here goes the same tape all over again, only with different contents this time.

Sitting through the new lectures, there is that same fear again. It was the kind of daunting feeling I had on the first day of school, but it was a little worse this time around. There are more modules, more projects, more assignments, more of everything basically. There weren't so many of those in the past I remember, and I was daunted back then simply because I was new to the system. This time around, despite being numbed by everything, there is an inevitable sense of dread in the air as the projects were disseminated to the students. I have yet to take the Computer Science lecture that is happening tomorrow, but already the amount or work is piling up already. Aside from scoring from this semester, there is also that legacy I am trying to uphold from the last semester, something I take a lot of pride in.

I mean, I have never been a straight A student in my life. The fact that I managed to achieve that in the last semester is something I am proud of, to tell you the truth. Throughout the holidays, I've been congratulating myself, telling myself that I deserved the break, that it was OK for me to turn my head off for a while. However, this semester started out with the same kind of fear, the same kind of dread, the same kind of horror in the past - only a little more this time around. I am afraid that I may not be able to achieve what I achieved in the past, I am afraid that I may not live up to expectations. I know in studies, the worst crime you can commit for yourself is to have expectations. After all, expectations are what make you fall the hardest once you do not achieve something desirable. However, it is not just my own expectations that I am worried about, but the expectations of my friends and family together. I am sure they are - in a way - thinking that I would attain the same kind of grades this time around. It is going to be much harder, but I am sure they are not expecting any less from the same usual suspects. And that is the kind of expectations I am dealing with, the kind that I am afraid to kiss and fall back down to earth.

Looking at the course outlines and the teachers I have for this semester, I am seriously unsure about things. In the last semester, the only problem I had in the teaching department was the COM101 lecturer. She was the epitome of boredom, and probably shouldn't be allowed in a hospital with comatose patients because she may put them to sleep with her words. She was the only problem back then, and the rest of the lecturers were actually rather interesting. I mean, Baban actually made Economics manageable and interesting, and that alone id deserving of some kind of praise from me, the cynic. This semesters, the teachers are from a totally different world. I have yet to know much about the psychology and the world civilization lecturer, but the ESL tutor is a serious pain in the ass. She is a lawyer - enough said.

There is something about her that pisses me off. I told Naz - who so happens to be in the same class along with a whole bunch of ex-Nina students - that it was a sort of retribution for all of us. We are in this English class simply because we had it good in the last English class. This time around, we are getting this cock-eyed lawyer from Hell who defined the word 'boredom' all over again in dictionaries everywhere. In fact, in the new edition of Oxford dictionary, you may just find her face plastered there like a mug shot. She is not exactly a person who has the capacity for a long of humor, and certainly a person who is pretty much on a straight line crash course with grades. Just looking at the questions she posed during the diagnostics class was enough to put me off. I mean, "Wealth Vs. Knowledge". Haven't we done it a million times before, seriously. We've learned a little about persuasion in communication studies, and the way she said "Have fun with your research topic" sure wasn't the more convincing way of letting us have fun. It was like letting a bunch of kids into the theme park with leashes tied to their necks. The irony of it all.

COM337 is not going to be an easy topic either. It is going to be heavily based on assignments and projects, and the overall grades are going to be based upon 500 marks. Yeah, 500. That is half of a thousand. There are a biblical amount of assignments for us to complete, and the worst part is that only a selected few people are doing COM337 this semester from my cohort. We are being plunged into a world of seniors that we hardly knew, and we actually have to work with them one way or another. To make things worse, scoring 90% overall is not going to gain you an A, but merely a B+. The next person that says that life is going to be easy in my school is going to have a sledge hammer shoved up his or her ass I swear.

So here I am, on the verge of everything, petrified. It feels like the seconds that ticked down to the beginning of the SOC test in the past, the way the sweat would already pour down our foreheads at the starting line, and also the pounding of the hearts inside our chests. That is the kind of feeling that I have right now for the rest of the course. There are questions floating in my head, as to whether I am going to achieve the same grades, or pass the course at all. As high as the Jacob's Ladder and as long as the rest of the run back to the finish line, all the fears are amounting to this great mountain before me right now.

But looking at the guys sitting on my left and my right, the ones who are in the same situation as myself. They all have sweat pouring down their faces and hearts beating in their chests ferociously. I am sure most of us - if not all - are petrified one way or another. The clueless look on Jonathan's face this afternoon was a clear sign of how - even the top-scorer - can be beaten. However, like I said before, to be in the league of the same people that went through the last semester with me, things are not nearly as daunting anymore. It's like being outfield for days without food, rest or comfort, it doesn't feel good for anybody at all. But to know that your friends are with you every step of the way, is just the most comfortable mattress you can lean back on out in the cold and harsh reality.