In Continuum.

Psychological Disaster/ Computing Miracle

We are in our halfway mark, and tomorrow is a little break before we take the final plunge into nothingness. The final plunge into nothingness, what a harrowing way to describe the last two papers, but I guess the experience is really going to sound that way to a lot of people because the last two papers are, after all, the last two papers. You want to do well and finish off with a bang, because it doesn't matter how you begin in every race, but how you end it that is the most important. Some of my friends have history and maths left, while I have history and my communications paper left, which is probably going to fly by like a bird in a storm. But maths, maths is going to be a drag for those people who are going to take it tomorrow while I remain at home with my legs comfortably propped up on the table. Maths is a killer subject, but I love maths. Maths is like women, you kinda grow this love/hate relationship with the subject, especially when you start to get questions correct. Once you get a series of questions correct, you are hooked.

Of course, in contrast, getting questions wrong just make you hate the subject even more. That is not a trait that is exclusive to mathematics, but every other subjects out there. At least that is the conclusions I arrived with after my Psychology paper, and it shall be referred to as my psychological disaster henceforth. The psychology paper pretty much tanked, like a ship would after receiving a wave of torpedoes. It sank to the bottom of the ocean like a dead weight, and the worst part was that I was trapped in the cabin while it happened, without an axe or gun in sight to kill myself with. The paper went downhill the moment it started, and for some reason nothing was coming into my head. It felt like standing in the middle of a blizzard with snow being blasted into your face at a thousand miles per hour. Everything in my head was a whiteout, like being suddenly hit on the head with a baseball bat. Nothing came out and nothing was registered, by my hand sort of moved in accordance to its own commands, and I found myself completing the paper sooner than expected. I should have checked through one more time after I did for about ten times over, but that one more time could have rectified all the mistakes that I made. But of course, I did not make that last check and I am - as of this point - as regretful as ever.

You walk out of the exam venue unsure and scared, especially when you circled half the question paper, unsure of everything you have just written. Finishing the paper faster than anybody else always means two things: Either you did tremendously well or you did tremendously bad. However, I don't think I did tremendously good or bad for this paper, probably just somewhere in between - which makes it tremendously bad in my standards. After that psychological disaster, a lot of "I should" and "I could" were included in my sentences, a lot of things could have been done during the paper. Somehow, the answers that my friends exchanged just did not register in me, and for some reason I just don't remember reading about any of them. It was a day of being demoralized, to be utterly smashed by a hammer made by my own stupidity. I wanted to dig a hole and bury myself in it. Because everything was going down the drain like shampoo bubbles after a long hot shower. But this shower is not warm at all, but ice cold like melted ice in winter. And I am standing in this claustrophobic bathroom, stark naked.

So Tuesday - today - came along without a lot of light on my face. First off, the class registration thing ended yesterday with a major technical glitch. The system was closed down because there were some registration problems with people taking NTR next semester. They couldn't register for their courses, which means that the people who managed to apply for the classes they desired would have to re-register for the classes at some other time. Now, the class selection thing is a big thing for any students out there, simply because it dictates how your life is going to be like for the next three months in school. Either you get to wake up at twelve noon everyday or you have to wake up at seven in the morning for a nine o'clock class on a Saturday. Imagine that for a while now. While everybody is staying up late on a Friday night because it is a Friday night, you will be there tucking yourself into bed because you have to wake up early tomorrow morning to get to school. The only up-side to going to school on a Saturday morning is probably the lack of human traffic at the train stations, but even that can be a little depressing at times. I mean, when you are suffering alongside about ten thousand other morning commuters, you don't feel half as bad anymore. In contrast, if you are the only person walking around in a train station with a stack of books in your hands, you feel completely like a loser.

When we found out that we could choose which lecture group to go to(One is on a Tuesday afternoon I think, and the other is on Saturday morning), the lot of us rushed for the earlier class of the week and not the second one. Being the one with the computer at hand, I managed to enter all the pre-planned classes into my account and registered myself with the school - safe. Everybody else managed to do the same, save for a few unlucky individuals who faced some technical errors accessing the site and entering their classes. So a lot of phone calls were made, a lot of angry words were said over the phone and the man behind the curtain got frustrated after all the complaints about the computer glitch. So everything was shut down moments after it was set up, and everybody were back to square one all over again. The perfect combinations were gone, and everybody has to go through that stressful minutes right after the portal opens for us to select our classes, where it is a matter of seconds before your desired classes disappear off the selection list.

With the psychological disaster and the loss of my class selection in mind, I was gloomy for the most part of the morning. But that soon ended when I started going through the tutorials with Kania and Sherry in school, and found out that my repeated viewing of the tutorials actually worked miracles. I actually remembered some of the most obscure answers, and managed to spit them out one after the other without much mental work at all. So the little light of hope in my head was rekindled, and I found myself secretly jumping with joy, hoping that the paper is going to be equally easy, or easier. But deep inside, deeper than the secretly jumping self, I knew that the dark enforcer is a force to be reckoned with. This man is dark, he is sly, and he has tricks up his sleeves you do not want to know. Everybody should be careful when he is around, with his darting eyes and his false smiles, it is easy to fall for his tricks. I had my hopes up, but I was careful. I revised the materials in my head, but I had my fears. The dark enforcer awaits to smite us from the dark Heavens above, tripping up for one last time with his rope of death!

Sitting down at the table, the invigilator placed the thick stack of question paper on the table, and what was thought to be a paper with just fifty questions turned out to be seventy-five in the end. I panicked then, wondering if the history of the psychological disaster was going to repeat itself this time around, with a computing disaster. It felt like receiving a deadly virus in your computer from an online source, and you are just watching it load one percentage at a time. You cannot stop it from loading, and you cannot shut down your computer. You are just waiting for your computer to die out on you, wait for the information inside your computer to be cleared off one by one. You are helpless, a passive observer of your own destruction. There I was in my seat, looking at the blue front page, feeling the rest of the semester crashing down on me.

But flipping pass the first page was a different story altogether. I did the first question, the second question, the third question, and then started flying through all the questions without even reading the questions in the first place. I was on a row, a blazing trail, a winning streak. I felt like I was cheating for an exam but yet I never had those intentions whatsoever. Everything just flew off the tips of my fingers, everything was a little too easy to be real. I pinched myself a few times, made sure that I wasn't dreaming, and continued down my path of glory afterwards. A one hour and fifteen minute paper was completed by me in under ten minutes, and I sat there wondering if anybody finished the paper as fast as I did. I waited for someone to hand in the paper before I raised up my hand as well, and was out of the hall in no time with a million watt smile on my face. A psychological disaster, a computing miracle. This week has been quite a ride, I wonder how it is going to end indeed. I wonder, I wonder.