good mood.
written: 6:23 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2004

Somehow or other, my marks for Paper 1 Lit were grotesquely inflated and apparently I got a 78%, which is humanly impossible, as well as mathematically impossible, considering I got 32, 40, 36. So you add up those numbers, divide them by three, and multiply by two. You'd get a 72%.

Two explanations:
1. My teacher cannot calculate any more than I can, but this explanation is essentially flawed considering the fact that calculators are in abundant supply and I'm sure that any normal person would own one, unless one were a walking calculator in which case one would not need one, but since my teacher teaches Lit and not Maths, I'd assume that he's not a walking calculator and hence he should, logically, own a calculator. Even if he doesn't, he has a phone that comes with a calculator, so he could've used that as well.
2. So if he does own a calculator and he did not calculate the marks wrongly, it must mean that he upped my marks to like, 40, 40, 38 or something along those lines. Which also does not make any sense because seriously, the increment is simply too large.

Conclusion? I'm as baffled as... I don't know who or what, but yeah. It makes no difference to the grade ultimately, because it's still a B.

Final (I think) prelim results:

History - B
Literature - B
Economics - C
Mathematics - O
GP - A1

Looks like I've got more work to do than I'd initially thought. More intriguingly, this means that I have effectively emerged tops in three subjects (History, Lit and GP), which is really hilarious considering the fact that I didn't even get As in History and Lit, and that I am (used to be?) one of the biggest slackers around. I mean, okay, the GP thing is pretty much a given but History and Lit? Haha, excuse me while I laugh. I don't know if this is a sign of my capabilities or a sign of my schoolmates' lack of it. I choose to believe in the latter as I'm the eternal pessimist. Hence. Nothing personal, dear JJCians; it's just my own lack of self-esteem.

Then again, whatfuckingever. I couldn't care less about the prelim results anymore. Doesn't have any real bearing on my A Levels anyway, save for the whole 'it builds up confidence' bullshit. More like it completely undermines confidence and makes a person feel like shit.

From this point onwards I'm just going to type sporadically about whatever that happens to come into mind, as a clear illustration of the mess that permanentmy inhabits my brains. Sounds fun, I know. Wahoo.

Tubby's class. A minute after the bell, signalling the end of lesson. In saunters Pei, the uniform its usual unkempt self, the girl looking completely nonchalantly, as if it is her god-given right to come into class one minute after it has ended. I looked at her and just started laughing. She rocks.

This is extremely embarrassing: During his GP class which I conveniently crashed as I had nothing better to do (since nobody turned up for my GP class), I came up with a non-existent paraphrase for the word 'colonised'. Since I am extremely anti-colonialism and anti-imperalist, and since History teaches that imperialism and colonialism are basically the same fucking thing, I stupidly went, "Oh, 'imperialised' lah", when he was going through (for want of a better phrasing as my brains are especially dead today) the various paraphrases for 'colonised'.

I thought I was being oh-so-clever, but little did I know that 'imperialised' is not even a bloody word, and since I'm just an 18-year-old fraud years away from being granted a poetic license, if that ever happens, my incredible faux pas was completely exposed when he went, "That's not a word."

God, I could've just shrivelled up and died completely. Talk about a total subversion of my image as a linguistically-inclined individual with a more-than-above-average (am I supposed to put the hyphens?) command of the bloody English language, or to put it more simply, the top bloody GP student! That was so completely, utterly and immensely embarrassing. And it was in front of HIM. If it were someone else who wouldn't have called my bluff, it wouldn't even have mattered.

So, yeah, good going, self. Next time, shut up and don't make a noise; nobody would take you for a mute.

More bitchings: Same blog of that male person who complained about Tubby's alleged favouritism. Now he's going off about how JJC's notes are shitty and how he has to rely on other JCs' notes to get by.

That's extremely interesting, considering I rely fully on my school's notes to pass my exams. The grades I got for the prelims? No external help at all. I have two huge Economics textbooks resting peacefully under my bed but it doesn't make a difference to my Econs grade, because I'm too damn lazy to read them in the first place. If I'd bothered to consistently do the stupid MCQs (which are getting less stupid 'cause I'm starting to get the hang of them, which should only make sense considering 50% of the questions are repeated) I would've got a B at least for the prelims. And what 'external notes' do I have? Absolutely none. As in, absolutely none. The last time I met my friends from St. Nicks was in November last year and we did not exchange any notes.

So my point is, sometimes it's ludicrous to blame the teachers when other people are being fed the same information but are getting better results.

Okay, maybe the fact that Miss Chin is an amazing Econs tutor has something to do with it, but still.

I can't believe I'm defending the school but there you go. On second thought, there are only two teachers in the school whom I absolutely cannot stand, and it's been reduced to one, considering the Bulldog mercifully fuck off-ed and died in August. So yeah, there's only one teacher whom I absolutely cannot stand, and she's the joke of the teacher who "taught" me Paper 1 History last year and the first half of this year. My main gripe with JJC essentially lies in the fact that the students there, in general, lack quality, and that the general command of English in there is abysmally pathetic. Hence, from my perspective, there is hardly any competition between classes, let alone within my own class. And that makes me quite frustrated for a few reasons: 1) lessons are excruciatingly slow sometimes because people just don't bloody get it; 2) there is a grave tendency for me to fall into the deep dark pits of complacency because the people around me give me the false illusion that I'm good, when in actual fact, I may not even be competing with the people from the better colleges on equal footing during the A Levels; and 3) THERE IS HARDLY ANY INTELLECTUAL STIMULANTS GOING AROUND AND IT MAKES ME FRUSTRATED BECAUSE I GET BORED TOO DAMN EASILY.

Having said that, for some reason, I realised today that I'm a little bit too mean and arrogant sometimes. I was in the canteen early this morning, attempting to get started on the last question of my Econs case study (but failing pathetically since it was like, 7.45 a.m. and I was half asleep), when I saw this dude in front of me. You know, this guy Johnny, the infamous Assembly Commentator? (He always has something to say during "dialogue sessions" with the principal, in mangled English, hence making him the butt of many jokes amongst most Arts students.) Yeah. He was there by himself, drinking a cup of tea or coffee, and moments later, he appeared to be sleeping.

I don't know why but I felt really sorry for him in that instance. The thought of going over to talk to him even crossed my mind, although it left as quickly as it arrived, of course; it was just a fleeting thought, but its presence, however transient, was still significant in the sense that I conceived it. Prior to that whenever I see him the only thing I felt was disgust.

I still do not subscribe to altruism because I fervently believe that it does not have a place in the modern world. And I'm still extremely irritated by the fact that everyone is leeching off me, photocopying my bloody essays, from GP to History to Lit to Econs; the only subject that nobody gets things off me is Maths, which only makes sense considering you don't write essays for it, and that I failed the goddamn thing. So everyone is leeching off me and what the hell do I get in return? Absolutely shit-all. Yes, shit-all, that's what. So why must I be accommodating? Why the hell would anyone in his right mind willingly give his competitors an edge over himself, hence jeopardising whatever absolute advantage he might've had over his competitors (assuming that they know how to use the stuff effectively, which is too much to say for some people if you want my honest opinion, and even if you don't want it)? Okay, so it's good to be nice and shit but hello, the last I checked, the A Levels was a fucking competition. Why, pray tell, should I give and not get anything in return, only to sit back and smile and pretend that I don't mind, because I bloody do? Having that said, I don't mind at all if it's for my friends, people whom I care about. But I do not, under any circumstances, care for every single bloody person in the Arts faculty, let alone the entire bloody school, let alone students in the Science stream whom I do not even bloody know. So my civics tutor photocopied my GP essay, supposedly to distribute amongst her students. So tell me, why should other people benefit from the stuff that I know, from the newspaper articles that I bothered to cut out and read? I bet that half the people in the school don't even know that the "Analysis/Commentary" section of the Straits Times exists, which of course, explains their abysmal GP grades.

So I have just spent the last ten years demonstrating my flagrant disregard for altruism. To make this relevant to what I was trying to say before I went horribly off-tangent: I still do not believe in philanthropy (haha, what a word to use) but I cannot deny the subtle realisation that has somehow crept into me, that, yes, I am a mega bitch who practically feeds off her own sometimes-unjustified arrogance to inflate her mammoth ego and that is not a very nice thing for a person to do.

Some people really deserve my disdain, but there are others who probably don't. I wouldn't know, because I don't even know them -- and that is precisely the point.

If I don't check myself and reign myself in, I may just become another Bulldog with egotistical pretensions more than proportionate to her humongous size (which aptly reflects the horizontal length of her self-constructed pedestal which she never got off long enough to be a real teacher). I should learn to be more... I don't know, altruistic, but I've used that word to death, so I guess I'd say patient and sympathetic. Yes, sympathetic. I don't really like people like Miss (or is it Mrs) Merriweather, the embodiment of decadent hypocrisy from Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" and neither do I want to become like them.

How does one define 'stupid' anyway?

Okay, on second thought, I don't want to go down that path. I'd be getting a bit too nice for my liking; it'd be awfully unnerving and strange.

So about Johnny. Uh, yeah, that's about it, pretty much. It was the weirdest thing I've felt in quite a while, if truth be told. I really don't know what the hell I was on.

Econs MCQ progress: I bloody hell finished the injection-withdrawal approach thingy and parts one and three of the national income accounting topic in less than three hours today. Yes, it was punctuated with many short sessions in honing my almost-perfect craft of staring aimlessly into space and walking out of my room to the kitchen/my brother's room to disturb him/my parents' room to disturb my mom, but I did do every single question in the book for these topics, including the obsolete ones from the 80's, so I think that's pretty good.

Econs MCQ have got a lot easier. The only thing that really pisses me off is that 50% of the questions are repeated, and some of them are repeated on the same page. Worse still, a question can appear in two topics, so that I'd do the same question two more times. How nice, right? I intend to finish everything by the end of this week so that I can move on to yearly papers to do and if I don't get at least 25/30, I will slit my wrists and bleed to death.

Well, not really, but you get the gist, don't you?

And speaking of 'gist', I've always thought that it refers to the rough idea of something, like the superficial meaning of a poem, for example. Found out a few months back that it actually means the essence of something, the central idea in a piece of writing or a film around which the piece of writing or film revolves.

Yeah, just wanted to mention that.

7.43 p.m. An hour and then some. I should stop writing so much but I'm feeling tons better today and when I'm feeling good I tend to go off, so yeah, too bad lah.

I should stop using Singlish too.

Oh joy. Doing sums and series later on. I absolutely hate this stupid topic. I only remembered half the arithmetic progression formula for the Maths prelim and hence I got no marks for that question even though the equation that I got would've been correct if I'd remembered the '2' in front of the 'a'.

I'm so smart sometimes that I truly, truly amaze myself. Hahahahahahaha.

Stomach hurts. Need to lose weight. And, yes, that's about it.

before sunrise // before sunset


Previously:
- - Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017
I'm moving. - Sunday, Jul. 11, 2010
In all honesty - Tuesday, Jul. 06, 2010
What I want for my birthday... - Sunday, Jul. 04, 2010
On Roger's behalf. - Friday, Jul. 02, 2010