i'm a doofus.
written: 8:54 p.m. on Wednesday, Apr. 06, 2005

The Chinese poem (and I use that word very loosely) I posted in the previous entry...feels a bit incomplete to me. I don't know, I probably shouldn't have posted it and exposed my gross incompetence in the language for all to pour highly concentrated salt water into but I guess I'm too darn narcissistic for my own good, even when I really don't have anything to be narcissistic about. I mean, it's...well, I think 'crap' sums it up very well and yet I posted it and I know full well that it's shit but I'm not going to delete it all the same. Wahoo, I love myself.

Oh my god I almost lost this entry. I even began to yell "FUCKING HELL!" really loudly and all. And while we're still at the part where Yelen randomly writes out the things that are coming to her head, can I just mention that I put too damn much bloody condensed milk in my tea and hence it feels like I'm drinking extremely watery condensed milk right now? I don't understand how the people who sell milk tea outside do it; even the most awful and tasteless milk tea I've tried tastes better than the one I just made. Shit. My favourite milk tea though has got to be the one from Killiney Kopitiam at Bukit Timah. You know, that stretch of awesome eateries opposite Beauty World and Bukit Timah Shopping Centre (or is it Plaza? I can never get it right). In fact, you know what? I love my area. I'm so glad I don't live in the East anymore because Bukit Timah is the best place in Singapore. Uh, bwahahahaha.

Right, enough of nonsense. What I really want to talk about today is how I completely screwed up and bombed my USP interview today. Yes, my bloody goddamn University Scholars Programme fucking piece of shit interview, and the excessive swearing should be more than enough to alert the average reader to how badly I bloody fucked up.

Not only was it excruciatingly awkward, I was also in a mind-numbing state of 'dude, I just got up; how the hell do you expect me to answer stupid questions about creativity and education?' I knew that things didn't bide well when I got out of the lift at the seventh storey of some building called Block ADM and saw a few people all dressed in the same lack of colours. Three girls wore almost exactly...well, fuck it; they wore EXACTLY the same thing: black A-line skirt that smothers the knees and a white formal shirt with that intriguing thing called clog shoes (how the hell do you spell it?) which I've never owned before in my life. So I sat there in my dark pink Mango top and light pink Zara skirt that gently grazes the knees and that cheap pair of black heels I got for Jurong Junior's pseudo-prom and spent about ten minutes feeling like a poor fish out of water gasping for its last breath of air, and trust that I am not kidding at all.

Oh, I forgot to mention: I was carrying my puny pinkish handbag that I got for sixty bucks last Tuesday (or thereabout) too. It was the strangest Twilight Zone I've ever been in, ever. And the interview itself? So I went in, said 'good morning', sat down in front of the two interviewers - a man and a woman - and then I proceeded to look expectantly at them while they looked expectantly back at me.

Fuck, what was I supposed to do?! I'd already done the requisite courtesy thing! Finally, the man was like, "What's your name?"

Ugh. How in the world was I supposed to know that I had to introduce myself? I was under the illusion that they already knew who I was since I was called into the bloody room and didn't just walk in, hello? But anyway, things only further decomposed as the interview dragged on. The first damn question was some shit about what I hope that the USP can do for me.

The very split second I heard that, mentally I went, "Oh fucking hell shit I'm so fucking dead." But I had to rescue myself, right? So I went off on a stupid, uncouth and barely intelligible ramble about how I applied to USP because I was attracted to its whole multi-disciplinary learning thing and how, as an Arts person (PRETENTIOUS, YELEN, PRETENTIOUS!), I would like to expose myself to the Sciences for a more holistic learning, blah blah bullshit. I don't think the interviewers bought it because the man was like, "But what if you're forced to take four Science courses that will count towards your marks?"

I really wanted to die and walk out but I resisted the urge; I plastered a smile on my face and went, "Yeah, that would be a positive challenge."

ARGHH!!!! You know what, I am a bimbo. I am so damn stupid that I could die. Every word that came out of my mouth was yet another painful knife stab into my already bloodied feet, and it was so obvious too. Even to my own eras I was hardly making sense, and my brains did that wonderful thing where it diabolically deserts me mid-sentence, so that I'd be saying something and then forgetting what the hell it was that I'd initially set out to say, hence leaving me utterly helpless and concluding with a 'yeah, so yeah.'

Fuck. I shouldn't do Law. How can I expect to make it as a lawyer this way? Hell, I don't even think I wanna be a lawyer at all. I couldn't even handle a simple 10-minute interview without exposing myself as the fraud that I truly am. I bet that the second I left the room the interviewers asked themselves, "How in the world did that moronic bimbo possibly get the grades that she supposedly got? It's impossible! She was such a dunce!"

Well, not that they'd use the word 'dunce' but whatever. Other highlights of my disastrous interview include that hilarious bit where I answered, "Uh, I'm a leader when I need to take charge of my life" when asked "when are you a leader and when are you a follower"; which I quickly changed to, "Well, I don't know, really, because I'm not a leader nor a follower. I'm just like, out there, independent."

Or how about this bit? The man asked me about a book that I've recently read and I chose to talk about Julian Barnes's "A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters", but I'm so brilliant that I even screwed that up. In the first place, the first damn chapter is The Stowaway and not Shipwreck!, like what I told them. In the second place, I don't think it was very intelligent of me to round up my ramble with, "It's just a really interesting book that you just have to read for yourself." Before that, I talked about the woodworm and the book's subversive nature, ie. the bit about how the narrator basically painted Noah as a drunkard - and right at this bit the man raised in eyebrow in a 'what in the world?' fashion.

God, I almost died. I was not convincing at all, and this came immediately after I'd gone off about how today's people aren't as intelligent as people of the past because we can't digest works by geniuses like Charles Dickens while people in the Victorian era really appreciated him, yada yada yada. I wanted to go all Fahrenheit 451 when I was trying to explain my rationale but I think it backfired heavily on me. And the worst part? I had to talk about Chinese. They asked me something like, "What aspect of the education system would you change if you had the chance to?" I was like, "I would definitely choose to place more emphasis on the mother tongue." I said something about Chinese and how ang moh pai (I really said 'ang moh pai', quote unfuckingquote) I've become, and I'm so stupid that I repeated "I grew up speaking English" when I'd corrected myself the first time that slipped from my mouth.

The woman asked me one question throughout the whole thing, and that was, "How has not knowing Chinese well enough disadvantaged you?"

My answer sucked so much that it pains me now to recall it. I think I should just direct them to this journal; more specifically, the entries in which I talked about this, because for the life of me I could not verbalise any of it.

My pride has been denigrated. I felt so lousy about it at first that I wasn't even going to write about this, but now I'm just like, "Oh fuck it. That was a nice warm-up to the Law interview."

THEN AGAIN, I MAY NOT EVEN BE SHORTLISTED FOR LAW BECAUSE I AM A USELESS HUMAN BEING. IF I'M NOT SHORTLISTED FOR LAW, MY LIFE IS OVER. I REFUSE TO GO TO FASS WITHOUT USP AND SINCE THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL THAT USP IS GOING TO OFFER ME A PLACE AFTER TODAY, I HAVE TO GET INTO LAW OR ELSE MY LIFE IS TRULY, SINCERELY OVER.

There. I feel better now that it's all out of my system. I find it quite funny now actually, in retrospect. The last question they asked me was, "How would you count the number of strands of hair on your head?" I probably asked for it since my reply to the question of 'what is creativity and how can it be taught' was something along the lines of, "Creativity is when you create something new (OH REALLY WOW I NEVER KNEW THAT!), something original, and it can't be taught; you either have it or you don't."

When I heard that last question about counting hair I was so tempted to go like, "What the hell? I wouldn't do that." But in the end I did give a legit answer and the interviewers laughed, which I'm not too sure is a good thing. My answer is really stupid though so I'm not going to say what I said. But needless to say, when I came home after lunch at NYDC with my mom, I thought of a much, much, MUCH better answer to that question. Damn my stupid, slow and useless brains.

Oh, and guess what? A few minutes into the interview, halfway through one of my answers, MY HANDPHONE RANG. And I ANSWERED IT. It was my mom; she drove me there and all but she went to park the car while I went up by myself. But oh well, the bright side is, when I said that it was my mom, the interviewers laughed, so yeah.

Right. Things are really abysmal when being made the butt of jokes is a 'bright side' to me; ME, someone who hates to be the butt of jokes and hates to be embarrassed. God.

You know, the thing that bothers me isn't really the very likely possibility that I won't get in; hell, I don't think I'd choose to go to FASS even with USP if I could get into Law. Rather, the thing that bothers me is how I really, really messed up the damn thing and how they're rejecting me instead of the other way round. This is a blow too unkindly to me, my pride, my ambition, post-A Level results, you know. I think, in fact, that the USP interview was the most �� (embarrassing) moment of my life, ever. My only consolation is that I don't really want it anyway.

Sigh. Oh well, time to mop up the spilt milk and obsess over how much I hate working AM shifts because tomorrow is an AM shift and I can't begin to describe how I'm totally dreading it. The only good thing about AM shifts is that I get to use the computer which I'm used to. I mean, even though nobody uses it 'cause I've stuck a post-it with my name on it to the cubicle, I can't use it either 'cause the surrounding computers are always occupied by other people and I don't want to be there alone without my teammates to talk to, you know? Gets awfully boring that way.

Apart from the computer thing, I hate AM shifts because I hate taking the MRT in the morning during rush hour when I have to squeeze with all those people. This other day, I was standing next to this old man who kept breathing on me and I could smell the stale cigarettes in his throat - which grossed me out beyond belief. It was the most digusting thing ever, no shit.

On a lighter note, I noticed that I've been seeing this same person on the train whenever I took it to work on days that I had to work AM. I mentioned him before; here. Go to the bit where I mentioned some gorgeous man, blah blah.

That person has been taking the same train as me, in the same carriage, standing in the same spot, every single time I took the MRT to work in the morning. I'm not kidding; every single time. And I could tell, too, that he recognised me because he kept looking over his shoulder at me and all. But I don't think I've given him any indication that I recognised him too; it was always too damn early in the morning and I was always in barely-awake mode and hence I couldn't ever be arsed to respond or whatever. So, yeah, I just thought it would interesting to mention that intriguing coincidence.

He's not as gorgeous as I'd thought though, so yeah.

Right, so work yesterday wasn't as stressful and demoralising as the days that preceded it, mainly because I had to do fucking GSM screening - ie, checking already-provisioned mobile phone forms to see if other people made any mistakes. It wasn't challenging at all, save for the bit where I had to challenge myself not to fall asleep or go to the toilet every other two seconds and to hang in there until the day was over. I did that the entire day, you know. If it weren't for my Discman and Ken, I would've died.

Okay, Ken is actually Kenneth, and I know about four Kenneths now. The other day, Kenneth and I and this other girl LW were at Times the Bookshop/Bookstore and we were looking through those useless pocket-sized quotation books. Kenneth pointed out this book of cynical quotes to me and I flipped through it and discovered my Utopian Lit A Level mantra, that two brilliant lines from Shakespeare: "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds/the sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds."

But since the book is shit, it stupidly had the order of the lines confused and in the book it was, "The sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds/Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." I think Shakespeare would turn in his grave if he ever found out.

Anyway, my point is, I pointed out that quote to them. That was, I think, Sunday...yes, it was Sunday. I remember this well because I bought a cup of over-priced milk tea from the kaya toast shop at PS basement 2 because the coffee shop I normally buy from doesn't open on Sundays. How shit, right? I could've saved $0.90 if the coffee shop were opened!

But I digress. So that was Sunday. Yesterday, Tuesday, Kenneth suddenly asked me about it and I was trying to explain what it means to him but I don't think I really succeeded. He brought up something about objects that are already perfect in nature, like diamonds that are 100% pure, in relation to the idea that perfection can never be attained.

But that's the whole point, isn't it? Such objects are already naturally perfect; it's natural, it's organic, it's not artificial like a pseudo-perfect world that our excessive enthusiasm tries to put in place. Utopia is not natural because human beings are, by nature, imperfect; and this intrinsic quality basically dictates that whatever methods we employ to achieve perfection will end up in ruins at the end of the day, a point that Shakespeare made with those two lines, especially the last one.

This only occurred to me after work when I was already home. See what I meant about my brains being slow? There you go.

I think I've mentioned how much Kenneth reminds me of The New Kid in terms of character and behaviour. He's also told me that I remind him of one of his friends, one which he doesn't really like. I guess the unsettled feeling is pretty mutual then.

Oh well, anyway, the Jielun Lookalike wasn't at work yesterday so blah, it was boring. This guy went with us to dinner though, and over dinner I found out that he was from SAJC and has gone to the University of Liverpool to do Economics and Business. Cool. But since I was eating, which meant that talking while eating would've made me very unglam, I didn't really talk to him much after a while. I thought he was from ACS because of the baggy jeans that hung halfway off his arse and all, but it turned out that he was from SJI instead.

Whatever lah. Same difference all the same. Ha.

My mom wants to check her email and I'm tired and have to sleep so this shall be it from me.

I'm still an idiot who deserves to be shot.

this entry requires chinese simplified encoding

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