it's finally over.

pw cycle 3.
it's really been forever since it first began. why, i can't even remember when that was, meetings have been too frequent and too long.
but still, we've come through and our WR (also known as our first book by mr koh, and our baby by our group HAHA) is at last out of the oven and into the examiner's (not mouth sadly, but) hands.
the feeling's good.
at this point i just feel like saying that "whenever we remember" is an excellent song to describe some of my thoughts towards this near-hellish period.
pw will come back to us after our promos though, so we won't be missing it for too long yet. oh well, OP. we'll cross the bridge when we come to it eh?

the past few days have been abit of a rough tumble for me. first the fact that my mugging progress sucks like *insert an expletive of your choice*, damn it's really so bad. 6 days to do chem and econs from scratch and that isn't too bright a picture painted. second was that i got some really demoralising news from my cca side. shall not elaborate here for now, but it hurt me (figuratively, obviously) pretty bad. all in all not an excellent combination of things to be happening to someone who has their oh-ever-so-important promos due in 6 days, but nothing can be done about it, it's life.

today was also mr tan's last lesson with us. ok, i can't bear to see him go...argh. it's abit of a pity because i don't feel like we've shown him how much we appreciate his effots yet. you know, it always sucks when you realise you've not done something, except that it's too late to atone or make up for it. and it always comes upon us too fast, too soon. sometimes you wish time could just freeze in that instant, and you'd be content staying that way for eternity even.

at least we can console ourselves with the fact that, despite all the drama and negative/undesirable whatnot that has occured, there are small events along the way that lift your spirits, even if just a little.
today i crashed kenneth's pw group for lunch at manna cafe. speaking of which, you people should really go there sometime. desserts especially are awesome. (and if you didnt know, it's a cafe set up in rjc itself so there) and it was super funny the way their group interacted, i haven't laughed myself off that much till my abs hurt for a long while already. laughter's the best medicine, truly (other than sleep that is). these are brief respites from the crazy schedule, which by the way is likely to last until mid november even (thanks to OP and chi o level, which are in the exact same few days, my god). admist all the hecticness and madness of jc life, there are these small sparks of happiness that allow you to temporarily forget all your slogging and just bask in the moment. life is enjoyable this way.

and let it continue to be this way, if you would.

promos in 12.
every day is like a countdown to some bomb explosion.
or implosion, since it's more like me killing myself from the inside.

i'm really not doing justice to my own grades to come. didn't mug a single thing for the past 2 days. today wasn't exactly superb either; would you call looking through 3sets of physics lecture notes and then having attempted 10 mcq practice questions something to be proud of?
not quite.

sometimes i wonder what's happened to me. have i become oblivious to what my grades will become? am i totally nonchalant to my future in JC as well as beyond? am i going to just live and let life and not care a hoot or two even if my grades go down the drain (and into the sewers maybe)?

it really looks like i've lost all motivation to study. not that i started out with much, but this year (and right now) it's especially apparent.
can i say that PW's to blame? or even the extremely huge syllabus? no that's just being ridiculous and irresponsible and stupid.
if anything, i'll only have myself to blame at the end for any screwups.

life sucks...

ok, to avoid being 100% negative in this post let me recall yesterday's x stigma final round competition!

it was quite cool, being held outside/at NLB and all that. nice place...
anyway it was quite a rush to set up our booths proper, haha now i appreciate the effort that organisations have to put in just to put up a one day exhibition. not easy, you gotta try it for yourself to understand.
exhibition judging seemed to go by in a swing, and i think i could have done much better in terms of presenting our booth. oh well, experience.
our presentation wasn't bad but i guessed it really lacked the punch that some of the other groups displayed. and our entire campaign lacked a strong theme tying everything together; it was probably one of the factors that killed us. marketing campaigns you see, should naturally have a strong theme to it.
we bagged a consolation prize eventually (there were 5 teams in all), but it's 100bucks apiece! not too bad for my first (if i recall correctly) try at a nationwide competition heh. wonder what i could spend it on...it's probably going to treating my pw group or something, i've owed them that for so long already hahaha.

speaking of which, i really hope PW cycle3 can come to an end soon. it's been endless slogging and i've been really fatigued by all the turn of events. just last meeting i totally blanked out and couldn't do anything for close to 30mins. that was how bad it was...and i felt so guilty about it argh.

it's a pity that cca has been suspended till after promos, so it's alot of just lessons mugging and more mugging (or supposedly so anyway). but i guess it is necessary for such a crucial period.
just hope i can perform. i'm not aiming for deans list, AAABC (with B for GP and C for econs) would be seriously fantastic and i could be ecstatic for a whole week maybe?

now i think it's time to get back to books, i think it's been awaiting my return long enough...

holidays are over.
9 topics down.
NOT an achievement, god...
so dead argh.

i need to buck up, seriously.

this place is still highly popular hmm. weird but ok, whatever.

have not got down to a proper post since the sept hols started, so here's one.

today was pw consultation since our draft 2 submission. we got shot down quite abit...apparently in our overzealousness to employ diagrams everywhere, our report became more "conceptually thin". which does actually seem to be the case. and alot of our diagrams got killed off haha, we were pretty indignant about that, especially those who spent so long just to do it up nicely =/ ugh...and then we spent the entire afternoon working on our WR, yet we only managed to edit 2 chapters. bleargh, i don't know if its because we're slow, or that things (as in pw) are supposed to be that way.
well, as long as we get the A at the end of the day (and not screw up our promos for it) that's good enough huh.

and as correctly pointed out today during pw, i'm really a very micro person. haha mr koh mentioned it once before and so did my group. i'm rather bad at GI, ah...i can critique and fine tune all the minor minor points but if you throw me a macro or really vague conceptual idea and expect me to go off from there by myself it's going to be pretty tough. well, i'm not sure its exactly good that my creative juices are somewhat limited, but oh well i'm like that and i guess i'd just have to use that to the best of my abilities.

oh and mr koh is really funny when he starts predicting what everyone will be like 10years down the road. you have to see it for yourself to know what i mean. but i'm a little fearful of what's to come for OP preparation though, it seems like he'll totally slaughter me with my mediocre skills...but, it's a learning process so i tell myself, just take it in good light?

x stigma meeting was a little disorganised (i felt), but i really hope we can do this well. i mean even though it's smack in the middle of promo preparation period (and we're even missing a day of school for it grr), we've come so far to the final ruond and it's just not my style to give it up easily like that. having said that though, i should probably qualify that preparing for it is no easy feat and smoking (if i still intend to do that) would have to be taken to a higher level even.

ahhh, i really hate myself for being so slow/hesitant in my promos mugging. or for that matter, doing any kind of work in general. my inertia is like super high and i have no idea how to get it to go down. plus today was totally gone with pw and x stigma! argh ok i'm damn screwed. AABBC is seriously a pretty ambitious goal already i feel, but yet i'm not sure if that can get me a H3 huh. ok to be honest, econs game theory sounds damn interesting (and it's the only H3 that truly has some appeal of interest to me) but i don't know if i can get it, or if i can do well even if i do get it. sometimes the environment pushes you to opt for other lesser alternatives, but that's life and we'll just have to see how things go.

i know it's a lot of rant about promos, but don't mind me. anyway its a free world so you can always go surf some other blog if you're sick of this...

lots of things have happened recently and i'm not exactly sure how to deal with them. that's life experience for you now isn't it. you're sitting in the classroom right here and now. that's the beauty of life sometimes, but at other times it isn't all that beautiful either. life doesn't really allow you to err and then lets you get away with it all that easily.
but ok this is all so philosophical, so i'll stop.

shall scram to do x stigma (hopefully), and then more mugging.
i'd better persevere through all this...

this week shall be known as pw week.
since it was seriously crazy. 5 days straight of pw. with yesterday spanning 12hours long. i wonder if this much time is even put into studying of any other subject at all.

hopefully we've at least sorted out most of our WR (if not i'd be so angry), then it'd not have gone to waste. and i really see the point of social memories now, the way it applys to everyday life. you get these surges of emotion and memories everytime you revisit a familar place where you spent hours on during cca, pw or just pure randoming.

we got into x stigma! haha, final round, was super shocked that we qualified. my team says i'm super good at smoking XD but i wonder if that should be taken as a compliment (or substitute? ok bad joke) or not huh. oh well, whatever works! and if that'll dazzle the crowd on the final judging day, why not..? =/

oh but this makes me think of last year's RI open house, where i was coordinating the npcc booth display. talking to parents and introducing our cca to them was quite a unique experience to be honest. even though i remember that i was pretty nervous and not too sure what to actually tell them, it was good that i was able to do my part and share with parents what npcc had to offer. i wouldn't mind doing it again next year man.

read finish outliers in one day today, whee. it wasn't as insightful as i had hoped it to be, but nevertheless a super interesting read (proved by the fact that i can read it from start to end in just a day) and it did indeed shape my understanding of the world around us. which reminds me, i still have one "the economics of life" waiting for me, but how am i gonna find time to read it! i'm supposed to be mugging for promos.

argh, its 25 days left to promos. i'll be super honest here that i've barely started. ok make that have not. does that not make 5 days for each subject (unless you don't count GP as one). that is a totally scary prospect because it doesn't seem likely that i'd be able to get myself familiar with so many topics in just 5 days. they aren't even 5 full days, what with school and all that. maybe i should have done my tutorials religiously in the past terms. i just hope that somehow i can pull through. ugh, is AAABC too much to ask for? no...h3 requires an A for the subject and i don't even know what h3 i want to do at this point in time yet!

and this may sound random, but i suddenly feel like finding some CIP to do or something throughout the year like what kejia and grace are doing now. i don't exactly have the luxury of time to do all that though, but we'll see.

i'm really afraid of what's to come in the near future, you know.

are you.

gonna squeeze in a short post now, while i have the mood and (ok maybe not) time to.

have been (not so) hard at work at econs since the weekend, and i'm contented to say that i've got alot of things clearer now. it really beats the level i was at during CT, or even the previous essay lecture test for that matter. but even still i'm afraid all the content will just leak out of my brain during the test tomorrow, like how water leaks out of a defective tap. ok lousy analogy, but you get my point. ah...

i need to learn some imba way to make notes. bleargh. pfft.

PW meeting today seemed to go a little too slow, what with us taking 2 hours to edit one chapter. ok maybe it's just me. but meh, my group's been pretty angry at me rushing them and checking the time ever so often. just me trying to keep everyone on task and on time luh. oh well, but now some "quarrels" in our group even seem light-hearted. that's a good sign definitely, that admist the controversy in opinions we're still able to appreciate and enjoy each other's company (i sure hope this is the case!).

and in the blink of an eye we've come to the last 3 days of term3 already. cliched as it may be it seemed only yesterday that i was sitting down thinking through how i will survive term3 which all my seniors and teachers deemed the most crazy and hectic period of jc life. and yet now we're at the end of it before we know it. soon enough it will just be pure promos mugging and not much socialising/fun events going on, and then once promos are over it's pw OP, and for me preparation for chinese Os as well. it all seems too quick, too soon. i only wish time could slow down sometimes, if only so that we can appreciate how fast the world is speeding past us.

the lack of time is a really scary thing to realise.

and time is what we don't have right now. sigh.