I want my two months back.

Ah, the new year has arrived. It's starting to feel a little weird, considering this is the first time in 4 years I don't have to go to school on the 1st and 2nd of January. Hell, I'm starting to become twitchy and restless already.

I probably won't stay like this. In slightly more than a week I will be heading back to school to receive my GCE O'level results. I'm starting to have recurring nightmares of my Physics teacher pouncing on me with my result sheet in hand and screaming, "BANZAI!!!!". Those who know me should get the gist of what I'm saying, but for those who don't, you get the basic idea. I swear, when I look into my previous yearbooks, all I see are pictures of the gleaming, radiant faces of students with their result sheets filled with A's to the brim. Fuck that propaganda, I'll bet the photographers didn't catch the few poor bastards crying their eyes blind in some lonely corner of the school. That's the unfortunate reality folks, deal with it.

I can't be sure I did exceptionally well, but I can be certain that I'll at least do a nary decent job. Very sorry to my non-Singaporean readers, but you should understand this equation:

Decent in Singaporean context =/= Decent in World context

A "decent" job on your GCE over here means that you roughly get an aggregate of below 10 points, while an exceptional job would be something within the range of <6. That means you must get at least 3 A1's on your results out of 6 subjects. Sounds easy right? Wait till you offer Humanities as a subject, then you'll realize you require much more than just 3...

Our education system is a bit screwed up. the system expects you to be a jack-of-all-trades, and if you can't keep up, you fall flat on your face. Why do we have to do exceptionally at general education, when we can be doing much better at what we're good at? The teary-eyed parents are not any better. Their wish is for their children to get into one of these "future career" categories: Law, Medicine and Finance. What if you want to be a Physicist? Sorry, no market for that over here. A video game developer? What a senseless job. A chef? You're killing me.

It ticks me off, period.

Away from that, I thought I'd share this piece of advice:

"If you make a shot in basketball, it happens in a second. If you fire an arrow at a target, it takes a second. Living your life takes years. You can screw up in a second, but there are so many seconds in a year, and so many years in a life."

So, while you may fail at things, you've got your whole life to make it right, so go on and try again. Hope you will remember this and follow it throughout 2009!