I Made It.

Honestly, I feel like deleting every single post I wrote for the past five months.



Success is sweet, though watching your closest, truest friends and comrades fall most definitely isn’t.

Theirs is a solemn reminder of the grave consequences of not having made it through.

Theirs is a bitter reminder of the human costs behind the thick cold faces of ruthless academicians who trump the “standards” flag.



Where most expected —especially coming from me, of all people— is the relentless gloating and praise of all the wonders and joys of life, there shall be none. 

This seriously isn’t at all funny, or worth celebrating for.



I am lucky to have just scraped through, to have saved a brand new Gen.2 and twelve additional months to repeat two subjects.

These were perhaps the two most expensive marks in my life.

Beginnings

   
Children. They are everywhere around me, lurking beneath ever so thinly veiled membranes, but just peer through the words, the conduct, and right in the depths of those shallow souls is that malicious, malevolent child reigning supreme in them full-grown adults.

They say pain is what we need to grow —that without trauma, or other extraordinary life-changing crises, we’d never learn, or progress above and beyond that which we are.

In recent months, the overarching thought has perhaps been that of immaturity, the (fortunate, unfortunate) need to grow up, not losing one's humanity, and compassion.

Lessons in life... that life is not a fairytale, a romantic illusion, or a fanciful novel, that life is not a house full of comfy beds and giant sofas with an eternal cash tree in the backyard that bears fruit rain or shine, that the world is not a fabulous land of joy and wonder where good and just is always triumphant, or that things will always work out for you.

Life indeed is short —definitely short enough not to be spent over the little things or the little people that bring you displeasure and discontent. And also too short in fact, to be wasted away over the inconsequential, the irrelevant, and the obsolete.

Times have changed.

It's time to grow up.

I’m moving on, and I’m definitely not sorry that a few of you won’t be coming along.

 

Branches

 
Facebook. Wedding. Pictures. And metallic-silver 5 Series’.

I start to picture myself at 35, a rather successful well-to-do engineer, a bachelor pad perched high atop the skyline with spectacular views of the city, and a 5 Series of my own —this the mid-sized executive saloon that has been the unrivalled gold-standard of it’s class for almost three decades, this the model that has made the Bavarian company famous, this the car that has fascinated me since childhood.

A pair of monumental KLIMAX floor-standers with an equally impressive front-end to match, huge portions of glass offering panoramic views in a small, cosy apartment, and an even smaller bedroom.

Dreams, I snap out of my mind-wandering to tell myself.

Dreams that may full well not come true.

Which is also equally fine, I think to myself. Having nothing to do with the flamboyance, the glamour, and all the gay, living a “small” life of bare minimums rid of all excess.

I figure I’d appreciate life —and everything else— more this way; living lean, living clean, and living simple.


But moving a decade backwards to the here and now is July the 14th with which I wait with indifference. As the days draw closer and closer, hope still seems to spring eternal.

Hope that I will pass the two particularly troublesome subjects, hope that a normalised curve will be employed and that it will favour me, hope that things will turn out alright.

But then again, a fool’s hope it may very well be too.

If indeed I fail any of the two papers, my graduation day will be pushed further into the future, the completion of my degree prove to be lengthier and far more costly a battle than what I had hoped or wished for.

But if there is any consolation, it is that the reduced workload of three subjects per semester would make life easier, and give me more time to do the things I want, as well as the life I would rather live.

And if I do manage scrape through without any failures —and heavens do I not hope and wish that I do— then that too, would be a wonderful outcome.

There’s the dream thesis topic I get to do, there’s the huge sum of cash not needing to be used, there’s the whole year I’d not need to spend in university, and let’s face it: who likes the idea (and the consequences) of failing?