Drifter

It's nine pm on a Sunday night.

I have done litte/no studying today. Or yesterday.

Or even, the day before.

The mere mentioning of the phrase "under mountains of tremendous pressure to perform and to pass in 3300" -as well as the other subjects- is akin to flogging to death the already dead horse one more time.

I have become used to living under the mountain's shadow. So used to it in fact, that I do not even fear living in the darkness anymore.

I have so much energy bubbling inside me. There is just so much I want to do. I want to read up on a good book. And then another one. Maybe even a third after that. I want to travel to the other ends of Sydney for example, and get lost. Taking thousands of pictures along the way, and thousands on the way back.

I want to draw. I am so inspired to take up drawing again, my previous 'personal frontier' -photography- having been conquered (veni, vidi, vici so the saying goes) and a certain Andrew having uploaded his drawings very recently.

I want to write. Write and write and write and write. I want to write on a myriad of issues: politics, technology, the stupidity of Malaysians, and -oh hell yeah- you religionists-die-hards and your ever so contradictory and hypocritical ways.

I want to go home. I want to see the people I love. I miss them so much. I want to see real people, not the fake hollow shells that I am surrounded by. People who actually have soul, people who are warm and genuine.

I want my freedom.

But alas, that all has to wait.

And apparently so too will my revision, as I continue being inexplicably glued to this LCD.

Bygones

“It’s amazing how people don’t change.”

That has been the single one thought that has been banging in my head since I woke up this morning.

A particular conversation last night brought to me a chance rendezvous with my past, and boy was it an insightful one.

Why am I not surprised? Why -more importantly- does the ringing reverberate and resonate so intently within the confines of my skull? Why -above all else- am I even remotely bothered by this?

I know not the answers to these questions, but if there’s one thing I know, it is that I am thoroughly glad that that element of my past is behind me.

Way, way behind me.

Thousands and thousands of miles so, in the dark recesses of the horrendous pit I got myself out of all those months ago.

Each and every day is an opportunity for me to move further and further away from that hell hole, and it is one that I have duly made use of.

Each and every day I grow more and more pleased with the current reality that is my life -a life made delightfully pristine without the presence of those nasty element(s) that I no longer associate myself with.

Each and every day I become more and more glad that there are people like you, you, and you: all the you(s) who have found me, stepped into my life, bringing along with you, and showing me so much love, so much warmth, so much decency, so much innocence, and so much life.

This is a post as much it is about the past as it is the future: yesterday, and today has been a reminder of the past -my past; one filled with a garbage truckload of negativity, and at the same time, it has been a reminder of how much much much better off I now am.

And how bloody lucky I am.

On this track, there is only one way to go -and it is forward.

Strength

Insomnia strikes again.

In the middle of the night, being too mentally drained to study, and too filled with caffeine to sleep, the alcohol is making little (no) difference to me.

In the 3300 tutorial-cum-quiz today, I for the first time in many, many years, felt what it actually was to be so vastly inferior and sub-standard to a certain 'reference point', so to say in 3300-speak.

It was disheartening, and in that blaze of envy, I felt an overwhelming gush of (negative) emotions.

Yes, I'm certainly not the most gifted tool in the UNSW shed. And I certainly haven't all the intelligence in the world -nor even amongst my peers, for that matter.

Personality wise, well, that's even more of a no-brainer: from the bottom up would perhaps be an accurate description. Oh, and let's not forget the constant emotional outbursts that plague this blog.


But now that the evening/night has settled down, and played itself out, and that the chinks in my ego and the insecurities of my life have all been papered-over and pacified, I can't help but feel how tremendously nice it is to be me.

I have two of the most exceptional people in the world as my parents. I have a warm and wonderful group of close, life-long friends --people that I cannot be more happy or proud to know, or have known.

I am courageous with the things I know and for the things I believe in. I am a formidable combination of good looks, quick wits, and an ocean of depth and a wealth of intellectualism.

Luck, for the most part, has been on my side for the past half decade. And as horrendously wrong as this would sound, I have faith in the future always being a better place than the past.

Truth be told, it's good to be me.

Fridays

...mark the start of all the (wonderful) things that the weekend entails.

Not needing to wake up early, or at all. No classes/tutes/work. No pressure. No schedules.

Fun.

It's just the second Friday since the semester started. I'm sitting in the library at three in the afternoon, trying to revise for the doom-and-gloom that will befall upon me next week.

It's just the third Friday I've spent in Sydney since I flew back here, and I've already cancelled out all the other Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays until the semester is effectively over and done with.

I simply won't have the time to a 'weekend'.

Currently, I have lost all my senses of perspective of life -lost them senses all in the sines and cosines and angles of trying to integrate this arbitrary height of a sphere to find it's volume, so that I can find the weight of the working fluid, and thus the pressure it applies to the liquid below.

Why am I doing this?

Why am I cracking my head in this horrendous pile of scribbles and mistakes and errors? Why is it that when I'm done with this, I shall have to worry about LaPlace-transforming equations into forms that I know I will never do for the rest of my life? And then after that, face Mechanics II and be expected to be an expert in the field of motion by an expert who has spent his entire life in the same university?

Why.

Hell Below Blue Skies

So there I suddenly was again, onboard another Boeing craft jetting south through the massive Australian heartland.

It seemed just like yesterday that I was heading the opposite way -that 400 going ever faster with each kilometer it passed.

It seemed just like yesterday I landed at the airport in the night where my parents were waiting for me.

It seemed just like yesterday that I was suddenly home again, and where everything I could ever want or need was within arm's reach.

It seemed just like four months ago when I reached the flat and entered my room: a place filled with academic struggles and that very familiar feeling of frustration at everything I did.

It seemed just like four months ago when I finished unpacking to realise that beyond the double-digit circle of souls, there is no one, and nothing else for you here.

Engineering Mechanics II though, is unlike anything else I've gone through before. I am truly frightened to bits at incurring another term here that cannot be afforded.

I wonder why such dickheads are lecturing 3300. I wonder wish if there is even the slimmest chance of me passing. I wonder wish if anyone has tried murder doing something.

I wonder at times, why a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do so much good to me, my career, and my life, has turned into a hellish nightmare that I cannot bear to live with.

Yoyos in the Sky

That this was perhaps the most unenjoyable Chinese New Year to me is definitely an understatement.

It’s just the most polite way I can think of putting it.

And so I thought my escapade to the Big City would be a welcome (and much needed) relief.

Disheartened, disappointed, frustrated and sad, I packed my things into the car and hurried off in the middle of the night without a care in the world.

Never would I have thought that so many things were being put to the test in so short a time, and in so many possible ways.

And if I thought driving two hundred kilometres down south to the thriving metropolis to see friends close and dear would solve everything --at least for now--, then I was to be proven utterly wrong.

But its all over now. What’s past is past. And it was all to be another lesson to be learnt. Even with all this being so, I definitely had a pleasant time during my stay there.

Thanks so much for the omelette sandwiches. For staying late despite the long drive back to Cyberjaya. For the lovely DAC. For the pint of Guinness. And for that afternoon drenched in green tea.

We are told from young to not keep unhealthy things --emotional baggages, and grudges especially-- against others for too long a time, but I cannot help but walk away from the past week doing precisely so.

Maybe just a little bit here and there.

Oh well. With all the hustle and bustle settled down and done with, I certainly look forward to the (very few) days ahead, spending time with family, the cats, the car and the coffee in this beautiful valley that is home.

It won’t be long before all this would again be a luxury, and nothing more than a mere memory of people and a place that once was.

It won’t be long before I’ll start missing all this, and wishing the academic hellhole in the island continent would be over.

It won’t be long before it’ll be time to go, again.

Another Late Night

It's almost 5 in the morning and I am still awake, gripped by a dark sense of dismay.

Petroleum is running out. The climate is at a critical point. A little over a billion people will —in the very near future— join the developing/developed world in its voracious consumption of energy.

Fusion technology is still half a century away at the very least. Carbon capture sounds like a childish fantasy. Wind mill farms don't really cut it. Nuclear stations cost too much time and money.

The country has lost it's lead in every single field to the once inferior competitors from South Korean and Taiwan. But instead of teaming up to get our acts together and to stand up to the challenges of the world, we're a nation gripped by ridiculous religious drama and a sodomy trial. Add that to a population intent on seeing even patriotic and unifying attempts fail, you know that we're in deep shit.

Lowering the scale to a more personal level -and perhaps upping the significance- is 3300 that awaits me, and the towering exchange rate and the heavy financial burden it will incur. 

I get the sense somehow that the coming decades will see humanity go through an extremely difficult and trying period, with deep and overwhelming changes to our way of life, and the way we see ourselves.

I feel like a fool and an idiot to worry over the problems of the human race, not least when a course in dynamics is impossible enough in itself. But is it absolute wrong to fret and to worry over things one has no control over, especially if there are smarter, wealthier and more-abled people in the world to lead us out of this pit?

All I want to do is to wake up in the afternoon tomorrow, step into my chilly air-conditioned car, burn a few hundred mils of black gold —putting my share of humanity's CO2 burden into the atmosphere— to get to town and have a lovely glass of white coffee.  

And when the festivities of the Chinese New Year is over, all I yearn for is to go out and get my freezing cold beer and drink well into the mornings with the people most dear to me, then speed through the city streets to get home.