Spent the past two days playing around with it, learning how to do stuff ‘for real’ as opposed to in theory.

Played with aperture settings yesterday and succeeded in manually setting up those nice ‘macro’ shots with stuff in the foreground is in focus while everything else is blurry behind.

Today I spent playing around with shutter speeds, and got the super cool LSD-like Lomo-esque effect:

:))

So even though money’s super tight now, I’m happpyy!

I haven’t finished the book, and I usually try not to cheat, but even though Possession is tremendously readable and brilliant to boot, I just didn’t make time to finish it. But that Postscript is really just beautiful in a quiet, melancholy way. Which I suppose says something about me and my issues, but it’s beautifully written nonetheless. It’s just such a brilliant book, I’m going to resolve to finish it.

The lasts are piling up—last history essay (which I literally forgot all about until 4pm the day it was due—today.), last Lit presentation. Pretty soon it’ll be last Lit test, and last Lit essays. Then last History exam, and last Lit exam.

(Shit, y’all! It’s freaking tragic!)

Overinflated gestures towards, and comical misuse of ‘tragedy’ aside, I really just feel lost at the thought of leaving my cosily-furnished ivory tower. There is no plan, there is no PLAN. I feel panicked just thinking about it. I don’t necessarily intend to follow the plan, I would just like to know what the damn plan is supposed to be. What my plan is supposed to be, because I’ll be damned if I end up pathetic and miserable, shuffling onto an MRT at 8 every weekday morning and again at 7 in the evening.

What’s the plan, damnit?

And well, I’m really just not the ‘creative’ type. I don’t create. I don’t spontaneously make stuff. I’m not an architect, not a creative writer, not a poet. I look at what other people create, and I talk about it. Which is such a ‘those who can’t, become film critics’ kind of thing. And maybe that’s what this is. I love watching TV and film. I get excited over a great cut, or a genious camera angle or shot. I get all gleeful over a particularly smart or witty sound or visual bridge. I love watching these things, even when they’re just trashy fun. But do I really want to make films? Do I even have what it takes? Two semesters editing a few IHG/Hall Pageant/Block Farewell/Whatever Crap videos doesn’t actually mean squat.

Am I being realistic or am I just chickening out like a little bitch?

All I know is I don’t want to be a 9am-6pm cubicle worker; I don’t want to push paperwork; I don’t want to work for an idiotic boss. All I know is what I don’t want to do. And time is really running out.

And yes, I know I’ve been whining about this forEVER, but I really just do. not. know.

So anyway. It’s Week 5. Next week, I’ve got one presentation and two essays due. Granted, it’s not anything as insane as previous semesters, but this sem it’s seeming so much harder, not only to just get-the-shit-done, but just to take it seriously. Was just reading something somewhere, when I realised (tangentially) that the reason is not that this semester’s modules suck—even though I’ve totally ignored one of ‘em, am kinda bored by another two of ‘em, and feel slightly let-down by one. Yes, I only LOVE one of my classes this semester. But yeah. Even for that one class, there’s no real ‘out of class homework’, since it’s a discussion-centric class.

For the other four? I’ve just been sorta phoning it in. Even though most sems I don’t actually, you know, read exhaustively or completely, this semester, I’m just really not..well, ‘emotionally engaged’. Which makes it sound like I’m talking about some dude I’m dating, but that’s sorta the most appropriate term I can think of to describe it.

And I think I know why. For seven semesters, all I really WANTED to do, to ‘have done as a symbol of my having been in Uni’ was to write a HT. Yes, as a symbol. Cos I’m shallow like that. Cos, well, what kind of Honours Student would I be had I not “Written a Paper”? And then I had to fight my way up the ladder to be able to write it, and tussle with the practical problem (or as practical as we get in this ivory tower of mine) of well, what I was going to write.And then I finally found something that spoke to me, something that I cared about, deeply, and went for it, wrote it, handed it in.

And along the way it stopped being a symbol—it became something I really cared about, something deeply personal, the one thing I’ve done so far that I really am proud of. (Which is, incidentally, why, five months after handing it in, I’m still talking about it.)
[And wow, talking about it like that—someone should write a bildungsroman about my life as an undergraduate! They should make it into a movie! erms.]

But yes. An experience like that? For me, that was the apex. Not just writing it, really, but writing it along with some of the greatest people and minds I’ve met in NUS, having the time of my life. It was painful, but it was also so damn fun. Late nights, dirty jokes, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, suppers. Alcohol. Seriously, it was just—an experience unlike any other. Those three months were just fantastic.

And to go from that, to this? Well it sucks. I feel empty, let-down. Chasing a high that is just nowhere to be found. Phoning it in.

GAH! I want to love school again! I want to LOVE school. So far I only LOVE one of my five classes.

Right now I need to write these papers and get that presentation done. But I just can’t bring myself to care.

RAR.

But ok. No one cares that I don’t care. It’s a whole ball of uncaringness. GAH.

Fucking 1700s shit. *mutters*

*hauls self off to get to work, still muttering*

*mutters some more*

And okay, maybe I lied—because there’s something a little decadent about buying a fresh slab of sashimi-quality salmon and poaching it gently until it’s flaky, soft, juicy and just-cooked-but-not-over-cooked. Mmm. Also, oven-grilled zuchinni is always a win in my book.

I have a call number!

So, Mondays exhaust me, usually in a good way. But today was bad.

Trying to come up with a structure for Pynch today was brutal. Not used to working in a certain way; too used to working my way; too accustomed to working with people who work in the same way as I do. Today was not fun.

But even when I hate it, I still love what I’m doing right now. On the bus I was thinking, “I really really miss AY2009/2010.” Then I realised, next year, I’ll be thinking, “As much as it kinda blowed (or rather, as much as it was not as awesome at 09/10) while I was living it, I really miss that last semester.”

Damnit, this is what I love. Maybe it makes me pretentious (although I still disagree.) but I love this life. I love talking about poetry and postmodernism and Baudrillard and Heidegger. I love that there is just no practical application, no real-world parallel—I love my freaking ivory tower la, okay?

And strange as it seems, even as I live out this last sem, perversely enjoying the unique torture of this life I love-even-as-I-hate-it, I’m already waxing a little nostalgic—ahead of time, yes, but nonetheless, I already miss what’s yet to pass.

Shit, it’s kinda super fucking tragic la. Cheeebs.

Facing this whole midlife-crisis thing sucks la. All that shit people say that’s supposed to be inspiring—’Where are you going to take life?’/'Where’s life going to take you?’/'Enjoy the roller-coaster ride of life in which part of the thrill is not knowing what comes next!’ blah blah blah—it’s all really not inspiring at all la.

Plus, I have people (person) telling me that I’m a wannabe academic made for Grad school—as a desperate last attempt to avoid facing the real world, at the end of which I’ll still be in no way qualified or ready for anything. Which is frustrating because I actually hear the truth in that granted somewhat sweeping overstatement.

And I know what I want to do, I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around the fact that I may or may not suck at it. Cos let’s face it—I’ve got no experience, the last time I did aaaanything related was 3 years ago, and those were some lame-ass pieces of work, which, although I worked on, I do not have copies of. Oh, and also? I need to know things. I can’t just—go with the flow. Not when I’m personally invested. Not when it involves actual life and not theoretical discussions during which reality can be suspended along with disbelief. I know what I should/could do, but at the moment, there’s just no freaking time. I know that this insane rush for time, this must.find.a.job.asasp. feeling is really just a constructed/false thing but I can’t help feeling it. It’s not that I feel I need to get a job immediately—I do feel like I need the financial independence IMMEDIATELY, but the thought of sitting here, not doing anything to move myself further along the trajectory I’d like to be moving in, and the thought that if I were to take that leap of faith and believe in myself—hard in an of itself—I’d forseeably spend another half-a-dozen of years finding my way around. Part of me is screaming—are you crazy!? You don’t do stuff, you just talk endlessly about it in a (some would say) pretentious manner that eludes true application! And the other part of me is silent and has, for once, no fucking counter argument. I’ve spent the last four years feeling out this sphere of existence, this world—the world of academics and writing papers and a specific set of vocabulary. I understand this world, not completely, but as much as I understand anything. I get this world, all it’s illogics and weird conventions and rules. To spend the another chunk of time exploring a totally different world? What if I hate it? What if I suck at it? And most of all, the thought that really just— The thought that I have no way of getting around: What if this world has shaped me in ways I  can’t escape?

What if I just. am no longer equipped to think in any other way but how I’ve been trained? The evidence that suggests ‘yes’ piles up—I am not a creator, I argue. I can’t spontaneously create, I write to or against something. There! THAT, precisely: I don’t do, I write. I respond. I don’t get flashes of true inspiration—I react, think, read, and then proceed on to do something that in any other aspect of life would be labelled ‘bitching’.

I really just. don’t know.