Saturday, January 16, 2010.

this year onwards will be grueling, i realised.

one week into school, and i feel the horror of a lot of unfulfilled dreams. the burden of so many things that i need to do, and how to manage them.

indeed, the path out to freedom is filled with tons of booby traps that look like accelerating portals towards the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, but in reality merely set you back a few days, a few hours.

they call it a necessary evil though.

anyway, enough rambling.

some stuff that actually went through my not-as-astute mind (lack of usage mah, old and rusty and cranky alr) these few days:

we see the j1s, cute and cuddly and TALL (sigh), coming in just as we did last year. no no no this is not some emo shit rant about how i've grown up and all (though i could easily do that), but yeah it's about the j1s.

how do you spot the difference between a j1 and a j2! (besides uniform lah)

ans: see how fast they walk. j1s don't exactly walk very fast cos they 1 - don't exactly need to, 2 - aren't stressed enough yet, 3 - don't know the place well enough.

yes and in the span of one year, we see a similar cycle repeating. of people asking others where the mini-lts are (not that i do know where they are - are they in block d?), of queueing up at the bookshop for badges, of wandering around the school in frustration at not being able to find a toilet.

indeed, it's the whole same process of exploration and integration. even if the place they integrate into may be slightly different each time (when we came in the lifts weren't blocked off on levels 1M - 4), it's the whole process of adaptation into a new life that is at once foreign and familiar to us.

we emphatize with them; i was certain i had no idea where the entrances of each lt were.

we disagree with them; the positioning of each lt is actually rather straightforward and standard.

and as we grow up (with our juniors, just as our seniors did with us), the whole cycle repeats itself. it's actually interesting viewing your own development from a whole new perspective; now our juniors are a proxy for us one year ago, while our seniors one year ago are a proxy for us now.

actually, that wasn't the point. the point is this - how about the people who don't grow up?

to think about it, to these time-immune people, how does each batch differ from the rest? all of us exhibit the same traits - the same "where is the toilet?" questions, the same "can we not do tutorials?" attitudes, the same -westartponninglecturesastheyeargoesby- behaviour.

we are all intrinsically human, and identical after all.

so some food for thought - is there really something that makes a batch stand out?

anyway. i like this song! it's very very old, but then again i'm quite a late bloomer.

ohhh and and i take back my words about how prokofiev isn't genius enough. honestly, some melodies of his are pure genius. think sognando (op. 19), the soaring melody of the 1st mvt of op. 100, and a whole host of really inspired melodies that give him something else to boast about besides motor rhythms and dollops of sarcasm-laden music.