Tumblings

How have I been this week? The non-committal 'alright', as usual. I picked up a new habit - to always have a notebook in the back pocket, and to keep pens around at all times, to direct every thought there anytime it arises.

Feeling liberated too, mainly because of spiritual freedom! woohoo! Learning to get past own conceptions and perceptions of myself.

Discovered the MIT Graduate Writing Course in science writing, and thinking about how to get there. Still thinking about the sociology major, but that is low down in priority. Definitely taking the science, technology, society minor thought! Dread thinking about working with potentially a very sarcastic prof

But all of the above lies in the future, right now, doing fine with chemistry, and progressing in USP mods.

I can safely say I am still living a charmed life, more or less.

Celebrated friend's 19th on the 23rd. oh wells.Technorati Tags: NUS, life, writing, wishes, ambitions, hopes

getting past myself

i realised that the most difficult thing in NUS is not the modules. It's not the lab reports, and for me, its not even USP. those things, i now realise, are secondary, compared to the more important thing... my own personal and character development. And the hardest obstacle for me thus far, is not really about getting the grades, but its about getting past myself, accepting myself as how God has accepted - i still find it hard to accept that, and i am still comparing myself with others, even though i know that is something i must not do, and that it will only drive me towards negativity and depression.

i should really accept who i am - someone who daydreams a lot, who cares more about the originality of ideas, someone who bothers to think deep, who is willing to get to the bottom of things, who considers his own learning primary to the grades he receives. Of course, grades do matter, but grades should not be primary, and should not be used as a basis for comparing intellectual capability. Besides, i MUST accept who i am - a thinker, first and foremost, and i am learning all the time... in some sense, i should be true to that, and not get depressed about who i can't be - simply because i am not, and because God has made me so. there are some areas i need to improve, but these improvements can come only because God deems it so as well. Without God, all my strivings would be for in vain. 

I must be clear about who i am, and get past myself. at least for now. other things are secondary. wth, i might even drop USP, and just take modules for fun - serious fun though, for my own learning...

i love my writing class. i am still loving this process of challenging ourselves, of getting to the core of ideas, of learning about the way we think, of critically assessing claims, and how to write a good essay... I find so much pleasure in learning and critically learning! love it! somehow i feel i wanna do something special for this writing class... documenting our traumas in writing, staying up till late just to come up with a draft, half-knowing that it'll be trash the next day, and stuff like that - its just so stimulating...! and it isn't about the class, its also about the classmates and the prof as well, who all end up to this experience. the writing class is truly the defining class for USP. questioning everything, even our most closely-held assumptions. self-realization, becoming a true scholar, who is able to come up with truly original thoughts instead merely rehashing what has been said and done before... i would love to have conversations with dr don about all of these, and just find out what he thinks... 

off to run!

thank God for the day!

at home now, trying the crazy setup

back in PGP, i complain that when I move between the 2 screens, I still have to use the mac keyboard and look at the screen, at i find it irksome because the angle of sight is different from the angle of typing. So now I'm home, and naturally, I hook up the other keyboard to my mac. If i keep doing this, i really should go upgrade the mac during december... pump it up with another 2Gb of additional RAM, and upgrade the hard-disk space at the same time... hee... I have the feeling that I will use this set up for a while, unless of course, my brother uses the acer mini as his desktop... oh well. having fun now!Technorati Tags: home, pgp, macbook,

getting used to myself.

I'm glad I was able to more than survive the math test. honestly it wasn't really that difficult, but i did make a lot of careless mistakes, as usual. Anyway, I reminded myself not to brood over it. Now that the test is over, treat it as another tutorial, and learn from it. 

I need to get over the fact that in some other areas in academic, I might still be somehow, above average. I know that there are people who can think faster, and more thorough than me, and I think my time in JC has kinda conditioned me that I am just not a certain kind of thinker. I am however, a slower, deeper thinker, and I know that I'll just suck at trying to strain myself thinking faster than others when I am plainly not able to do so. Flashes of insight do come, but only after going through a thorough process of thought...

and so this line of thought leads me to Psalms 139. 

close reading orchard road. or just a brief overview

It's been a while since i went to orchard, and i'm just amazed at the pace of change that from the time that i was last there.

i would like to close read all of these things. like, the attempted graffiti that doesn't quite make it, and i dun understand why the kids didn't use a normal heart shape, but instead, a '<3'... are kids too used to digital representations that they have forgotten how to draw a heart?

the photo of the keyboardist is amazing. it says, 'sponsored by boon lay nasi lemak', and the woman was singing some popular nice english song completed with the accent i found the juxtapositio of the local and foreign amazing, and this just begs the question, what is the singapore identity? how can all of these contradictions coexist? it is jarring though.

the last photo, is, i presume, a chinese national who's a singaporean pr who busks at orchard playing the pipa, i think, to an english tune.

wow. its simply amazing, the juxtaposition of identities and such.

which leads me to fantasize... orchard road by itself is such an interesting subject to study. need to close read it further if i were to do an ISM just for this, camp here 24/something just to observe, spot, close read behaviour and youth culture...

i guess i'm a singapore-logist. or at least a singapore-logist-wannabe...

the writing class has given me a close-reading mentally, to put everything i see, hear, feel under the lens of the close-reading analysis, to see something interesting, puzzling... for good or for bad, thats who i am, or at least a part of me...