And I still tread on this path we call Life. It's not well-worn, not clearly defined from the thousands of footsteps that have trodded over it. Because it's my path alone to walk, and the entirety that lies before me is as yet un-ventured forth by me. I can only walk ahead the best that I can. There isn't going to be any signposts pointing me in the right direction to go. I'll take the wrong path as it forks out into the fabled two, and I wouldn't know, because in this path of Life, the two paths aren't clear in their distinctions; they are not one of darkness and one of light. I'll take the wrong path, and I'll take responsibility for it. That's the way it goes.

But something is only wrong when you yourself feels it's wrong.

Eighteen is far too young to be jaded and cynical. I could never understand people who were so cynical and pessimistic in the things they did, the way they thought, the way they regarded people. I thought they were leading a life that couldn't possibly be fulfilling. Life is very bleak without optimism and innocence. You don't know how beautiful it is to look at the world through rose-colored lenses. There is no judgement, no pain. Just wide-eyed innocence and delight that this world is so beautiful. I don't know if someone whipped my rose-colored spectacles off me, or if I removed them myself. Sometimes reality gets too stark, too harsh. And you try to find back those rose-colored lenses. But you find that the degree isn't right anymore. And when that happens, it doesn't correct your imperfect vision. It only exacerbates it.

Right now, I think I'd give anything to be simple-minded. My head is going to burst soon, if I keep up with this, at this rate. I should think you can die from thinking too much.

This is not a resurrection, this is the end. My farewell post for this blog, because I never properly said goodbye, did I? This has been my emotional crutch for the past one year or so, but somehow, it got hacked out from under me. And I can do without it now.

So goodbye.

I think I'm shutting this thing down. Am pretty tired out.

Goodbye.

I think that you could be whatever you wanted to be
If you could realize, all the dreams you have inside.
Don't be afraid if you've got something to say,
Just open up your heart and let it show you the way.

This song popped into my head today while I was in the shower. It's a really old song - Stay the Same by Joey McIntyre. I still remember the first time I heard it. It was on the radio in my dad's car, and my cousin, who was with us, told me the title of the song. For some reason, it stuck with me. Just like Diana Ross' "If We Hold on Together". You know, that song from Land Before Time, the dinosaur movie. Yeah. I guess they're classics in their own right.

Hmmm, check Christian Bautista out. I quite like his songs and his singing style.

So I shan't spend too long online, although I've been here for nearly an hour. 9 more minutes, and it's back to the books. The sound system's finally back in my computer, so I can totally listen to music now.

I have concluded that studying consumes an insane amount of energy/calories. I mean, yesterday, I went for lunch with Ai Ling at J8, and I had the tori-q bento thingy. Okay, thereafter I proceeded to have an eclair, and shared an ice-cream toast with her. Oh man. (And I hadn't even studied that much before lunch. Siao.) The eclair and ice-cream toast were mediocre, but the thing is, it was the first time in a long time that I actually felt the way I did yesterday. There is no other word but "content" to describe the sublimal state I was in after ingesting all that food. I was full, but in a warm, comfortable way. Aiyah. You might get what I'm talking about. But I obviously can't make a habit of it. Although you know how food takes you to this higher plane... and whooo! The feeling's incredible. Like biting into a cold, chocolate-coated eclair, sinking your teeth past the light pastry, the bittersweet taste of chocolate in your mouth, and then the climax comes suddenly. The custard and whipped cream bursts into your mouth, and thereafter oozes very slowly but surely, down your throat, all velvety smooth and seductive. And your eyes are just irresistibly drawn shut, as all your senses succuumb (sp?) to this very private, very sexy experience.

Uh huh, uh huh.

Okay, I'm very hungry now. I adopt very weird eating habits when I'm alone at home. I had noodles and coffee for breakfast, skipped lunch because Il Duce was far too compelling to think about food, ate some Arnott's cracked-pepper crackers and had green tea with honey-lemon for uh, tea? Yes, and am now positively ravenous. I hope dinner will be ready soon. Muahahaha.

Okay I'm scramming off now. I'm nine minutes too late.

There's this saying that goes like this,

"I love the sun for days, the moon for nights, and you forever."

Hmmm guess I ought to do a little update. Especially on Friday, which was a hoot. We had our graduation ceremony on that day. Mr. Kwek is probably the funniest, most eccentric principal I've ever had. The most unassuming and unaffected one, too. I should think he'll be one of the most vivid memories of my college life, years from now when I look back and reminisce. And the student selected to speak on behalf of the J2 cohort was a riot. The speech he made was more along the lines of him having won the presidency or something. There was even German involved. Highly amusing. Well we took loads of photos, and 05a5a and BBGT are definitely two groups of people I will not be forgetting anytime soon. Even though I didn't really feel particularly sad (I don't know why either. I think I'm turning into a stone.) I know I'll look back on these cherished memories and smile.

So, school's out.

Scary how there's only two weeks left to the exams. That's 14 days. You know, I never thought I'd make it this far. After my devastatingly bad results for Prelims in Sec. 4, you could say I was rather doubtful of my own abilities. But I worked hard, probably the hardest then I'd ever worked in my life then, and usually I like to think I create my own luck, and I determine the end result, but my A Maths results were really probably with the help of God, and I was pretty undeserving of it. So I never intended to come to a JC, and all I wanted from my O Levels was a score decent enough to let me do Mass Communications. But everything underwent an upheaval when I got my results, and I promise you, I never felt more proud of myself in my life. (I remember screaming for a really long time.) And I've always worried about my grades since coming to JC. I worried that I'd get retained during Promotionals, I worried incessantly after every exam... Simply because I'm not smart. I hear people breezing through PSLE, and getting way higher scores than I did, even though I remember putting in a lot of effort for it. And I studied Chemistry in secondary school like mad, really put in a lot of effort, but it never showed during school exams. On the contrary, I failed nearly every single test. I'm not saying I look down on myself, neither am I belittling myself. I just can't reconcile myself to believe people when they say I'm smart, because I'm a really slow learner and I always daydream, so in place of that I have to work doubly hard to understand things that people understand at a snap. Yes, evidence of my slow-ness is the frequent headaches I got when I took Maths, hahaha.

Okay, I just went completely off-tangent. What I meant to say was that I didn't think I'd get this far, but I have. And so have you. So this is our very last stretch, the last sprint after five and a half agonizing rounds, and we just need to put in the very last burst of energy for these two weeks. We did it before, and we'll definitely be able to do it again. We've come this far, haven't we?

By the way, I think I'm in love. Or very, very much in like. (:

Alright. I have to go and psycho myself to go down to the gym now. So that you can't squeeze no fats man.

Ta!

Death? What's that? And who decides when it comes to you? Does it happen when someone takes a gun and bang! Blows your brains out in a heart-stopping, split second? Or when you're lying on the floor with slashed wrists, the life eking out of you? Or when you struggle to draw your next breath on the hospital bed, your body ravaged beyond recognition by disease?

Can you tell me, who gave those terrorist groups, those extremist groups, the right to go around planting bombs to kill people, trying to stop girls from having an education, cutting off their ears and noses to punish them?

Why do we constantly hurt each other, why do we always find all sorts of ways to spite other people, to kill them? Why do we say, "Since you can't make the right decisions, you've therefore forfeited your right to make decisions, and therefore, we will make your decisions for you." Who dictated what the right decision should be? The right decision by your own standards? By the way you lead your life? Well, did it ever occur to you that the way you lead your life is your own business?

It's so utterly stupid, utterly ridiculous, how each and every one of us was conceived the same way, in the womb, each of us are made up of DNA, yet we constantly think we are better than others, and we find ways to get power, then use it to marginalise the weaker people, and benefit ourselves. Screw Social Darwinism, because that's bullshit. Living your life according to a theory, now that's real smart.

Please tell me how a human being can kill other people without compunction. Tell me how you can plant a bomb somewhere knowing that it will kill thousands, knowing that thousands of families will have a father, a daughter, a mother, an aunt... gone from them forever. Tell me how you can live with the burden of being responsible for the raw grief and pain these people will go through. Tell me how you can live with having taken away someone else's life, a life that was not yours to lead. So we've taken coal, oil, minerals, precious stones and metals from the earth. We've taken trees, animals, and the ozone layer from the earth. We're running out of things to take from the earth, aren't we? So we turn to taking our own human race.

So throughout life, this is what it's going to be like. It's amazing how we embark on this self-destruction process and remain gloriously blind. We're going to criticise people and judge them based on our own morals and standards. We're always going to act like the way we lead our lives is the correct way. Is the only way. And we will never learn to accept that other people have their own ways of leading their lives.

I watched Tokyo Drift today, or the majority of it. I didn't like any of cast, apart from Han (who's Korean and reminds me of So Ji Sup!!!) and Bow Wow. But the drifting scenes were so awesome. The scenes in Initial D were better though, if I remember correctly. And Vin Diesel at the end of Tokyo Drift took the icing.

And I watched Lara Croft too, heeheehee! So good, even if she's probably the only good thing about the film.

I had a disconcerting dream in the afternoon. I was supposedly planning to bomb some building, but I chickened out at the last minute, and stupidly threw the bomb out of the window of the building. And after I threw it out, I was like, crap, it's going to explode and kill innocent people. Obviously I didn't use the word "crap" in my dream, I'm doing self-censorship here. Yes, so I never found out what happened, because I woke up after I threw the bomb out of the window, but it was a very unsettling dream indeed. I don't even know why I wanted to bomb the building man.

And I finally hauled my ass down to the gym today. Wanted to do an hour on the treadmill, but I decided I oughtn't to be so ambitious, and good thing for that, because I nearly wanted to give up after the first ten minutes. Imagine that, ten minutes!! I had to struggle on for half an hour. And I felt like a mass of blubber on the machine lah. Couldn't even muster enough energy to lift my legs up properly. I never felt more like SamSoon at that point.

Well, I'm off, there's school tomorrow. Ta!

I have done next to nothing today, except laze around like the bum I am. I really should go running soon, but there's always the excuse that the haze is too thick to exercise. And it honestly is. The PSI is more than a hundred now. And I can't see the opposite apartments anymore. The gloomy weather is doing nothing to help my inertia man. I really, really, really hope it goes away soon.

And so today shall go down in my history as one of the singularly most-unaccomplished days I've ever had. I finished The Notebook in the span of two hours this morning, the words were so big. And then I wrote in my diary for awhile... read a whole load of quotes (I love those by the way, if you haven't already realised)... Tried doing an essay for Econs, but ended scribbling some sentences, and that was it. Read a few pages of Chaucer and ended up falling asleep on the sofa, and woke up with two numb legs. Yes. And I studied some pictures of Mussolini and the like when I was supposed to be reading about them......... I behave as if I have a lot of time left.

I am extremely miserable right now. I'm telling you, it's the haze.

And Juliet said,

"For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night."

I also found out today that she was the one who said, "What's in a name, that which we call a rose by any other, would smell as sweet?" One of my all-time favourites.

I think I'm losing my mental faculties. My brain is no longer in my head, it's on some higher plane, probably right up there with the haze. Speaking of the haze, it gave everything a really surrealistic (is there even such a word?) quality that was really quite beautiful, if not for the fact that it wasn't cool mist, but smelly old haze. Maybe my state of limbo (is that what they call it? Or is it "limber"?)(I'm really losing it) is due to the full moon. Mr. Mark "Werewolf" Lee has already gone over to the Dark Side, to join his brethren of werewolf homies. It was quite disconcerting to see the hair sprout out all over him tonight, but I'm sure we will meet again, as humans in the near future.

"I am nothing special; of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts, and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."

This alone compelled me to borrow Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook from the school library today, while I was supposed to be deeply engaged by Adolf, him with the tootbrush mustache. Obviously the novel is a gazillion times more interesting, although I am kind of regretting borrowing it now, because I have now generated an opportunity cost that I really cannot afford to have. But I digress. The above quotation really struck me. Just the sheer simplicity of a few sentences, yet the implication of these words is profoundly moving. For me, at least. There's a raw passion, a sincerity behind those words that I found when I first read it. I can't explain it, and it may seem stupid, but it's beautiful to me. Someday it'll be enough. To just love wholeheartedly.

I'm quite sure I'll dream of Adolf tonight. Look, we're even on first-name terms now. That's how much time I spent with him today. That was not to say I enjoyed his company. I find him utterly inhumane, an utter coward through and through, and a weakling twice over. Not that he cares, since he's been dead for..... a very long while.

Oh man. Whatever. I'm babbling nonsense now. I'm off to get sleep.

Hello, Melissa.

If there was one thing I remembered clearly about you, is that you were perpetually in a state of lunacy all the time, back in secondary school. You never used to care if anyone was looking, you'd just go right ahead and do whatever crazy thing you intended to do. I remember how you and the girls sprayed water at one another and got all wet, and nearly got scolded by a teacher. How you smashed cake all around and screamed the classroom down, and the discipline master nearly had to be called up. And how all of you stank of cake for the rest of the school day. I remember how you'd always yell at the boys in your class to keep quiet, and get really pissed off, and threaten to give their names to Mr. Bernard. You'd always walk out of class, but you never submitted their names. How could you? You were always like that, threatening, but never being able to carry out what you said. But everything would be back to normal on that day itself. You could never stay angry at the people who gave you such good times, such laughter, such fun. I remember how you could do utterly embarrassing and stupid things in class without caring. Like practising tango with Darianne for Prom, even though your O Levels hadn't even started.

I remember that you had quite a temper, and you weren't afraid to show it. You could say you always externalised your emotions. I remember how you and Bel screamed at each other in the atrium, in full view of everyone, but neither of you really caring, and you stomped off to cry in anger. I remember how you and Ching Lam quarrelled, and during class-cleaning, you didn't allow her to clean the window panes, because you were cleaning them. You were such a weird kid, Melissa.

I'm sure if you asked your 4C classmates what they remembered best about you, they'd say, "She was crazy." And you were, completely, unashamedly crazy. But it was a craziness that came with your teenagehood. It was a craziness that was a manifestation of your happiness. You used to show your temper quite a bit, but after that, it was all over, and you never bore grudges after that. None of us ever did.

Hey, Melissa. I don't know where you've gone to. Somehow, I have a feeling you lost yourself somewhere back there. And it's sad, because I remember how you and Ching Lam said the two of you would never change, for life. But you have changed. Not to someone else, but you lost that part of you. That impulsive, impetuous, crazy part of you. Back then, you worried that you were always going to stay perpetually mentally-unhinged. I wish you never worried, because that was you. That was someone I recognised, that was you being true to yourself. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the old you. Why did you ever let that part of you go? I don't know who you are now. Cautious, always holding back, hardly ever expressing your true opinions anymore. If this is part of growing up, then I wish you'd never grown up at all.

Maybe it's the stress. But it's only in junior college that I really understood what stress is. This overused word. There is something I can't shake off, of late. I just know I have to find back what I lost, because I am not complete without it. And I know, that I cannot allow anything, or anyone, to take such an intrinsic part of me away. It's strange that I should be facing an identity crisis after nearly eighteen years of a self-assured existence. At the end of the day, I just have to keep on finding and reminding myself what I'm living for, what I'm doing all this for. I don't particularly know either, actually. And I'm not suicidal, rest assured.

I'm tired now. Skipped school today because of a horrible headache the night before. I ought to go and make better use of my time now. Ta.

Because everyone could use a little love, because there's a romantic inside of everyone, and because these are words that move me, and I hope they do the same for you reading this.

But still sometimes, when the wind is warm or the crickets sing... I dream of a love that even time will lie down and be still for.

Did you ever stick your arms out and spin and spin and spin? Well, that's what love is like.

Love is passion, obsession, someone you can't live without. If you don't start with that, what are you going to end up with? Fall head over heels. I say find someone you can love like crazy and who'll love you the same way back. And how do you find him? Forget your head and listen to your heart. I'm not hearing any heart. Run the risk, if you get hurt, you'll come back. Because, the truth is there is no sense living your life without this. To make the journey and not fall deeply in love - well, you haven't lived a life at all. You have to try. Because if you haven't tried, you haven't lived.

William Parrish: Trust, responsibility, taking the weight for your choices and feelings, and spending the rest of your life living up to them. And above all, not hurting the object of your love.

Joe Black: So that's what love is according to William Parrish?

William Parrish: Multiply it by infinity, and take it to the depth of forever, and you will still have barely a glimpse of what I'm talking about.

-

I could certainly do with the two movies from which the above quotes are taken; Practical Magic and Meet Joe Black. Movies where you do things with wild abandonment. Love with wild abandonment. I would certainly like to kick the A Levels in its butt with wild abandonment and gleeful relish.

Have been feeling slightly off my rocker, slightly melancholy, and a lot of not-being-there. As the days draw on, I'm living more and more in my head. It's getting a bit unsettling, and I really need to snap out of it.

Was ironing my pants with great vigour, and was extremely puzzled as to why the creases just didn't seem to disappear. Then I looked at the water mark, and realised that it hadn't gone down at all. Thinking that I had discovered some defect in the iron, (you know, like maybe the water wasn't flowing into the metal ironing part, or whatever... I don't know how the inside of an iron looks like) I asked my dad in all manner of seriousness, what was wrong with the iron. He came over, and then I realised I didn't switch the iron on. He then made some stupid joke which I didn't get at all lah. I'm appalled at my ridiculous behaviour. I bet some of those bimbo jokes were inspired by people like yours truly.

I reckon it's the haze that is getting to me. Right now, everything outside my window is shrouded in a mysterious, translucent blanket of mist. And it's not even the gloomy, romantic, chilly type of mist like the one in Great Expectations. It's the choking, smelly, acrid type. The thing is, outside it looks cold, but it's actually so warm. I'll let you in on a little quirk. I used to like the smell of haze when I was younger, in Sec. 4 or so. It smelt very comforting to me. I used to think everyone enjoyed the smell too, till I told my friends/parents, and they thought I was very odd. I still like it now, but only when it's in very light dozes, not so overpowering like this one. Anyway, the heavy rain yesterday does not seem to have dispelled it a bit. It's back with a vengeance; everything looks foggier than before. I wish I could take a huge sack and run around, sweeping up all the haze inside and clearing up the atmosphere.

Okay, I just dedicated one whole paragraph to haze. And it wasn't even what I wanted to talk about. Went out with my parents and brother yesterday night to Changi Village for dinner. The food wasn't very good lah, but I had a lot of fun. Doing stupid things, and listening to my dad's lame jokes. My brother and I were shouting out into the wind to each other, holding some inane conversation, when we were just sitting next to each other. Utterly fun. I love driving with the windows down. Wanted to stick my head out, but my brother said I might bang it into a lamp-post. I didn't see how that was possible, seeing as there were no lamp-posts in the middle of the road, but it's better to err on the side of caution, knowing my luck.

As of today, it's 10 days to booze, wild partying and hot wheels. I'm going to be legal man. I can do just about anything but watch R(A) movies, including squatting in jail. Imagine if I took my A Levels in jail. Now, that'd be a once in a lifetime experience. If I ever get to write my life story, I could say, I battled all odds and Changi Prison to get 4 As in the GCE A Level Examinations. I'll be a pioneer of jailbird A Level graduates.

Okay, not funny at all. My favourite choice of "booze" is sparkling juice, and that says volumes about my alcohol tolerance, doesn't it? Have no desire to mambo my night away every week either, and the time when a guy asked me for my number in Zouk, way back in Sec. 3 (no, I wasn't so hip, I went there for some Seventeen party, where they gave you teddy bears)... I think I scarred him for life. Now, hot wheels, that I wouldn't mind. But I don't want to drive man. I can't stand being stuck in traffic jams. I'd rather take the train. And I definitely don't want to do anything that will land me in jail.

This entry seems quite pointless. I'm off now.