so, mass physical training today. oh the agony, oh the pain - the horror stories are true [and then some]. we did circuit [?] training where we went from station to station [only once through thank God]. lets see, skipping alternated with sprints, tricks of speed twice around the track, push ups, sit ups. sounds fairly reasonable when listed out but i assure you i almost died.

i'm not that unfit, in my humble opinion. there was a time where i'd run everyday [during the prelims and a few months before that] but after such a long lapse in exercise i ached in places i never even knew existed. i keep thinking about the slack days of PT [can it even be called PT?!] in scgs and how we complained even then. oh we were so spoilt and so terribly lazy. i am a habitual breakfast-skipper. it's not that i don't want to eat, i simply can't that early in the morning. and in scgs i could afford to do that because we have an early break where the two food clubs bring goodies. hence i never broke the habit. even on days where there was pe it didn't matter because as i mentioned earlier, SCGS PE IS THE SLACKEST THING. i can come out of it dry and almost as fresh as before i started.

today i was drenched, as i walked up the stairs i started feeling woozy and faint. i quickly went to get myself a drink to up the blood sugar level or else i would have really fainted. you know i can actually argue all day long that it's hard, but now i'm more inclined to laugh at myself and say, 'mel, you're such a wimpy wimpy wimp.' well, lesson learnt, eat breakfast on PT days. oh and bring a change of clothes. you are no longer in scgs where you hardly perspire.

do you know that every morning one of the PE teachers runs to school from his home in - get this - Toa Payoh? well now you do, and now you know there is a slightly deranged man amongst us in njc.

i've been thinking more seriously about my future and i honestly don't know what i'm going to do. i want to be a writer, but it's no good being a writer when i hardly write anything at all nowadays and when i do, it is sadly pathetic. i can't seem to go beyond this level of maturity. it is as though i have stagnated. i mean, i have stagnated. anyhow, other than career choices, i've been thinking of university. i really want to get to Yale. partly because of harold bloom and partly because my parents seem to be suggesting every single college but yale [they don't say it, but i know they secretly have resigned themselves to the fact that i can't scale such heights]. and sometimes i want to yell, 'you're supposed to believe in me! you're my parents! what's so wrong with me trying for Yale?!'

though actually i'd really like the UK. but now that my dad is encouraging me to take my SATs this year and bypass the A levels, i am tempted to give the UK a miss. i honestly don't see the point of putting myself through that whole hellhole of intensive mugging again with a worse environment of muggers [njc, if i do stay]. i hate it, i hate this mugging and stripping of subjects. it makes me delusional and drives me to the suicidal brink of insanity. i imagine my classmates to morph into robots in their steel grey uniforms and chant, 'we must mug. we must mug. we must mug.' it is a very scary and disgusting image. the ironic detioration of the human brain with each one-track answer given during math exams and memorized model answers for lit papers. i honestly have reason to believe that most of us don't understand or question what we are doing, almost all the time because that happens to me in math.

my dreams of dropping math may be dashed any moment. i've been looking at US universities i'm thinking of applying for and so far i haven't come across one which states specifically that it requires math but what if i do?! though wellesley requires one lab science but i've decided to hell with them because i'm not willing to torture myself with physics and chemistry after i looked forward to arts stream for years. and anyway i'm not into women's colleges.

so far i've decided i will apply to NYU, UCLA, UCBerkeley, Yale, Browns - but i'm still thinking. at this point everything is so very unsure yet minds need to be made up.

life, as it is, seems so empty. i've not really felt a richness in my life. there is poetry, there is love, there is God, but after the poems are read, the feelings are felt - what is left? perhaps i'm just not feeling too good today.

this too shall pass, and so will everything else, good and bad. what am i living for? time to delve into the cliches and lose myself in the recesses of my soul.

+ posted by M @ 9:56 PM