syntaxfree

How Will I Live?

From The Onion: Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television.

"Green has lived without television since 1989, when his then-girlfriend moved out and took her set with her. 'When Claudia went, the TV went with her,' Green said. 'But instead of just going out and buying another one—which I certainly could have afforded, that wasn't the issue—I decided to stand up to the glass teat.'

'I'm not an elitist,' Green said. 'It's just that I'd much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen.' "

I'm not normally a big TV watcher, but at exam time I undergo a bizarre metamorphosis. Nothing is too banal, nothing too dull, it's all good as long as it continues to provide an excuse to sit slack-jawed on the couch instead of gritting my teeth at my desk over comparative financing mechanisms of international trade transactions.

Which is why, over my back-to-back exam periods of the past few months, I developed certain, shall we call them, attachments, which cruel reality now threatens to deprive me of.

The Bachelor 3 had me screaming abuse at bitchcat Kirsten, with her shiftygoogly eyes and infuriating tendency to speak only from the back of her throat, Survivor had me screaming abuse at Jon the vicious conniving shrimp with bad hair, and Am I Hot? had me screaming abuse at the judges every time they dismissed someone who floated my boat. I writhed on the couch cursing David E. Kelley to hell and back in a particular episode of Ally McBeal where he made it look as if Ally might dump sweet sexy plumber Jon Bon Jovi for Fred Durst's evil twin (played by fat-faced Matthew Perry). Let's not even go into my hours of MTV hoping for just one glimpse of Justin Timberlake.

But as I stagger out of exam haze and re-enter the world of the living, a small part of me feels an acute sense of loss. The Bachelor is over. Ally's broken up with her plumber. Survivor continues, but self-respect demands that I actually leave the house on Friday nights. Similarly, the Am I Hot? finals are tonight (black guy who's an English teacher! black guy who's an English teacher!), but I'll miss them because I'm having dinner with Pei Ee. Tomorrow I'm taking mum to see Love, Actually (Colin Firth! Colin Firth!), which means I have to miss Punk'd.

I'm not proud of this promenade of plebeianism, but Armchair Psychology 101 suggests that the first step towards regaining my intellectual cred is to come clean and document my fall. Meanwhile, ongoing attempts to wean myself off the glass teat include If on a winter's night a traveller and The Brothers Karamazov (still not quite Proust, but they'll do for now), half-written poems stuffed in drawers (don't even bother with the obvious jokes, y'all) and, quite importantly, admitting to some of my friends for the first time in a while that I actually exist.

Wha?!

I obviously don't check my site counter referrals enough. If enthymeme hadn't helpfully pointed out that some nice person (who? 'Fess up!) apparently nominated my site for best Singapore blog at the 2003 Asia Weblog Awards, I would have blissfully continued neglecting this blog in favour of teaching myself Dancehall 101 via Soulseek downloads and this raggalicious thread at I Love Music, as I've been doing the last couple of days.

Now I'm under pressure. Of all times to get nominated for a blog award. I live in London for 4 years, writing about my swinging life, deep intellectual thoughts, and ubercool pursuits, and no nominations for anything. Then I return to Singapore, sink into depression, boredom and frivolity, with the nearest things I have to a life being reality TV (last week I even descended to watching Am I Hot, I kid you not) and making love to the Marine Parade library, and pow.

So. Huge sycophantic grin. If you can get past the fact that all the other nominees have, like, good design and good content and are actually complete, unlike my half-arsed straddle between blogging at syntaxfree and everything else still at ineffable because I have just been too crap to transfer stuff over, and if something about this blog perhaps appeals to you a little more than the other nominees do, and if the men in white coats agree to undo the leather straps once you've convinced them of all of the above, please vote for me.

If you don't, I might just take that as a sign that my content doesn't have enough mass appeal, and start posting pictures of furry baby animals. And porn. And furry baby animal porn. You have been warned.

I Really Really Hate Birds And That Ernst Painting Has Always Freaked Me Out, But...

(The following passage is a fictional excerpt from an ornithological journal.)

"Is it possible, I wonder, to study a bird so closely, to observe and catalogue its peculiarities in such minute detail, that it becomes invisible? Is it possible that while fastidiously calibrating the span of its wings or the length of its tarsus, we somehow lose sight of its poetry? That in our pedestrian descriptions of a marbled or vermiculated plumage we forfeit a glimpse of living canvases, cascades of carefully toned browns and golds that would shame Kandinsky, misty explosions of colour to rival Monet? I believe that we do. I believe that in approaching our subject with the sensibilities of statisticians and dissectionists, we distance ourselves increasingly from the marvelous and spell-binding planet of imagination whose gravity drew us to our studies in the first place.

...

When we stare into the catatonic black bead of a Parakeet's eye we must teach ourselves to glimpse the cold, alien madness that Max Ernst perceived when he chose to robe his naked brides in confections of scarlet feather and the transplanted monstrous heads of exotic birds. When some ocean-going Kite or Tern is captured in the sharp blue gaze of our Zeiss lenses, we must be able to see the stop motion flight of sepia gulls through the early kinetic photographs of Muybridge, beating white wings tracing a slow oscilloscope line through space and time."

- Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

In Which I Explain It All

Some explaining is in order. I have made vague occasional references to feeling down over the past few months, but never really went into anything in detail apart from whining about missing London. This entry is mostly for people who know me and want a little more information, but those of you who rubberneck at road accidents are welcome to read it too.

I returned from England on 4 August. In the first month of my return, I studied for and sat 4 Masters exams. I had to combine this with meeting certain demands of the Diploma in Singapore Law course (a compulsory conversion course for people who studied law overseas) I was simultaneously enrolled on at NUS (National University of Singapore). These demands were mostly confined to one particular module of that course, a module based mainly on training and selecting members for NUS's international moot teams.

Mooting, for non-lawyers, is basically a competition where law students pretend they're real lawyers arguing a case in a simulated court-room. This doesn't usually include cross-examination of witnesses, but focuses instead on the ability of the advocate to deal with the various interventions of the judge, who can interrupt at any time with questions on the case. I started mooting when I was at UCL, and was fairly successful at it, so I decided to give this NUS course a try. I knew it imposed a tough workload on its students (I didn't realize quite how ridiculously huge though), but wanted the chance of taking part in the most prestigious international moot competition in the world, since UCL had never seemed remotely interested in sending teams to the same competition.

If you're still here after what I admit have been two rather tedious introductory paragraphs, this is where I tie everything together. So this was the situation: I had to combine studying for Masters exams with meeting the intense workload of the moot course. In the meantime, my other modules on the Diploma course were being completely ignored, because I simply had no time for them. Add to this a Michelle who missed England and Alec dreadfully, was generally miserable in Singapore battling rampaging eczema, and also worried about certain aspects of the future of her career (which we won't go into, I'm still working on those), and you pretty much have a Michelle at her lowest ebb ever.

Specifically:

3 Masters exams went fine, but one was disastrously bad, so bad that I thought it was possible I may fail it. If I did fail, I would have to resit all 4 exams next year - not something I was keen on, obviously.

As the moot course progressed I was finding it increasingly tedious and unfulfilling. Hours upon hours of research had to be condensed into 10 minutes of presentation time, which included the judge's interventions. The only legal arguments that could really be conveyed under these constraints felt extremely simplistic compared to the arguments I had always put forward in my moots in England, where we had double the amount of time. The part I always relished the most about moots - the feeling of engaging intellectually with the judge - got completely lost in the feverish race against time. As performance got more and more important, I got more and more demotivated, bored and burned-out, and it showed. As a result, I underperformed dramatically and didn't get into the team I wanted. (I did get into a different team, but for me that doesn't detract from the disappointment from not getting into the best team, unfortunately.)

What made this all so crushing is that I felt like a different person from what I was in England. It felt as if the Michelle who, in England, juggled multiple responsibilities, had a great life, and emerged at the end of it all brandishing first class honours, was lost to me. In her place was a Michelle who had no drive, no energy, no friends who gave a damn (except Alec, and Pei Ee, who never missed a clue), who couldn't get to sleep at any time before 6 am, who couldn't get her hair to look decent or the eczema sores on her legs to stop bleeding, who might fail her Masters course, and who couldn't even get into a moot team she would, frankly, have walked into if she had displayed a shred of the mooting capability she had in England.

Let me clarify now that I didn't actually blame anyone for any of this except myself. I didn't tell my friends I was unhappy. (They didn't ask either, but that's neither here nor there I guess.) I don't resent anyone for not picking me for the top team - it is generally a good call not to pick a depressed burned-out underperforming basket case to represent you in anything but the Loser's Olympics - and I wish the best for the people who did make it. The crux of my depression was that for the first time in my life, I was unable to find the inner resources necessary to succeed where I wanted to succeed. To fail because you're just not good enough is no big deal - God knows I'm used to that. To fail where you *are* good enough but just managed to engineer your own downfall is bloody depressing.

Oh, and I still had to salvage the other subjects in my Diploma course from a term of utter neglect, which wasn't much fun either. The exams finished on Friday. They didn't go great.

"Okay," you ask, "so has anything good at all come out of this mess, or is this just going to get worse, because if it is, I'm gonna go read The Onion instead."

This is the point where the somewhat disproportionate exuberance of my previous post about the LLM merit should become clearer. I'd normally reserve something like that for a distinction - and must admit I've been wondering if a distinction would have been forthcoming if I'd done my exams under less draining circumstances - but under these circumstances...THANK YOU GOD!!!

I felt the need to make this entry mainly to write it all down for myself, but also because I'd been feeling an increasing sense of disconnection between my blog entries and my real life lately. The post about my LLM results seemed almost meaningless without an explanation of its context. And I figured you guys should know, anyway. You're kinda important to me like that. :)

So. For the first time since last summer there are no exams, no dissertations, no moots, no lectures hanging over my head. I have two weeks in which to self-indulge, do Christmas shopping, do nice things for my family to show my appreciation for how wonderful they've been, and catch up with all the friends I've been too busy/unhappy to keep in touch with since returning. Then I get the 3D, Technicolor reminder of why I am blissfully in love when Alec comes visiting on the 16th.

Quite simply: I am determined that life will be good from now on.

(Oh fuck, it's nearly 6 am. One step at a time. One step at a time.)