Fare-Fucking-Well

My exam results arrived a few days ago, and I can at last confirm that my wasted year is finally, gloriously over. No more lectures which substitute Powerpoint presentations for actual imparting of ideas, no more constant cringing at people speaking in accents which are part-English, part-American, part-Singaporean and COMPLETELY annoying, and generally no longer having to be in a university I do not give a damn about and never will.

There were always many reasons why doing my law degree in London was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, but until this year, those reasons were never academic. I didn’t choose UCL because I thought it would give me a superior legal education to NUS, but I spent most of this DipSing year thanking my lucky stars for that choice. So goodbye, NUS. May we never meet again.

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.
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Not A Failure! Not A Failure!

I have been awarded the LLM (Masters in Law) with merit.

THANK YOU GOD!!!

And as if this good news isn’t enough, I have finally found the rare collaboration EP by Low & Spring Heel Jack on Soulseek and am downloading it this minute! Joy! Joy! Joy!

Thanks For The Memories

I guess there’s just no pleasing some people.

For weeks I griped and complained about the fact that my boxes hadn’t arrived from England yet. And now they’re here, I wish they weren’t.

I never thought I would be quoting lyrics from The Tennessee Waltz in this blog, but while I was unpacking, one particular line kept playing in my head, louder and more insistently than the Fugazi on the speakers. Going flagrantly against the optimistic conclusion I forced myself to draw here in a previous entry, that line was: “Now I know just how much I have lost.”

I always intended, apart from living a proper goodbye to London (which I think I did), to sit down and write something about it, but in the pressures surrounding my departure I never got time to. Call it solipsism or exhibitionism if you will, but somehow it feels inadequate just sitting here alone with my memories, I want to tell everybody about what this city, these people, this time, meant to me.

Typical Michellian Disclaimer: What follows may not mean a great deal to people who either don’t know me or don’t know London, but if you’ve ever been madly in love with any other city, that’s all you’ll need to understand. And of course I don’t think London or England are perfect, and of course there are serious problems with them which I was just lucky enough to never really encounter personally, and of course there are things I like and respect about Singapore. It’s just that on balance I swing West rather than East. My attempts at translating jumbled ecstatic memories into dry electronic scribblings may therefore give but a rippled reflection of reality, either through my inadequacies with prose or my tendency towards sentimentality, but here is my goodbye. I pray it wasn’t a farewell.
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Where In The World Is SuperMichelle, Singapore?

It occurred to me that for those who don’t know me personally and are wondering what’s going on and why I seem so damn depressed all the time these days, I should probably give a more precise explanation of what I’m doing now than the vague references I’ve been making.

I am doing a Graduate Diploma in Singapore Law at the National University of Singapore. It’s a conversion course for people who studied law in England. I’m also studying for exams for the Masters course I was on this past academic year. As can be expected, the overlap between the two courses is somewhat stressful right now.

I feel incredibly tired today. I walked through NUS (National University of Singapore) feeling like a complete alien. Attended the first class for one of my diploma courses, gave a stunningly mediocre performance in a presentation I was required to do, left feeling awkward and self-conscious for the first time in years.

On the way home in the bus there was a TV show (yes, we have TVs in buses) about Singaporean university students at home and abroad. One was a medical student in UCL. I watched as she showed the camera crew around the main quadrangle, through the cloisters, in the library, outside the Union, past so much that was familiar and beloved to me. My insides were churning with envy. I’m not used to having to deal with re-adjustment blues. I lived four years in London without a single pang of homesickness. Now I’m “home” the homesickness is killing me.

I’m sorry about all this whining – it isn’t what you come here to read, and it isn’t what I put up this site to write. I know I should and can get over this. SuperMichelle can pass the Masters exams. SuperMichelle can combine the Masters exams with the diploma course. SuperMichelle can redeem herself from today’s lousy performance in the moot course and make it into one of the international moot teams. SuperMichelle will balance keeping in touch with the people she loves in England (and Ireland), with catching up with the people she loves here, with making new friends in the new course. SuperMichelle will ignore the fact that in Singapore she looks and feels ten times worse than she does in England, because of how the humidity screws up her eyes, hair and skin. SuperMichelle will triumph.

I just have to bloody find where she’s hiding.

Relocation

I can only give the following explanations and ask you, gentle reader, to forgive me.

I’ve spent the last week saying goodbye. Goodbye to Nick on Sunday, goodbye to John on Monday, to Ireland from Tuesday till today for a few snatched days with Alec, goodbye to other assorted dear friends and Fabric tonight, and Saturday and Sunday are the hardest goodbye of all, because everything I did in the past week finally hits, and I have to get to grips with the realities of packing, going to the airport, and leaving.

When I get back to Singapore on Monday, I’m going to have to study for exams starting on the 13th, combine this with another academic course that starts on the 11th, and try to stop missing London and everyone there.

I will try to blog, really I will. I love it, and feel something’s missing from my inner life when I don’t. But if real life gets in the way over the next month or so, updates may be sparse. Ineffable will also be moving to a new address soon, when my university computer account is terminated. I don’t know what that will be, or if it will even continue under the same name, but it will continue. Please bookmark temporarineffable to check if this one suddenly disappears, and when life is less ridiculously hectic I promise lots of messiness will be sorted out.

I’ll see you on the other side.

2003

Happy new year, everyone. The mayfly project asks people to sum up their year in 20 words. This is my entry:

First class honours degree, church music, debating, a life – juggled successfully. Some disappointments, many blessings. Treasure old friends. Love Alec.

* * *

2003 will be challenging. I have to return to Singapore (reluctantly), and deal with missing everything and everyone that London has been to me since 1999. (Warning: when it happens, there will be soppiness.) I have to find some way to convince myself that I can live and work there happily for the next 6 years, despite heat and humidity that renders me red-eyed, sneezy and itchy, societal and political culture which irritates me on many levels, and an arts and entertainment scene which will obviously fall far short of what London has to offer.

[Note: I haven’t become one of those people that returns to Singapore from a life overseas and can say nothing good about it. There is a lot I like about Singapore. The problem is that there is a lot I love about London.]

It won’t be easy, and given that I have led a charmed life with little or no contact with adversity or discouragements of any real significance, I’m frankly not confident I’ll manage this particularly well. I suppose the best attitude to adopt will be to seek solace in the things I love in Singapore – great food, green city, old friends, family life – and carpe the fucking diem for what remains of my life here.

Debating Nostalgia

On Saturday I felt old and retrospectively stupid.

The semi-final debates were on the motion This House Believes That The IMF and World Bank Have Done More Harm Than Good. If I had had to take this on, when I was 17, with an hour to prepare, I would have curled up in a fetal position in the corner and cried for my mother. The teams I judged took it on bravely and far more competently than I would have done 5 years ago, and while I was able, in judge mode, to make many criticisms of their efforts, that really doesn’t detract from the fact that they’d have kicked my 17-year-old ass to Washington (is that where the IMF and WB headquarters are?) and back.

The seven-generational Raffles Debaters party (affectionately christened the Gangbang by Jolene) afterwards had the magnificent cacophony you would expect from an event where you put a lot of debaters in a room but don’t actually have rules of debating in place to control all of them. Party games included obscene charades where people had to act out stuff like Octopussy and Dr Strangelove (the guy doing this mimed wanking a very big dick, and someone guessed it just from that. Go figure), Polar Bear (too complicated to explain, but I am told all the young people play it these days) and Dance Dance Revolution.

As I said, old and retrospectively stupid. But in a good way.

Katong Convent Nostalgia

Another of those Real Life weekends, I’m afraid. I really must get my priorities in order.

The Katong Convent (my primary and secondary school) class reunion on Friday wasn’t as manic as others have been. Being unable to attend due to her being in Afghanistan volunteering, our form teacher was unable to offend the family at the next table by loudly recounting stories about her lesbian friends. Since Shoop wasn’t meeting her boyfriend afterwards, the class didn’t have the chance to charge headlong after her and hammer on the windows of the taxi demanding to meet him while she tried to explain, within, that she didn’t actually know any of these mad girls at all.

Debating and my other various pretensions draw me back to Rafflesian soil more often than to KC, but all the sappy reminiscing in the world would still be inadequate to convey what KC was, and still is to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about choices, and evaluating most of those I’ve made with the benefit of hindsight, I continue to be amazed at how few I regret, even the ones that were fairly risky at the time. I am glad I chose not to go into the Gifted stream (this would have meant leaving KC) or to a school higher up on the rankings. Both those forks in the road continued to generate their fair share of angst years after they’d been taken but these days I’ve been thinking Robert Frost was right.

One More Year

I went to Germany feeling extraordinarily low; protracted showers and sleeps over a too-brief weekend hadn’t been enough to combat the accumulated dust and disorientation of moving out of my comfort zone of 2 years, and remaining rebel elements in my lungs were still mounting the occasional tubercolotic (that’s probably not even a word, but you know what I’m getting at) revolution. I felt residually gritty and somehow off-kilter, like a bad photocopy of myself.

I returned from Germany yesterday and it feels like everything has changed. I had a pretty damn fabulous holiday with my pretty damn fabulous best friend, which will hopefully be written about soonish. I found out two wonderful pieces of news – one, that I got first class honours in my degree, two, that my scholarship organization will let me take advantage of this by sponsoring me for a Masters (which means another year before they have to pull me kicking and screaming from London back to Singapore).

For the first time in a while there is certainty, and optimism that can finally be more than just cautious. It’s sunny today. I’m feeling good in my skin.