Friday i attended the Nanyang Polytechnic Open House. suffice it to say that i wasted my time, and that it's full of unsavoury characters.
Saturday i went to the NUS Challenge Shield debates. it wasn't bad, actually. both matt and xuan were representing their own JCs there, but xuan said he wouldn't be speaking at all. and ACJC had this huge, intimidating posse, so i tagged along with matt's team and found myself to be the only one on NJC's side. matt didn't speak the first two rounds. at the first round there were two men and three judges plus the timekeeper, so i felt less out of place. however on the second round i discovered that SRJC's uniform is almost identical to what i was wearing, save for a bit of colour and texture [my pants were corduroy, their shirts were of the shiny polyester material that all uniforms seem to be made of].
you can probably imagine what the final, NJC-vs-ACJC match felt like. the motion was that This House [it took me until we were three speakers into the first debate to realize that THBT stands for This House Believes That] Would Set The Internet Free.
i did not expect them to choose that motion [NJC was prop]. i expected them to choose the one about religon and politics not mixing. or even the first of three motions [which i can no longer remember] offered. anything that mixes with the Internet will be messy. that rings even more true when it involes privacy/human rights/censorship issues.
i can't really tell, but my money would have been on the fact that no-one on either side was a techie. it would have helped, greatly.
i read Prozac Nation outside the rooms in between debates. it felt odd reading it whilst the people inside the classroom wrestled with issues like overpolluting MNCs and ... i suddenly cannot remember what the motion for the second round was.
alex from the NJC debating team is nasty. he does the god-cop-bad-cop thing that was so reminiscent of my father i wanted to strangle him. i would print his surname but i can't remember it. he lacks leadership qualities. matt and the other girl who also spoke for the first time in the last round seemed really down afterwards. if i were her i wouldn't've offered alex that ride to the train station. chances are he spent the trip to the station giving her more 'pointers'. alex isn't even a/his real name [in my book a name you give yourself is not one].
i thought they did well considering the circumstances. i was going to say so, but i first decided to hold until i found out the results, and then after the results were announced i thought it would sound bad, if matt thought i was saying it because i had to. and after we met up with xuan the moment passed.
i overanalyse and overthink too much [the 'too much' is not redundant, it's reinforcing].
plus i worry quite a bit too. at xuan's i told everyone that i decided not to drink because i hadn't slept quite a bit--drinking would smash everything. their drinking-goggles game was impossible to follow even with me sitting at the side watching, i don't think i would have lasted much acutally playing it. that was true, but additionally there was the issue of becoming drunk. i have yet to explore the limits of my liver and hence do not know how much i can take on before i become pissed and shitfaced. so i let the others do the drinking.
you know that Robbie Williams video [Come Undone, i think--odd name] where he wakes up in the morning and walks through the house, looking at all the passed-out people lying in heaps on the floor in the house and remembering the night before?
that was more or less what i felt whilst sitting in the dark in the room where all the passed-out people were [and also while the actual drunken-running-around was going on]. i went up there after alvin chow and matt were put to bed. then came leowjun. then cedric [a bit of a surprise there. ced doth not seem like the sort to get pissed] and just sat there, got alvin tissues, reset matt's arm twice before giving up, did't remember that i had already tried to do that when xuan came in and tried resetting it as well, brought the bottle of bacardi and pat's flask up from the middle of the living room floor where it lay, talked to pat for quite a bit, wacthed leowjun in his half-drunken-stupor amazingly managing to answer incessant incoming messages on his Nokia, saw ken get alvin a towel, etc.
it wasn't much at all, but it satisfied the worry bit in me, probably enough for me to sleep [dax said he saw me asleep in the chair, but i don't remember sleeping]. see, this is the kind of kid that parents like mine bring up. my father used to come home drunk and just sit at the doorstep, and no one would know he's back until we heard him or happened to open the door. he would be asking ask endless questions related to his current location, his identity, our identities, and what he was doing here. we just put him to bed and the next morning--no recollection for our troubles. it's sick. my parents are still teenagers, and i'm ready to settle down into a Saab, a flat, a 9-to-5 job, and live the rest of my life out quietly [am i the oldest seventeen-year-old in the world?].
the rest of the night i spectated, helped a bit with clearing cups, took too few pictures, sung along quietly to 99 Red Balloons, etc etc.
it was fun, though from the second-person view it probably shouldn't have been. i'm always living through other people anyway. creeps me out sometimes, when i think about it.
"I'm living without you
I know all about you
I have run you down into the ground
Spread disease about you over town
I used to adore you
I couldn't control you
There was nothing that I wouldn't do
To keep myself around and close to you
Do you have an opinion?
A mind of your own?
I thought you were special
I thought you should know
But I've run out of patience
I couldn't care less"
- "Special", Garbage
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