WRYYYYYYYY

...it's a ridiculous 25 days since I last posted. How extremely remiss of me; and unfortunately I can't remember everything--I could check my Google Calendar, of course, but I'm far too lazy to do that--that's happened over that time period. (In passing, I wonder how long Google will store those Calendar entries. Would it be possible to, at some unknown future time, riffle through one's own archives and go "oh, wow, ten years ago on this day I had my very first exam in NTU ever!"?)

Twenty-five days; sometime in this period, a lot of people from the House of Bread have gone off back to behind the Great Firewall. Most of them I didn't mind because it was explicitly a temporary absence--most of them are students--all bar one, actually--so they're sure to be back by the time the school term starts up again. On the other hand, the one who went back on Tuesday has just graduated, and has got a job that'll apparently eventually send him off to Wollongong, which I don't like, because I don't like the idea of partings. I'm not sure why; in anybody else I'd call it pathological clinginess. I never do like the idea of anybody going away with no possibility of returning, and when I do it--well, I never do it. At least not explicitly; one of my stock phrases when people ask about my long-term plans is "well, life is long, who knows?" because in my ideal world, there would always be the possibility of reunion. (One of the reasons I like the last episode of The Law of Ueki so much.) And of course there's heaven, but it's so difficult to imagine it.

At any rate, the more pressing issue is exams, which are upon me--in fact they're more than halfway behind me now. Though I must say, it's oddly... jarring. These days I seem to be giving much less a whit about exams than I used to; I've watched the entirety (all three seasons!) of Avatar: The Last Airbender between the first exam and last night, while alt-tabbing between the Media Player Classic window and the TVTropes page--and we all know what a time sink TVTropes can be--while also playing The Sims 3, which is in itself a very accomplished time sink because I'm ridiculously kindhearted and keep on helping the Sims accomplish goals and things. The one instance I had of a family actually running itself into the ground, I aborted the game and started over. So yeah, I'm not as much of an amoral gleeful maniac as I sometimes think I am. That's probably a good thing.

But I digress, as I often do... the exams aren't frightening in themselves. It's what comes after--the whole issue of finding a place to live, a job to do--it'll all be completely new to me and I know I'm borrowing trouble by worrying about it, but everybody else is worrying too! And even before that there'll be the rest of the final-year project to complete and nobody seems to ever have breezed through that--they have tips on how to get through it more easily, but not on how to get through it easily: a subtle but terribly important distinction there. I still don't know what I want to do after graduation--work, yes, settle down somewhere, yes. I just don't know the details, and that's what niggles: where, what, when, how, why? and the why of it is the most unanswerable. There's that old story, isn't there, where some rich magnate happens across some bum lazing in the sun and tells him to work hard and be an entrepreneur and establish his own business empire and all so he'll have the leisure time to laze in the sun, and then the bum shrugs and goes "that's what I'm already doing"? It's the "be all you can be" argument rushing headlong against the "do just enough" argument, and both have their merits. And of course--my parents would be aghast--my inclination is to the "do just enough". One of my friends has landed a position that'll earn him easily 10k a month in a little less than two years after graduation; my inclination is to some medium-income, medium-rank position where I'll make just enough to be comfortable. And after all I am easily made comfortable, I think; but then simply settling for comfortable goes against the entire Protestant work ethic plus the entire history of Chinese rice farmers (I recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and ye gads, how much stranger life is than what I thought).

My method of doing the exams is also, perhaps, questionable. It's probably habit, but... maybe I ought to slow down? It's one of those things I notice about myself every time I do a paper, but forget about later on and do again. Hopefully finally getting it down will have some effect on it--unless I've previously already written about it and forgotten it, which is probably entirely possible. I don't read my own blogs that often, after all. But my method of doing papers is to write everything I can down, as quickly as possible, and to get as complete an answer down for every question as possible on the first runthrough--which, for engineering papers, takes maybe an hour, one and a half at most. The rest of the time is spent second-guessing my answers to worry about whether I wrote correctly or the handwriting is legible and not too squiggly (my handwriting is squiggly whether in cursive, exam-writing, or note-writing--someday I shall photograph my writing and put it up) or the calculations are correct. And then I look around and everybody is industriously covering pages and pages with their answers and then I have a little moment of panic because obviously I have underestimated the question somehow--my answer must be off-topic, or I haven't answered fully, or there was some implication or inference that I've missed. It's always an attack of the nerves and it's always absolutely exhausting.

Which may be why, after the paper yesterday, I slept at 7pm--and subsequently woke at 11pm and couldn't get back to sleep 'til 3.30am. And woke today at 8am. Bleh.