Bite Me Awake

So, the semester's officially ended. I know it ended more than a week ago; I do apologise for tardiness, and I know it's been 16 days since the last update. But for whatever reason, the NTU network decided to block Blogger, or at least make it so difficult to access that the browsers simply gave up on trying to load it; and today's the latest that I thought to check and then I decided to write a post. And it'll be a nice long one, too, since it's got 16 days to cover--that's the entire last two weeks plus a bit, which means the last of everything... the last lecture, the beginning of exams and the end of them, and how I am now... and of course I'll be detailing them all in obsessively overabundance of detail. After all, I've got plenty of time to type up the post.

So we begin... let's see, April the 27th was the day of the final lecture--I'm not sure how that managed to not be mentioned in the last post--but at any rate I attended it, partly because the lecturer had promised revision tips for the final exams and partly because, hey, last lecture ever, might as well show up, right? As it turned out it was a massive disappointment; the lecturer spent most of the time saying essentially "everything in the notes is important" and then concluded by "if you've skipped any of the lectures then too bad for you, you've missed out, nyah nyah nyah". I fell asleep partway through the lecture and only woke up when he started nyahing, which made my last attended lecture in the University very much like a lot of my other attended lectures, which was a bit of a pity. You'd think such events would be marked by something a little more memorable, like fireworks or sparklers or little elves falling out the ceiling with pots of gold.

Shortly after that the exam revisions began, with decidedly less fervor than for the previous 6 semesters' exams; partly because I'm used to having 5 or 6 papers to study for and so having only--"only"!--three papers to sit for seemed the height of luxury, and partly because some calculations told me that short of straight E's or fails, my graduating class wasn't going to be vastly changed, for the better or the worse, and at any rate I had other things on my mind, like job-hunting and sitting around playing board games. The way the exam schedule was, I had a bit more than a week in between the last lecture and the first exam, which gave me some breathing room to go around doing random stuff, like staying up all night with friends playing games. It was remarkably fun, and I'll miss those times--I don't think those will quite be possible once work starts, except under remarkable circumstances. At the very least I'm going to have to be able to bunk in with somebody in the hostel, or manage to get back to my place of residence while severely sleep-deprived. But the exams then came, and were dealt with as they came; quite a few days passed with four-hour sleeps and then naps to pay off the sleep debt, and some with far more sleep than really needed.

I should add that some time in between the last lecture and the first exams, I came down with a truly horrendous sore throat; in fact the first I knew of it was the day I came down with a bad fever and couldn't study at all for the cottonwool in my head where my brain usually was, and so I took that day off to sleep, assuming it was nothing more than sleep debt. That was, I think, Wednesday the 4th of May... by Friday I was incapacitated with the inability to swallow, and by Saturday I was waking up every three hours or so with a completely closed throat, where swallowing anything--even saliva--left me with a pounding pain in the throat. Googling revealed upwards of a hundred possible causes, and so instead I turned to Facebook for help. As it turned out that Saturday was the day of Singapore's General Election and all the stores were closed, so I spent the day medicating myself on warm green tea, which was the best I could do; the next day I skipped church but not the House of Bread, and was thoroughly fussed over (That was the first time Munchausen's crossed my mind as actually pretty understandable.) what with hot tea with lemon in it and various other things... on Sunday night I got loquat syrup, and by Monday I was equipped with honey and salt (and WikiHow taught me how to gargle, I kid you not) and even though I was still waking up with a closed and painful throat, I at least had ways to deal with it and get back to sleep. The most educational thing in the experience was when I talked to the aunties of the little 'mart, who conferred with each other when I asked them if I was holding ginger (for making tea with), and then yielded the judgment that ginger was entirely the wrong thing to cure a sore throat with--something about being too heaty when what I wanted was something cooling--and then I was introduced to Snake's-Tongue-Grass Tea and salted yellow watermelon slices as cures. The former was horribly bitter, which raises the question of how such things come to be sold at all, and the latter was actually quite delicious; I overdid the salt once, though, and it turned out both crunchy and horrible to the taste, though no less efficacious. At any rate the sore throat eventually gave way to a cough, though a phlegmless one; and that gave way to more-or-less health, and all this over the course of a bit more than a week.

At any rate I was well before the final exam, which raised no end of ire in myself and various other coursemates; the module in question is called Engineers and Society, has little to nothing to do with engineering or society at all, and was coincidentally also the last lecture attended. It was taught, I believe, by some outside company hired by the University, and was horrendously boring, as the lecturer tended to segue into old anecdotes that took the better of two hours to relate, and somehow managed to use the same three or four anecdotes--told in the exact same amount of detail every time--for everything. Which made the lecture notes no fun at all to read; I compressed the lot into 17 pages' of .pdf, which I usually do for every module before the exams--read the notes, rewrite them into a format I can understand (which usually does nothing more than underscore how little I actually understand), and then pore over my summary--so that's what I did again. 17 pages' of .pdf, and the man loved his lists, so it was a constant process of reading "...and the fifteen causes of amorality, 1. Lack of moral fibre, 2. Depression, 3. Incredible lack of moral fibre..." over and over until they were quite memorised. And then came the exam and I found I'd forgotten most of them, so left the examination hall rather full of rage and irritation and a sort of despondency.

That day I had pork-rib noodles and a long session of board-gaming that lasted until about 4am the next day; then I did some packing, wrote a letter to the roommate that he ought to have read by now, and then set out for the grandfolks'...

...where, four days later, I still am. I arrived entirely without warning, not even the usual five-minute-before-arrival phone call (it usually goes "hullo, I'm at the front gate now..."), and arrived coincidentally as my grandfather got back from the farm, thus had no need to wait for anybody to open the door for me. The days so far have been full of food and second helpings and sitting around and mosquitoes and talking in Mandarin. And of course there's been a lot of talking about what my plans now are; everybody, even the hairdresser, is unanimous in agreement that I oughtn't to work in Malaysia, so that's that for that. And for some reason my imminent graduation has been taken as good proof of my having become Grown Up (even if they still agree I'm just a giant baby boy when at home) and so now I get to listen in on the worries about the cousins' study habits (i.e. that they're practically nonexistent because of computer gaming, which makes it rather a pot-and-kettle situation) or about my grandfather's health and so on. It's been good times so far though, even if I keep unaccountably waking up before sunrise because of a combination of heat and mosquitoes; even with the mosquito netting up I still wake up bitten all over for whatever reason, and of course the mosquito netting means that the fan doesn't quite penetrate into my airspace very well.

In two days' time I go back to Singapore; in three days it'll be the FYP presentation; and then in four I'll be preparing to go to Australia for the graduation trip. And I'm still jobless.

*curls up in fetal position whimpering*