You colour my life.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

hmm.
(imma write in caps so it seems slightly more professional.)

Haha I know I've talked about this countless times before, near spent an entire school year composing poems about it last year when I wasn't trying to counter the problem itself, but the fact remains that the problem still exists and it's p*ss*ng my *ss *ff. (Woohoo if only it could! Then I wouldn't be desperately doing laps in the swimming pool every week in a futile effort to level down my two glutinous maximus-es. T_T) And if I already ain't being obvious enough, 'tis the workload of the Suffering Singapore School Student I'm talking about here. I'm writing now with the intent of some professional taking a professional break from his profession and unprofessionally browsing through blogs and coming across this (hopefully! :D) professional-looking complaint against the extremely professional professionals up there who profess to be professionals at education but in reality are naught but professional killers. ^^

How goes this? Well, it's all a really elaborate flim-flam. I mean, their means of torturing us is really so delicate and subtle that one really doesn't realise one is being tortured till one is quite, quite dead. It's something in the way of making one so busy in trying to keep one's head above the water that one doesn't realise one is already drowning anyway. T_T How devious. How very, very cunning.

I wonder how the Singapore government feels about everything? About how Singapore ranks 131st out of around 180 or so countries in terms of happiness? About how there's a constant leak of what little talent Singapore has and needs through mass immigration? -by the way, doesn't that already seem like a kind of exodus to you? Kinda like the Israelites right. Fleeing from a place where slavedrivers (the monarchy, you know what I'm talking about) whip at the Israelites (we the poor oppressed citizens of Singapore) across a sea (that could mean anywhere) to a place flowing with milk and honey (doesn't really narrow down the list of countries who fit the criteria either; just that Singapore's definitely not on the list, cuz we're renowned for not having anything in the way of natural resources).

I read about how teenagers these days are all supposed to be weak and frail and unable to do housework and unable to hold up to wind or rain and basically unable to do anything other than spend money, eat money, wipe their asses with money etc. And I get really, really really really peeved. I mean, yeah I got over this bout of peevishness a long time ago for the sake of not foolishly disagreeing with everything that the Chinese exam papers throw at us (newspapers have often reported that teenagers now are rather like strawberries [?!] - pretty, but weak - what are your views?), but that doesn't mean I do agree with what the papers say. Heck the papers man. Take a peek into the living hell we teenagers, whom, I deign to remind you at this point, hold the purse strings of your future CPF savings and are going to decide whether you get your upgraded lifts or not - and see what we really go through.

1) Pressure to do well, do VERY well indeed, for our O and A levels and even just PSLE. Probably because Singapore doesn't have enough land space to build more universities, it isn't enough to snag a couple of As for our As, to get into any university at all. So we tread the water like mad, our arms and legs whirring like clockwork through the turbulent water, just to take one gasp at the end of Os, after which we plunge back into the murky depths in JC and and resurface to fill our lungs with life-giving air again, and this cycle just continues until - we think! the end of our education. Oooooh, but haven't you heard? LIFELONG LEARNING is all the rage now! So that means our education continues past our prime, past our menopausal stage and carries us all the way past our golden ages and back down... into the grave. What ho! And there's one Singaporean life, just one more sacrifice for the good of our Great and Glorious Empire.

And do we hold up to the pressure? Oh boy, do we. Day after day we ask ourselves, what's the point of carrying on? Well, at this point, another wave sweeps us back down and we're reduced to struggling for survival again, or we pacify ourselves with the smaller joys of life - chocolate, ben and jerrys, or - for the more sophisticated ones ^^ - looking at pictures of Lee Joon Ki and, for others, a certain Jae Joong. And they tell us that we don't know how to be happy? I'm telling you, Singaporeans are the best at understanding what it is to be happy. Scrap a high-ranking job with a high salary and yearly bonus. Scrap the swanky new Mercedes you're going to drive to your disgustingly opulent office everyday. Scrap the 10-course dinner you plan to eat every night of your future prosperous life. I'll tell you what happiness is. Happpiness is getting a smile from a stranger. It's sharing a joke with your friends. It's rejoicing over the fact that the canteen stall has restocked its sausage buns (nothing dirty here). We don't (okay sometimes we do, but mostly we don't) get upset that we didn't get A1 for a subject. Rather we pop the champagne when we don't fail. Happiness is having one day, just one, in which we don't have homework to do. Happiness is looking forward to eating nasi padang during recess. Happiness can even be found in knowing that you've got about ten other people battling the z-monster the night before a major exam, fighting the same fight as you are, laughing over everyone's morbid plight together. Happiness is everywhere, and most of all it's on top of the education system.

And we've perfected this to an art-form. Because we know we're never going to get out of this vicious cycle of Lifelong Learning till we die. So we pull up our socks, tighten our belts, and sacrifice our sleep, our meals, our body to Contribute Towards Society.

2) Say that we don't know how to do housework? Oh puh-leez, newspapers. Every one of us who can stand up, see lightning, hear thunder, and run away screaming and flailing our arms can do housework. It's all a matter of determination. How much skill does it take to pick up a broom and move it in a rhythmic motion to get the dust all over our neighbours' doormat? Now the thing that really gets me here is that, although we teenagers are part superhuman and we can not eat and not sleep and not bathe and still call ourselves a civilised human while we slog away at our homework in the dead of the night, we're still part human and I wish somebody'd remember that. For heaven's sake, ask yourselves this question! Do you want us to A) contribute towards society or b) do housework? What the bloody hell is your problem man? You can't have everything in life. That's why so many of you are unhappy. Learn to be happy with just A or B! Didn't your teachers ever teach you that when you shade your OAS, you can only shade ONE lozenge? Otherwise, if you shade two, you'll get the WHOLE QUESTION WRONG. Now that's exactly where you're going. Choose one, kids, and leave the gobstoppers alone!

And from the fact that we just don't happen to think housework is a very high priority in our lives, you go on to conclude that we a) can't be independent b) are self-centred c) take things for granted etc, etc, etc... There's a whole long list of four-worded Chinese idioms just to describe how bad and decadent teenagers these days are. Personally I disagree with every single one of them. Singaporean teenagers do NOT grow up to be teenagers with characters or personalities like that. It's a human-eat-human world out there, and boy do we know that. As a Singaporean teenager, you fight the war on many fronts. You deal with misunderstanding parents. You deal with teachers who think their subject is the most important among all the subjects you take. You deal with CCA teachers who think that CCA is the most important thing among all your other school commitments. You deal with teachers who think that the school projects they're heading are more important than everything else! You deal with bubble tea shop keepers who have a bad command of the English language and mistake your vanilla order for a banana order. You deal with police officers coming to your school to conduct talks about how you should please not get into crimes during the holidays and make things difficult for them when obviously we don't have ANYTHING, anything at all in the way of holidays. Holidays are an illusion. (But we'll get back to that later.) And of course, you have to deal with other teenagers who are sharing the same breathing space as you and one day you're going to have to clamber all over or end up as a stepping stone to that other person's success. And obviously the people-relationship thing is just ONE part of it. Did I mention that everyday, everynight, everytwilight, we slog away at our workloads, hacking away at an unassailable granite surface? Did I mention that we, as teenagers, especially those 15 years and older, have conquered all these to come thus far? Do you really think that we, especially this generation, who are the transition between the modern and the traditional, could possibly have clawed our way to this point in our lives without having some kind of skill? Some kind of survival instinct? Some kind of independence? Some kind of perseverance? Determination? Everything you say that we don't have.

Bite your tongue!

3) On top of all this, which heaven knows is already more than enough, we also have to deal with people saying that we can't deal with all these, which happens to be the main target I'm aiming this barrage at. Mmmhmm, we'll dissolve at the slightest hint of a light summer's breeze. Totally man. I worry for this country's future if you all really think that, since the society makes the man, doesn't it? Just one nice thing you could do for us, perhaps, is to FINALLY get down to making those stickers in the public buses which tell us to please give up these seats to those who need them. As in, those who really need them. Just add in a picture of a student with a heavy, bulging bag, arms nerdily overflowing with books and files, and you'll do fine.

man tha felt really good. well it's 4 am and imma go bed now.
SLEEP TIGHT ALL YE TEENAGERS OF THE WORLD!
and those teenagers at heart. :D

ILYALL;
the Darkening Dawn.

You coloured my life @
2:59 AM
[c]d4rkang3l