Projekt 45 —- Part 1

[ long post, not edited for typos, coherence or logic ]

Yeah with a ‘k’ baby

So its been around 8 months since I started a new education in an old school in a new campus with new types of people (they call them “females”) and a vaguely familiar setting. As you might have guessed, I’m a hopelessly underperforming student in ACS (Indep) the 3^rd best IB school in the world.

Well I’m gonna assume you know what the IB program is, and if you don’t you shouldn’t be reading this anyway. See, as I have mentioned before I have had seven (attempted) blogs before, most with no sense of purpose other than showcasing pathetic works of my non-existent literary mind, or leet tips on how to bypass your school’s firewall, which anybody can learn how to do with a simple search on “how to bypass school firewall” and “free proxy servers”.

So now, I assume that this blog might be a bit more successful, since I now have a purpose. To chronicle my time in IB, and to improve myself so I might get our CEO’s aim (I kid you not) of 45 points for every capable student.

(Our Principal/CEO is very respectable man, who has brought ACS to these wonderful heights of awesomeness and epic superiority over other schools being the first national IB school in Singapore, and have a <39.? Avg score for the IB 2007 exam, higher than the World 30 point average, so due respect shall be accorded to him, in all honesty he deserves it, and as a student who doesn’t agree with a lot of the things the school does, our institution has come thus far mostly due to his, and his senior administrations efforts and guidance, along with relevant teachers and high-scoring students.)

Now I have just assumed that I am one of those capable students, and I’d like to believe so, even though my records from Year 3 onwards suggest the opposite. Teachers comments include “…sad case of intellect gone awry…” and among others which seem to suggest I’m much better than the position I’ve been in for the past two years (2^nd in the Year 3. From the bottom).

I’m not one to blow my own trumpet, I have absolutely no musical talent, and I’d prefer getting my trumpet blown by somebody else rather than me blowing it myself (which sucks), but, crude euphemisms aside, I’d like to think this to be true, because not once (seriously not a single time) have I opened up my physics books, 4 of which are university level awesome books in Year 3 and 4, hardly done any practice in Advanced and Core Math (I’ve rarely passed up assignments, maybe 2 or 3 out of the 40+ given every year) and have spent most of my time gaming, programming random keygens (or binding keyloggers and sending to classmates who request Chemistry Prac 2 report.doc (sometimes .exe tricks them ) and then finding out with surprise that they surf rather, hm…undesirable..no, er, crude, aw fuck it, porn sites, and telling them to their rapid denial and passive-aggressive behavior towards me for the rest of the year), making game mods, maps, hax, (and failing because they’re poorly done, and full of bugs I have no idea how to fix), writing fail pieces of fiction, and basically idling around. Yet I still managed to scrape 5 points for physics and both math subjects, scraping a pass for chemistry and close 5 for bio (which I hate with passion) and then surprisingly getting 7 for English (I was wtf-ing at that point, because it really pulled my average up to a decent level) in Year 4.

Essentially I’ve been a lazy douchebag who couldn’t be bothered to do anything productive because he just didn’t care.

End of last year, tail-end actually, things changed. But it wasn’t the sudden, smash-you-in-your-face change. It wasn’t the evolving-in-spurts Darwinian change. It wasn’t Obama-change and it wasn’t change for any amount of money. It was this weird awkwardness of being surrounded by people, who were such over-achievers, that they’d cry if they didn’t get above 40 points (with a max of 7 points for each of the six subjects and 3 bonus points for another two). It was the uncomfortable stare when you said you had gotten 30 points for Year 4 final year, when people were discussing how to make the 41 to 43 point jump. I’d have to make a pretty long jump from 30 to even fucking 36, and I’d probably only clear 34. It was a quasi-forced voluntary change. And I say that because, I semi-wanted to do well, but I was quarter-interested, and half-hearted with a third of confidence that I might even make it to 34 by next year finals (or promos as they’d call them in Junior Colleges and in our school’s Year 5).

Fundamentally, there was a flaw that caused this queasy quasi-ness in the way I conducted my academic and extra-curricular affairs in the first three months of Year 5 (2008). There was a flaw that resulted in my awkwardness in my interactions with people, minor confidence in the way I studied, and how I’d always get depressed about the way some pricks in my class were collectively being assholes in a very obvious, albeit popular way (now I have a great sense of humor, you can poke fun at me, but it better be intelligent and sharp, even if its crude, and not repetitive, stupid [hur hur] and clichéd, like your mother, I’ll cover the story of these pricks in another post). There was this flaw that made me want to get into a good college, preferably Harvard or Columbia, but not be motivated enough to do anything at all about it.

Although my theory is that it could be a lack of focus, discipline, or hard work, I still haven’t found out what it is yet. It’s late into the year, and my mid-terms were terrible (you won’t be shocked when you’ve been hovering around the same underperforming score for the past two years), and I still get depressed about the pricks in my class, with their passive-aggressive campaign of exclusion and ridicule eating away at my already insignificant reputation, and me being powerless since one guy in the douchebag-only club used to be my good friend, and their popularity for being fun, funny and smart (all high-scorers) far exceed my controversial, omg-he-didn’t-just-say-that, guy who doesn’t fit in anywhere. I still get depressed with my consistently low scores in everything, and how all motivation I have in one week fizzles away in the next after being the victim of another prick-club antic or battering by a low score, or realization that things might never get better.

I had said earlier on that I might be a capable person, and I’d believe myself to be, since I used to get excellent scores in my years before 2006, and used to be the smart kid. See, the key words here are “used to be”.

Instead of wallowing in self-pity and disgust at myself for not doing anything about something leading to nothing happening in everything, and the awkward zig-zag of ‘change’ I’ve been through this year, I’ve decided to step backwards a bit. This flaw only started this year, when I tried to be a better person, albeit a more awkward and unconfident one. I’ve tried being parsimonious on the charisma and toning down on the loud voice, being nicer to people and putting on this face. It never worked, and I have always been screwing up along the way. Sometimes genuine malice has crept into my being, and other times I’ve replaced it with an imitation product to appear strong, vengeful and dangerous, ultimately failing and destroying myself.

Things have changed as they always will continue doing, but for me, this change is just more of the same, repackaged in greater layers of fail and loser-dom.

However, I needed a better kind of change, and I realized that not gradually, not suddenly either. It was there at the back of my head, waiting with a mallet to knock me back into my senses, and I guess the people who opened that door, each holding one of three knobs are my teachers, my one close friend ( a constant critic and guy who tells me when I’m going to screw up, and me being short-sighted as ever, disregarding his cynical, truthful and wise advice) and surprising the prick-club.

One opened the knob labeled hope. As Obama as it can get, my teachers and parents have continually reminded me that there is that potential for success, that I’m too lazy to realize. The other turned the knob toward reality. This friend tells me that I have a crappy attitude and I need to work to get better. I always keep screwing up, not because I’m incapable, but because I just don’t bother thinking before doing, he calls it EQ, something that is inversely proportional to my IQ (honestly, I don’t think its that high for my EQ to be that low, or else I’d be the Rain Man). The finally the biggest knob of them all were turned by the all the pricks. They’re not bad people, not all of them. One is inherently good. Whenever I’ve screwed up its always affected them in some way, and they get pissed and wish to dissociate themselves from me (we’re of the same ethnicity, an ethnicity prone to politics).

I see my mistakes now. I see my missteps. I see why I tripped, how I fell and who I tried bringing down with me. While I still don’t see that constant linking up all of them (attributing it to attitude is atypical and never reactionary, so I won’t use something so unquantifiable, rather I’d take events where I screwed, be it academic or other, and see my behavior at that time, and see what I needed to fix it. I believe that one guy doesn’t have a constant attitude, its shaped according to the situation), I believe that’s like searching for the GUT (Grand Unification Theory), so I’ll leave it to discover itself once I’ve applied the change.

That’s the theme for 2008 anyway. Change. Hope. Belief. These things would only happen during a bad period. A self-analysis, self-realization. It might seem $5-an-hour-psychiatrist, but its real to a certain extent. This world needs new change, not old change, it needs the change that dares to deviate and explore to fix and heal the troubles, not the change that is so famously defined as being the only constant, not that change that changes year from 2008 to 2009 and people from better to worse. Things aren’t so black and white, as what the Presidential Race might assume. There’re always shades of grey, and it is inside these shades I must reside. Not one extreme of lackadaisical carelessness and apathy, and not the other extreme of only studies and mugging all day long.

So with that I start my new project. Projekt 45.

Aside from the stupid alternative spelling (I notice Amerika is a popular alternative spelling for USA for all those truthers and conspiracy theorists who believe that the States are turning fascist and Ron Paul is the only hope between “Obomba” and “McSame” [denoting the similarity between a McCain presidency and a third term of Bush]; ad hominem at its finest) where I believe adding ‘k’ to any word in a title’s ‘c-containing noun’ word turns it radical and manifesto-like with Soviet-era sharp reds and black and intense secretive must-work-or-will-destroy-all-hope kinda thing, this is my chronicle of my mission to change, (remember, we’re talking about change change, not change as a constant change change) myself, my attitude, my academics while still retaining my core self (which I do not know) and eliminating that nagging flaw in myself.

Details on the Projekt 45 next post, until then thank you for reading this long post (if tl;dr then gtfo) and note that some parts have been fictionalized for, er, dramatic dramatism.

Once again, thanks, and drop a comment if you’d like.

Regards,

the ever enigmatic,

Roucateur

(yes I misspell it sometimes)