Reading back, I’ve noticed an embarrassing number of typos and grammatical errors in my previous posts. I’m too lazy to fix them anyway, so, fuck it.

Recently I’ve read:

Simplexity by Jefferey Kluger

Liberty or Death by Patrick French

Chaos: Making a new Science by James Gleick

In Search of Superstrings by John Gribbin

The Riemann Hypothesis by Karl Sabbach

and I’ve just bought Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.

So, I’ll try fix in a small review of these books sometime soon.

Sorry to my non-existent readers for being away for so long. IB sucks you in.

basically, you have wasted one hour replying to my comment. You might be from ACS fucking independent but you will never be able to have my level of cunning. Fags like you must be put on the streets and raped by trannies in the middle of the road. You don’t know shit about me in real life , so you can’t judge my intelligence , while I can, by just reading your post full of faggotry. It does not concern you if a faggot is taking a pic of himself in a club and uploading it on facebook. Write something which the world cares about next time, not your club propaganda. I don’t defend clubs , and I don’t put cool sounding names like Roucateur as my sign off either. Don’t you have a name ? Yeah and i sure can go into a club and call other people faggots cuz i ain’t scared.

And a few minutes later, as an afterthought:

I think you should have put in more work into your IB extended essay than writing this shit down , at least you can become a faggot doctor/engineer/lawyer and study in IIT like all other typical indians

Oh glee, you came back!
“basically, you have wasted one hour replying to my comment.”
Not really, I really enjoyed exposing your stupidity.

“You might be from ACS fucking independent but you will never be able to have my level of cunning.”
A little bit jealous are we? I don’t think it matters whether I’m from “ACS fucking independent”, and if you use that as a yardstick to measure my intelligence, I’m sorry sir, but I have friends in Poly whom I consider to be more creative and intelligent than I am, I don’t take a person affiliation with a certain institution to approximate their intelligence. If you stopped being so judgmental about a person’s school as a measure of their intelligence, perhaps you could actually understand that not all kids from ACS or RI are automatically intelligent, and therefore, in your book, automatically faggots. So this cunning you speak of, would it be your multiple creative uses of faggot in your comments, or the fantastic suggestion that trannies should rape students in the middle of the road?

“You don’t know shit about me in real life , so you can’t judge my intelligence , while I can, by just reading your post full of faggotry.”
I goes both ways Mr. Double Standards. If you can interpret my faggotry (become kind of a catch-all term now doesn’t it?) from my posts, then I’m on equal standing to judge your comments as those being written by a spiteful, ignorant, and cowardly person. It’d be safe to assume we knew each other at some point, you were probably one of those guys from drama last year in ACS, Express. I could deduce that from your extensive use of faggot, but I’m not going speculate any further.

“It does not concern you if a faggot is taking a pic of himself in a club and uploading it on facebook. “
Yup, that it is one thing you’ve said that is right. It doesn’t concern me. Similarly, the “phonies” shouldn’t be concerning Holden Caulfield, neither should social commentary be a valid form of expression. Using your same logic, we shouldn’t be concerned the least bit if some guys is doing something. I don’t believe in that. You might be right, its none of my business, but he uploaded those pictures onto a public domain, and I felt the need to try and write something funny about underage kids’ obsession with clubs. In your eyes, I might not have succeeded on the ‘funny’ part, but hey, I’m trying.

“Write something which the world cares about next time, not your club propaganda.”
Point noted. Although I’m under no obligation to write about important issues, I understand that it might be better. Okay. I can accept that. I have had some issues I’ve been meaning to write here, but, I wasn’t confident I could articulate it well enough. So I figured I’d practice on keeping my focus on the subject matter, and write something light and humorous to develop my style. I’ve said before, and I will say it again, I seriously have nothing against clubs. Seriously.

“I don’t defend clubs , and I don’t put cool sounding names like Roucateur as my sign off either.”
You really have a problem with things that sound cool don’t you. Well then, please your self with generic tough sounding cliche nicks like “Death”. I’m sure that it reflects the amount of originality and cunning you have as an individual.

“Don’t you have a name ?”
Yes, and I’m sure you chanced upon this through either my Facebook or MSN account, so I’m sure you know who I am. Vishnu is my name, and I don’t feel it necessary to use my real name in a blog.

“Yeah and i sure can go into a club and call other people faggots cuz i ain’t scared.”
Good luck with bouncers on that

“I think you should have put in more work into your IB extended essay than writing this shit down… “
Yeah, I’m going to the library soon to get some material for preliminary research. I haven’t started yet, but thank you for the advice. Time management is a skill I have yet to master, but if you noticed the dates, I hardly post here, busy with my studies, TOK, and of course the EE.

“at least you can become a faggot doctor/engineer/lawyer and study in IIT like all other typical indians”
IIT? No fucking way dude. The acceptance rates are like 5% and I’d be having to compete with millions of other, infinitely more hardworking Indians. I’m aiming for the States, IB helps over there in admissions. And no, I’m not planning to be a doctor or engineer at all. Not a lawyer as much. I want to start my own business once I get my degree in economics or something similar.

Thank you for writing and commenting. You’re always welcome here, seriously. At least you’re giving me material.

Roucateur
Now branded “cool sounding” by Death himself!

So much for a faggot who has no life sitting at home and writes bullshit about clubs and calls them drinks “pussy” albeit he has never had even a fucking breezer. I hate pseudo bloggers who like to call themselves by “cool and intelligent” sounding names like Roucateur… ass wipes

A comment I received on my previous post. First of all thank you very much ‘Death’ for the time off your obviously busy schedule clubbing and angrily reading other people’s blogs to come to my humble abode. I assumed that the long length of my posts would be enough to deter idiots with short attention spans, looking for a quick opportunity to lengthen their e-penis with an inflammatory comment or two about the blogger himself, while conveniently hiding behind the wall of anonymity the internet provides.

Secondly, dear 220.255.7.133 (Singapore, Singtel), unless you me personally, and I doubt you do, your characterizations of me as a “faggot with no life”, and assuming I have never had a “fucking breezer” is absolutely mistaken and wrong. I don’t know whether your definition of “having a life” would include furiously commenting on other people’s blogs, but hey, who am I to question glorious, exciting life?

Thirdly, as I have mentioned before, that this blog is partly fictitious, not representative of my own personal opinions. I’m sorry I got your panties all in a twist by satirizing your favorite means of entertainment. I’m not sure if I’ve specified, but I’m using this place as platform to improve my writing. I will readily accept criticisms of my blog, if they are criticisms, not meaningless flaming. This honestly would have been a waste of your time if I hadn’t accepted your comment. If I had deleted it, think of all the time you spent composing a comprehensible sentence, wasted, time that could have been spent calling other people faggots in a real club. Imagine that! If you want to criticize my technique, or my poor attempts at humor in my previous post, and then tell me what it takes to make it funnier or more original, I would have been more than happy to take your advice. You’re doing nobody a favor by flaming on a blog, that’s hardly read by anybody at all, and then not even providing an email address so I could identify you, and perhaps make you understand what I’m trying to do here. This isn’t the work of a syndicated columnist you’re seeing, its of a bored 17 year old trying to improve his craft.

Fourth, you’ve misunderstood the “pussy” part. The strikethrough was to satirically suggest that people were there to get laid (hence get some pussy drinks), so your reading comprehension fails. I had realized that the strikethrough had not appeared properly on the blog, even though it was there on Word, and I had to manually add the strikethrough later on, before you commented on my blog, so if you had seen it without the strike, the error is on my part since the context would’ve appeared as how you’ve understood it to be, but since you commented on that on after I had edited it, I can only assume that you don’t have the comprehension skills necessary to understand what I meant.

Fifth, “pseudo bloggers” and “sounding cool and intelligent”. “Pseudo bloggers” as opposed to what? What exactly is a pseudo blogger? If a real blogger is someone who uses the internet as a platform to record his ideas, thoughts or as an online journal, a pseudo blogger would be, someone who pretends to use the internet to publish his ideas, when in fact, he writes on a regular journal book so his friends won’t think he isn’t cool. Congratulations, now you’ve managed to make yourself sound more stupid than your first sentence possibly could.

Thank you for that solitary compliment in your short treatise of hate and spite. “Cool and intelligent” is not exactly what I intended when I thought up of Roucateur, it was something I scribbled on a piece of paper when my English teacher explained the meaning of a raconteur. If you think it sounds cool, and intelligent, thank you very much, though I am rather disappointed to note your apparent hate of things cool and intelligent. For a person of your brain capacity, it isn’t very surprising for there to be a natural dislike of intelligent and cool things.

Sixth, I must comment on your masterful flourish at the end of your critical dissertation of my faggoty-ness; “ass wipes”. I envy your level of mastery over the English language and wish I, too, could one day be as fluent in the art of concluding a well thought out argument as you evidently have.

Finally, on a more serious note. I have to thank what few readers I have, and that includes you Mister Death. If anything, I’m a bit disappointed that I couldn’t resist the urge, and fed the troll, but ah well, exams are over. Also, thank you, Mister Death, for giving me some material to write about. I must admit, my last piece wasn’t very good. Reading it now, from a critical standpoint, it stands as a localized piece on nightclubs, but falls as messy, unoriginal and not very funny.

To confirm, I have nothing against sheesha smokers, or clubbers, I view it on the same level as Comic Exhibitions, PC Shows, Sports Events and concerts; forms of entertainment. I do not dislike clubs, or those sheesha locales in Clarke Quay (Marrakesh right?). Now I understand why so many op-eds and works of satire have disclaimers on the front. Maybe, I need to write my own disclaimer as well to repel people like Death over here.

To conclude, I look forward to correspondence between Mister Death and I, and if you’re reading this 220.255.7.133 (Singapore, Singtel), you’re welcome to comment again. At least I get the page hits. And to all those readers who do go to clubs, well you’re probably on the same dance floor frequented by creatures like our commenter over here.

Thank you for reading,
Kisses and hugs to Mister Death as well (aka 220.255.7.133 (Singapore, Singtel)),

The “cool and intelligent sounding”,

Roucateur

]]> http://roucateur.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/a-troll-has-been-spotted-finally-something-to-write-about/feed/ 3 Roucateur http://roucateur.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/on-nightclubs-and-my-omnipresent-absence/ http://roucateur.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/on-nightclubs-and-my-omnipresent-absence/#comments Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:28:37 +0000 Roucateur http://roucateur.wordpress.com/?p=26 ]]> Listen, I know nobody reads this blog, and I view it as a board to sound off my ideas and stuff. Also, it is no way, a traditional blog, with huge-ass posts and no pictures to satiate the attention-deficit teenage mind of today. I want to use this to improve my writing and rattle off about stupid things, and refine my arguments with regards to these things so my contentions won’t sound half-baked if the opportunity comes for me to voice in real life (IRL). That said, I realize I haven’t done a part 2 for my projekt 45 thing, partly because, I, as usual, royally fucked up my final years yet again. I have no intention in the foreseeable future to make another post chronicling my failure attempts at getting myself to study.

This is a recurring problem: I have no discipline. Laziness and sloth overtake my mind, controlling it, making it procrastinate every other assignment or self-study, instead just turning my attention to 4 hour CS marathons, at the end of which I feel pathetic and depressed. It’s a vicious cycle, that I have tried several times to get myself out of, but have failed miserably. So I won’t be touching on this for a while now. I need to recuperate from my failures, and most of all I need some time. With school closed, I get more time to think what I want to do, and how I want to do whatever I want to do.

Those last two paragraphs didn’t make much sense. This is another caffeine-fueled post.

So, several people I know, think about nightclubs as a status symbol. Not in the grown-up Bvlgari-watch, Beemer-car kinda way, but in the sense that a Facebook photo album of a person (most of the time under-18) at a nightclub, preferably smoking sheesha, is instant cred. A symbol of a popularity and social power. You might guess that this is going to be a rant from a socially inept fool about how crappy clubs are just because he isn’t cool enough to get in.

Wrong.

I believe clubs are a good place to socialize and get some good pussy drinks and all, but the way it gets hyped by the under-18 crowd on facebook and in my school, makes it seem like the ultimate place to be ‘seen’ at.

I think it’s a conspiracy, echoing the words of Charlie Brooker, from the Guardian, who asked “Nightclubs are hell. What’s cool or fun about a thumping, sweaty dungeon full of posing idiots?”. Then again, we’re dabbling in ad hominem here, characterizing clubs as dungeons where (posing) idiots gather to thump together. Most people who go to clubs are perfectly normal, well-adjusted folk, looking for some place to chill after a hard day’s work and get some nice pussy drinks. However, that’s looking at the over-18 crowd. The way I see it, the under-18 folk are there to get ‘seen’ by people in their network, later upload pics of their awesome fun time on to Facebook, and get some pussy drinks, probably the type they couldn’t get from 7-11 or regular bars with a fake ID.

It probably is a conspiracy. The place is usually full of sweaty drunk people hitting on other sweaty drunk people, taking sweaty, drunk photos to each other to upload to a social networking sites to show how sweaty, drunk and cool they very obviously are. Either that, or its them sitting on a couch with some friends smoking out sheesha, looking all high and wasted, even if sheesha has absolutely no drug-like or hallucinatory properties, and most of them are probably smoking flavors like strawberry or lime. Nevertheless, the thick smoke they exhale, which they take a snap of, and inevitably upload to Facebook, instantly would give them much cred and “respek” for looking like a smoky douchenugget.

So how can we sum up the clubbing experience in one sentence?

“Clubs are despicable, cramped, overpriced furnaces with sticky walls and the latest idiot theme tunes thumping through the humid air so loud you can’t hold a conversation, just bellow inanities at megaphone-level, and since the smoking ban, the masking aroma of cigarette smoke has been replaced by the overbearing stench of crotch sweat and hair wax.”

Thank you Charlie. How would you describe the people who put themselves through such torture then?

“Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they “enjoy” clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.”

Replace “drugs” with sheesha or beer and you have the experience most underage cool-kids crave here in Singapore. Considering how mind-numbingly easy it is to get into The Arena or similar clubs here in Singapore, don’t be surprised if you see some young looking people incessantly taking shots of themselves in the club, like a pictorial timestamp to prove how they were ‘there, and enjoying it thoroughly’.

So Charlie, if it isn’t the beer or the sheesha, or the popularity spike in posting pics of their presence in the club online, what other reason could there be for underage kids to put themselves through such torture? Why would they forgo the dancing component for pouting and posing for hot shots of them in hot clothes with hot people in a hot, humid hellhole?

“Because you might get a shag,” is the usual response. Really? If that’s the only way you can find a partner – preening and jigging about like a desperate animal – you shouldn’t be attempting to breed in the first place. What’s your next trick? Inventing fire?

So could this be the final point in the evolutionary tangent of the mating ritual by humans? A return to stupidly dancing around a potential mate, outdoing other competitors with a nicer haircut or a better dance-step? What ever happened to personality? What happened to conversation?

It got drowned out by the next crappy My Chemical Romance song the clueless DJ belts out. (Crappy is a vast understatement for the abortions that are MCR ‘songs’)

Since it’s the tail end of my rant, I would like to point out to the reader that I am a hypocrite. If I got the chance, I’d totally attend those European raves people keep talking about. The kinds in which truly amazing people come together, and DJs know what songs to mix-out, be it Daft Punk remixes, Telepopmusik tunes, or some good old dance hits, and the clubs themselves are themed so you won’t find a punk group in a hip-hop themed club (which is the prevalent theme of most clubs here in Singapore). The problem is here in Singapore, most DJs look toward the top 10 hits for their song track, the clubbers are drunk or underage, and most of them are too busy snapping away to actually dance or talk. Yes, I might seem like a sneering, spiteful fool in this post, but I have no desire to attend clubs here in this good nation, since all people seem to like doing there is pose and collectively try to out-cool each other in Facebook pictures.

Thank you for reading this rant,

‘Till next time,

Roucateur

Determined not to fuck up my exams like I have been doing for every single important exam in the past three years, I decided to remove most of my distractions and focus on work, calling this endeavor, as mentioned in my previous post, Pre-Projekt 45. And this is where all my mention of exams and Projekt 45 ends in this post, since I thought I’d write a retrospective on my performance when I’m more sober. That is not to suggest I am drunk. I just don’t feel serious enough to be adequately concerned about my future at this timepoint of writing, which is a chronic affliction that plagues most of my waking hours and wraps in guilt the rare two to three hours of sobriety and repentance. To explain, most of my days go like this: Come home from school and the first thing I do is to switch on the PC, yeah not a turtleneck-wearing, Starbucks-sipping, crappy poetry-writing Mac, but a hardcore leet dual boot XP-Ubuntu gaming-rig bitches (…not really, it’s a modest HP bought in 2002 that only plays CounterStrike and Deus Ex : ( ). On the PC it’s the usual routine of forums, discussion boards, vidya gaems, and general trolling and whoops its already 1 am. So then I decide to study for a while but overcome with exhaustion or some other lame excuse, I sit on my bed.

Then I weep, inside. I feel pathetic at having wasted another day, still lagging far behind in everything academic, distracted and uninterested during lesson time. Depression kicks in, fearing my dreams of a good college admission will never be realized, and the fact that I have to go to my class tomorrow and face the cold anti-stares of some pricks, and repeated snubbing and behind the back jeering of the many, put a weight on my mind, so heavy, it becomes hard to lift my head back up from the tear-stained bed, after sleep to go back to school. Back to the dread and underperformance. I thought I’d get used to mediocrity, but you never get used or grow conditioned to repeated mediocrity. You only continue reveling in that mud pit, becoming dirtier and dirtier, more and more mediocre.

I think I might have said it before in my previous poorly written post about how I feared mediocrity. The below average-ness. You’re on neither sides of the spectrum, nor in the middle. You’re a little above it , or a little below it, crushed by the masses of those who can memorize that formula a little better than you and blindly apply it without understanding its true significance, while you have to painstakingly read, understand and apply due to the lack of attention during lesson. Crushed by those who can weasel their way out of a difficult conversation a little better than you, retaining their dignity and their token friends, while you over-react and get a more tarnished reputation. Then you stupidly tell yourself you couldn’t give a flying fuck about reputation, only to realize that what put you in such a grimy spot was your selfish pursuit of that very same thing.

I’ve been through that. And as I wrote before, I, thanks to one invaluable friend’s advice, (ironically) the pricks’ attitudes toward me, and the support of my teachers and parents, have hopefully snapped out of this cycle. I removed these distractions completely, but not all at once, since that’s dangerous and according to experience, makes it easier to slip back into that vice. So it started with the easiest ‘vice’; Xbox. Rarely used these days, I gave the controllers to my dad to keep in his office. Then the games on the PC got deleted. And the hardest phase: internet removal. Few weeks ago, the modem was gone. A self-imposed action meant to wean me out of my cycle of time spending. And so this place stagnated, and my urges to go to my forums and such dulled. Studies were hard, but consequently, time spent towards learning increased and curiously, my non-fiction book reading too.

I’ve always been an avid reader, and a well-supported one at that, with enough books to have a mini-library, mostly novels. So I got some books to while my time away and started out with familiar territory of Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, then Barack Obama (both his books), the non-fiction works of V.S. Naipaul, Rushdie, then soon enough I found a book that seemed to sort of understand the problem I faced; Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. I saw this book on an interview he had with Stephen Colbert (I’m a regular watcher of both the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report) where he talked about how the internet was making people superficial. His argument on the show was how being connected to the ‘cloud’ of information, be it the internet or mobile phones or even Live Messenger, was giving people less ‘own’ time. Essentially time for quiet contemplation, the reliance on your own thought and retrospective reflection was becoming virtually (pardon the pun) non-existent with our continuous connection to the virtual world. How people had less time with their own mind to formulate their own opinion on issues rather than rely on the groupthink that permeates most of the internet forum and discussion sites, be it involved discussion, like a message board or online media outlets.

How true. I understood, then why I felt this sadness and depression during those periods. How serenity and understanding came over me once I unplugged myself from this matrix of millions of thought and ideas, where the most dominant ideas or memes influenced the group’s core line of discussion on a specific issue. Look no further than the comments on say, Digg.com, with constant memes ranging from ASCII art to phrases that have been repeated ad infinitum on any popular article. I myself have been a part of this, but I’m not unhappy about that. Obviously you might not necessarily know what I’m talking about unless you experienced it yourself, so I’ll leave it at that.

Not to get it wrong or anything, but what I discussed previously about the internet, is not exactly the main line of argument in Mr. Carr’s book, rather its what he discussed on the show. Here’s an excerpt from the blurb on its back to tell you what he talks about if you’re interested in getting the book (which, considering the people I know who read this blog, probably won’t care):

“Writing in a lucid, engaging style, he weaves together history, economics and technology to describe how and why computers are changing — and what it means for all of us. From the software business to the newspaper business, from job creation to community formation, from national defense to personal identity, The Big Switch provides a panoramic view of the new world being conjured from the circuits of the “World Wide Computer.”

These days are better days. Away from the internet, most of the time. I find optimism in the fact that I feel bored after three minutes on my browser, and much rather be reading up on Naipaul’s India of 1990 as compared to his India of 1964. These days I feel I’m quieter, and in less disquiet. I will not blame my poor grades or bad attitude on the internet, but only on myself. I do not regret having been on the internet, I gained much general knowledge through it, but I regret the obsession, lack of control and instability I experienced during that period. But these are better days, and you can expect more writings from me.

So now that I’ve explained my absence from this blog, here is my promise to you to update more often since I’m a bit more free now. In the next post: Nightclubs and Stupid People. I’m also going to ignore the condition of the economy to preserve my, and the readers sanity.

On a final note, these long posts seem like self-pitying rants on how much I suck. No, I did not create a blog to give you pointless exploits in my day in school or cool, awesome pics of me hanging out with my friends or my crappy poetry. This is a semi-fictionalized and dramatized take on a real kids perspective of the world, made to pass his time, improving his poor writing skills, and hopefully make those who read this understand the kid a bit better. Thanks once again to all my readers (don’t really know if I can put that in plural), and thank you to those guys who wrote the comments. I’ll write a written response to them sometime.

I have promised you no stupid poems from myself, so here is one wonderful one, not by me. One of my favorites, and rather apt for this situation.

Until then,

Roucateur.

Some things I like
I like these laundered days,
          crisp and bright,
and with the full promise
          of an unopened letter,
                    from a long lost friend.
I like letters
          hand-written, not lasercut,
                    with catcurled words
                              stringing artless alphabets
                                        like school children holding hands
                                                  about to cross a street;
                    words with moods and character
                              and a curious hunger.
I like words that come
          with the wind
                    against my window;
          with starbuds blooming
                    in the black garden of the night,
          washed in with the rain
                    puddling in the cracks
                              and crevices of my dried bones.
I like the rain
          that rivers through
                    my lifeline etched
                              on my palm,
          washing away my sins
                    and my memories of my sins,
                              sinking the hundred
                                        islands of my heartline.
I like memories
          of those youthful days
                    carried by the cadence of the radio,
          before the television
                    spread its million fingers
                              over my stainless skies.
I like these laundered days…

— Hari Kumar

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)

OH! CounterStrike! Endless joy you have given me, playing on random non-Steam Hong Kong servers, listening to a barrage of strategy tips by very professional cheaters in Chinese, incessantly through my 10 dollar headphones, not understanding a word they’re saying, but replying : “how lah, wo se yi ke ren. tu ni sen re qwai le, he xing nian chu sing nian, sing nia laaaah nian nian nian. zing nian qwai le” (which roughly translates to. “yes. i am one man. happy birthday to you. happy days, happy new year!”) after which they kick me from their server. Nowadays I just say, “Congrats to Beijing Olympics” and speak in broken English so I won’t get kicked.

So now. I will uninstall…no delete the shortcut to my CS 1.6, and begin this new addiction of writing. One day, when I’m famous, I will look back on this foolish rant, laugh a hearty laugh and donate some money to wordpress for having saved me from failing my IB, and er, continue being successful, surfing on a wave of money to the bank.

That said, I need to get back to being successful (sob…its a lie…) by (trying) to complete (but failing) my History Independent Assessment on the Quit India Movement.

Details and more when (if) I return.

Regards…

Roucateur