Crisis Week Day 5: Two Months

This Crisis Week thing is getting quite tiring, especially when school ends at 5 for me. I’m also running out of ideas to write a variety of posts, but I’m already halfway through it anyway, so here’s to two more posts for this week, excluding this one.

Two months is the time I have left at my high school. Everything we did in school, it felt like it was our last time doing it. Two months left of eating at the canteen and behind the teachers’ room, of shoving each other to buy food at the counters, of using the science labs, of being generally rowdy in class when no teacher is present, of laughing at Cikgu Harum’s awkward jokes, of holding weekly chatting sessions with Laiyy and Beneh at the air-conditioned Accounts room under the tables…I could go on. I was shocked when I was told that the trial exam that just passed was our second last exam in high school. Second last. Which means that there’s one last exam to go and then we’ll be done here. Forever. It sounds like that Nanny McPhee movie in which Nanny McPhee says, “I’m only here when you need me, now that you don’t need me anymore, I’m going to leave.” Not in those exact words but something along those lines.

We are completing our secondary education. We are at the end of this stage and it’s time for us to level up.

It’s actually true when I say my life started when I was in high school. I don’t mean that it started for me the moment I entered high school, but somewhere along the way, it did. I started “gaining consciousness”, as I like to put it, and could see everything in a clearer view. I started to form opinions of my own, started to write for the benefit of myself and other people, started to discover my identity (as corny as that sounds) because I started to get an idea of what kind of person I wanted to be, started being analytic of my surroundings and people around me, and started to think and peruse beyond my safety borderlines. It happened during the middle of last year, and being in high school and mixing with the people I used to mix and still do now influenced me greatly in that department. If I’d been somewhere else, God only knows how I would’ve turned out, and generally speaking as a whole, I’m quite contented with where I am today. I mean, of course I still plunge into dark moods and meet dead ends every now and then, but judging by my current situation, I can imagine worse turnouts if things had been different for me, e.g. entering a different school, mixing with the wrong crowd et cetera, and I’m very thankful for being placed in this school.

At this time of the year, the question I get the most is, “What are you going to study after SPM?” It’s a question I’m very reluctant to answer because frankly, I don’t really know and also because it reminds me of how close I am to stepping into the real world. Initially, the answer I gave everyone was “dentistry, and then specialising in orthodontics” but now I don’t really know. What I do know is that I have this hazy passion for science which can be cultivated with the right factors so I’m also considering courses that involve scientific research and development as a possible path I could take. I don’t know, honestly. In the end it all boils down to how well I performed and am going to perform in trials and SPM. I suppose I am on the right track at the moment (I’m not going to say anything just yet lest I jinx myself) and I’m hoping for a smooth sail until the end of this year.

Remember Collecting Memories? Well, I have discussed it with Aifa, Anum and Beneh and right now, I regret to say I’ve lost the momentum but hopefully in a few weeks’ time, when the pressure of leaving school looms over me, I’ll be able to revive it. It’s not a dead idea, it’s just an idea undergoing hibernation until its tinder is sparked.

Something really nice happened today: Teacher Amanah praised my English essay which I wrote for trials which had something to do with time-turning machines and Sector 7 (yes, I stole that off the Transformers’ movie franchise, I’m sorry, it was a critical moment in the exam hall!) which I thought would sound silly but it turned out that she loved it and said that if I ever wrote any other stories besides exam essays, she would like to read them because, and I quote, “reading your essay was like reading a novel.” Ahhhfhfuiydgireinsdjkaflsasa I didn’t know how to react oh my god!!!! But I’m probably going to print a few stories off michwrites.wordpress.com for her and I know this might seem like I’m showing off but I really am not, I’m just really happy my English teacher likes my writings and it’s one thing for your friends and family members to tell you that they like your writings but it’s another thing entirely for your English teacher to do so. I know my stories still have room for improvement and I’m not saying they’re entirely flawless, but there’s an indescribable joy of knowing that other people like something that you have created, something you have put in effort to make, and it’s one of the greatest feelings in the world.

And that is all for day five. I hope you liked the post I wrote for day four, and would anyone care to share their opinions with me on that piece? Because it was my first time writing something like that and I want to know what people think of it.

Cheers!