Tag: WordPress Mid-Life Crisis Week

Crisis Week Day 7 aka the last day of Crisis Week! YAY!!!

Don’t get me wrong, it has been quite a fun week, and it made me more aware of my surroundings in my search for interesting topics to write. Aside from that, it also helped to kill my procrastination (ONLY towards blogging, however) because it felt like I held a responsibility towards you guys. I have failed to carry out so many previous projects of mine that I shudder to think what people would think of me if I failed this one again.

So, today, in conjunction of the last day of Crisis Week, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before, which is to post my SPM trials marks on my blog. And, drum roll…

 (I have no idea why it looks so blurred when I post it but click on the picture for a bigger view)

One of the reasons why I never did that was because I was afraid of being called arrogant or a show-off for that. Let me tell you why this isn’t so. First off, I understand these aren’t the best marks in town. They aren’t even straight A+s. There are people out there who did better than me. Heck, I don’t even know if I’m going to be first in form this time again. But what I do know is that I myself think they aren’t quite bad. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever truly been happy with my own results. I’m not entirely satisfied because of the 2As, but I’m happy with it, and I’m happy that my efforts have not gone to waste. Please know that I didn’t post this to make anyone feel inferior, or to make myself look superior to anyone else. I’m not, I am aware of that. I’m just…very happy, and I want to show it to the world. One day, I want to be able to look back through my high school posts and remember this moment, this moment in which I worked hard and got what I wanted, and I hope this will serve as a source of motivation for future Michelle if she ever feels the walls closing in. In which case, hello future Michelle if you’re reading this, I hope you recognise your own efforts and don’t you dare feel bitter if you can’t achieve things on as great a scale as your previous achievements. Remember how you craved for imperfection? This is it. This is human.

So that is all for today, I hope you enjoyed this week of my WordPress Mid-Life Crisis Week as much as I did. Just a little update: from next Monday till Thursday, I will be heading for Dusun Minda Resort at Kuala Nerang in the middle of the woods for a 4-day-3-night study camp, or as Aifa put it, cram school with no (gasp!) Internet. Weirdly, I think I’m quite looking forward to it. Let’s see what happens when you put 180 rowdy teenage girls in the middle of a forest for four days.

BYE!

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!

More than 24 hours after my previous post, I realise I might have overreacted. A lot. To be fair, I wrote my previous post on my Notes app on my phone at the driving centre itself and then published it when I found wifi at Tesco, so all my emotions and wounds were still fresh and raw, and I was, to put it bluntly, a bitter old lady. Mostly, I was just very disappointed in myself for letting my parents down after all that they’ve done for me that I was even afraid of telling them about it.

I came home after that, still licking my own wounds, and tried to watch Avengers to cheer myself up. And then I fell sick, and all optimistic thoughts went out the window. It also didn’t help that I was reminded that The Wanted’s concert was on that day itself and that I could’ve gone to that concert because it wasn’t like I had acquired a driver’s license to compensate for it. And then the rest of the day was just me being bitter and feeling absolutely horrible and just thinking. That was it, really. I can’t remember anything about yesterday except that I watched the Avengers and then felt everything that was to be felt the rest of the day, besides also lashing out bitterly at most people that talked to me on Twitter and reliving scenes during my driving test. Those weren’t easy to let go of. Pain demands to be felt. I was a magnet attracting all sorts of negative thoughts and the remaining energy I had left was dissipated in the form of sneezing and blowing snot out of my nose.

But I’ve accepted my failure now, come to realise that it’s not as such a big deal as I’d made it out to be, and that in the grand scheme of things, this was but a small hurdle in the way.

And that was how my Blue Monday went, and in the history of annual Blue Mondays I’ve ever had, that was the worst. And I attribute my Blue Monday (and all my Blue Mondays) to my Melancholic temperament.

From “The Four Temperaments,” by Rev. Conrad Hock:

The Melancholic:

• Is self-conscious, easily embarrassed, timid, bashful.
• Avoids talking before a group; when obliged to he finds it difficult.
• Prefers to work and play alone. Good in details; careful.
• Is deliberative; slow in making decisions; perhaps overcautious even in minor matters.
• Is lacking in self-confidence and initiative; compliant and yielding.
• Tends to be detached from environment; reserved and distant except to intimate friends.
• Tends to be depressed; frequently moody or gloomy; very sensitive; easily hurt.
• Does not form acquaintances readily; prefers narrow range of friends; tends to exclude others.
• Worries over possible misfortune; crosses bridges before coming to them.
• Is secretive; seclusive; shut in; not inclined to speak unless spoken to.
• Is slow in movement; deliberative or perhaps indecisive; moods frequent and constant.
• Often represents himself at a disadvantage; modest and unassuming.

[source]

According to buzzle.com, Melancholics are “severely emotional and sensitive”, so there you go. Everything that other people felt, I felt it ten times even more in intensity. Other people felt sad over failing a test, I was pulverized to bits. I am an internal amplifier, and an enclosed one at that, because whatever ordeal that I go through, I am forced to relive it over and over again involuntarily. It was like being yelled at by my brain that, “You brought this upon yourself so now you have to think about it for the next 300 hours.” And so a single bad thought was able to ruin my day by making me think and ponder about it, about what I could’ve done instead, what would’ve happened if I’d chosen an alternate path, made a different decision, how other people thought of me in that moment, how I looked like to other people, the list is endless.

I also feel a lot when it comes to other things, everything in fact, and not only in the face of predicaments. For me, my life is a giant tale which I am constantly striving to make perfect, and everyone in my life plays their respective roles in my tale as important characters. And it is the darnedest thing when I constantly spend my time thinking about these characters in my story and my own role in it, and then I get sad when I realise that this whole big “my life is a story that I’m telling” process and concept isn’t exactly applicable to everyone because then I wouldn’t be a character in someone else’s story and that makes me feel melancholy. I know this sounds selfish and narcissistic, but is it really that bad to want to be a character in someone else’s story, even if it’s just a minor character? I feel very strongly about the characters in my story, without them, my story wouldn’t be complete, and I just want others to feel the significance of my presence as I do towards theirs. There, that sounds better in simpler words.

Besides being an amplifier, I also work great as a thermometer, both physically and mentally but I’ll leave the former out. My views and the ways I act varies in accordance to my surroundings and the people I mix with, and they vary very quickly, the way sensitive thermometers work. This was worst when I was younger and thankfully it’s getting better now, although this also enclosed thermometer prevents me from forgetting about others’ opinions when I try to form my own. For instance, I once visited Best Coast’s page on Last.fm and saw in the comment box that many commented that their new album was terrible so I downloaded their new album and gave it a listen and tried to form my own opinion, to decide whether it was good or bad, and found that I couldn’t. My opinion since then has been null and void.

So this is it. My post for the third day of my WordPress Mid-Life Crisis Week. I don’t even know what post this is, or if it’s even relevant to its title but alas I don’t think I can start a different post. This post sounded a lot grander in my head last night but nope. So I’m just going to say goodbye and hope no one finds this as bad as I do. Okay bye bye BYE

I failed my driving test. Initially I didn’t want to talk about it, had a blogpost ready in mind that consisted of only two sentences: I failed my driving test. I really don’t want to talk about it. And truth be told, if it wasn’t crisis week, I wouldn’t even want to mention it, but what has happened has happened, I’m not going to question it.

“What has happened has happened.” How I hate that sentence. People say it often to cheer someone up, let bygones be bygones, nasi sudah jadi bubur, there’s nothing else you can do. Fine I agree. But it’s not like the knowledge of truly knowing things have passed which I can’t change can prevent me from thinking about it. Because that’s what I’ve been doing since the tester gave me a big fat cross on my result sheet. It consumed me whole the first ten minutes during which I wanted to drown myself in the toilet or something but now I’m okay. Okay in comparison to being wholly consumed. Okay as in being half-consumed. Which sucks but at least I don’t feel like drowning myself anymore so woohoo gold medal for me.

My luck has really gone to the dogs today. Because that’s really what it’s all about. Luck. Not lack of skill or practice. I’d practiced for an hour beforehand and everything was okay, my driving instructor said I was okay, and even I said I was okay. And then I got up that hill and panicked when the handbrake got stuck and I panicked some more and the car died and I rolled down the slope. All this after I’d landed perfectly within the yellow line AND raised my hand.

So now I have to wait two weeks before I retake my test. Two weeks. I have a car and I failed my first test and have to wait two weeks for my second one. Everyone thought I was going to pass. Heck, I thought I was going to pass and that was the highest expectation of all. But no. What the hell did I do. Or rather what the hell didn’t I do. Now I have to miss another day of school. Now I still can’t use my car legally on the road. Now I’m still a failure.

Let me confide this in you: all along, everything I did, I expected victory. Or in blander words, things to work out right. Every single time. And every single time, ever since I dubbed in perfectionism, I did. I passed. I won. I was victorious. Up until this year. Twenty twelve was and who knows, still is a year of failures. I failed my violin exam for the first time, I failed to get the ASEAN scholarship, I failed my driving test. It was a hard punch in the face after so many years of perfect triumphs. This is either my luck and/or skills going downhill or just me stepping into the real world. I really hope it’s the latter, otherwise I might be consumed once again.

The worst thing is I know I can do it. I can pass this. This isn’t hard at all. I’ve done this multiple times. I’ve prepared myself for this moment. Things weren’t that bad when I failed my violin exam, because I knew I didn’t practice enough, and I was expecting a fail. But not this. Everything was absolutely perfect, building up to this moment, and then I literally roll downhill and ruin everything.

I’m not accustomed to failure, I will admit this. I’ve led an invincible life all these years, pretty much born with a silver spoon in my mouth. People fail and get up and try again and learn in the process but I haven’t failed enough times to do the same. Looking at everyone else around me doing what I failed to do that ONE TIME is really a hard hit. I can do this. I could’ve done this. But there are no second chances in things like this. At least, not for another two weeks. Now everyone is going to feign surprise when I tell them I failed my driving test. If you see this, please don’t do that. In fact, please don’t bring it up at all. Mentioning it on the Internet is one thing but mentioning it face to face is another entirely.

But contrary to what I’d initially wanted to do, which is not talk about this at all, I’m going to do so because not talking about my failures is going to hurt me so much more than the opposite. So there, I’m baring my weaknesses to the “real world”.

And now I’m going to keep this feeling of failure from consuming me by crying alone, something which I very much wanted to do on the spot but couldn’t.

Taking a leaf out of Charlie McDonnell’s book, this is what I’m going to be doing for the whole of next week: I’m going to be blogging every day.

Contrary to his reason for the existence of such a week (which is his perfectionism leading to him deleting videos he made and end up not updating his YouTube channel), mine is more of a getting-my-lazy-ass-back-to-blogging reason.

Blogging hasn’t been easy for me lately because a) I have done nothing remarkable of late since all I do is go to school, come home, revise, sleep, rinse and repeat: the woes of an SPM student b) expressing opinions publicly on a website that many people I know in real life visit is quite a hazard and c) all that is left to acceptably talk about is One Direction and I’m pretty sure Careful Confessions has seen enough fangirling posts now.

Hence, in order to shed off this shell that has kept me from real blogging, I’m going to try this Mid-Life Crisis thingmabob  to see how it turns out. Mind you, my life is still going to be as less remarkable as it has always been but let’s put my Joy Detecting Skills* to the test. * the ability to detect entertaining and amusing moments in one’s mundane routine-centred life.

And now, as a sort of opening ceremony to my Crisis Week, I’m going to tell you about my day today.

I woke up blazingly early today: 8.30 AM, and couldn’t go back to sleep, which is surprising because 8 to 9 AM is my Roll Over and Go Back to Sleep period. So I got up, cleaned up and obeyed my basic human instinct to search for food in the kitchen downstairs.

No one was around though, so I went outside to find my parents washing the cars and the house compound so I went to help out. Two hours later, I was sweaty and absolutely famished as I threw myself into a 20-minute cold shower, feeling the cleanest I’ve ever felt in a while.

And then, because it was only right we treated ourselves after a long morning’s hard work, we had Indian food at Mysore Curry House and if it’s one thing in this world that can make me happy it’s Indian food. I could write ballads and sonnets about the glory and beauty of Indian food. When One Direction sang about “that One Thing”, they meant Indian food.

As usual, I overate and came to regret it later, but there’s no fault in eating good food because…IT”S GOOD FOOD!!

We went to Alor Setar Mall after that because it had been some time since we last went there (and also because I heard a new Chatime franchise had opened there) and…that’s what we did. I hate sentences like these, it’s so tedious and boring, let me rephrase.

Riding our horses, it took us about three days to reach the Mall, and even then, it took us half the time to get in because it was swarming with people. In the end, we managed to worm our way through the huge throng of people to get to Chatime, only to be surprised by the wild presence of a Factory Outlet Store which no one warned us about.

After I reached home, came the biggest highlight of my day: a three-hour nap. Actually no, that wasn’t the highlight of my day. In fact, it was the complete opposite. In fact, I think my day would’ve been close to perfect if it wasn’t because of that three-hour nap during which I had a horrible nightmare in which me and the other Form 5 prefects were at this yoga house and we were trapped there trying to look for a way out until we stumbled upon this long corridor with a steel door at the end of it so I started towards it but then I realised there were red laser beam tracks (which were tracks that showed where laser beams would go when they’re switched on) (and by laser beams I do mean the red coloured ones you see in movies which safeguard something valuable in a vault or something) (bringing back the multiple parentheses awyiss) covering the entire floor and surrounding it was a force field which induced uncomfortableness and pain so frightened, we left the room and looked for a way to escape until we realised that the entire house was covered with laser tracks so me and another prefect (I don’t remember who) exited the house and climbed to the neighbour’s house only to find it covered with the tracks too even though it was a “guardian’s” house and then we found out that the other prefects found a safety spot so we headed for the only room in the house that had no tracks only to have someone find us and tell us that the Safety Room was only available to old and sick people and we had to endure the laser beams when it was time and PLOT TWIST! that was how their “yoga” was carried out, by enduring low power (but still painful and headache-inducing) laser beams for a period of time and it was so horrible that when I woke up I had a throbbing headache and felt moody.

So that was all that happened, and I look forward to a successful Crisis Week. See ya!