Of My Moleskine Notebook

Everyone is talking about what a year it has been to them. They write long detailed posts in accepting and un-judgemental prose; an air of wisdom through experience tousled around their images of memorable activity during the year. They write about the events that have defined them, and the people they have loved and lost; the music they had made love to or cried over, and for those whose purpose is to write about issues : The Financial Crisis and The US Elections.

To be very terse; I find all these articles and posts annoying. This is simply due to because – unlike most of the general human population – I have not thought of the year in retrospect, and am completely too chicken to even start.

There is just far too much to rant/blabber/cry about this year and the fact that my life and the lives of people around me are going to change in the New Year, is just too overwhelming to try to capture on paper without sounding contrived.

Then there’s that whole “oh this time last year I was..” going on in my head. It’s really, to be honest, a bitch.

This time last year I had a crazy sleepover with two of my closest friends. My parents were away and had given me complete dominance of the house for the night they were away. So the girls and I cooked steak and pasta, ate vanilla ice-cream while watching The Notebook; and fell asleep on the floor under the make-shift tent we made in my room.

The room was a patchwork of tablecloth and bedsheets tied and hung through the window and bed; and as we stared at the ceiling listening to Kevin Drew with lazy japanese origami lanterns hanging overhead; our bodies made shadows through the fabric; illuminated by the warm glow of a lantern.

This year my parents are going away again, but all my friends are off gallivanting abroad or are already busy treading the paths set up for their new lives. When they come back in the New Year, I would then have already started my trek in a new land; whether I end up at boarding school or not.

It’s really discomforting this situation I am in at the moment. I have yet to receive a reply to whether or not I will be accepted into that boarding school, and in the midst of that anticipation; I have far too much time in my hands and so start thinking about the what-ifs to if I stayed on here and attend a college in Subang instead.

Then there’s that whole TOP 10 CDs of 2008! Or my Top Ten Movies, Books, Songs, Bands.. and so on and so forth. To some people it may not make any sense to why it might matter. In my opinion however, pop culture chronicles our lives as a time line lying in the background. While we all have our own lives completely independent to any influence of the overplayed 1# hit on the radio, our daily existence at that moment in time can always be put into context by remembering generally where we were, what we were doing when everyone was singing Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl. Give me a few more days, maybe then I can write this post.

The thing about doing all these flashbacks, retrospectives and looong ardurous essays on existence in mid December is that it is a necessary catharsis, a way of letting go before moving on to the new year. It’s as if we just need to compile a short recap on our growth as individuals before we seal the book of memories shut; before stuffing it at the back of the bookshelf.

Some would call it a Briefing on The Economy, A Retrospective of Cultural Events 2008, The Academic Calendar, Highlights, or What I Did This Year OMG!. But be it a long article in the FT, or an unreadable post (perhaps like this one) on a blog; it’s in essence the same thing.

We all need to lick our wounds before we head on to the next fight. In the new year.

I started this evening with a sick feeling in my stomach. A kind of a toss between having a disagreeable gastrointestinal condition and the influx of pensive thought which would never fail to torment me this time of the year. Mind you, I have been sitting in front of this damned LCD screen for about 5 hours or so, making feeble attempts at writing a colossal piece of cathartic prose or some over-romanticised shit like that.

Instead I went through my old blog posts. Then my old writing. Then Facebook. Then whatever sane musing I convinced myself I should articulate some way or another went totally OUT of the window because everyone on MSN decided to message me at the same time.

One person in particular is my dearest friend Elaine.

Over the course of the past few weeks, Elaine has been writing countless of university application essays which would help secure her a place in a liberal arts education in an Ivy League. Most of these character limited, earth-shattering personal responses would find their way into my gmail inbox; and roughly about 11 a.m. every morning, as I wipe from the sleep from my eyes and read through Draft No. 22 in my smelly pyjamas; I am further convinced that Elaine Leong Li Jing deserves a place in Brown/Princeton/Swarthmore (it depends on the day of the week) because she : has had a definitive experience/is going to save the world/would challenge the foundations of cognition and philosophy/has the wisdom of an old Confucian sage.

Well, okay; her essays aren’t anywhere as pretentious; but really the prompts are quite superfluous. I really wonder how amazing do you have to be to catch the admissions officer’s eye. I am rather sure a big percentage of these essays would cover an experience which had stemmed from a co-curricular charitable activity, a few percent or so on death/illness/near-death experience, and I do not doubt the thousands of essays about some grandiose super heroic act of kindness or another.

The thing is, it’s not just that you have to seem completely compelling in general, you have to seem even more compelling than the other 20 odd thousand or so applying for 1000 seats. It reminded me of Erwin, the young substitute teacher from The History Boys and his take on how to answer entrance exams. He trained the boys to write essays that would seem memorable and unique. So parallels between Stalin and Thatcher were compared. Carry On films could be referenced to when talking about World War 2; and the foreskins of Christ “added garnish” to essays on the Church.

So, this morning I wasn’t that shocked to receive a short personal response by Elaine that compared Obama’s marketing campaign to Mussolini; or that one of the reasons she wanted to go to Providence was because she wanted to check out whether the university was really that filled with hippies.

Maybe it’s just me, but I would offer her a place based on early decision straight away.

Then theres this tedious question : How did you become interested in Brown?

This question I think is a bit of a wild card. You can’t answer college counselor, you can’t say website or advertisement or 20 second spot on prime time TV. You can’t exactly tell an Ivy League that you found out about them at the back of cereal boxes. This is not a survey. It’s your application form that’s going to be torn apart, analysed and tallied up with the other 20k entires.

Honestly, I think most Malaysians know about Brown and Yale due to Gossip Girl and The OC.

Though come to think of it, that could be a pretty eye-catching personal response:

My discovery of Brown and its status of a top liberal arts university is completely due to an intellectually stimulating television show called Gossip Girl. This exceptionally well written documentary about life in the upper-class strata of “Manhattan’s elite”  featured a case study in which two adolescent hormonal girls were vying for a top notch education while at the same time competing for legitimacy as Top Teenage Bimbo. The very pretty blonde, whose plaid mini-skirts I greatly adore, had put Brown as her first choice! After finishing a ravishing episode of the series, I then went onto my pink Hello Kitty laptop and googled this “Brown” she had mentioned in between getting laid, getting in a bitch fight, and getting laid again! This is how I had gotten interested in a top liberal arts education at Brown!

If you made it this far and have started to wonder about the purpose of this entry, I would just like to say that I don’t know, myself. I think somewhere in between I wanted to touch on the what was the likelihood for teenagers at the ripe old age of 17 to actually know what they want, or what they think they want..

Or was it I wanted to muse about what possibly could be so definitive in one’s life when one only went through puberty a few years before. Of course, this is not counting the few who actually have had life-changing experiences, tribulations, Homeless to Harvard-esque courage and brilliance…

In a year or two, if all goes well; I too might be squeezing the juice out of my grey matter trying to write my common application essay about some definitive moment in my life. And I just realized that unless something huge-ass hits me in the face in this short period of time; I really cannot pontificate much.

Just that keep that thought.

Well anyway, I think I would need to retire to bed now; as in less than 9 hours or so, I would have my own little admissions affair to deal with. My father has taken the liberty to take the day off tomorrow to take me to submit my application form to KYUEM as well as visit the school. I am approaching this with excitement and underlying anxiety; because my parents have talked about sending me there since the place was called KMYS, because I really am not sure if they would let me in due to the fact that my trial results were really : Shit, and because if they accept me with open arms then that would mean I would have to cancel an interview I have scheduled the next day with a magazine about an internship.

Reading that last paragraph, I think if I keep up with this anxiety and producing these fragmented long sentences with no sight of an end in the form of full stops; I could perhaps pull off a pseudo-Salman Rushdie prose-style.

If there’s one thing Salman Rushdie is good at doing, it’s not obeying the sanctity of the full stop.

(Actually, my French teacher Bruno used to tell me that in class. Ainaa, respectez la sanctité de la ponctuation, s’il vous plaît. )