Dinner with John, Adrian, Xinyun and Pat brought back memories of the good old days. You know you’re old when you refer to anything in that way. It’s been almost a year since we, the guys, graduated and, to state a cliché, time has really flown by. And so it is that we find ourselves forging our individual paths through our respective careers, worrying about a whole new set of problems compared to our time as students. It’s amazing that just a year ago, I didn’t know what a copywriter was and John wanted to go to prison (as a warden). As for Adrian, well, nothing suits him more than big guns and, more recently, big needles.
Saturday night reminded me of our lives in NUS where inordinate amounts of time were spent slacking around in the canteen, making fun of other people and then remarking that one day we’d get our retribution. Of course, there were the unforgettable, often comic, references to the size of my head (yes, one day retribution will be heaped on the two of you!), the clever comments on Adrian’s propensity to attract members of the same sex, and of course John’s habit of ordering ghastly looking food and then proceeding to make them vanish from his plate. There were also the odd philosophical arguments we engaged in from time to time just to remind ourselves that we were actually philo students and not uncles sitting around at the neighbourhood coffeeshop. Or else we really cared about what we learnt as philo majors, but let’s not push it. As an aside, what’s the name of that bug-eyed guy again?
We really were slackers, weren’t we? But with a requirement of only 93 MCs, who could blame us? *sneering looks of envy from Pat and Jolene should ensue* Looking back, I see only the canteen and nothing else. No LTs, no tutorial rooms, no exams, no library, no revision stress etc. This is terrible. My whole 3 years of university life condensed into slouching over a plastic table, spouting rubbish while munching, all too often, on a chicken chop/cutlet/fish and chips/laksa yong tau foo and sipping iced tea.
The only 2 projects I remember are the social variation one on comedy (thanks to John’s brilliant suggestion) and the sociology project on homosexuality on the Web (subcultures?) or something like that (I dare say that Adrian provided much inspiration for this particular breakthrough). Indulge me in my boasting when I say that both projects produced grades which were inversely proportional to the amount of effort put in. (15/20 and an A- respectively, if memory serves me right)
Essays. The bane of any Arts student. Writing these profound pieces of literary dung inevitably involved procrastinating till 11pm the night before they were due, panicking, and then splurting and spluttering to find a suitable opening line. This thinking process was, I might mention, often disrupted by a constant stream of ICQ messages bemoaning our tendency to procrastinate. Somehow or other though, we managed to hand in our essays mostly on time. Interestingly, despite the chaos, we often finished in a certain order i.e. me first, followed by Adrian and then John. (Correct me if I’m wrong) I’d finish up at about 4am, followed by whoever it was in 2nd place at about 5(?) and then the next at say 6.
Exams went along roughly the same vein. We’d read what we could or were willing to, sit for the paper and then hope for the best. More often than not, presenting our arguments clearly made up for our lack of depth in understanding though this clearly didn’t work for MCQ exams such as the one for engineering materials where John and I ended up with big fat Fs. What a waste of time that was.
University was, by and large, an enjoyable experience. We definitely learnt a lot in the Arts faculty. Who can forget Frege or Kant (no relation to the first body part that comes to your filthy minds) or Kierkegaard? Just being able to remember their names makes me feel like an intellectual. Then there was Chomsky in English studies for whom “googoo gaga” was more than just baby talk but the basis for a whole theory on how language evolves in human beings. There was, memorably, Durkheim for sociology of deviance. Was it him who claimed that women were born liars because they could fake orgasms? I can’t remember. All rubbish of course, along with phrenology and all its crackpot conclusions.
And so we spent three years of our lives being imbibed with such wonderfully named theories as Whorfism and... er… I can’t remember the rest. Metaphysics? Our reward being a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts and Social Sciences, which, incidentally, is the exact same degree you can get at any fast food joint, with or without cheese. On the other hand, it got me a job so no complaints there.
I’ve run out of stuff to write. Damn.
Saturday night reminded me of our lives in NUS where inordinate amounts of time were spent slacking around in the canteen, making fun of other people and then remarking that one day we’d get our retribution. Of course, there were the unforgettable, often comic, references to the size of my head (yes, one day retribution will be heaped on the two of you!), the clever comments on Adrian’s propensity to attract members of the same sex, and of course John’s habit of ordering ghastly looking food and then proceeding to make them vanish from his plate. There were also the odd philosophical arguments we engaged in from time to time just to remind ourselves that we were actually philo students and not uncles sitting around at the neighbourhood coffeeshop. Or else we really cared about what we learnt as philo majors, but let’s not push it. As an aside, what’s the name of that bug-eyed guy again?
We really were slackers, weren’t we? But with a requirement of only 93 MCs, who could blame us? *sneering looks of envy from Pat and Jolene should ensue* Looking back, I see only the canteen and nothing else. No LTs, no tutorial rooms, no exams, no library, no revision stress etc. This is terrible. My whole 3 years of university life condensed into slouching over a plastic table, spouting rubbish while munching, all too often, on a chicken chop/cutlet/fish and chips/laksa yong tau foo and sipping iced tea.
The only 2 projects I remember are the social variation one on comedy (thanks to John’s brilliant suggestion) and the sociology project on homosexuality on the Web (subcultures?) or something like that (I dare say that Adrian provided much inspiration for this particular breakthrough). Indulge me in my boasting when I say that both projects produced grades which were inversely proportional to the amount of effort put in. (15/20 and an A- respectively, if memory serves me right)
Essays. The bane of any Arts student. Writing these profound pieces of literary dung inevitably involved procrastinating till 11pm the night before they were due, panicking, and then splurting and spluttering to find a suitable opening line. This thinking process was, I might mention, often disrupted by a constant stream of ICQ messages bemoaning our tendency to procrastinate. Somehow or other though, we managed to hand in our essays mostly on time. Interestingly, despite the chaos, we often finished in a certain order i.e. me first, followed by Adrian and then John. (Correct me if I’m wrong) I’d finish up at about 4am, followed by whoever it was in 2nd place at about 5(?) and then the next at say 6.
Exams went along roughly the same vein. We’d read what we could or were willing to, sit for the paper and then hope for the best. More often than not, presenting our arguments clearly made up for our lack of depth in understanding though this clearly didn’t work for MCQ exams such as the one for engineering materials where John and I ended up with big fat Fs. What a waste of time that was.
University was, by and large, an enjoyable experience. We definitely learnt a lot in the Arts faculty. Who can forget Frege or Kant (no relation to the first body part that comes to your filthy minds) or Kierkegaard? Just being able to remember their names makes me feel like an intellectual. Then there was Chomsky in English studies for whom “googoo gaga” was more than just baby talk but the basis for a whole theory on how language evolves in human beings. There was, memorably, Durkheim for sociology of deviance. Was it him who claimed that women were born liars because they could fake orgasms? I can’t remember. All rubbish of course, along with phrenology and all its crackpot conclusions.
And so we spent three years of our lives being imbibed with such wonderfully named theories as Whorfism and... er… I can’t remember the rest. Metaphysics? Our reward being a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts and Social Sciences, which, incidentally, is the exact same degree you can get at any fast food joint, with or without cheese. On the other hand, it got me a job so no complaints there.
I’ve run out of stuff to write. Damn.
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