Saturday, July 30, 2005
was chewing cud on a conversation with a certain "scholar" from a certain university down south and i kept wondering why i was so pissed off:
She: "oh, so you're from wisconsin?" (accompanied with a subtlely dubious look. trust me. i've got an excellent radar)
Me: "Yep"
She: "Well, wisconsin is.. how should i put it... theres nothing to do there, and its so slack."
Me: "Huh? Slack? Why?"
She: "Oh, my friends (referring to the batch one year below mine) do nothing but study most the time and they still have time to have fun and do things. us, we do soo many breadth and core courses.. (the usual rants about not enough time for oneself, tests and papers and midterms in between. ie, the usual scholar rhapsody. check my blog entries. its all there)
Me: "I don't think its so slack. I'm in liberal arts and I'm a part time lab tech and I'm dying almost every semester......." (furrows eyebrows in perplexity)
She: "Oh, but you see, yours is voluntary. You can choose.We die die have to do these courses ... ( continues the tirade, but with a sprinkling of how life is perfect down south - the usual PR/Scholar spiel)......"
... well, whats wrong with it being voluntary then? Well granted there are pricks who do the bare minimum here (and yes, the minimum here is as bare as one can get, and the issue of pricks doing the scanty minimum and ending up on the Honor's List have been covered ad nauseum in other parts of this blog), what about the rest of us?
Are we to be judged on the basis of student-faculty ratios, percentage minority, percentage graduating after 4 years, party school rankings and other useless stats that we don't make good scientists?
naohia. i'd like to see you fail your first experiments again and again and again and you don't know the hell why, and find out first hand how life is so not a bed of roses (nor fun) in the laboratory whether or not you've got the stinkin' scholarship and you've got nothing to show for your commitment and dedication except some random bird droppings on the X ray film. Then I'd ask you again, you freaking undergraduate!
She: "oh, so you're from wisconsin?" (accompanied with a subtlely dubious look. trust me. i've got an excellent radar)
Me: "Yep"
She: "Well, wisconsin is.. how should i put it... theres nothing to do there, and its so slack."
Me: "Huh? Slack? Why?"
She: "Oh, my friends (referring to the batch one year below mine) do nothing but study most the time and they still have time to have fun and do things. us, we do soo many breadth and core courses.. (the usual rants about not enough time for oneself, tests and papers and midterms in between. ie, the usual scholar rhapsody. check my blog entries. its all there)
Me: "I don't think its so slack. I'm in liberal arts and I'm a part time lab tech and I'm dying almost every semester......." (furrows eyebrows in perplexity)
She: "Oh, but you see, yours is voluntary. You can choose.We die die have to do these courses ... ( continues the tirade, but with a sprinkling of how life is perfect down south - the usual PR/Scholar spiel)......"
... well, whats wrong with it being voluntary then? Well granted there are pricks who do the bare minimum here (and yes, the minimum here is as bare as one can get, and the issue of pricks doing the scanty minimum and ending up on the Honor's List have been covered ad nauseum in other parts of this blog), what about the rest of us?
Are we to be judged on the basis of student-faculty ratios, percentage minority, percentage graduating after 4 years, party school rankings and other useless stats that we don't make good scientists?
naohia. i'd like to see you fail your first experiments again and again and again and you don't know the hell why, and find out first hand how life is so not a bed of roses (nor fun) in the laboratory whether or not you've got the stinkin' scholarship and you've got nothing to show for your commitment and dedication except some random bird droppings on the X ray film. Then I'd ask you again, you freaking undergraduate!
Friday, July 22, 2005
From my ole buddy Wind’s blog, someone commented:
“do you just want the piece of paper that says you graduated from Cornell, because that's worth more on the market than a piece of paper that says you graduated from NUS? (don't forget the piece of paper isn't important in itself; it's employers' expectations of overseas grads - more independent, more initiative, etc - that are important in securing that job.)also - don't forget that it cuts both ways. if you think Americans (and not just "ang mohs" but the whole rainbow of races - "American" isn't a homogenous descriptor - and what about the Koreans, Turkish, Israeli, Nigerian, Kenyan and Indians at your school as well?) are antisocial, maybe it's because you're pushing them away by clustering as a small, segregated group of Singaporeans. it keeps you within your comfort zone, but it reflects poorly on us as a nation. is that the impression we want to give the world? that we are antisocial, arrogant and insular? i hope not”
that’s a meaningless comment. It’s not even worth a rejoinder but then, I’ve had enough of this self righteous crap.
Its certainly easy to point one’s languid fingers while safely snug in one’s own comfort zone, accusing us of being overachieving pricks more bent on maintaining a perfect GPA than being, ahem, perfect ambassadors for our country doing all the happy smiley things perfect people do, ie socializing and making shitloads of friends from all over the world and taking in their culture and playing an active role in their community yada yada blah blah splutter splutter .
Its all bullshit. Sure, I do not doubt for one moment that we are overachieving dicks- that’s what got us to where we are in the first place. To satisfy the sponsor, and to do the above mentioned? Sure, Windy might sound a little insular, but I don’t think he’s arrogant or antisocial per se.
This phenomenon of a homogeneous cluster-fuck is not uniquely Singaporean in the first place. I observe the same phenomenon happening in other international students in the lab I work in. The Chinese grad students in my lab hang out mostly with his fellow Chinese contemporaries. Same with the Indians. I would daresay the Koreans are even more close knit (and endogamous) than the Chinese. Hell, even the minorities in Madison stay together in groups. It is simply fatuous to ascribe this clustering as due to the supposed arrogance inherent in the “scholar mentality” of the sheltered well fed Singaporean scholar. Here the guy is assuming that as sponsored slaves, every one of us are extroverts, share the same worldview and even speak the same scholar-speak. Wtf?
Every sponsored kia is different. Windy is an introvert. So am I. There are other people who are extroverts and they do not necessarily share the same worldview as I or Windy. So whats wrong with being an introvert?
Why can’t we do our own thang and carve out a niche of our own? Must sponsored buggers be obliged to carry the task of merely being overt ambassadors of Singapore? Yes and No. One can if one wants to, I see this most strongly in EDB scholars. The buggers, well at least the ones I know are an extroverted bunch. And all power to them. I’m constantly amazed at the ability of almost all of them to socialize and make small talk at the drop of the hat. Of course, they are the ones with the wide network of friends. So what about the rest of us; the quiet geek archetypes who don’t value attention nor have time to spare socializing as a result of heavy academic workloads? I think that’s perfectly fine. At the end of the day its a matter of finding one’s niche. I’ve found my niche, and so does Wind. I work in a lab where I’m the only Singaporean around. I have a sprinkling of angmoh/ABC friends, mostly through work. They know me as a person and they know about Singapore- well at least its not part of China. I am comfortable. They are comfortable. And in Wind’s case, he does spare some time to play table tennis and he also has some foreign friends.
So what the hell is wrong with that? Must we judged on the number of non Singaporean friends we have? Must we judged solely the “fun” (whats “fun” in the first place?) things we do? Must we be assessed by the amount of hours spent contributing to the community?
Why not see us normal individuals trying to cope with life in a foreign land, and adjust one’s expectations accordingly? Hell, why judge in the first place?
Even if all of us were cast from one perfect scholar mould and released to the various universities, I can safely say that results will still vary widely. As what the commenter said it “works both ways”. Is the Singaporean community at say, LSE or UCL exactly the same in number, make up and composition as the community in Cornell , Madison or Ann Arbor? More importantly, is the school and the zeitgeist of the particular school uniform in all places? Obviously not. When taken together, these factors interact and affect how each Singaporean – and various other minorities groups on each campus intergrate and participate. So can one safely say for sure that just because an individual who had so much “fun” in one school, the same individual will have the same “fun” in another school? (again, “fun”/ “enriching” to one person differs from another’s idea) And so what’s the “characteristic experience” vis-à-vis cultural integration of an overseas Singaporean student then? Is there one in the first place? Sure it looks the same from the outside; will it look the same from the inside?
“do you just want the piece of paper that says you graduated from Cornell, because that's worth more on the market than a piece of paper that says you graduated from NUS? (don't forget the piece of paper isn't important in itself; it's employers' expectations of overseas grads - more independent, more initiative, etc - that are important in securing that job.)also - don't forget that it cuts both ways. if you think Americans (and not just "ang mohs" but the whole rainbow of races - "American" isn't a homogenous descriptor - and what about the Koreans, Turkish, Israeli, Nigerian, Kenyan and Indians at your school as well?) are antisocial, maybe it's because you're pushing them away by clustering as a small, segregated group of Singaporeans. it keeps you within your comfort zone, but it reflects poorly on us as a nation. is that the impression we want to give the world? that we are antisocial, arrogant and insular? i hope not”
that’s a meaningless comment. It’s not even worth a rejoinder but then, I’ve had enough of this self righteous crap.
Its certainly easy to point one’s languid fingers while safely snug in one’s own comfort zone, accusing us of being overachieving pricks more bent on maintaining a perfect GPA than being, ahem, perfect ambassadors for our country doing all the happy smiley things perfect people do, ie socializing and making shitloads of friends from all over the world and taking in their culture and playing an active role in their community yada yada blah blah splutter splutter .
Its all bullshit. Sure, I do not doubt for one moment that we are overachieving dicks- that’s what got us to where we are in the first place. To satisfy the sponsor, and to do the above mentioned? Sure, Windy might sound a little insular, but I don’t think he’s arrogant or antisocial per se.
This phenomenon of a homogeneous cluster-fuck is not uniquely Singaporean in the first place. I observe the same phenomenon happening in other international students in the lab I work in. The Chinese grad students in my lab hang out mostly with his fellow Chinese contemporaries. Same with the Indians. I would daresay the Koreans are even more close knit (and endogamous) than the Chinese. Hell, even the minorities in Madison stay together in groups. It is simply fatuous to ascribe this clustering as due to the supposed arrogance inherent in the “scholar mentality” of the sheltered well fed Singaporean scholar. Here the guy is assuming that as sponsored slaves, every one of us are extroverts, share the same worldview and even speak the same scholar-speak. Wtf?
Every sponsored kia is different. Windy is an introvert. So am I. There are other people who are extroverts and they do not necessarily share the same worldview as I or Windy. So whats wrong with being an introvert?
Why can’t we do our own thang and carve out a niche of our own? Must sponsored buggers be obliged to carry the task of merely being overt ambassadors of Singapore? Yes and No. One can if one wants to, I see this most strongly in EDB scholars. The buggers, well at least the ones I know are an extroverted bunch. And all power to them. I’m constantly amazed at the ability of almost all of them to socialize and make small talk at the drop of the hat. Of course, they are the ones with the wide network of friends. So what about the rest of us; the quiet geek archetypes who don’t value attention nor have time to spare socializing as a result of heavy academic workloads? I think that’s perfectly fine. At the end of the day its a matter of finding one’s niche. I’ve found my niche, and so does Wind. I work in a lab where I’m the only Singaporean around. I have a sprinkling of angmoh/ABC friends, mostly through work. They know me as a person and they know about Singapore- well at least its not part of China. I am comfortable. They are comfortable. And in Wind’s case, he does spare some time to play table tennis and he also has some foreign friends.
So what the hell is wrong with that? Must we judged on the number of non Singaporean friends we have? Must we judged solely the “fun” (whats “fun” in the first place?) things we do? Must we be assessed by the amount of hours spent contributing to the community?
Why not see us normal individuals trying to cope with life in a foreign land, and adjust one’s expectations accordingly? Hell, why judge in the first place?
Even if all of us were cast from one perfect scholar mould and released to the various universities, I can safely say that results will still vary widely. As what the commenter said it “works both ways”. Is the Singaporean community at say, LSE or UCL exactly the same in number, make up and composition as the community in Cornell , Madison or Ann Arbor? More importantly, is the school and the zeitgeist of the particular school uniform in all places? Obviously not. When taken together, these factors interact and affect how each Singaporean – and various other minorities groups on each campus intergrate and participate. So can one safely say for sure that just because an individual who had so much “fun” in one school, the same individual will have the same “fun” in another school? (again, “fun”/ “enriching” to one person differs from another’s idea) And so what’s the “characteristic experience” vis-à-vis cultural integration of an overseas Singaporean student then? Is there one in the first place? Sure it looks the same from the outside; will it look the same from the inside?
Friday, July 15, 2005
i. am. seething. right. now.
lets. just. say. i. want. to. kill. lab. techs.
f.u.c.k.i.n.g a.y.
....
oh and ostentatious bastards. if you're hollow go fill yourself up with yourself. you don't have anything to prove to me.
lets. just. say. i. want. to. kill. lab. techs.
f.u.c.k.i.n.g a.y.
....
oh and ostentatious bastards. if you're hollow go fill yourself up with yourself. you don't have anything to prove to me.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
somehow, i'd wish i've learnt to be a cocky bastard from the start of secondary school. but noooOooo i had to be that self obsessed nerd that combed my hair with Vitalis and a ruler for the parting in order to meet the fucking discipline master's requirement. 4 years of that shite gave me the supernatural ability to force myself to do anything i want out of pure discipline, but effectively removed testosterone from my balls. yes, in other words, i became a limp wristed diffident fuck. my limp wristed ballless outlook persisted throughout my NS (ask my bunkmates; they'd tell you what a obedient soldier i was), when i diverted my resources to trying to hook a scholarship than trying to maintain my relationship with my ex, which explained why it bombed terribly; and it had to be bombed after my NS, as per Murphy's law. but anyway,
nowadays i think i'm having a delayed teenhood. coming from the party school that is Madison (riots in Halloween. yearly. nuff said) and despite my near monasteric lifestyle, one still cannot be immune from this hedonistic zeitgeist that hangs around even after the weekend and that which made my free weekends (not that i had many to start with) living hell. Hence the teenager-like why-does-no-one-want-me-oo-i-hate-myself posts. Its freaking boring, to say the least. Even worse, I've been kicking myself for not having enough ballz to get the phone numbers of TWO, freaking TWO girls that I met and kinda fancied. ok. not fancied. interested WTF! i've had enough of this lack of testicular fortitude. It wasn't the failed attempted that completely pissed me off. It was the complete lack of doing something. Zhenzhi was right, at least where I am concerned. Shit.
While the idea of myself suddenly turning from sex deprived geek to sex deprived poser is not exactly entertaining, i think its time i started living again. well, at least for one more month or so.
exactly how though, thats the problem. ie, how does one appear not desperate when one is desperate as ... er.. nevermind.
on another note, who
a) likes cold weather up to -10 degrees Celsius
b) likes walking
c) likes train rides?
am planning a backpacking trip to Eastern Europe during Winter break. who wants to join?
nowadays i think i'm having a delayed teenhood. coming from the party school that is Madison (riots in Halloween. yearly. nuff said) and despite my near monasteric lifestyle, one still cannot be immune from this hedonistic zeitgeist that hangs around even after the weekend and that which made my free weekends (not that i had many to start with) living hell. Hence the teenager-like why-does-no-one-want-me-oo-i-hate-myself posts. Its freaking boring, to say the least. Even worse, I've been kicking myself for not having enough ballz to get the phone numbers of TWO, freaking TWO girls that I met and kinda fancied. ok. not fancied. interested WTF! i've had enough of this lack of testicular fortitude. It wasn't the failed attempted that completely pissed me off. It was the complete lack of doing something. Zhenzhi was right, at least where I am concerned. Shit.
While the idea of myself suddenly turning from sex deprived geek to sex deprived poser is not exactly entertaining, i think its time i started living again. well, at least for one more month or so.
exactly how though, thats the problem. ie, how does one appear not desperate when one is desperate as ... er.. nevermind.
on another note, who
a) likes cold weather up to -10 degrees Celsius
b) likes walking
c) likes train rides?
am planning a backpacking trip to Eastern Europe during Winter break. who wants to join?
Saturday, July 09, 2005
i just realized that there are recurrent themes in the content of the blog thus far. and its not really good. in fact, its freakin' boring. i mean, wtf, i could even predict myself what i'm going to write according to the seasonal changes. i don't think this would validate the thinking that a human's emotion cycles according to the seasons, but this would just be plain proof that I, am just a boring piece of shite. i met up with my juniors who were overseas and they were telling me tall tales of fun and fun and more fun and backpacking and travelling, while i could only give them a bewildered look: " oh. but you see, i'm a monk and my monastery is my lab. ohmm" wtf man. they've been in the US for only one year and they've had more fun (and for some, more *ahem* ) than me. wtf wtf wtf wtf. and i've only got one more year left. wtf wtf wtf wtf.
anyway, to illustrate the boring shit life i lead i present to you my thematic blog template for a sample year :
The Cyclical Life of Wang - TCZB Wang
- Fall Semester
- celebrate and feel excited about coming semester.
- celebrate the impending cool weather.
-moan about 3.8 GPA requirement
-moan about asshole scholars sucking up to sponsor
- insert random observation about beer and its powers of boosting mugging (or lack thereof, dependant on time and context)
-moan about love lost and more love lost (especially pronounced during thanksgiving season)
-Spring Semester
-celebrate end of Fall emester.
celebrate and feel excited about coming semester
-bitch about cold weather
-moan about 3.8 GPA requirement
-moant about ....
u get the idea.
i'm bored already.
WTF!
anyway, to illustrate the boring shit life i lead i present to you my thematic blog template for a sample year :
The Cyclical Life of Wang - TCZB Wang
- Fall Semester
- celebrate and feel excited about coming semester.
- celebrate the impending cool weather.
-moan about 3.8 GPA requirement
-moan about asshole scholars sucking up to sponsor
- insert random observation about beer and its powers of boosting mugging (or lack thereof, dependant on time and context)
-moan about love lost and more love lost (especially pronounced during thanksgiving season)
-Spring Semester
-celebrate end of Fall emester.
celebrate and feel excited about coming semester
-bitch about cold weather
-moan about 3.8 GPA requirement
-moant about ....
u get the idea.
i'm bored already.
WTF!
