It's weird. My exam is a week away and i still have the time to reflect and look back at the things I've been through.
Me  and my lads were chatting during lunch. We talked about the days when  we were secondary school. Out of 10 of us, 7 of us were Police Cadets.  The other three lads are sportsmen. I told them i was a Police Cadet. Ah  
Cao laughed, Will 
Teoh shocked, 
Kok Fai knew already, and the rest were stunned. You can stun your opponents in a 
Dota  game and look what happens to those game characters. Now, you equate  that with the 7 guys who are stunned. The next moment, they asked "Are  you talking crap?"
It got me laughing. I was the hog-eating-tiger  kind of guy. I look like a douche or a weakling. But hell, i bite when  it matters. Then, we talked about the good old days of secondary school.
I enjoyed my secondary school days. It wasn't like your primary schooling where you are piled with lots of 
homeworks and 
tuitions that you never have to chance to try something else. All you do was homework, homework, homework and 
tuitions. (I was in 
Chinese primary 
by the way, so 
I'm not exactly ABC.)
I really get to live my life in 
SMK Datuk Lokman.  It's a very normal school at the time i enrolled it. (Before, it was a  school of gangsters.) It's not as bad as it seems. It has all types of  people you'll meet and grow up with in Malaysia. It's like a small  country where you have bright kids, normal kids, 
badass kids and kids who will go to jail.
First  year, i mix around with gangs until my parents got very worried and  talked about this problem to the Vice-principle of afternoon session.  Then, i changed and mixed with the nerds. Call me a geek then.
PMR was very easy. I studied hard only during the 2 months prior to 
PMR.  I got very impressive grades that my teachers thought i was a bright  student. I wasn't. I was slack and wanna live my life, do dumb things,  try new stuff, involved in activities and do something to the principle  before i enter college.
Yes, i did them all. study was a secondary mission because i know very well 
I'll be entering 
STPM.  So, i enrolled for Police Cadet and the English Language Society. I  also participated in a small private choir known as the Little Noise. I  was proud of being a Police Cadet. It's the only uniform society where  different types of people with 
noob-ness  in every newbie get to mix around, work together, and grow into a very  efficient and discipline human being. For the first time, i witnessed  how kids so weak in terms of mentality and physicality, trained and  pushed to become a very different, stronger person. I have my full  respect to these people. Don't call them kids even if they are just 15  years old. They'll whoop your ass.
Little Noise was a meaningful  singers club. It is also the only club, thanks to one lady, where  friends group together and do things we loved most - have fun with  music. But it wasn't a matter of singing. We learned how to organize  events, meet new people and organizations, create networks and be in the  media (public attention). All these on a very tight budget. Besides,  it's a place where we socialize and forget our pain and stresses we face  in school. It was a very 
pleasing and meaningful experience. I used write that phrase in my essay 
writing for 
English subjects but i don't know what does it mean. Now, I experience it very well.
Little  Noise also gave me a field to test my feelings. I had a crush on a  girl. It was the crush of a lifetime, a bad one. She was pretty, sweet  and friendly. I saw her for the first and i thought "wow, i gotta try to  go for it." I started my 'assault' when i 
received the first so-called hint. Maybe i misunderstood but if you saw that, you would believe it. I wouldn't tell you what is that.
Honestly,  i don't have as much a feeling as i had once when i was younger. I just  wanna live a life and experience the things i won't do. So here goes, i  took her as a social experiment. For her, i fought against my parents,  did a year's worth of lecture notes for one subject (i did it nicely  too), and she kept me waiting for 2 years. It was hell of a chase. Then,  i finally gave up. I knew it was over but it was worth while. 
After all,  it was only a social experiment to the max. You never get to do it  again later in life. Unsuspectingly, her killer blow came. After all the  years of emotions and the hell that i been through for her, she said  she 
chose a girl over me. Wow, that really hurt. Fair enough. I was the one asking for trouble after all.
Then,  form 6 i entered as expected. For the first time in my life, i get to  be a school prefect. Nothing to be proud of except that my first job of  being a prefect for the first time is be the vice-head prefect. In other  words, 
I'm  standing next to the head prefect, the boss that is in-charge of the  welfare and discipline of all pupils. It's kind of cool when i look  back. I was never a prefect, and out of somewhere i got the job offer to  be the vice-head pupil of 
Datuk Lokman. I have no experience in the field and i basically enjoyed breaking one or two petty school rules. I jumped at the offer.
Form 6 is basically taking the 3rd hardest exam in the world, THE 
STPM. This is the most stressful, people-changing, brain-washing, very stern test for a person. If you take 
STPM, you'll be a totally developed person 1 and a half years later. I won't bee different. My childhood friends still mentioned 
I'm the same old person, just that i am developed in many ways; partly because of Little Noise, and partly because of 
STPM.
Now,  you add the two element together. You are the vice-head of pupils as  well as tackling the 3rd toughest exam in the world at the same time  being the president of an 
Engligh Language Club (a failure club) while still actively involved in a heavy Little Noise musical project. This is what i call fun.
I was lucky again. My boos, the head pupil of the school, was a 
smartass. He encouraged me to play chess. He's a left 
hander, domestic winner of chess competitions, and a former athlete for Karate who went to 
Macau 2004. That's why i call him a 
smartass,  i used to call him kiddo. He knew how to use the arsenal that i have in  me. Being the vice- head boy and a newbie in prefect, i don't know much  on the function and way of things moving in the prefect hierarchy. But i  adapt very quickly and assert my influence. My boss is a little hot  tempered kind. So, when there is something bad happen, 
I'm the one to tell them how to correct and deal with things. But somethings just worth blasting about. I only 
lambasted the kids once, and that one memorable one. I don't remembered what i did.
The  English Language Society does not have kids who takes the initiative  and commitment to do things. All they did was slack and talk cock. They  are so good at that that i gave up any operations i had in mind. The  whole society had no activities throughout the year. Fail, don't you  think? I mean, i fail. As the boss i should be able to motivate people.  However, i had bad experience with these people so i just gave up on  them.
I quit the police cadet because i feared that i will not  have time. I have a larger activity to handle and that was out of  school: the Little Noise choir. That year was the 
pinnacle  of my involvement with the choir. The founder had an ambitious plan:  she wrote a musical set (inclusive of script, plot and its music; she's  bloody talented and she's no longer available and she's in China now).  It's called the Midnight Puppet. It's a first original musical Malaysian  production. The plot, story, dialogues and music are all developed  in-house. We are gonna bring this on BIG TIME.
We went too ambitious as to go to 
Genting and try to get a venue. The person in-charge plant us firmly onto the ground. He said "It is possible to perform in 
Genting  but you need to have credit. You need to have the reputation to do so.  And as for you young and new group, it is best to first perform in KL  and make a name for yourselves. Then, we'll come looking for you." He  next act of kindness was 
very grateful to us. He gave us the mobile number and personal email of a man very 
influential in the local music scene. I'm won't say who but you can look for the person who made 
Mawi famous, who also founded the Malaysian Artist Association and the AIM Awards.
Then,  the everything begins to fall into pieces. All we need was media  attention and The Star came. We managed to get some sponsors, we build  our own props, we practiced with much frequency and the ambition has  finally achieved. Along the way, we met many cool people and a choir  coach who is a big name. On the night we achieved our ambition, we made  some audience cried, laughed, touched and enjoyed themselves. I was on a  high and everything felt perfect. I have never sing solo before and  this was a proud achievement. One or two magazines came and watched, we 
received  calls from various parties to ask to perform at other places. But my  dreams are short lived. My parents stopped from the involvement and  demanded that i focus on my studies. So i had to. It was one of the rock  bottoms of my life. I'll never have a chance like that again, or maybe  the coach might allow me to join his very own choir.
Then, it is time to focus on 
STPM.  Hell, it was hard. You have to change the way you think, the way you  see things and the way you understand things. A-levels was pretty easy  stuff compared to 
STPM. If you don't believe me, you can compare the character of 
STPM and any non-
STPM  in Malaysia. You can see the difference. That's where i understand to  full extent what stress is like and how stress creeps into you and you  start to feel the fatigue. And when you are about to succumb to fatigue,  you realized the exams is just around the corner and you force yourself  to push on and never give up. That is what we call the determination  and human spirit.
I made a terrible strategy. I know by gut  feeling that i will fail my chemistry paper terribly so i thought of  full attacking to the subject until 
i'm ok with it. Until the last three months, i realized that i still could not get 
to grips with it so i shifted my focus to the other two Physics and Math, which 
I'm stronger at. I shifted too late. But i still managed to pass the papers except for Chemistry; i failed terribly. Sob.
The 
STPM  results came out. It wasn't good enough to enter a government  university, but i wasn't planning to go to a local U. My study strategy  was so bad that my result was not enough to enroll to better  institutions. But i was so damn lucky there's this thing called TAR  College. I'm a 
TARC-
ian now, a very proud one. It's one cool place to be in...
If I'm in my mood, I'll come up with the second part...Just feels like it. Oh, and drop some comments...Hit Me...