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...
