11 April, 2006
(0 ) 00:14 This might repeat some things that were mentioned in the post made earlier, below. However this was written separately, as a cathartic piece of writing, a ramble if you will. Hence do excuse the discontinuity.
I feel like dissecting my feelings right now, even though it's not the right time to do it because I'm so tired I want to sleep, even though I need to wake up so bloody early tomorrow morning, every morning, even though I have work to do that I have not completed. I feel this compulsive need to make my feelings clear to myself. All these thoughts are running around in my head, amok, with nary a regard to order. It's making me confused, the entropy of my mind simply hitting the wall and rebounding back, chaos multiplied.
The dominant feeling I have right now is not foreign. It is one I have dealt with before, yet still do not like. It is brought upon by deadlines and late nights with not enough sleep. I don't even know what to call it, but it manifests itself in a sinking sensation in my stomach, coupled by a need for a lot of sighing and needless screen-sucking. The latter perhaps not even being unintentional. I can't say I have, quantitatively, a lot of tasks to complete. Putting aside schoolwork for a moment, what's pressing is fac comm work, which entails finishing the website (which I will get to in a moment). It's not an awful lot, to tell the truth. I have to get the blog working, which I have just given up for the night because my mind doesn't feel up to processing imagination into HTML code for tables, which I simply cannot summon the energy needed for my lousy-mind-that-works-at-the-speed-of-a-crawling-snail to work. Hence I've decided that I would downgrade to Wordpress 1.2, with most of the customised code fobbed off my own site so I don't have to think so much. Besides, I'm more familiar with the 1.2 interface, making things a damn much easier. Sigh. This is terribly reflective of my personality, whether I like it or not. I can argue that it's so much more practical because I'm lazy and I want the blog done up fast, but the fact remains that I'm far more comfortable with things that I'm familiar with than things that I am not. I am reluctant to venture into territory where things are murky and unknown.
This allows me to recall last Friday, when we were doing our skill A practical assignment in Physics lab. We were simply thrown an experiment on capacitors which we had no idea how they worked at that time, and all I felt was a deep sense of confusion and a sort of gasping-for-air reflex, bringing on the familiar gripping of pen in my hand and nervous, rapid gunfire on the tabletop. The sensation of being lost, of floundering in a sea with no rescue in sight, is so damned terrifying. I didn't know what to do, I didn't pause to think rationally, all I could do was latch on hungrily to the analyses of others, of the tutor, and pass them off as my answer. I can't work unguided, I can't step onto the road less travelled, because I become so afraid I become unable to function at a productive level.
Digressing aside, I shall return to my talk about the fac website. Aside from the blog, I have the rest of the content to make up, which is basically a writeup on our faculty goddess, our mascot, aims and whatnot, a short bio/list of the councillors who are in our faculty as well as the fac comm itself and pictures and writeups of past events that have occured in our faculty. It isn't that much. I just have to get around to doing it. I just have to put aside this constant feeling of tiredness that permeates my eyelids and make me feel like dozing off, like sleep-dust, fairy-sprinkled, into the eyes of dreaming children, who never ever wake up again.
I feel like I am not doing enough, yet this statement is as ironic as it is hypocritcal. It is hypocritical because I will not venture out to do more out of my own free will, simply because I am not a person with a heart so big as to relieve the suffering of others at the expense of myself, and also because I have no love for the faculty, this I admit frankly. That is also the reason why the statement is ironic, because why should I feel as if I am not doing enough when I don't care enough to want to do more anyway? However this statement, this feeling, is so reflective of my inner inadequacies, of feeling that whatever I do is never good enough, that everyone is silently sneering over my work and crossing their fingers behind their backs as they let false words and false eyes praise me. An (admittedly) rational part of me says there is a possibility that this is not true, that it is all in the mind, something which the irrational part of me even agrees with sometimes, but aren't we all made up of impulses, of feelings, of instincts, that make us so irrational that it is only through this irrationality that we can be truly qualified as human beings?
I say I have felt this feeling before. The best and most recent example would be during the Project Work period last year. Dear Lord, it was hell. Okay, I admit I wouldn't have spilt any blood over it, of mine or of others, but it was still torturous, akin to slowly pressing a sharpened blade over your skin, then sliding it over, not hard enough to cut but enough to leave a thin red, line, then repeating the process again until blood begins to bead through, until the red line becomes more of a mark, before beginning at a fresh spot, and repeating the entire process again.
But there is more. Tomorrow there will be a meeting for the choir publicity committee and I'll more likely than not, be given more work to do. It's not that I'm griping about it. The difference between the fac comm and the choir is that I love the latter, and I don't mind sacrificing my time and energy to the betterment of it. But the fact remains that there will be another set of deadlines and sleepless nights.
I seem to be writing a lot about workload, but oddly enough, I'm not feeling bogged down by the pressure of workload alone. After all, I am only taking 3 'A' level subjects. That's a very light load -- let's overlook the expectation to get As for all three subjects at the moment. It's so much, so much more than that. I've probably written about it in previous posts, mentioning it cryptically or briefly, more often than not adopting a self-pitying tone while writing about it. But to tell the truth, most of the problem lies with me and my absolute dissatisfaction with my very self. I've gone over this before, a dozen times, and I cannot convince myself that I actually like the person I am, because the exact opposite is true and try as I might I am unable to lie to myself.
I think I shall stop here. Though I haven't completely written about the feelings that I am experiencing at this period of my life, The past few paragraphs have been cathartic enough for me to take a breather. Perhaps this is Anaylsis I, of myself. Perhaps there will be an Analysis II some time in the future, when again I am feeling confused and lost and need something concrete to hold onto, where that something is the concrete certainty of words and phrases that can be spun over and over in different ways to mean the same thing but with subtle shades of meaning to convey exactly what you want them to. Words are mightier than swords, for you can sharpen them or shape them, direct them or withdraw them, so fluid is its nature.
Enough rubbish. On with my life.
I feel like dissecting my feelings right now, even though it's not the right time to do it because I'm so tired I want to sleep, even though I need to wake up so bloody early tomorrow morning, every morning, even though I have work to do that I have not completed. I feel this compulsive need to make my feelings clear to myself. All these thoughts are running around in my head, amok, with nary a regard to order. It's making me confused, the entropy of my mind simply hitting the wall and rebounding back, chaos multiplied.
The dominant feeling I have right now is not foreign. It is one I have dealt with before, yet still do not like. It is brought upon by deadlines and late nights with not enough sleep. I don't even know what to call it, but it manifests itself in a sinking sensation in my stomach, coupled by a need for a lot of sighing and needless screen-sucking. The latter perhaps not even being unintentional. I can't say I have, quantitatively, a lot of tasks to complete. Putting aside schoolwork for a moment, what's pressing is fac comm work, which entails finishing the website (which I will get to in a moment). It's not an awful lot, to tell the truth. I have to get the blog working, which I have just given up for the night because my mind doesn't feel up to processing imagination into HTML code for tables, which I simply cannot summon the energy needed for my lousy-mind-that-works-at-the-speed-of-a-crawling-snail to work. Hence I've decided that I would downgrade to Wordpress 1.2, with most of the customised code fobbed off my own site so I don't have to think so much. Besides, I'm more familiar with the 1.2 interface, making things a damn much easier. Sigh. This is terribly reflective of my personality, whether I like it or not. I can argue that it's so much more practical because I'm lazy and I want the blog done up fast, but the fact remains that I'm far more comfortable with things that I'm familiar with than things that I am not. I am reluctant to venture into territory where things are murky and unknown.
This allows me to recall last Friday, when we were doing our skill A practical assignment in Physics lab. We were simply thrown an experiment on capacitors which we had no idea how they worked at that time, and all I felt was a deep sense of confusion and a sort of gasping-for-air reflex, bringing on the familiar gripping of pen in my hand and nervous, rapid gunfire on the tabletop. The sensation of being lost, of floundering in a sea with no rescue in sight, is so damned terrifying. I didn't know what to do, I didn't pause to think rationally, all I could do was latch on hungrily to the analyses of others, of the tutor, and pass them off as my answer. I can't work unguided, I can't step onto the road less travelled, because I become so afraid I become unable to function at a productive level.
Digressing aside, I shall return to my talk about the fac website. Aside from the blog, I have the rest of the content to make up, which is basically a writeup on our faculty goddess, our mascot, aims and whatnot, a short bio/list of the councillors who are in our faculty as well as the fac comm itself and pictures and writeups of past events that have occured in our faculty. It isn't that much. I just have to get around to doing it. I just have to put aside this constant feeling of tiredness that permeates my eyelids and make me feel like dozing off, like sleep-dust, fairy-sprinkled, into the eyes of dreaming children, who never ever wake up again.
I feel like I am not doing enough, yet this statement is as ironic as it is hypocritcal. It is hypocritical because I will not venture out to do more out of my own free will, simply because I am not a person with a heart so big as to relieve the suffering of others at the expense of myself, and also because I have no love for the faculty, this I admit frankly. That is also the reason why the statement is ironic, because why should I feel as if I am not doing enough when I don't care enough to want to do more anyway? However this statement, this feeling, is so reflective of my inner inadequacies, of feeling that whatever I do is never good enough, that everyone is silently sneering over my work and crossing their fingers behind their backs as they let false words and false eyes praise me. An (admittedly) rational part of me says there is a possibility that this is not true, that it is all in the mind, something which the irrational part of me even agrees with sometimes, but aren't we all made up of impulses, of feelings, of instincts, that make us so irrational that it is only through this irrationality that we can be truly qualified as human beings?
I say I have felt this feeling before. The best and most recent example would be during the Project Work period last year. Dear Lord, it was hell. Okay, I admit I wouldn't have spilt any blood over it, of mine or of others, but it was still torturous, akin to slowly pressing a sharpened blade over your skin, then sliding it over, not hard enough to cut but enough to leave a thin red, line, then repeating the process again until blood begins to bead through, until the red line becomes more of a mark, before beginning at a fresh spot, and repeating the entire process again.
But there is more. Tomorrow there will be a meeting for the choir publicity committee and I'll more likely than not, be given more work to do. It's not that I'm griping about it. The difference between the fac comm and the choir is that I love the latter, and I don't mind sacrificing my time and energy to the betterment of it. But the fact remains that there will be another set of deadlines and sleepless nights.
I seem to be writing a lot about workload, but oddly enough, I'm not feeling bogged down by the pressure of workload alone. After all, I am only taking 3 'A' level subjects. That's a very light load -- let's overlook the expectation to get As for all three subjects at the moment. It's so much, so much more than that. I've probably written about it in previous posts, mentioning it cryptically or briefly, more often than not adopting a self-pitying tone while writing about it. But to tell the truth, most of the problem lies with me and my absolute dissatisfaction with my very self. I've gone over this before, a dozen times, and I cannot convince myself that I actually like the person I am, because the exact opposite is true and try as I might I am unable to lie to myself.
I think I shall stop here. Though I haven't completely written about the feelings that I am experiencing at this period of my life, The past few paragraphs have been cathartic enough for me to take a breather. Perhaps this is Anaylsis I, of myself. Perhaps there will be an Analysis II some time in the future, when again I am feeling confused and lost and need something concrete to hold onto, where that something is the concrete certainty of words and phrases that can be spun over and over in different ways to mean the same thing but with subtle shades of meaning to convey exactly what you want them to. Words are mightier than swords, for you can sharpen them or shape them, direct them or withdraw them, so fluid is its nature.
Enough rubbish. On with my life.