Monday, September 29, 2008
I've just returned home from a chalet stay-over held to celebrate QH's coming 1-year training programme at Lucasfilm in the US. Earlier last week, I met up with Brandon, who will be (if he has already signed the contract by now) relocating to Tokyo to work in a Japanese company later this year. So two friends whose presence in my life I have more or less been taking for granted will be leaving Singapore soon, and I may not be able to see them again for a long time.
It has been approximately 5 months since my last semester in school ended, and reality has finally sunk in. Where we once shared a common road, my friends have now embarked on their respective journeys along forking paths. Everyone seems to be going somewhere, getting somewhere. Except me.
Most of my friends are now in NIE, training to be future teachers. Some of them seem to be doing pretty well in the news media industry. Some of my JC and secondary school classmates are on their way to becoming well-heeled, sharp-suited Shenton Way executives.
And people whom I have thought of for the longest time as friends and school seniors have grown up all of a sudden and gotten married! Two of the pioneering anime club seniors have just tied the knot with each other on Saturday, and ZF sprung an even bigger whopper of a surprise on all of us at QH's chalet when he introduced us to his wife, who was previously his girlfriend only about a year ago.
And what have I been doing (and will be doing) in the time between graduation and starting school again in January? As much as I pretended to be indifferent, it never failed to irk me whenever this question was posed to me and I had to answer it with, "After NYP, I'm not going to find any employment" and confront the mildy incredulous and accusing looks of the questioner - "You're not going to work between now and then AT ALL??" And of course there's the familiar "You STILL want to study SOME MORE???" It's as if I can't justify my existence in this world if I'm not receiving a paycheck.
I'm certainly enjoying my last long holiday and spending my free time fruitfully (even though it may not appear so in the eyes of the rest of the world) but I can't stop feeling slightly envious whenever my friends talk about going for interviews and gripe about their jobs. It's as if everyone else is moving on to something new and great, whereas time for me is stuck in a rut. Unfortunately for me, the Eternal Student was an ideal which went out of fashion at the end of the Age of Enlightenment.
And on the romance front, nothing is happening as well. When I was an idealistic teenager in a single-sex secondary school, I used to dream of meeting the perfect guy in university, dating through school and a few years after that, and finally settling down happily ever after at age 29, no earlier and no later.
Having spent the past four years actually living the real life of a university student, I have come to realize how horrendously naive I was, and I don't agree with the idea of deliberately looking for love just to be in a relationship, yet I can't help but sometimes be plagued with a lurking twinge of bitterness which has to be suppressed in the face of happy school sweethearts innocently wanting me to wish them the best.
Sick of relationships which die before they even begin, I bemoan, like an annoying, whiny, self-pitying, pathetic loser, "Why does everyone else manage to find happiness? When will it be MY turn to be happy???"
But ultimately, these feelings of envy are only temporary. Come next January, time will be zooming by with the aid of readings and seminars and papers, and before I know it, I will be standing in the UCC auditorium with another piece of paper in my hands again. And, in a rather ironic but perhaps not unpleasant turn of events, (school)work will help to preoccupy me and put all thoughts of romance out of my head.
And even now, deep down inside, I know I would not have my life as it is now any other way.
kaoru said at 2:33 AM
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