It's been ridiculously long since my last post, but I feel that now may possibly be a good time. My eyes are sore, I have a throbbing headache, the Self-Access English Learning Facility where I'm currently am doing my part-time job is quiet and cold (both because there are too few students around because it's the midterm break over here at NUS), and there have been too many thoughts swimming in my head I want to coop them all up in one long blog entry.
How I've managed to not blog when so many things have happened can only be explained by two words: Honours Year. Add to that Joseph's incurable Superman Syndrome, driving him to want to do this and that and this again, never mind the physical/emotional/mental toll (hello part-time job, hello Executive Editor for the school magazine, goodbye NUS Choir though), and good old fussiness (about everything else except his hostel room), and you have, ladies and gentlemen, an explosive recipe that can go either way -- it can be mindblowingly fantastic (or Drastic Fantastic if you, like me, like Scottish singer KT Tunstall), or it can be, well, massively disastrous.
But then again, I ask myself, what's new? Joseph has earned a reputation for being stressed and high-strung regarding schoolwork and everything else for the longest time here in the University, so yeah, I guess it's just like that. All in a day's work.
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Needless to say, the past few weeks have been incredibly hectic for me. The highlight of it all, perhaps, was the week that just passed. On Thursday I had a tutorial submission due for my Computer-Intensive Statistical Methods class, and it required long computer lab sessions involving random number generation and simulation. On Friday I had two projects due: one was a discussion on statistical tests of a research study for my Clinical Trials module, and another was the first presentation for my Nonparametric Statistics project.
The Computer-Intensive Stats tutorial I couldn't understand at all, let alone how to actually derive the formulas and come up with computer codes. A classmate lent me her senior's notes, and even then, trying to work backwards, I still couldn't understand. Depressing. I finished it up in the end, and then it was on to the Clinical Trials project. Never before have I crammed for a project due in two days' time. And it wasn't because I was slacking too, trust me. I did half of it, and postponed the rest until Friday afternoon, as the deadline was Friday midnight. I focused instead on my Nonparametric Statistics project, a group project, but which only I was tasked to present as I did most of the programming codes, and because I spoke more fluent English than my Chinese groupmates. Tidied up the presentation, even used the LateX program so the equations would look more professional, and slept for my usual four to five hours a night.
So I presented at 10:30AM, and after I presented, I asked the small class of 15, "Any questions?" To my absolute horror, almost everyone's hands were up. My heart sank. Of course I tried to regain composure and joke around a bit while asking for reinforcements in the form of my three Chinese groupmates, but in the end, it was, just like that: we were too caught up doing the numerical and graphical analysis of the data that we forgot the underlying assumptions in the first place, the actual real-life interpretation of the data, and the aim and direction of the entire project. "Don't be upset, it was fine. You just need to think about your data more," our lecturer and my Honours Year Project supervisor Dr Chen was saying. Well I was upset, for sure, but thanks Dr Chen, for always being nice and encouraging.
Later in the evening, after getting over the presentation that bombed, I continued doing my Clinical Trials project. In the midst of the task, I received some email from the layout artists from The Ridge, the student magazine of which I'm the Executive Editor. He asked why the article he was supposed to layout was not uploaded in the Yahoo!groups yet. Mea culpa. I promised it would be up in an hour's time. I edited the article quick, and resumed doing my project. My phone rang after a few minutes. It was another layout artist, asking about another article that wasn't up yet, apparently taking the cue from the earlier one who emailed. I asked, "Err.. are you doing your layout now?" "Yes" was the reply. OK, so Joseph did some quick quick editing and file up in 20 minutes. In the end I dropped the hardcopy of my project in my lecturer's pigeonhole (I walked from my room to the Science building) at 2AM , two hours after the deadline. I was thinking, he would not notice anyway. Haha I remember Karen doing the same for our film history module last semester at 1AM, while I dutifully submitted right on the dot after much mad typing and even madder running at 4:55PM. Haha.
Anyway, so that's that. I don't want to quote Matchbox Twenty's Mad Season again in this blog, or my nick on Windows Live Messenger. Haha suffice it to say, that it absolutely is Mad Season right now in NUS. It goes without saying.
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Wow, it's 3:46PM already, and I began typing at 2:42PM. I will always be fascinated at my incredibly slow writing speed. I'd like to think it's more than just typing. It's thinking and reflecting, and deconstructing and reconstructing all at the same time. It may not be coherent, but that's fine. Somehow, I'm feeling slightly less stressed now, now that the burdens of the past weeks have been, well, cyber-inked and chronicled. I still have a lot to say, but it gets personal, and I'll leave that for the next entry, which will probably come way sooner than you think.
