A friend sitting next to me talks about working in the banking industry. The friend sitting opposite gives advice on clinching an internship. Soon, the whole table starts talking about Citibank, Standard Chartered, Barclays, Bank of Tokyo (Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd), JPMorgan, and about this or that friend working in this and that big-name firm.

I still can’t answer the question of what I want to do after I graduate, I don’t even know whether I’ll be in Singapore at that time, but if conversations are going to be like this from now on…

For now, I’m just satisfied with the little steps I make from time to time. I just want to live the remnants of my student life in the way students should be allowed peace and isolation from the world after, even though most college students around me in this era have more or less established where they want to be in life.

Perhaps I refuse to abandon the disillusion that things will somehow work out, with the complacency that they always do.

There’s an increase in the sound of wedding bells, or friends wanting to sound the bells. Talks of marriage, buying houses and whatnot fill dinner tables, and I try to understand their whines that it’s such a pain, when my idea of marriage is everyone having a helluva good time because we all get to fly across the Pacific Ocean for a happy holiday throwing maple leaves at me and (dare I say it) Sam.

But I do feel the pinch of age when thinking of skydiving and bungee jumping gives me the shudders. I admit I’m increasingly afraid of leaving the world too suddenly. Roller-coaster rides don’t possess the appeal they used to, just when not too long ago I could get down from a death-mocking ride and itch for another. I’m more conscientious about health and dental check-ups, and I can’t ignore heart/lung pains anymore. Routine headaches, fevers, diarrhoea, knee pain, and cramps; nightly dosage of medication and daily dosages of supplements all tell me that I’m no longer young and invincible. Looking at the metal brace on one of my molars, I know the possibility of bodily dysfunctions is very real, and very now.

I guess I still want to believe that things will only happen many years later so there’s nothing to worry about. I’m 23 this year and very much expected to be an adult who should know what to do, what’s next. Truth is, I have one foot in school and the other merely tiptoeing nervously beyond.

Almost all my friends are graduating in the next two months while I’m just hoping the next year and a half will whizz by, but yet not slip by without my consciousness.

These days I’m just indulging in brain-degenerating activities like peeling and eating mandarins in class or in between them (and spitting the seeds anywhere and everywhere with bad aim towards the bin), eating mo pi in between eating mandarins, eating popcorn chicken with yam milk tea, basically eating till I’m left with only one pair of pants that fits.

I’m indulging in being a student, albeit not a studious one, sitting at the back of class talking or sleeping or eating mandarins/a banana/nuts/dan bing or all of that; or sitting in the small classroom for English classes waving flying chalk powder away with my hands along with the rest of my classmates (as if it helps); to laughing at all the little things we do to make class time speed by (like doodle in our books); or taking pictures of my friends and I sleeping or being bored in class (see below). We fantasize about life after all these, but never dare to make any concrete plans.

I’m getting at nothing with all this incoherence, and it tells of my impoverished worldliness. Nevertheless, I know I’m enjoying the life of a student’s, having the power to skip classes to get more sleep/to go shopping/to eat crispy-skinned duck/to forge closer bonds with friends. I do feel pressurized to establish some connections beyond the schoolgates, but there’s the rest of my life to be obsessed with that, right? Why not savour my privileges (like having decorum AWOL) now?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:05 am and is filed under Campus Life, Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.