Today is the first time in weeks that I actually have any time, space or energy to just appreciate the concept of "I have a life for the first time in November."
The last 2 weeks have been a never-ending cycle of going to school, sitting on a hard bench, enduring random self-disclosures and bad jokes and trying to cram stuff into your head that you can't recall in the exam because you don't even have time to THINK.
The exams are certainly not much more than a speed writing exercise. We should have a module on speed writing. If one could write faster I'm sure even a C paper would become an A paper because you wrote twice as much crap as your neighbour. The exams are essentially an exercise in crapping. If you want to find diamonds in the rough, you need more rough.
About crap, here's what I actually did for my 205 exam, a module on speech and argumentation. We were supposed to write 5 key selling points for some policy for the first question. After spending about 5 minutes wondering what the question really wanted, I wrote down my 5 points. However, one of them went like this. Have no fear, for Spring Singapore is here! It was so cheesy that I cringed, and beside it I put in a bracket (yeah, corny I know).
I don't know why I did that but I couldn't resist it. It was probably a way to absolve my guilt at writing something that corny. Not to mention it stopped me from cringing every time I saw it again.
Since I'm in an exam mood, let me teach 201! My favourite subject, although the exam's over.
The situation: You just farted. Even as you are suffering in it, your greatest fear is, "Can anyone else smell it oh-my-gawd." You start wondering how you will excuse yourself from such appalling and anti-social behaviour. Somehow, you don't know what's worse. The fact that you're suffering, or that someone will realize what you just did and suffer along with you.
The constitutive rule is that farting is antisocial. The regulative rule however, varies depending on whether you want to admit it and how smelly the fart is. If it really stinks and you're in lecture, and its obvious that everyone is gagging and about to pass on, a good script to use would be "Not me!" However, if it isn't that bad, and it isn't that obvious that you're the perpetrator, like in the case when there are only 2 people in the lift, you can use "Hey who farted ah?"
If you are the kind who can't lie, say "Sorry".
However the dumbest thing is, the apology doesn't work on yourself. You are still suffering, and despite apologizing, so is everyone else. Sometimes, the best regulative rule is just to sit there and stay silent and hope that it all dissipates quickly so you can pretend it never happened.