Life is finally starting to return to normal. I wake up at 10am, lumber around like a zombie, and start eating brunch. In the holidays, I don't really take breakfast. It's more like brunch, dinner and supper.
But today, I was dragged out of bed for an interview, because my parents were like you ought to try for this scholarship, supposedly some fund where you get 10k and no bond. Its like 4D, only that you don't have to pay 2 dollars to buy in. You just kick your son out of bed and tell him to get his ass down to the venue.
So at 9am I found myself in formal wear at some clan association in Singapore waiting to be interviewed, along with rows of people in formal wear all grimacing and looking terse like they had a bad stomachache.
I tried to do the friendly thing and talk to one of them.
"Hey dude where are you from?"
"SMU."
"Which school and year?"
"Business, year 2"
"SMU is fun huh."
He looked at me like I just told him the most ridiculous thing in the world. I mean okay if I had said "NTU is fun huh" it would be justified. You will never find NTU and fun in the same sentence, unless that sentence is "NTU is not fun." But hello we're talking about Shopping Mall Uni here. I moved on to another few people after that. This guy was about as chatty as a frigid dead fish, and he probably had the life to match.
I moved on to someone from NTU. Unfortunately this guy was from Triple E. He kept telling me about how the Chinese scholars never found any exam difficult. I was like "Hmm yeah hee-haw." Ok, minus the hee-haw but I wasn't particularly interested in listening. Yeah pi-r-squared thank you very much goodbye.
After that I met some other NTU pple. There was this girl from hwachong who was like "I love maths, so accountancy was a natural choice for me". At that moment I got a little culture shock because I'd forgotten that there are still girls who love maths. And she said it with a totally genuine and earnest face.
In CS that very same expression would mean "I love shopping, clubbing..." and after that 100 other activities, then maybe "I love maths, so accountancy was a natural choice for me." Before that, you would probably hear stuff like "I love gambling, so playing mahjong was a natural choice for me."
Soon the bell rang for my turn, and the interview was on. There was one stern looking middle aged guy in the centre, and two white haired gents at the side. They asked me why I wanted to be a journalist. and I quoted someone else's biography. I hope they don't read it, because I'm pretty sure I mixed the quotes up. I'm leaning towards advertising at the moment, but in interviews, you don't really want to tell them that you're doing it because journalism pays shit.
Next they asked me why I would want to be a journalist in Singapore, since there was the freedom of speech issue. I took what I learnt in about media laws and practices and unloaded it on those old men. Along the way I could feel my ears burn because I knew I was bullshitting but I saw the old men's smiles getting wider, although the guy in the middle had a permanently raised eyebrow. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I was criticising a certain old man surnamed Lee and the other white clad thunder gods, and doing it with a damn lot of panache.
Finally, they asked me if I had done any community service in the past year. I was like "okay that's it, play the community service card". So I redefined the word community for them. I mean, the community doesn't just consist of old people so technically, I can say that doing FOC is community service for the CS community. Obviously they didn't buy it but there are only so many old folks homes in Singapore, and there are too many young kids fighting for CIP hours. I don't want to snatch their CIP bowl.
And now that that's out of the way, back to normalcy.