Living in hostel is a totally different experience from living at home. I still remember the first few days of this year when I was excited about living in hostel. It felt like living in a holiday chalet. Now whenever I use the meleleuca shampoo and body soap I started using during those days, those feelings of excitement and adventure come rushing back. I remember the first few weeks, when everything we did was exciting, because everything was a new experience. Waking up at six in the morning to go for a morning run was something that we would do with enthusiasm. Then we would have breakfast in the peaceful atmosphere of the canteen, while little people were in school. In between lessons, being able to return ‘home’ to rest was a luxury which I find extraordinarily gratifying. But after time, the lethargy started to set in and the initial hype about hostel life drained away. I started sleeping in as long as I could, and life didn’t seem so fresh anymore. I started ‘getting used’ to how things work around here. I would have preferred if I didn’t at the expense of the enthusiasm I used to carry to school on a daily basis. I ponder, what would it be like if we could do something extraordinary on a regular basis, and to live life as if everyday were an adventure?
Living independently is something quite new for me. I had to do many things on my own I didn’t have to do in the past.
I used to have a free flow of clothing to wear, but now I had to send my clothes to the FREE laundry service every alternate day. And I had to wash my own underwear, if one is allowed to classify soaking them in dynamo water and stirring it as washing. Then I started getting bored of climbing the stairs to the laundry room and filling up the form so I sent my laundry less and less frequent, accumulating many dirty clothes in my room. I stopped folding my clothes and there was no distinct pile between the clean and the used. Anything that didn’t smell bad was considered clean to me then, and sometimes I used loose pieces of clothing as bath towels if I have exhausted my dry supply of them. And to think I used to wonder why people could not fold their clothes. I try to do it regularly and now I know why some people do not see the point of it
I also tried to keep my room clean and tidy. It was fine at the beginning, perhaps even fun and satisfying when I lay back down on my bed to admire my masterpiece. It still is, but throughout the hectic school year, many times I could not find spare time to focus on cleaning up. I was shocked to find how fast dust settles on a surface and how bad stray food crumbs are for one’s table. I didn’t think it was a big issue before. Over the year I found myself owning a big lizard, a couple of bite-sized ones, this slimy slug like thing residing behind my laptop, and a colony of white fungus draping over my bowl which looked a lot like cobwebs, or white candy floss, or the shredded stuffing you find in soft toys. Now that I have tidied up again, I all of a sudden feel the difference between a clean and tidy, and a dirty and messy room, a change that used to transit so gradually I was unable to do so.
Another thing is food. Food was a big problem. The hostel vegetarian food did not taste that bad initially, but as time passed, I realised that the only reason I did not find the food bad was that I am not used to consuming such bad food, and I thought it was only a matter of getting used to. I tried cooking, but the furthest I got to was cooking plain noodles and dumping spaghetti sauce onto it. Or heating up tofu, which I still find the most convenient source of palatable food. Sometimes I would go out of dinner, but I liked it better if I had someone to eat with. Well, there was a rather emotional period when I liked to go out for dinner on my own, when I would bring my laptop and listen to peaceful music on the bus and type stuff, while immersing myself in self-pity for my lack of food and companionship. But I didn’t always like eating with people. Sometimes I just liked waiting alone at a table in hope of meeting someone I liked at the dinner table without anyone else to interfere, or have quiet moments pondering over my life.
And many other things just got worse as time passed, just like I have described in my post new hostel semester. Recall how I told myself that I would do my best in semester two. This is a continuation of that post and here is how it went. Frankly I am no match for my own workload. Whatever I have resolved to do my best and not slack off utterly failed. There comes a breaking point when too much stress stops giving the drive to carry on, and one just crumbles under its weight. I had to start shedding some weight. There were so many points when I felt that everything was hopeless.
First major difficulty which came was my violin exam. Being on the 27th of July, I had not more than a month to prepare for it, with technical mistakes still prevalent throughout my pieces. This was an exam I was most unprepared for, and my impression was that the standards would be pretty high for a diploma exam. Technical proficiency would then be nothing but fundamental. I neglected my homework and started to seize every opportunity I had, in between lessons, free periods, to practice any short passages. I still remember how terribly I played on a student’s recital a few days just before the exam, and I was so panicked that I woke up the next day at 6 am to start practicing before school started. During the exam itself, the moment I screwed up a set of four notes, I kept on thinking about those few notes, and lost focus on the present. Thus I started making more mistakes, and the more I made the more I thought about them till a point when I started thinking about how I should start preparing to retake the exam. My weakness is concentration, and I cannot sustain the initial energy and emotion I always have at the beginning of a piece till the end. When my violin exam was over, I could finally start catching up on my work.
Then there was TIP as well. I had no idea where this project was going, and with all the things I was handling, such as fitting my ARP into my packed schedule, and chamber music, was too enervated to bother thinking about how to salvage it. This was the first thing I abandoned when I realised that there was only so much I could handle. I was prepared to fail it for lack of contribution.
Modern Physics. This was a module in which I never understood any of the lessons, superficially even if I could claim I did. The attempts to understand it always ended up in vain and I was initially unwilling to write a term paper for a topic that I did not understand, as I felt that I would be cheating myself, so I left it till after the exams, and wrote the whole paper off my knowledge without much research. It wasn’t too bad, for the amount of time I put into it. I had to move on to other matters. Oh yea and assignment 4 was in only after the final results were keyed in.
I think it is only fair to say that this semester, above all, the module which I put in real effort and hard work into is chamber music. I fretted over it and constantly thought of ways to pull the chamber recital off, regardless if those ways will be actually put into action. When my mind was empty, only two things would creep in, either chamber music, or her.
After a typical day at school, I would return to my room, and the first thing I would do is lie down on the bed and try to reorientate my mind into the right direction and think about all the stuff I have to complete, and ordering them based on priority. I would then fall asleep and narrow down the list to one or two crucial things I have to complete, and sometimes those things aren’t even on the list I created for myself, such as an organic chemistry quiz the next day. I will then feel hopeless and unaccomplished and take a break, going up to my friends’ room to chat, sometimes even up past midnight, and I believe it not to be a timewaster but a necessity to maintain my sanity.
I then decided that making any plans were no longer going to work, and my plan reduced to a pathetic ‘do work when I feel like it has to be done’. I got past assignment over assignment, without much of a big picture of what I was supposed to accomplish but a plethora of assignments yet to be completed still.
By the way, where does running and exercising come into the picture this semester? Come on don’t be ridiculous.
Lying beneath all the work I have to do is yet another layer of hardship and impedance - emotional burden. To try to work feeling so despondent about one’s relationships with others is a real challenge, most of it coming from getting out of bed and stop thinking about the source of despondency itself, especially with little people around to encourage me.
But it is through the crazily stressful circumstances I have been in that have initiated a few paradigm shifts in me and gave me vastly different outlooks on life.
To be continued…
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