… so don't take this so literally.

I’ve been back in Singapore for a year and 3 months, and still, not a day passes without reminiscing about my life back in Melbourne. Life back here in Singapore is not what it was 4 years back. Things have changed, people have moved on; I’ve new responsibilities, a new mid-term goal. But the greatest difference is that I no longer go to school.

I miss school. I miss being in a pampered environment where my sole objective is to learn as much as I can and to produce my more-often-than-not ambitious research papers on my pet areas: foreign policy of the major powers. Gone are those days which I sit in my lecturer’s/tutor’s/supervisors’ office, discussing at length how I should value-add my current draft. Gone are those days which I pass handwritten messages to my classmates sitting beside me, often telling them some odd thought that has invaded my mind.

There comes a point in time where we all leave school – for those luckier few -  who had the chance to go to school. But we never stop learning; after university, we go into the highest tertiary education of it all, “the school of hard knocks”.

Some choose to enrol in that school for various reasons. At times, I do wonder if I’ve made the right decision enrolling in that school. Don’t you always find yourself at the crossroads where there is an easier route and a tougher route laid before you, and you find yourself gravitating towards the tough, long and windy one? Wonder why… the need for self-actualisation, or the penchant for self-destruction?

But what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger; when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. The dialectic of life as told by Hegel: the thesis and anti-thesis births a new synthesis – isn’t it amazing? Just unfortunately, some yield to the anti-thesis and the synthesis never sees the light of day.

So I’ve been particularly introspective, possibly because I question my existence in my locality during this season which I dread the most. It’s not that I dislike the festivities, but rather it’s the commercialism angle and the obsessive buying sprees that irritates me. Can we not act like we’re living in pre 221BC during the Warring States of China, before Qin Shihuang reunited the kingdom? Can we not act like it’s World War II? Can we not act like we’re running low on rations? Can we please not play horrible covers of Chinese New Year songs sung by Mediacorp artistes, from news-readers to has-beens?!!!