08/09 The Year Ahead

Urgh, I didn't manage to get into any of the economics classes that I wanted. That's the crappy part of the system here, the utter randomness of class selection, much unlike the points systems Singaporeans are used to. Sure, it purports to broaden your horizon, allowing to take and maybe fall in love with a class you would never have expected to take, but on the flip side, if you already have a set academic plan, you have little or no control over it.

But this year will be interesting. I'm taking four classes, one more than the usual 3 (we take fewer class because we do independent research papers for each class on top of class work).

There's Intermediate French, which I'm already shitting myself over, because some of the kids in the class are pretty darn fluent, and the teacher speaks really quickly and uses a lot of cheem (to me) vocab, unlike my Beginning teacher last year who took time to speak and enunciate very clearly. On the first day of class, he played us this satirical French political news broadcast which poked fun at Sarkozy. More than half the class didn't understand a single word. I know I didn't. But one or two managed to laugh frequently at the jokes. Damn them. Je pense que je dois peut-etre ecouter plus de chansons francais et regarder plus de films francais.

Modern History of Diplomacy and Intelligence with a teacher who's got a really great reputation in the school. He's an ex-CIA intelligence officer and is just amazingly intelligent, really cool. Really excited about this class. Again though, crazy knowledgeable peeps. In the first class, since we hadn't done any readings, we talked about the Ruso-Georgian conflict. And these kids began throwing out their ridiculous history knowledge, referring Chechnya, Baltic problems in Estonia and Latvia, possible separatism issues in Ukraine, Poland, and some Hungarian revolution.... Yeah, I did not speak at all that class, except for the introduction (Reminded me of how lost I felt in my first Intro to US Politics class year, which incidentally also had one of the above-mentioned crazy knowledgeable kids. He knew a alot about US political history too. And he apparently edits Wikipedia entries on US military subjects...). Damn these kids too, let's see you talk some Qing, Ming, Song, Tang, Manchurian, etc. history!

Cultural Studies of the Pacific Rim is the first lecture I will take here ('lecture' used loosely as there're just like 30 ppl tops). It's classfied as a Lit class, about Asian, Asian-American lit mostly. I signed up because we're gonna be be reading my fav author, Ishiguro! And Murakami, and other such Pacific authors. We're gonna be watching some familiar movies too: Chung King Express, 2046, even Eric Khoo's Be With Me (which my teacher mistakenly announced as Indonesian in the class. WTF)! But I'm really not a Lit person, I realise. The first class, the teacher was talking about all of these abstract terms that I just felt so lost (yeah, recurring theme there). Stuff like identity, nationalism, orientalism, tropology, paleonomy ("using old words, old categories with the purpose of launching new inquiries, new investigations"). Most interestingly to me, there're quite a few Asian-American kids in this class, and many of them relate to this struggle for identity, for the search of their roots, etc. I just thought: It's funny how I've never really thought about tracing my roots, or even questioning where exactly do I draw the line on where my roots begin. Hmm. Oh well, I get to read Ishiguro!

Statistics: This was my third choice in alternate registration. It's math, 'nuff said. I didn't even bring a freakin' calculator over, lol. So I have to go get one. This will be interesting. And to show the astounding popularity of math in my school, we have 9 people in the class. Haha.

And in more exciting news, soccer! We're forming a club team this year, and will have three games, including one up to Mass. against Hampshire College. Roadtrip! Training, 3x weekly, begun Monday, and it was fucking tiring. We did what is commonly termed here as "suicides", which is basically running back and forth the field, stopping at the midpoints to do pushups, crunches or jumps. Fucking tiring for this old uncle. Earlier tonight, we had a 4 mile (8-9km) run scheduled. Are you freakin' kidding me? I didn't even run that much in the army! Erm, yeah, so I didn't go for training tonight. Lol.

So, all in all, I''ve observed that my classes seem to work diff. parts of my brain. There's the linguistic part, the analytical part in both Math and Hist., and finally, art in the form of Lit. to soothe my soul. Heh. And soccer now and tennis in the spring to keep in shape, and I'm set. And since Stats is a fall-semester class only, hopefully I'll be able to successfully register for a freakin' econ class in the spring.

And of course, more trips into the city, hopefully! Maybe see more of Brooklyn, and its hipster-haven parts.

To a good 08/09 then.