We’re going down…

I’ve finally given in.  Having to combat an avalanche of work after two weeks of suffering from fatigue, late nights and early mornings, has caused my body to surrender. So I’m down with a fever of 38 degrees and…an avalanche of uncompleted work.

But nevertheless it’s a timely break. At least all the concerts and performances are over, so I can afford to slack a bit.

Right, the fever has been on a roller coaster ride – the highest it went up to was 39.5degrees yesterday afternoon, but I’m pretty fine now; it’s gone back down to 37.5degrees.

I went to school yesterday and after two hours I went home, before school even started. What a waste of a good morning’s sleep. Slept through most of yesterday; the only times I was not lying on a bed or sofa was when I had to go to the toilet, so now I feel all stiff and creaky. I’m on MC until Wednesday. It’s pretty hard for me to attend a full week of school; There’s always some reason for me to skip a day of school almost every week.  :O

Do you know, that 19th April 2008 marked RGGE’s one-year anniversary of clinching Gold with Honours at SYF 2007? I wonder how many of you guitarists stlil remember that fateful day. The adrenaline rush, the nervousness, the announcement, the amount of hard work each and every one of us put in. How many of you are still clinging on to the same dream? How many of you still have the passion that you once felt for guitar? The most important part is not the award, but the fighting spirit that the process of clinching the award set into us.

Random thoughts about guitar, because I think I’ve finally woken up. SYF is next year, and I’m still in a GE. The flame has awoken, and it’ll not be put out. We are going to clinch Honours. WE are.

And at this point of time I need to remind myself that no matter what, I’m happy with what I have now, the people around me, and that I will not burn out.

Done and over with

So today marks the end of my “series” of school concerts, and the proper start of Hardcore Studying in 2008.

歌创 concert was amazing. It’s my first concert as an official drummer, and so, I can proudly say that I’ve played different roles in different concerts! (The whole irony of this is that I’ve never played at a piano concert before, though it was the first instrument that I picked up) The songs were wonderfully written – I particularly loved 南飞, 告别微安 and 巧克力豆. I’ve been inspired by many people, specifically Ruth, our chairperson of the class of ‘98, who is now an acclaimed pianist/songwriter/arranger, and the PRCs in general. They have crazy determination, which I seriously need to learn from them; (you haven’t seen how they learn new songs in like, a day or two before the concert and pull it off awesomely during the concert itself) and they’re very nice people to work with, or to just mix around with. I see so much potential in the club it excites me, and I want to stretch it.

But yes I’ve met so many wonderful people – Qing Yu, Feiya, Huihui, Chloe, Xiang Ting, Yu Xi, Liang Xu, Fang Yan, Li Ke, Yi Ming, Aaron, Tan Jian, Xiong Chao, Wei Ci, Mingren, stagecrew…thanks for everything, treating me like as one of your own even though we’ve only known each other for 2 weeks, putting in so much trust in my amateur drumming skills, and just being there. 律·无双 would not have been possible without each and every one of you guys.

Reprise - RJGE Guitar Concert was good too, no major screw ups (Hiok you were fine okay!) that could be heard from the senior ensemble, so that’s all fine. The audience was entertained, so I take it that we did pretty decently. I got to know PL a lot better, thanks to the time spent in LT6 trying to “de-classical-fy” her. She’s a genius classical guitarist, but she can’t get the hang of rock rhythms and The Pick. It’s very amusing but I am determined to train her into the best J-Rock guitarist in Singapore.

Ah. This guitar concert has caused a lot of hair-pulling and frustration on my part, mostly inflicted on myself by myself, so I shall not complain about it. But it’s been an eye-opener. I have grown from it.

Now I’m back to being the average student no wait, the Super Mugger to catch up on everything that I have not done this month. So WAKE UP VAL you’re not one of those people with crazy rehearsal schedules anymore so the tutors won’t give you extra time to finish up your homework. Get out of your state of inertia and start revving up because JC life is just getting more intense by the day and you don’t want to waste your time here like you did in secondary school do you?

things again.

I just needed a place to post this here, of Weix cheerleading! I’m still trying to spot him because well, all the boys in the video look exactly the same.

Anyway one concert down and one last to go for this year. I’m prettty thankful that my concerts are clumped together at the start of Arts Fest, and not clashing with any of my tests (like poor Sebby’s and Louis’s). Mm. I’m starting to feel exhautsed from all the rehearsals, coming back at 10 – 11pm everyday for the past week is really taking a toll on my mental and physical health…

Shall go watch the video one more time before I sleep. It’s very amusing.

Nine in the Afternoon

No seriously, the night hasn’t even started.

Council results were out today; Congratulations to my friends who got in! I didn’t bother to check the list of councillors, because, well I didn’t bother to. My words to one of the newly elected councillors, Louis – “no matter what you do in council, just please don’t end up wearing the mascot costume.”

Mummy has gotten around to baking things. This is wonderful because I get to eat the yummiest cakes and pastries on earth everyday, yet not wonderful because it is totally going against my plan to be on a more abstemious diet. Today she made Golden Chocolate Butter Cake, which is essentially butter cake with chocolate sprinkles.

The Brother isn’t coping very well with his second and third languages. I can only help him with Chinese, by sitting him down and making him memorize 5 成语s a week. That amounts to 260 成语s a year, and 1000 好词好句s by the time his O’s come. It is also my desperate attempt to make myself learn them to save my half-bucket-filled Chinese as well. I must be the craziest Chinese student in RJ – I’m in 歌创, and I take GSC and H1 Chinese. 

I finally got my hands on a drumset today at rehearsals. It’s been such a long time, I thought I’d lost my magic touch. I ended up drumming too loud and overpowering Chloe, says our teacher i/c. Nevertheless it was fun, and therapeutic. Drumming is my way to destress, I think. Out of all the songs I’m playing for, 娃娃音 and A Piece of Summer are my favourites, just because they have cute drum parts. But practice should start getting intense from tomorrow onwards, because concert is in…two days’ time? I’m accompanying Huihui at a mini-preview session at the library tomorrow; my first time performing on the keyboard in ages. I feel a slight sense of unfamiliarity with the keys, irony being that I’ve literally slept next to my piano for the past 5 years. So I shall attempt to practice right about now.

Take a breather

Everything has been passing in a flash, my moodswings occur faster than I type. Thought I’d take some time out to catch up and reflect on what’s been going on. Reflection is important, especially when everything is happening too fast, you can’t appreciate what’s around you, instead you whine about things that you don’t have.

Academics
Well it’s not exactly satisfactory, by my standards, to be a C-average student, but I’ll look on the positive side of things – it’s only my first three months (shut up, those who say that 1/8 of my JC life is gone) and well, it could have been worse. I’ll take it as a motivation to work harder; I’ve been slacking recently. Math (surprisingly) is my strongest subject now, followed by Geography, GSC, Lit/GP. Econs is….well you know how Econs is in the Humanities. Well the bottomline is: I don’t know how to write good essays anymore, and I. NEED. TO. READ. THE. DAMNED. PAPERS. And improve my vocabulary (for both languages.) And I need to mug more. I’m thinking of staying back in school everyday till about 9 to study (since I can’t concentrate at home), but I don’t exactly live very near school, so getting home would be a problem (no I don’t like to impose on my parents, but they will worry if I go home on my own at such an inconspicuous time); I’m in need of a new plan.

CCA
April – May is the college’s Arts Festival, which basically means that there will be a series of concerts put up by all the performing arts CCAs in these two months. However, the two most important days to note are 11th April (Friday) and 16th April (Wednesday) because there will be the GeChuang concert and Guitar concert respectively. Practices have started to get really intense, especially for GeChuang (being a new member and all, I haven’t seen most of the concert items so I’ll have to learn and perfect my parts in a week). I think I’m gonna start feeling the fatigue like Sebby (poor boy, his concert is in a month’s time and he’s like that already. Mine’s in a week!) but at least it’s going to be enjoyable fatigue. I had a 11-hour rehearsal session yesterday in school, from 8am – 7pm and it was crazy, I was formally introduced to most of the members of GeChuang, and my performance time has doubled after we all realized that I’m the key drummer in GeChuang…so I had to learn new songs (a confession here: Okay so I haven’t actually learnt the songs yet and I’ll probably improv on that day but at least I know which ones I’m playing for now) but I enjoyed it very much. Watch out for GeChuang’s mini-showcase at the school library on Wednesday!

SUFD
Met the rest of the OT for the very first time last Tuesday. My committee head is a wonderful guy. I seemed a bit out of place at first; almost everyone there were J2 Science students, and on top of that they were guys, the jocks, if you’d like to call them that. There were girls there, but they were sparsely located around the room, and I don’t know them as well, so. But after breaking up into our subcomms I managed to loosen up a bit, open my mouth and talk. I’m really glad to be part of this OT, and the whole experience is going to be wonderful. Really.

All this is totally going against the initial plan I had at the start of the year to take up one CCA, a slack CIP, and focus on mugging. I’ve taken up two CCAs, a very engaging CIP and not keeping up with my work as well as I wanted to. My parents have expressed their displeasure with me taking up two CCAs, so now I’ve gotta work out a way to balance that and studies. Balance is key. And of course I would like a life out of school as well. Now you tell me how.

So this is how I’m surviving in RJ.