Grand Plans

It only hits you that you're leaving the educational system altogether when people say things like:

"What are you doing next, Aimi?", "Fill in the yearbook!", "Only 2 weeks left of lectures oh my gaaaad", "Do you want to invigilate the votes at the AGM Aimi, you're not gonna be here next year"

:(

Look shut up. I'm not bloody gone yet. I have another 11 weeks of suffering yet to come don't fricking tell me it's almost over. There is much more pain to come thank you.

I'm not too bothered about not having a job yet, although I have put some (only some) effort into it, and have not yet yielded any results. I secrely do not want one, okay, not really a secret, but at the same time I would like some money coming in so I can save up to do really cool things like, go back to Tanzania, run my own project, and have a wedding. (Two years, folks, two years.) I would also like the skills I will gain from having a job, skills that I know a definitely need to work on, which I just haven't been able to refine yet during my short time at uni. So in essence, I only want the things I will gain from a job, but not necessarily the job itself. Means to an end. Just like the rest of my degree.

In any case, job or no job, I would like to go back to Malaysia for a few of weeks sans the rest of my family because a) my friend is getting married, b) I NEED to visit the rest of Malaysia that isn't just my relative's houses, c) I just want to get away. Although I'm being guilt tripped by my dad for leaving my brother behind which is really unfair because my brother has to deal with me not being around at some point in his life and I bet you it's my dad who would miss me more but he won't show it.

For the moment, I shall carry on dragging myself through the rest of the tortuous path that is my degree. It's not over yet, bitches.

(p.s) I know I promised some posts on the many awesome things that I do but photos have been neglected for a while, will sort it out at some point. Sorry!

Happy Things of Autumn Term

Past happy things (click to enlarge):

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1. Up close and personal; front row with VVBrown
2. Tanzanian food in London with Tanzania crew
3. Stratford at sunset
4. Untamed natural beauty; Dartmoor
5. Sneaky peek; Olympic 2012 Stadium
6. Doubled EWB interest at Fresher's Fair
7. Best dressed orchestra; Four Seasons at Royal Albert Hall.

More recent happy things:

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1. Tana special; EWB outing to Ethiopian restaurant, tastier than last year!
   
2. Finding out that one of my favourite US webcomic artists will be coming over to London soon, chyeah!
3. Securing tickets to see Lady Gaga this morning, woop!
4. Securing tickets to see Avatar in 3D at IMAX, woop!
5. Seeing my engineer crush [hearts] he is such a leg-end.
   
6. Getting cheer up cuddles from my bebis after a bad week. Obviously better than seeing engineer crush, before you pass judgement at me. There he is looking a bit more dashing than usual.
   

I need to remind myself of these good times, because job-shopping is getting me down. I wish I could stick the job to the man and tell him to put it where sun doesn't shine. I call it job-shopping because it makes me feel like I have some choice left.

Fascination

Whenever you have a problem, do always go through all the different solutions and then finally end up resigning to the one idea you first thought of?

I do this too often, then I forget I had those other ideas in the first place, and then end up sticking with what I've got.

I do have more profound things to say, but this has been the theme of the first two weeks back at uni. Oh the joys of making life choices and having a brain like mine that thinks too much. Bloody life choices. I'm not afraid of wasting a year, because I never feel like anything is a 'waste', since you always gain something out of any experience, whether it be good or bad. Regret is something I am not fond of feeling, so I don't feel it any more. But clearly there are good decisions and bad decisions. At times I wish I wasn't attached to particular people, (and perhaps a little more well off) just so that I could make the selfish decision of going off into wider world to make my mark in places where the sun shines more and life is much simpler and doing things that aren't dull and dreary and wearing a coat most of the year.

The world is so immense, there's so much to see, and there's so much worth doing that nobody chooses to do. We all complain that the world is falling apart at the seams, that it's no longer a friendly place, that we're at the brink of our own destruction. Sounds melodramatic and slightly sci-fi, but not as far removed from the truth as you may think. There are things that I feel is my duty to do, being an able-bodied and capable young person. Although all these things are far bigger than one individual, many people choose to comment on it, as if they know they way the world SHOULD work, but when it comes to action do nothing beyond their own rut of life to make things any better for anyone. I'm not saying I am currently working on the ultimate masterplan to change the world in my spare time, but where I feel I can make some contribution, I will.

But such is life. We all have things that inhibit us, all of us. Although, being further removed from people I care about tends to lead to me making ridiculous decisions. So maybe, it's a good thing I have people to ground me. For now.


[Afterthought]
Having said that, I've been told I value my friends too much. Why is it such a bad thing that I care about people? Forgive me for I'm about to sound new-age and hippy now you big grumps: but the world would be a better place if we were all willing to hold love in our hearts. Methinks that many of you do not value your friends ENOUGH.

Absent

People can say they will be your friend, and the good memories you had will be something you both share for always. You can hold love in your heart for them forever. But once their gone, they're gone. They're not there.

You can't make up for the fact that you're not there.

The Unhappy Truth

There are times when asking questions gets you nowhere. You end up with even more questions, and on occasion you get an answer that you don't want to hear.

Maybe I should just stop asking. There are people who accept everything as given, and don't bother to question why things are the way they are. They're content enough with that. The only people who have a problem with it are the people who ask questions.

Why do we ask questions? Is it because we're unhappy about the truth before us? Or just curious to make sense of everything around us? Or is it because we're all secretly looking for an absolute truth that we can accept and be happy with?

Nobody really wants to have to accept an unhappy truth. Having said that, when it comes to belief systems, I think the percentage of people who believe in the Unhappy Truth is increasing. The Unhappy Truth being that it all comes to nothing in the end.

And The World Carries On

Something strange happened today. I looked at all those photos from last year, and nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

It's just another story. It happened with someone else, to someone else. It doesn't change who I am.

I can close the book now.

Thoughts For A New Decade

Birthdays have always been a selfish time of year for me. I always expected someone to care that I'm a year older, and it's as if presents are an easy reward for surviving. Friends were people who would remember, because that's what friends do, they remember your birthday. Every birthday I would voice out that I might want something material, simply because when you're younger you don't have the means to buy it for yourself. You like the thought of someone else being thoughtful about what you might want, and the thought of them being sharp enough to give you something you might want to have.

I've always known it to be silly to be that selfish, but I couldn't help it when I used to make a big deal about other people's birthdays. Other people's birthdays were occasions for me to be selfLESS; I don't know why, but it's just what I do. I would agonise over what to get them as a gift, because I wanted to show them that they meant something to me. Sometimes I spend ages in the shops deciding what to get. Sometimes I even do things for people I barely know. It was a way of reaching out, of saying: I value you. And even if they didn't know it, the time I spent picking out a present, or baking a cake, or even just buying a cake for them reflected upon the fact that I wanted them to know that they were special to me. Everyone deserves to feel special for one day.

And every year I'd wonder when anybody would make the effort for me. For a few years, somebody did.

Sometimes I take people's actions for granted because I expect it of them. The gestures made towards you that are unexpected always end up to be the ones that you appreciate. But the fact that I was taking someone's goodwill for granted was a sign that I didn't appreciate them as much as I ought to, and so, I've been trying to get them to stop.

But here I digress, because this year I was pleasantly surprised by my high school friends who planned a really lovely day out, photos of which I will post up when I'm feeling cheerful. It was something I really hadn't anticipated, because while we've tried to surprise each other in the past not many have succeeded in trying to surprise me. So I was quite touched to see that they had planned so far ahead. I guess that it's because we spend so much time apart, and as life gets harder we become nostalgic of the time where life was simpler. We end up missing the people that made life that simple, and who still do, even when times get so much more complicated than they used to.

As soon as I enter a new year of my life, something new always happens. Something that's always exciting and unprecedented, something to look forward to. I suppose this year I feel in somewhat of a limbo. I don't really know where I want to be in the next five years. I don't know what I want to occupy myself next year, IF there is a next year. I still don't know what I will be doing for the next few months. I don't even know who I'm seeing next week. I just don't know. And it's this not knowing that made me think I didn't know what I wanted out of life any more. All because for once there isn't a path ahead of me.

A few days ago I had some sense knocked into me (quite literally). Birthdays aren't benchmarks of what you have achieved or experienced, but what you have learned. They celebrate how much you have grown. What I failed to realise is that growing up isn't always about having a number of different experiences under your belt, it's how much you have gained from them. Sometimes you can do a lot of growing up just by sitting alone. Growing up is about realising the different possibilities that you hadn't considered while your mind was younger. Even though I've turned 20, and drawing ever closer to making even more life-changing decisions, there are still things to look forward to. I've just been too scared to walk through new doors so I turn back to old ones. I guess I have to stop clinging onto the juvenile dreams and reach on to some adult ones, in order to achieve something worthwhile. It may be heartbreaking, but it's probably the sensible thing to do.

The only problem is that I hate knowing that although we may be able to achieve anything, we might not be able to achieve everything we want to.

Such Is Life

I sigh a lot these days.

- "*Hhhum*"
- "Aibi why you *hum*-ing?"
- "I got a lot of things to *hum* about."

I just cannot foresee the future. It's very misty out there. I don't even know where I'll be in 3 years. Let alone 5. I just don't know what I'll be doing, who I'll be meeting, where the wind will take me. How many more mistakes I'll make, how many times I'll win, how many hearts I'll break, how many things I'll lose.

I'll graduate (please God) and I'll be 22. Woohoo. I'll work for some company, decide that it's crap, get married and have babies.

ARGH. BABIES.

I saw my friend's baby last week, and I decided that it would be impossible for me to have a baby now. She was having a go at us, coz her daughter will be 10 by the time any of us have kids. I mean there's so much to do with my life before I can have a baby. Things that I didn't really think of doing until my eyes were opened to all the possibilities. Things that you can't do when there is another little person in the world who's really depending on you to stay in one place and be there.

So no babies yet.

Besides, I still need to find someone to make babies with.