the clouds are lifting

189. Death summarized to a mere verbal abbreviation
Monday, July 7, 2014

Tourism is complicated and sometimes death and history is romanticized to allure people into thinking it is okay to be excited about it. "Torture and terror happened here" they say, "come and take a picture!"

There's something eerie about stepping into a place that is historically so significant and looking at other tourists taking pictures with smiles and peace gestures and thinking...what are they doing? Are they happy for what happened? Are they aware that they're stepping on war ground? Is it pride? Are they showing off that they were born during a time where war ended and they can stand on those grounds without fear of dying because they were a century late, is that it?

It's as if one day when the remnants of MH370 and MH17 is assembled together, and when the sewol ferry is preserved and shown off to attract tourists. What exactly is the attraction? A history of death and terror summarized and sold for tourism.

Colchester and London were great, Edinburgh was majestic, Lancaster was humble in its beauty, Paris was unforgettable and Brussels felt like that unhappy kid growing up wanting to be Paris. The trip was overall very experiencing (if that's even an expression) and there's too much to say as well as not knowing where to start, but in short I can say that I liked it. Everything weren't particularly easy, we had a whole episode with the rental car but looking back I really liked it. I went through a whirlwind of emotions and the whole two week trip made me think of a lot of things and I am grateful to have those trigger of thoughts and hopefully I have the will and wits and strength to pen those thoughts in a travelogue for people to read.

But in the mean time, let's just settle with 'the trip was satisfying.'

Labels: nael goes to places, travelogue

188. Your lipstick, Cleopatra!
Monday, June 30, 2014

It's hard to explain or even grasp the concept of how stressful and mentally damaging higher education can be. It's probably just me, but then again I see people having a mental breakdown on a daily basis. We are given tremendously hard coursework and very high expectations to ace everything. And I am honestly not someone who likes to put the blame on the system, I just feel that I am not vocal enough regarding my distraught.

I've been trying to write an obligatory end of semester post and despite the exciting things that happened, the highlight of the whole semester would be the time where I broke down and cried in the examination hall. I've never done that before. I've been displeased with my performance before, I am aware that the ratio of answers I am confident are right to the answers I think is right to the answers that I have no clue of has been highly compromised before and as horrified I am with myself, I always cry after the exams, not during, this was a new low to me.

See the thing is, I feel like I've worked really hard for this subject. It's an 8.30am class and for a huge majority of the time I come in half an hour earlier. I was the first to present individually, and I handed in my assignments a week earlier from the due date just so I can have the lecturer comment on whatever's lacking so I can fix it before submitting it for real. Heck I even read the whole book, I did past year questions, we had a study group! And it was the functioning kind, not the kind of study group you say you have but end up reviewing a few chapters before talking for the rest of the day. This was a real study group!

The quizzes were the weirdest thing. We didn't have questions given on paper, or written on the whiteboard. We had it on a timed powerpoint presentation flashing in front of us like some weird ass game show. We had approximately 1 minutes for each 2 questions which could be a yes/no answer question or fill in the blank or a short answer question. Then there's a lightening round where the slides repeat but faster and sometimes I didn't even had the time to read the last question properly but well, tough luck.

I knew my quiz marks, I knew the questions that I could answer, and whatever that I couldn't, I knew I had no marks for it regardless if I answered it randomly or not. I'm fine with the quiz marks, I know it was my fault, but knowing that I had average marks for my assignments made me furious. I didn't hand in my assignments early so I would get an average, I wasn't aiming for a pass, I was aiming for a solid full mark. And we didn't know our assignment marks until the day before the exams and I just felt so betrayed.

How our system works is that we have a percentage for exams and a percentage for all the coursework done and a combination of both would determine our final grade, but for different universities, the carry mark percentage is different for each subject. My parents work at UiTM so I know that their maximum carry mark weightage is 50%, but for UIA it could go up to 80% and most of the hard subjects takes up 60%, so it is a big deal. It is a really big deal, you know your chances for getting an A in a subject or lack thereof.

What was embarrassing during my breakdown was that the lecturer saw me crying and I didn't know how to tell him how betrayed I felt with his marking scheme and quizzing techniques. I just cried. Because I wasn't good enough, that another semester pass and still I won't get a 4.00 flat GPA, that this subject would be my downfall and regardless of how much I gained from explaining things in study group and how well I do in the final exams I still cannot recover from my carry marks and everything made me feel so sad.

For the record, only one person got an A, and only one person got an A- out of the whole class and it's sort of unfair to be compared to them because they're freaking genius and not to mention also Kashmiri. It feels like going to class with the 3 idiots (the genius ones of course)

When people ask for my results, they wouldn't consider my struggle nor the unjust system. They would see me, scoring low, because I'm not smart enough.

And everything just makes me so sad.

Labels: college, menbung, rant

187. Taste my disaster, it's heavy on my tongue

It's quite an embarrassing story actually, there was this essay competition that was held in conjunction with Youth Ace 2014 ... and I sort of won.

For those of you who have never heard of Youth Ace, you've probably heard of Hilal Asyraf (if not, please google from under that rock you live in). Langit Ilahi is the company that Hilal Asyraf co-founded a couple of years back, and together with other aspiring personalities have done a great deal of effort in expanding the credentials of Malaysian muslims at large ever since. One of which is a (hopefully annual) convention called YouthAce.

For the essay competition, I was required to write two essay/articles of three pages at length for each with the theme of 'youth & change' which was quite challenging and fun. I don't usually keep track of how long I write before and I noticed that there was a tendency for me to write nonsense when I had nothing else to say but I still needed to increase the word count, and I just go "no, no that's not right" and delete everything and start again.

I took this opportunity to challenge myself even more by attempting fiction. I wanted to explore a different style of writing so I did one article in a first point of view monologue narrative that I am comfortable with for the first entry, and for the second entry I did a three page short story which was something new to me and although I hated the end product, I'm still glad that I did it.

When I first thought of doing the fiction, before I thought of what plot I wanted to do, I first established a few features that I wanted to endorse in this particular writing of mine which were that

there will only be two characters
the secondary character is a female while the protagonist's gender is left ambiguous
both the characters have no names
there are no backstory whatsoever
the relationship between the characters is never mentioned

The reason I wanted all that was to focus more on the message that I wanted to convey. I knew I wanted to talk about Umar al-Khattab's Tamannau. I wanted to talk about the fear of changing paths of pursuit, dwelling on the road not taken and putting age as an excuse, I wanted to include the green light analogy and how it represent the false pretense that our anxieties anticipate, and I just didn't want any of the characters to distract the reader from sinking in all that. I purposely didn't want to disclose the gender and relationships because I didn't want to compartmentalize this type of conversation to only a certain level of intimacy. What I did however emphasize was how dearly the protagonist care about the second character and I think that's the only thing that matters.

One of my essay titles paid homage to the Beat Generation, specifically Allen Ginsberg. I was reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road during the period in which I was finishing those essays. A recurring theme that occurs in Beat centered stories revolves around Allen growing out of his naivety and being influenced by these people he admire (Eg: Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, etc.) thus, 'Allen in Wonderland' has been in almost every autobiography book or movie iteration that I know of and I think it fits well with the theme of my essay. I mean, the whole world is a Wonderland, we'll always find things we never expect. Life always take us by surprise, and just because we've grown up, doesn't mean we should stop wondering.

I named the other essay 'Fragments of us' simply because I was looking for a title that would describe how disjointed we actually are and emphasize that change isn't really that hard because of that. I was also listening to Daft Punk's Fragments of Time while writing it, so there's that.

After the results were out and the essays were published on langitilahi's website, someone asked me what were my references for the essays, and that question really baffled me as much as I didn't quite understand what it meant and didn't exactly knew how to answer properly. I didn't cite anything— specifically there was nothing to cite. Everything was pretty much the kind of things I say to someone while we're having a cup of tea. I wasn't aiming for an academic report on the notions of human behaviour and its direct proportion towards personality change by age manipulation. I wouldn't be comfortable people referencing my writing as much as I'm not comfortable referencing others.

I assume what she really meant with the question is "Where did you learn all that?", and she expected the answer to be in the form of a book, which is why the question didn't make much sense to me because everything that I am today is an accumulation of everything that I've ever experienced first-hand in life or otherwise and books are merely a small portion of that.

I had a similar conversation with my sister quite recently. She was worrying about not reading enough books to be a well-rounded dae'i (something within those lines, I can't remember particularly what she said) and I was quite dumbfounded. If you don't like reading, then you don't have to force yourself to read anything. The point of learning is not to know where the knowledge is, but it is to absorb the knowledge well enough that you can explain to someone else about it.

I think the most important thing about learning is to be moved by it, to have a sense of curiosity and a passion to understand what is happening and why it did. Regardless if it's a book, a movie, a tv show, a random thing your lecturer said in class, the things your naqibah said in usrah. No matter how compartmentalized everything seem to be, from one angle or another everything can be related to anything, and the will to find that relation is the trigger to a critical thinking mind.

That being said, I cannot say that these thoughts are result of my solitude, but I also cannot say that all these information came from legit sources. The most accurate reference that I could say is life itself, and that makes me sound obnoxious as well as pretentious but my limited mind capacity could only come up with that, so that's my answer I guess.

This is probably one of my greatest achievement in writing, considering that the competition was open to anyone who signed up for the convention which not only includes Malaysians living in Malaysia, but also there were some who were studying in Jordan and Egypt etc who participated as well, and in all honesty, I feel embarrassed that those two essays represent this achievement because they're not even my best works.

I was finishing up these two essays and submitting them in the midst of Education Week chaos which was quite a gamble because I genuinely thought I couldn't win this. I've been drafting those essays for so long I just didn't want to see it anymore. There is such an emotional disengagement in the narrative like I'm just throwing random facts without relating them with one another and I just don't feel proud about it. I could do better, but I didn't and that bugs me a lot. Which also explains why it took me months just to write this post.

But when Aiman Azlan called out my name, it felt so surreal. I was sitting with Syakira, her sister and K.Ain at the back of the hall and so I walked all the way to the stage with adrenaline pumping in my veins and it's such a great feeling that even after I went back to my seat I couldn't stop shaking. Syakira and K.Ain were playing with the trophy and I was just sitting in my seat trying to calm down, trying to sink everything in, thanking God for His mercy and everything he has given me.

It was a great night, I met my neighbour Aifa, my other neighbour Farhana, my long lost primary school classmate Izzati, my ex-roomate's sister Raihana Rosdi (can't remember her sister's name but she calls her 'Yah'), my sister's long lost primary school classmate Safiyyah, and I dragged along my ex ungs groupmate Sumayyah, and I had such a wonderful time, the slots were amazing and I felt so pumped after the convention. I felt so grateful for the opportunity, and I pray that there are more opportunity that awaits, and I pray that I do more regardless of the opportunities.

Labels: langitilahi, writing

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