Australia Day/Backwards Day/Compliment Day/Republic Day (India)
2005-01-26 @ 8:52 p.m.

Have been reading my seniors' blogs, simultaneously envying them for the post-JC lives they're leading and yet terrified by the prospect of having to live one myself in less than a year. Suddenly, I don't want to grow up anymore. 'A' Levels, NS, university, work, and the list goes on. To survive in this country, there is only one correct pathway in life. Forget about your road not taken, it's all one and the same here. To be different, one has but to leave. Oversimplification, but the gist is there. I'm beginning to sympathise even more with Eustacia now. There is part of me that loves Singapore for what it is, horrifically flawed and obscenely proper. At the same time, there is an undeniable desire to run away from this place and never look back. Run, even if it kills me, because at least I died trying. I don't want to live the rest of my life in this dot on the map, even if it means having to be a second-class citizen in some decadent Western country. I need to live in a place where a third of the view is Egdon Heath, another third is a place of sanitised beauty, and the final third is the ocean. We did a self-reflection worksheet yesterday for Civics, and I finally realised something. What I want is to be different whilst appearing to be like everyone else. I want to be the one smiling blithely at the back of the classroom, while I think my own quiet, subversive thoughts, with the occasional laconic outburst of sardonism. I crave individuality, but I refuse to pay the price for it. (Where's a black market when you need one? This is appalling!) Only school could trigger such an entry from me. Sadly, I can't even do angst properly. Where are the "tragical possibilities" in my environment? All I see is a network of straight lines that converge on one point: here. Now that I'm in an adequate frame of mind, perhaps the essay on The Return Of The Native will go smoothly. A possibility is the best certainty one can ask for.