Saturday, April 09, 2005
It has been a long, long time. The previous entry was made more than a month back! i guess i have been busy. And add in a little procrastination too.
It was a non-stop bombardment of activities for me ever since March 5. First came the SPH Relay. Then Term 2 Common Test. It was such a flop. Next, the post-test activities. More races came after that. And poof, here i am, a weekend exclusive to me. It had been 2 weekends burnt out by races and 1 weekend spent on incessant playing. Life these few weeks had been spent worthwhile, i must say.
Singapore Press Holdings Relay
I was the reserve for the 4x200m relay and had to be down at Bukit Gombak stadium on Saturday anyway. This event was held over the weekend just before the Common Test. 2 days before the start of the tests and there i was, not at home mugging like a NJ mugger. It was a waste. i'm talking about my day spent there by the way, not about the race. Being a reserve, i only had to let my presence be felt by the Track team. But anyway, NJ qualified for the finals, and earned a 'respectable 8th'. The following day was the day for me.
4x100m relay. I was in the first leg of the relay team. It was the first time i participated in a inter-school race. i was extremely nervous. But whatever the case, i managed to calm myself down a little just before the start of the race. Be surprised, because i was able to do so all thanks to Amanda Choo. All hail this lady, a Team Singapore runner. The boys relay team had a race with the girls relay team. Amanda was in the first leg. It was nervous enough for me to be racing for the first time, and being in the first leg and waiting for the 'GO!' made me feel worst. Nevertheless, it was good experience racing with and against her at the same time. This experience of running with a Singapore runner, even though she's a girl, helped calm me down. Result? It was exactly the same for the 4x200m relay team. We qualified for finals, with a great stroke of luck, and earned a 'respectable 8th'. 48.05s. Really sucky. Oh well... If you haven managed to figure out why i kept using 'respectable 8th', it is becos this exact same line was used for morning assembly prize presentation on the Thursday that passed to mask the fact that we got last. There are only 8 lanes on the track. And there are only 8 teams competing in the finals. Get it?
Common Test
i cant believe i did the CTs when i'm not prepared for it. i spent 4 days, Monday to Thursday, of the march holidays training for the race and the entire weekend at Bukit Gombak stadium. Time spent studying was very little. By the time Monday came, the day of GP and Physics paper, i had only touched Chemistry and Physics. Maths and Econs were totally out of my hand and out of my brain. The results came out and were reflective of how much i had prepared for it, save for Maths. I got a B for Maths. Surprising. Well, definitely no thanks to Alvin Bek. He had no part in helping me, and i'm sure of it. The only reason which i can come up with is that i had been doing my tutorials rather conscientiously. I earned a B, 60%, even without touching the vectors question. A big loss of 14% and i still manage a B. Yeah yeah, it may look as if i'm bragging all the way to my nose, but i'm not really doing so. i mean, please la, this is a first B for me in a test for all my life in NJ. Just let me hao lian abit, can? Anyway, the rest were disgusting. E for Chemistry, even though i spent so much time of my holiday studying for it. O8 for my Econs, smacked right at 35%. And a F for my Physics, which was a grade given out so freely throughout S10. i'm quite sad for Chem, becos after going thru the paper, the questions which i had gotten wrong or did not know how to do back then, were all attemptable given what i had studied. I studied every chapter tested except for Carboxylic Acid, which wasnt really tested much in the paper. hAiz, i need to practise more for my Chem. Oh yah, i am officially a 3-subber. i've dropped Econs, finally. No more Stacey Tan. No more Monetarists. No more Keysian. No more Classicals. At least for the A-levels...
i must say that i feel sad having to drop a subject. Earlier on in the year, when i expressed my intention of dropping Econs and came close to dropping it, i had felt a sense of relieve more than once or so. This time, having seriously thinking through the entire situation, and deciding on dropping it for real, i actually felt sad. But i had to do it. Otherwise, god knows what may happen to my A-Level results. All i can do now is to feel guilty at having to drop a subject and use that same guilt to motivate me to work harder for my remaining subjects.
National Junior Athletic Championship
Nope, this has got nothing to do with NJC. It is another race held under the Singapore Amateur Athletic Association (SAAA) corporation. I was in the 100m and 200m Under-20s category. I did very badly for both. So bad that i realised i'm actually a below-average athlete. I did 12.99s for my 100m and 26.70s for my 200m. Such great lousy timings and i was the last for both heats. i think i'm even worse than 'below average'. Not much time left to Nationals. i really need to work extremely hard. But it is really hard to juggle sports and studies at the same time. i really think the NJ canoeists are god-like in terms of discipline towards training and studying.
So much in my mind and so many things had happened. What a narrative blog entry today. Well, at least it can pacify both yaowen and samuel. One has been telling me to update and calling me lazy. The other made fun of my starting line for the previous entry. Never mind. But it is really shocking to know that there are still so many people dropping by over the month even when i've not updated for so long. i guess they are just patiently waiting to peek into my mind at a new entry. All right, here's the end, get out of my mind before the gap starts closing...
