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March


"It is with regret..." I closed the window. Regret works both ways. While I believe they do mean what they say, it hardly means anything to them after a while. For one, they're used to it. Secondly, the opportunity cost may be high, but they've already chose the least opportunity cost they could.

I seldom regret anything that I do. Every important decision is made with lucidity and forecast to the best of my ability of the consequences of each path I take. As a result, the outcome is as I expect. Even the slight unexpected, I would be ready to accept with hindsight that through my choices I was prepared to face such results.

Now, it is as though this cruise missile has failed to raise its angle of attack enough to avoid the towering cliff. This analogy is by no means that random either. For years, I've slowly climbed, each time just making it past the academic cut off. I was, in similar sense, terrain hugging.

No one knew at first what I would be like of course. For that matter, no one would know at first how ANYONE might turn out. And not surprisingly, even the best primary schools don't have that much of a reputation due to this reason. Mine wasn't too good though. I mean, how high can the standards be if you could get into the top class (and stay there) with minimal studying? (And no studying for the first year too) The teachers weren't that good either. (or at least mine wasn't) Many of my questions went unanswered, and arguments (especially on the answers in the science paper) were rather unsupported coming from their side. It's alright I guess, after all, it was just primary school. So I didn't score that well either. A 254 wasn't really godlike at all. And I made it into secondary school just over the mark by 2. The cutoff was 252. (and on the side note, I managed to scrape a pass for higher chinese. A language I was starting to loathe due to not being good at it.)

Experiencing a new playing field, I had to climb again. I was at the bottom rung as expected. Fast forward a few years, I managed to top my class, but barely, beating him by only just 1 point (in IB total point score) then. I did miss out on the scholarship by 3, but I really didn't expect, and prepare for, the cutoff to be raised to a perfect score. I mean what the hell? seriously. The past two years had been 41 and 42, and that year I was in it jumped to 45?! Nay, I wasn't disappointed at my performance. I had prepared for it. I targeted to get 42 to be safe, I got it, and they just throw me something which was unimaginable (realistically that is). So no regret there see? And it wasn't anything that important too. Two years worth of school fees, in the same school.

Again, a year later, I was doing terribly in Chinese B. By terrible, I mean a non-7 scoring performance. It's bad enough considering only around 10 people per year get non-7s, and waste an entire year more to retake to get a 7 (not to mention that some of them still fail to make it to a 7). Come the actual exam, I managed to make it to a 7. It was most likely barely, considering I didn't score even a single 7 during normal school tests. The hardwork obviously paid off. I did choose to work that hard, and I did expect my efforts to pay off, so that was pretty awesome. I had gained myself about an extra 2 hours a week for the next year, which was the final year.

Talking about the final exam makes me mildy irritated and angry towards the marker who assessed my EE. For one, the two best physics teachers (best by my standards) in my school had given it a thorough look through and decided that it would score a grade A. Considering that I had looked through past years EEs as well, and that I had included a theory (with mathematical backup and reasoning) in this EE, made it totally shocking to see it come back with a C. If it came back with a B, it would have been better, since for the reason of not "losing face" IB never gives more than a 1 grade ammendment to my score, meaing that at best case, with the C that I had, I could only get a re-marked score to come back with a B, and not an A. Obviously the EE marker of my paper should be fired from his job for not having the required expertise (this holds water since the IB claimed my paper was re-marked with a senior marker), and shot for ruining something so important.

About scraping through? Yes, another instance of it. Through comparisons of answers (with the ONE, or ONEs actually), and a second go through the questions, it became quite apparent that many of us were making a number of mistakes in paper 1 and 2 for HL maths. There goes my 7 I thought. But thankfully, on my last paper, paper 3 (yes maths has 3 papers), I had some sort of enlightened moment, and managed to secure a question which was worth quite a sum of marks. It turns out that that was the factor which got me a 7. A friend with similar result to mine in the first 2 papers, only got a 6. The last paper had helped. It was extremely close too, I was finishing that question within the last 3 minutes of the paper.

So, with all these encounters, all I see now is just one huge explosion that that cliff wall. And mission failed. Sure, I don't only have one cruise missile, but I don't have an unlimited amount either. The last year had ended up with the same result, and that cliff is not crumbling anytime soon (not like it was a target, but it WOULD help if it did).

So I hit the start button again before the "Continue? 09" counts down to 00. 0 credits remaining.

10:31 31 Mar 2011
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