The Dysfunctional Pilgrim

I miss my old skin; my new one stretches too thin. It itches, tearing me     apart. It Hurts. Will I get used to It, or Will I grow a New one? New Haven, March 2018 (Hello! That's my first poem since my poetry course and I don't know if I like it or not. I guess I'm experimenting meaninglessly)

This was written a year ago, when my final observation was done and my supervisor informed me of my performance in my practical training.  Things have changed since then. Not really, but lately, I'm ... tired.  This was meant to be personal, but I thought of sharing it here. Why? I don't really know. Hopefully others can relate. More importantly, in typing these things, I hope to make sense of myself.  10 October 2015: Beat up teacher night What a messed up teacher I am. I don't remember all my students' names. I don't know if I've made a true connection with them, or if I was just rushing through the syllabus and worrying about my own performance and FYP too much. I don't know whether I've done any good at all, and I'm sure not all of them are going to perform well during their finals. I've failed so many. I can excuse myself and say this is just my first time, I'm not even a real teacher, etc. But the fact is in these four month...

...that I have terrible work ethic. I procrastinate. That is the be all and end all of my problem. As much as I'd like to think I'm amazing and did my final year project on my own, I know I absolutely didn't. So here's my official thanks (as written in the report) and some unofficial ones (which I could not afford to put in..) Acknowledgements Before all else, praise be to my heavenly Father who through Christ has granted me the deepest of mercies and grace. I am humbled by His continuous favour with Him and with men, even when I least deserve it. Throughout these four years, I have experienced His joy in which I draw strength to do all things.   My sincerest of thanks to my supervisor, Mr. Mohammad Sidik bin Ariffin, for his kindness and graciousness to me, the procrastinator to beat all procrastinators. Your advice and encouragement have been a great reassurance to me amidst the struggle of overcoming this last hurdle of my tertiary education. I am truly appr...

Asked me what course I'm doing. When he heard TESL, he said, that's good, just don't go be like Adam Adli. I thought, ah, not another 'young people should stay out of politics' speech.  But then he explained...He had to quit his studies to fight the communists. Never managed to continue it. He seemed genuinely interested in modern technology, but he said he can't keep up anymore. So don't throw away your future, he advised. Finish your degree, then go and 'fight' if you want.  I wonder how many others have lost the opportunity to further their academic pursuit because of war, disaster, inequality, poverty. Of course success is relative and certainly not defined by a degree. Is it 'throwing away your future' or 'taking a stand'? That's up to the individual to decide. But I think we should be thankful that we are free to choose in the first place. We wanted to go to uni, and we got to. Some wanted to, but never had that cha...

there’s a page to be filled a blank canvas waiting for words, and ideas but i say tomorrow there’s a bed to be filled a tired body waiting for rest, and sleep but i say tomorrow there’s a life to be filled a big world waiting for deeds, and me but i say maybe never there’s a hole to be filled a darkness waiting for dust, and me, and  i say maybe - Note: this was written a long time ago. I just found it again while rummaging through my stuff. 

I'm back, peeps, if you're still following. These are a set of poems I sent in for a poetry competition this semester. It's a set of three, but the last one was "canyons grand", which I have already posted up here, so I won't waste your time on it.  Milk The spilt milk drips  like murky white blood drops staining the brown floor and collecting black dust.        The broken glass creates icicles shattered and silver dust scattered from fallen wishing stars. Who did this? Who did this? I did this, and so did you. The milk has spilt and stars have fallen - No reason to cry for the two. Tanjung Malim, April 2015 Commentary: I wasn't very creative for this competition, due to time constrains. I wrote a rough draft of this many, many years ago, and with a pressure of a deadline, I pulled it out again and edited it. Well, when I say "edit", I mean change everything except the first line, haha.  A Haiku f...

I can feel it, that desperation when you realise every part of you is beeping, screaming "low battery!!" and you still have so much more to work on. Scratch desperation, this is panic. Contained panic, that will eventually leak out like a poisonous radiation gas and vaporize everything. I'm getting close to actually believing that I can't do this anymore. I'm not even sure what "this" is. I'm sure I had some sort of clear idea of what all this was perhaps 2 weeks ago? This is...me redoing people's work. This is...me trying to juggle too many things. This is...me making the sacrifice play. Fixing others' messes. Compensating. This is... What was all this?

This blog could easily be a rant blog, if I permit it. There's so, so SO many things to rant about in life. If you're a natural pessimist like me, it's instinctive. I can write 5 essays a day about how the realities of the world want to bring me down. Or how chocolate eclairs are absolutely gorgeous (yes, positive rants are also possible) Or why, why WHY is the grass so green. SERIOUSLY. But if I do that in my blog here, well just look at this entire entry. It's going to be one big fat mess. Life is already a mess, I rather have my blog in a little bit neater. So sometimes I let it rip on twitter. Or in a vague, random post on facebook.  Sometimes, I don't want to hurt anyone, so I'll just type out the rant and delete it. Sometimes, I don't want to remember the moment at all, so I just refuse to write it anywhere. Words will only etch the moment clearer in my brain, and what's the point of that? But life, for now, has great moments, but it ...

Class: Mon-Sat Night meetings: Mon-Fri (8-late ...) Afternoons free: Two (Fri, Sun) What have I done. p/s: Free time to blog: next to none.

Ok, so why are there ads on my blogger page now? it's irritating. i don't like it. Anyway, here's my Introduction to English Literature Group Assignment. Our play of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the wordsmith William Shakespeare. We didn't do the full play, because each group is supposed to do one scene, and we only had 5 groups. But that's not very important. My group was the fifth group. Below is the link to the first and i think you should be able to find the rest. This was possibly 3 weeks work so I'm really thankful we managed to pull it together. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes experiences that I've learnt from and would like to share but I don't have the time for it (or I am too lazy to think too much about it now). But I suppose I'd put something up about it soon. My own little post-mortem. This sem's finals, BTW, is just hectic. Because as soon as this play was done (which was my final assignment) we had one weekend ...

One of the few moments when a teacher became a friend in my eyes was when my Form 4-5 English teacher recommended "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred Tennyson. I went back and quickly dug it out, read it, and fell in love with the poem. I'm not quite sure what happened next but I remember being very excited about it, and I'm not quite sure when, but I did discuss the elements of the poem with her, and I brought up other Tennyson's works like Crossing the Bar.  I think it was because she introduced me to that poem, I became a lot more open and honest with her. If you know me, you'd know I usually shy away from being too open with others, especially if they're older than me and not related in any way. But I actually started exchanging books and magazines with her, and I'd recommend books to her in my Journal (some sort of English work - mostly to encourage writing skills). She'd in turn respond by writing comments, recommending other wo...

And two nights (and one day) of endless agonising efforts of squinting at a laptop. Here we are: my little trailer/preview/introduction to my group work presentation. It was just a slideshow at first....but our lecturer requested us to make the introduction more interesting... Me being....me.....went a little overboard. Ok.......so maybe I'm 40% of a workaholic. Naaaaaaaaaaaaah. I'm still lazy. Here's my little diddy. better to view on youtube...on a larger screen (yes, that's my ego talking. blow it up full screen! kidding) There's some minor glitches and timing problems. I'm not absolutely satisfied at it, but I'm happy. My group liked it, and so did others. So it's ok. Despite the how tiresome it can be, I actually enjoy doing it. Not sure why. But there's something about this whole video editing thingamajig that fascinates me. Midsem break is on. WORK WEEK though. WORK WORK WORK WORK. Noooooo i'm not a workaholic. Not yet. Hav...

You know you're overthought and overdone it when your lecturer goes "well thank you hannah....for making sure everyone else cannot present today" ...oops. But in all honesty, i did NOT overthink this presentation. I did it in less than 2 hours, and it was clumsily done, in my opinion. It just so happened to be an assignment that was fun: briefly introduce a style of music you like. I went and did soundtracks. I'm not entirely sure if it's a genre, but wikipedia seems to think so...along with some other web lists of music genres. So I went all out nerd on it and talked about the awesomeness of Hans Zimmer and John Williams (who is the man!), how soundtracks were once overlooked but are now slowly having their own limelight, etc etc. Yeah. ...maybe i did overdo it. In case your wondering what lecture this is, it's Music Appreciation and I'm enjoying it, despite the fact that I'm the only TESL-ian there. The only frustration would be how slow ...

When Prof. Dr. Shirley Lim (writer of Monsoon History, among others) came to our uni to share on Asian American Literature, she shared this poem by William Carlos Williams with us: I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were so delicious so sweet and so cold When she taught poetry to students (under the Budding Poets Society) in Hong Kong (I may be wrong about this information, it was a long time ago), she instructed them to use that format in the poem and come out with their own version. She actually wanted to do that with us but we ran out of time.  I took it on myself to give it a go, but there were two problems. First, I was writing it during a boring athletic lecture, and second, I was starving. As in, really, really, REALLY hungry.  And so I ended up with these two variations: This is just to say (V1) I have eaten the stray cat that walks around our five-f...

“November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year,” said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden. “That's the reason I was born in it,” observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose. "If something very pleasant should happen now, we should think it a delightful month,” said Beth, who took a hopeful view of everything, even November. November is here....I remember Guy Fawkes (but unfortunately not too familiar with him, i have to google him after this), but more importantly it's the birthmonth of Louisa May Alcott, one of my favourite authors, and Jo March, one of my favourite fictional characters. Jo March is apparently Alcott's description of herself, so that means....she and I are quite alike. It's kinda eerie that I'm in a way, trodding the same path as Jo now. She wanted to be a celebrated authoress, someone great and famous and rich, and in the end she became a teac...

Uni life has begun, and my kiasu-ness has been coming out of the closet. This is strange, because I’m a laid-back type who wouldn’t be too bothered with results or competitors etc. Ok, so maybe “ laid-back” is an understatement. I’m downright lazy. But laziness seems to be taking a backseat these days. For example, during orientation they were introducing us to all the elective and minor courses we could take and immediately the desire to take ALL of them (well, almost all) popped up in my head. I don’t know why. Also, we were grouped together in our respective courses during orientation and I was constantly trying to check out the competition. I had to rein my kiasu-ness in and remind myself that these people are going to be my course-mates, not my rivals. I’m supposed to be making friends. But friends can be rivals, right?  Shut up, kiasu.  During classes, if I notice someone being outspoken, my inner hackles will start to rise. I won’t challenge the ...