we’ll make the great escape.

right i might as well face the reality of my disastrous results:

math: 2/60 (look everyone, 3%)
chinese: 41.5/100
bio: 30.5/55
history: 20/30
lit: 16/25

I expected my math, so it wasnt SO bad, but the reality is always more shocking than the expectation. I sort of teared, though I didn’t think I was going to. I was hoping for a pass in HCL, but, oh well. And I thought that my bio would be better… lousy passmark due to a 6/20 for <CQ section. Never knew MCQ could be so shit difficult. And history- well, i definitely could have done better, with better planning of time and actual essay structure. But my lit is just- 16/25 is the worst mark I’ve ever gotten, and it threw me into shock. I’m not like the others who go around stressing about their 3.9 GPA (highest GPA 4.0), but I actually try and have realistic expectations, but 16/25?! I did worse for Lit than I did for History, and that’s a shocker if it isn’t anything else.

now on to the sortof but notreally happier things. sorry for the erratic capitalization, but, yeah. dont feel like religiously capping every letter i should right now.

i read two sad books in a row lately, the first being Stardust by Neil Gaiman and the second being Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. As of late I’ve been on a bookbuying spree, whenever the Shortlist sends me a Borders bookvoucher I would then go down and buy books. And yesterday, I planned on buying Eldest (from the Eragon series, Christopher Paolini) and the Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. They’re both really good books, both of which I’d only read halfway through and decided they were worth buying already. GUESS WHAT BORDERS RAN OUT OF STOCK FOR BOTH OF THEM. COME ON LAH BORDERS I LOOKED FOR THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE LIKE LAST MONTH AND IT WAS OUT OF STOCK THEN TOO, RENEW YOUR STOCK ALREADY!

But in that sense, Stardust and Flowers for Algernon were just as worth buying, because Neil Gaiman is fantasy brought to the mundane Earth and because, I just discovered, Flowers for Algernon is really good too. Flowers in particular made me think about how naive and foolish (seriously) I am sometimes. I always am not aware of the bad things that go on in the world. Perhaps Flowers for Algernon was written not so recently, but still, it shocked me to see that people could be so undeserving of a man’s trust and well, general state of being. as the book went on, i wasn’t sure whether charlie was being arrogant and self-centered because of his new level of intelligence, or whether the other characters were simply being jealous of his intelligence and/or too humanlike to see what both themselves and charlie were actually about. to tell the truth, i kinda disliked charlie towards the end, but daniel keyes portrayed charlie’s descent into (no other better word) stupidity so heartrendingly, like charlie himself couldnt even remember his thoughts during his ‘intelligent’ life, and what he could have been.

Is intelligence that great, then? Most people in my circle of friends are ’smart’, and we’ve always been. It’s terrifying to think of being a person who can’t remember, nor follow coherent thought and logic, and to be so naive that you laugh with the people who laugh at you. Especially the remembering part. This may sound more poetic than it actually is, but personally, I feel that a person is nothing without their memories. They’ve got no past to look back on, neither do they have anything to bank on to know how their life has been. How would my life be like if I were stupid or of super-average intelligence? My marks kinda brought me back to think about that, too. Charlie never had a fulfilling life in the entire book, he just had bits and pieces of it. He had expectations, he had hopes, and the experiment might have filled of the holes in his brain but it certainly didn’t do a lot for his heart. Charlie never really got what he wanted, in that sense. Enlightenment is all very good and well, but in the end he lost what he had, and in a sense, he had negative gain from the entire experience. Which sucks.

Stardust was romantic in the best of ways, like how Neil Gaiman’s books always are. I’m glad I bought it, even though I’d read it already. If you haven’t read Neil Gaiman, try Stardust. A lot of people die in it, but love lived on till the end (yes, I’m an incurable romantic, but I fail at the actual love bit).

On an interesting note, the cover of my new Flowers for Algernon is bright pink. I like.

~ by sydney on May 15, 2007.