a post to remember.

i have a test tomorrow. i've barely studied, yet im blogging. what a smart thing to do.

i've never been a disciplined person. in kindergarten i would often get into fights with other boys. at home i would get into fights with my brother. boys will be boys i suppose.

this did not mean i was a bully though. mostly i was the one being bullied. i really was a good boy back then.

i remembered that i was really talkative at primary school. one of the noisy ones. i remembered that i talked too much that i didn't know what the homework was most of the time, so i had to call my friend to ask.

those days, studies were never a problem. i don't even recall studying for tests. but i was top of the class most of the time. haha. until standard three anyways. then i skipped one year and went to standard five.

by standard six i was grouped into the smartest class apparently. so competition here was much more fierce. i can't remember what number i got in class, but it was in the top 10 still, so not bad. but i was the best speller in class. haha. unfortunately there was no spelling bee at the time, so i couldn't represent the school.

and yes i was still being bullied by some of the bullies. lol. i remembered playing this stupid game where you had to bang the other person's back if he didn't do the safe sign, and i got banged so hard i think it bruised a bit. but i did do the safe sign, this bully just wanted to hit me. zz. i remember my grandmother applying minyak gamat on my back.

[caption id="attachment_125" align="aligncenter" width="267" caption="Standard 6. it was very bright so i had to squint my eyes."][/caption]

i don't really know what this has to do with how disciplined i am, but lets just carry on.  in secondary school i was a bit less of a good boy. haha. i used to get caned a lot, and would often get caught with long hair. but in my defense my hair is thicker than most people and although it looks long, it isn't. regardless, i would still get caught, up to the point that the discipline teacher recognized me coz i was caught all the time.

didn't perform so well academically in secondary school. i remembered getting number 20+ in class, close to 30 i think. and my mother wasn't too happy about it. haha. and she still isn't. haha. oh well, some things never change. but i was still in the top class though.

i really liked history. cause of the stories i think. really hated geography. i would often say " why would i wanna know what people in this unknown country mined? ". i think this was the point were i picked up on sarcasm. haha. there was one time i had to do a hundred sit-ups cause i did badly in a geography test. that sucked.

come pmr time however, i pulled my act together. before the pmr, i was number 8 in class, tied with one chinese boy. for pmr, i was one of the three people in my school that got 8a's. (most of them took only 7 subjects. lol) apparently coz of this i was quite popular. but i didn't know. lol.

[caption id="attachment_126" align="aligncenter" width="604" caption="Form one. see if you can spot me."][/caption]

when most of my friends fled to more prestigious schools, i decided to flee as well. however, not at all intrigued by the concept of "taking care of myself at boarding school", i went to a school near to my house. a newly opened school. a place where the older schools nearby dumped their bad students. i must say that this was a very bad decision academically, but i was young. how would i know.

here, i was no longer bullied. i was more or less the bad boy now, though i never did any bullying. my studies weren't so great here, probably cause of the lack of competition. plus i was preoccupied with all the girls. lol. been in an all-boys school, relatively speaking, this was the first time i interacted with girls. i remember my father saying to me on the first day of school, "my son is now a teenager". lol.

due to all these factors, my spm results weren't so hot. i couldn't apply for any scholarships. i couldn't go to this swanky looking university i visited in tronoh. my teacher actually said this on result day. "yasin ni saya rasa kalau pergi sekolah lain mesti boleh dapat result lagi bagus, tapi dah duduk sekolah ni, apa nak buat".

till this day i often wonder what would happen if i would have gone to a proper school. i often imagine myself having a flawless academic record (cause spm was the only one that spoiled it all), and i probably would have been able to go study abroad with all expenses paid for by scholarship.

but honestly, i don't think it would have made that much of a difference. nowadays that school produces so many scorers, so it isn't really the school, its me. plus i don't regret the choice. i may not have excelled academically there, but the school did teach me a lot about life. about people. i really believe i grew a lot as a person there.

luckily, after spm, i was selected to enter pasum. though i was very low-profile there, i made some very close friends there, and enjoyed the hell out of life. haha. surprisingly enough, despite all the non-stop hedonistic activities, my results were not bad.

it was also here that i was forced to speak in english. since some of the malays here speak better english than malay, and some even better english than english people. lol. but through it my confidence to SPEAK (speaking and writing are two very different things) in english improved, so a very good thing indeed.

[caption id="attachment_128" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="my class at pasum. i wonder who that girl is. LOL."][/caption]

due to my not-so-bad results and my improved english, thanks to my one year stint at pasum, i was able to get accepted into my current university. and so here i am. still the undisciplined bum, blogging hours before an important test. haha.

all in all, utp has been a very good place for me. i am more patient, more understanding, less rude, less painful to live with, more open to people. i also learned a thing or two about engineering. LOL.

[caption id="attachment_129" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="a 3-years younger me."][/caption]

i'm not really sure what this post is supposed to be about, i think i did one like this before, but i do have one concluding point. life is unpredictable. the best way to live is to live without regrets. if i had gone to a boarding school, i probably would still be the wimp that was being bullied all over.if i had scored great results in my spm, i probably would not have gone to pasum, and would not have met all the people that i did there, and that in itself would have been a great loss to me. i probably would not have ended up in UTP, which apparently is the envy of a lot of universities out there, even the ones overseas.

(a friend studying in australia preferred my uni's curriculum better. plus i saw a university of melbourne graduate at our career fair, so that says a lot about our uni's exposure to the industry.)

okay that is all. back to studying. or maybe sleeping. lol.

take care. peace.

p.s : don't bother commenting. its bugged. wrote an email to friendster asking how to remove the verification thing, they say its standard so not an option to remove it. may move this blog to somewhere else if i have the time.