Life - May 5, 2017

I graduated from Tenby Schools Ipoh after pursuing my General Certificate of Education Advanced Level (which is known more casually as A Levels) on June of 2014. I started working part time at a tuition centre as an assistant teacher in which I worked two and a half hours on weekdays and I am totally free on weekends. I worked until the end of October and quitted my job because I was planning to look for a temporary job in Singapore but I did not manage to find a job so I came back to Malaysia.

I was free for about 2 months when I was trying to find another part time job as a teacher, I changed a few job until I landed on this job right now where I am still working at, still a tuition teacher. During the start of this life, I was quite positive about it where I took it as a gap year where I tried out a lot of new things and try to get new experiences (although not much has been done), I planned what I would like to do and what I wanted to achieve.

All was well and good for the most part of 2016 because I was able to keep myself busy as I was all motivated, I had an experience of having a formal interview for my application to Nagoya University in Japan although I couldn't get it at the end. Before that, I was so busy trying to prepare for my university application to Nagoya Unversity having a personal statement and a themed essay to write, and then also application to British universities, as well as writing my script for my Japanese speech contest. The later half of 2016 got a little bit more boring to me because I did not have a lot of things to do and I was actually losing motivation to do anything, I was so pumped up for my first trip ever in my life to Japan though, and I was preparing to go to Monash University.

After I quit Monash University back in December 2016, I came back to my old life that I have spent almost one year on, this time I lost all my motivation, although I am still excited to go to Taiwan to study Japanese and to have a trip to the Philippines in August, a place where that is so foreign to me all the while. Other than that, I felt like I am void of any purpose in life. One thing is although I work part time, most of the time I am alone in my house and I couldn't hang out with anyone because unlike 2016, all my friends are out of this lonely little city at somewhere else and I am all alone in this place, I do not have a normal social life anymore. All I have right now over here is Joyce since Joyce just graduated from her college she has the time to spend with me, but she is going to start working soon on June, she will be busy with her work and I will be truly alone during that period. "Human is a bunch of social animals, isolating a person from society can bring to a lot of depressing thoughts", that is an article I read on the internet although I couldn't remember the source of it. From June to around August, I will be so lonely, especially June and July since August I will spend my time mostly in the Philippines and when I come back to Malaysia I will be flying off to Taiwan in about one to two weeks' time.

Maybe it's all in my mind but sometimes I feel kind of useless because looking at what I have achieved in these 2 years, really nothing much. Yes I gained experience in working, and yes I did got a national second place in my Japanese language speech contest which I never dreamed of getting, but after all, it seems like that's everything I have done for these two years. There are a lot of smaller aim that I have set for myself like learning Korean, learning web development and so on, none of them really got any traction and nothing has been done really.

For one thing, I have a very low self-motivation, I feel a sense of satisfaction when I am working with other people, to keep myself busy because I am obligated to because maybe it's my job or because I am a student that I have to study, that gives me a very clear aim of what I should be doing. During the days of me staying at my home where most of the time I wasn't doing anything. When there is a reason for me to "not do it", it is very hard for me to get the motivation to do it. I guess this is the part of me where I have to work hard to change, although I have absolutely no idea what to do or where should I start doing that.

For now, I just want to start my life in Taiwan as soon as possible to bring in new colours to my life. I want to spend time with friends, burning midnight oil doing group assignments and reports with coursemates, keep myself tired, exhausted and busy each and every day, just like life in Monash a few months back. But as Joyce has told me, I chose this life when I quit Monash, guess I couldn't blame anyone. I am not blaming anyone, I just want this kind of uneventful life to get to an end as soon as possible. I see no light in my life right now.

9 Years of Blogging - March 6, 2016

I started my first blog back in 2008 when my friend who was using Blogger to blog about his daily lives and his football craziness. He persuaded me to start blogging a lot of times by saying how fun blogging is and he always ask me to read his football entries, so out of curiousness I tried out my first blog, I had no idea what I was doing back then, I did not even know what is a "blog" exactly back then. But nonetheless, I started a blog. I don't remember the URL of that blog moreover whether I have ever posted a single blog entry.

I started to make blog entries when I entered secondary school, back in 2009. Back then I had two blogs that I maintained, one of them is this blog that has had numerous facelifts and another one written all in Japanese called "Chocolate Memories" (as far as I can remember), don't ask me why I named it "Chocolate Memories", I had no idea, because I am not a chocolate fan, to begin with. All and all I have been blogging for about 9 years now if I have to count the time when I do not have the slightest idea what blogging is.

I have maintained about half a dozen blogs to date, I did not keep track of it but I guess that is the number of blogs that I owned/contributed to. This blog lasted the longest from 2010, and it has a lot of records of me as a person for all these years. There are numerous occasions where I wanted to close this blog down and delete it forever. But then I always remember what I told myself when I first started maintaining this blog, that I am going to keep this blog no matter what, no matter how embarrassing my entries used to be. Indeed, when I look back at those entries that I wrote years ago, sometimes I laugh uncontrollably thinking how stupid I was, and sometimes I feel like punching myself in the face/gut because of the stupid things that I have done.

The year when I posted the most entries and had the most traffic to my blog was on 2012 when many of my friends were doing blogs too. I am still subscribing to their blogs to this day (partly because I am too lazy to remove them from my subscription list). Fast-forward to 5 years later to this year, most of the blogs that I am subscribing to is literally dead. In fact, most of them haven't been updated once since more than 3 years ago. On my subscription list, there are only about 3 blogs that are still occasionally active.

Many of the entries that I have posted has been reverted into drafts by me when I gave this blog a facelift again a few weeks back, those entries shall remain my own memories and I intend to make it that way for now. Entries about me having a crush on someone and got sad because of that is a considerably large percentage of all my entries, guess what's all on my mind was love, love and love back then.

One thing about writing a blog is when I look back on all the entries I have written, I can notice how much as a person I have changed/grown into in all these years. For example, the way I write entries. I have this entry back in 2012. I used to write my entries with one line per sentence so that a very short entry looks long enough. After I gave my blog a facelift, I decided to change the way I write too because this way it looks better and more mature. I guess this is the direct influence after I read Joyce's blog. I mean after I met Joyce, I think I have changed a lot, for one thing, it felt like I got more mature in thinking, I started reading books and started thinking more critically. Maybe it's an illusion but that's what I felt. But from all the reading of my old entries and comparing it to the entries I wrote back a few weeks ago, I have definitely become a more mature person and the way I think has definitely changed.

Another thing I noticed is how drastically my linguistic ability has improved. I dare not say about my Mandarin proficiency because I have not noticed any improvements in it, although definitely, the way I express myself using words has become better. My English has definitely got much better compared to, say, a few years back. My English is definitely not very good still, but I am surprised how much better I am right now compared to before. Definitely, too, my Japanese ability has improved much, I guess I have to thank my Japanese teacher, Yamada sensei that helped me so much with my Japanese when I started attending to her class back in 2014. 

It's funny how people tend to think that everything in this world is static, things don't change with the flow of time. The fact is, every day, things are changing, for better or for worst. Through all these years when I am blogging, every time I post something, I don't feel like I am a better person compared to the previous time I posted an entry. But over the years, the change is so drastic that I almost couldn't recognise myself, it felt like two totally different people. I guess blogging is a good way to realise and to remind myself how dynamic this world is.

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