13 November // Last day of school attending lectures and all before we started hibernating at home for prolly three weeks doing up reports and preparing for exams!! Now that exam's over I am officially unemployed and the fact that Im gonna have to adult soon kind of scares and excites me, but more on that next time. Exams had been manageable, I mean seeing how I study for each paper (chiong one semester of reading materials in one freakin' day which meant I got minimum sleep if any at all and it felt soo awful coz Im too old to pull all nighters) but I could still write stuff out and that means I will do fine (: Still hoping to pull my CGPA up to the next class tho!! And my reports hahaha wtf all completed in like one day also TOO GUNGHO (tho I spent a few days reading up reference books) and I got back the results for this particular report after my last paper two days back - a freakin' 27 out of 30!! The one I included 我的少女时代 quote - “没有人可以定义我们，只有我们自己知道自己是谁，也只有我们才能决定自己的样子” HAHAHAH the marking criteria best siol :O
I feel like there's so many takeaways from the modules I read this semester, like for the Cross-Taiwan Straits Relations class (pictures above) we are learning about history + politics + current affairs all rolled into one (they are closely linked anyway) it just opens up my eyes to know how and why things became the way they are now when it comes to the China / Taiwan issue (I mean even the concept of China in itself is problematic) and how a select few hold so much power they affect hundreds and thousands of people. Basically just how this is part of a world order (I think we all are part of a global order somehow but it's not like it stays a certain way forever) and there are still the histories / politics / current affairs of other parts of the world that Im still not familiar with. It's funny how the more we study, the realization that we know so little hits home even harder.
And then there's Quah (: who made me fall in love with literary concepts in year one (tho Im not any good in my literature classes haha) His lectures are sometimes stressful but always enjoyable, timeless even. Same for Kd's (enjoyable and timeless, minus the stressful)!! With Quah's classes, it's more of the little things that will stick with me for a long time to come. The importance of being precise and how 惰性 is a really unattractive trait and to think critically and not just take things at face value etc etc and the concept of performance of coz. Basically, to transcend. Coz he's just up there like that.
My translation class hor, I couldn't really remember when was the last time I saw Uganda. Idk if it's coz she kept flying for overseas conferences or if Im the one skipping a tad too many of her classes or both. But thank god for the translation textbook I borrowed from the library. Coz like one day before the paper I finally learnt what I need to know and I realized I couldn't term 匆匆那年 lyrics translation as, well, a 'translation' based on equivalence theory so it's at most a transposition.
And my Air Quality Management class had been timely in a sense due to the recent haze. So there's a better gauge of air pollution out there other than the PSI which they called AQI (Air Quality Index). It measures PM2.5 in the atmosphere as well which inherently poses more risk than the PM10 calculated in PSI coz PM2.5 can reach the 600millions pulmonary alveoli in your lungs and lodge themselves there (GAWD the kind of thing I memorized for exams) whereas PM10 only reach the upper parts of your respiratory system and can be expelled back through the throat. Wtf I gave up on their calculations a long time ago so basically I registered my calculator for nothing lol and the freakin' 60 bucks textbook still like brand new (can sell on carousell alr).
So right after our last lecture we were taking photos EVERYWHERE - at the Chinese Heritage Centre (which dad calls it 庙) & HSS Building & The Hive (or dimsum baskets up to ya) they are all in close proximity to each other it makes for a really funny landscape coz they each represent the traditional, the modern and the postmodern respectively; it's basically a rojak of architecture styles that are representative of the era they were built in BUT THENNN it felt a lot like ideological clashes and also, you can't just keep marketing the university based on one building when the rest of the campus doesn't even remotely look like that ugh but apparently their marketing efforts paid off coz there really are tourists who make all their way into Pulau NTU just to take pictures of The Hive ???????
Okay, now Idk if I can succinctly say what I wanna say about my three and a half years in NTU Chinese in one post and Im not going to try anyway. Maybe coz Im not even emotional about leaving school (yet). Im just glad I chose a humanities course after all, even though I most probably will have it easier if I go study business. And as always, I could have put in more effort in my studies HAHAH tell me how I even managed to come this far, it's astonishing sometimes. But I guess I will miss being a student. Anyway, fun times taking photos together on our last day sia ~ school had ended on a sweet note (:
xx