of motivation (of the lack thereof)

For all the gripes that i have regarding nie, it's definitely not all bad, although up till say this week any views i had on the institution as a whole (as opposed to the people) were almost purely negative. Thankfully, this week saw the start of some classes which i feel are definitely more relevant to what we are going to be doing. Finally, for the first time since i've gotten there, during class i'm able to say to myself "hey, this stuff actually is of use!" instead of "oh no not more of this crap!" This does not, however, take away from the fact that the majority of what we are doing there is, imho, thus far quite a waste of time and other resources. But nevertheless, i guess it's a step in the right direction eh (even if it means that there's that much more work to do =p)?

And speaking of schoolwork, i've to say that in spite of that though, i've come to realize that for the first time in my recent memory i no longer have a motivation to work hard, as i find it hard to see a point in aiming for anything more than a pass. Last time, even if there were classes i didn't like, i'd at least try and put in some effort in order to get a reasonable grade. Now however, i dunno if it's fatigue or the environment or just the sheer blah nature of the class content and teaching methods, but i can't see myself doing much more than achieving the minimum expectations (if even those are met)... It's especially ironic that one of the edu psych (which btw is just terrible) assignments that we are to do is on motivation of learners. Hah!

Am trying at the same time to figure out what to do with myself during the december hols. Or rather, where to go during the december hols. I dunno what it is that compels me to take regular and frequent trips out of here (and preferably to as far away from here as possible), but the prospect of a future career that may severely curtail opportunities to get out of here to take a good long break has made me really value the month off from nie, as i dunno when the next one may be. So even though there's lots of work to be done, i've probably spent as much time researching on possible places to go - in fact, the first three books i've borrowed from the nat'l library in almost two decades (am not exaggerating here) are for that very purpose. Anyone got suggestions/ want to come? Heh think not but hey it's worth a shot eh...

Anyways, as a follow-up to my current bone to pick, i read about this site online and immediately went to sign it. It was the least i could do...

opportunity costs

Well as one might have guessed i've spent a good deal of the past two weeks watching the Olympics coverage on tv, thanks to scv and their six whole channels of coverage. Quite extraordinary actually - the opportunity to actually be able to choose between sports to watch was quite a novelty, and to that end i watched stuff i'd never watched before like rowing/canoeing/kayaking and women's weightlifting (scary stuff, that).

Come to think of it though, perhaps i overdid it quite a bit where watching was concerned - how ironic that the world's biggest multi-sporting event is enjoyed by millions all over the world like me sitting on their butts watching it on tv and not working any muscle save maybe the fingers (when changing channels) and the glutes (well, since that's what is sat on...). And that came at the expense of tackling the ever-increasing pile of nie work that has been silently accumulating - come to think of it, up till now i'm still not exactly sure what work i've to do - can't say that even if there were no Olympics i'd have been any more motivated to do it though...

Been pretty bummed as well cos i've had this real bad dry cough over the past two weeks, which has kept me from realizing any lingering desire to exercise. And it's really quite bad, and starting to get me somewhat worried. It sure doesn't help that with my meticulous elimination process where possible food choices at nie is concerned, and given the real limited choices there, there's practically nothing i can eat which may not aggrevate the situation... Anyways, tomorrow morning, i was intending to donate blood, since they were setting up one of those mobile centers at nie (as much as i believe in donating blood, i normally only go about with it if the center comes to me, rather than me going to the center). But then i just read their guidelines and they say that if you've had a cough in the past week (and i'm coughing as i type this), you can't donate. Ah well, another time maybe...

Rather randomly, my current bone to pick (and boy, do i ever run out of them?), is with LBW, the stta president (how did she even land the post in the first place?). I must admit that i've never been a fan of the stta's recruitment policies and over-reliance on foreign-born players, as good as they are - but in any case i can't deny the fact that they've achieved remarkable success over the past decade or so (let's not get to the dubiousness of that success). And then here saunters in LBW (who btw i never had a good impression of since her use of crude hokkien jamban-related terminology in parliament, in spite of her uncanny knack for appearing by the side of grieving relatives of at least two separate people who had died tragically, not long after their deaths) and by the end of one month at the helm she's succeeded in throwing a huge spanner into the works of a system that by and large has worked very well (and right after achieving the pinnacle of its success thus far, nonetheless), not only unnecessarily shooting her mouth off to the media after a major but nevertheless hardly life-threatening mistake, but also firing the manager and head coach just like that. And the worst thing is that she can say stuff like "let's move on" or that she doesn't want to be drawn into the fray. I find that so incredulous, especially when she was the one who started it in the first place... Sigh.

for a change

“Ladies and gentlemen, in keeping with the spirit of the Olympics, please do not applaud competitors’ errors. Thank you.”

To my satisfaction, after at least two matches of local fans applauding whenever the opponent of Li Na, a Chinese female tennis player, would double fault (i.e. two successive salah serves), they were finally told off. Granted that their interest in the sport of tennis was largely relegated to the sphere of a fellow Chinese playing in the match, and therefore they probably were not aware of expected tennis-watching etiquette, but even with that taken into consideration, i did think that they were at least partly to blame in terms of being disrespectful of whoever Li’s opponent happened to be. Nothing against Li though (she is a very good tennis player, and in fact, she did yell at those errant fans to shut up at one point), but thanks to such ignorant fans, for the first time ever i ended up rooting for Venus Williams in their match (and of course Venus went on to lose, but that’s another matter…)

It’s things such as this that which have made me to be the anti-supporter, if you’d like, of the Chinese team (admittedly, my sympathy for Liu Xiang and his untimely injury was more than matched by glee that at least some of the ridiculous Chinese public pressure for performance was not satisfied). Way back in 2001, in fact, i was probably one of the few here who was (albeit silently) rooting (in vain) for Toronto to win the bid to host the games, and in the seven years since then i’ve still not warmed in the slightest to Beijing. I suppose that to a large extent my rationale behind such a negative (and minority) view of the hosts has already been covered ad infinitum by the (chiefly western) news media (e.g. human rights abuses, pollution etc - such as this), and to that end I do recognize that there exist inherent flaws and sound counter-arguments. Nevertheless, there definitely are more than legitimate concerns in favor of a dissenting view, and perhaps I feel more strongly about them than most others (at least in this particular neck of the woods) do. So where that is concerned perhaps the ‘agree to disagree’ truce camp is the best way to go.

The other major factor behind my lack of enthusiasm, sad to say, is basically the inherent Chinese-ness of everything. Definitely my early disdain for Mandarin, a result of this more-than-reluctant so-called ‘mother tongue’ student being force-fed xi zi and zhao ju and what not for way too long a time, and hating almost every moment of it, has somehow developed over the years into an aversion of (and cynicism towards) many things Chinese, particularly whenever the annoying Chinese cultural card is played. So i rarely eat Chinese food (at least not voluntarily), think nothing of wearing black at CNY or sticking my chopsticks into the bowl rather than resting them at the rim (and in fact in cases would purposely do so just to annoy some others), and would never go to China for a holiday (again, at least not voluntarily).

And so now when there’s all this talk about how the impressive opening ceremony has shown how China has ‘made it’, i lament the unnecessary extravagance and opulence of the whole thing, thinking that $ could have been better spent in many other areas. When China dominates the competition in sports like pingpong and diving (and at least for the former sport, proving a very successful exporter of top-notch players to lesser rival countries such as S’pore), I regret the extremely tough Soviet-era training that these world-beaters have had to undergo in order to get where they are, separating parents from child and depriving the latter from many aspects of a childhood (and not forgetting the hundreds, of not thousands of others who are not the best, and as such not making it to the world stage, their effort at least in this respect being in vain. And when China is head-and-shoulders above the rest of the countries in the medal tally, prompting all those sentiments of how Chinese from all over the world can be truly proud to be Chinese, here am i rolling my eyes, wondering how, with more than a fifth of the world’s population to work with, surely such an achievement is but merely to be expected (and of course this sparks all those commentaries comparing India’s one gold to China’s close-to-fifty at this point).

In any case, China definitely deserves to be congratulated on its performance during the Olympics, be it in terms of sporting or hosting achievements. However, there lies much behind these achievements that is far less worthy of praise, and perhaps is more worthy of criticism. Not popular sentiments, i know – and perhaps i may kena whacked for voicing such views. Oh well, again, let’s agree to disagree on this. (and so don’t even get me started on how irritated i am with those who criticize people like me who don’t care much for Singapore’s alleged sporting success in the form of a silver medal – in short, all credit is due to the three ladies and the team behind them, but at the end of the day, regardless of all the talk about S'pore being small, and how we are a globalized society and what not, personally there is something inherently wrong with the way in which they have come to represent the country with such blatant recruitment being undertaken and how their success/failure is perceived and handled by the media and the public - oops, so i got started :p)

Sianifying nie work awaits…

Singapoor?

I remain ambivalent (not quite opposed towards, though probably i’m inching more and more towards that stance) towards Singapore’s purported Olympic medal prospects, due to the fact that virtually all of the realistic chances S’pore has of getting a medal basically lie with people who have been recruited from overseas to join ‘Team Singapore’. I’m definitely not being xenophobic or ultra-nationalistic or anything of that sort – if these people are able to get chances to perform well on the international stage that would possibly have been denied them otherwise, and help to encourage the further development of local sporting talent, then by all means go ahead. My issue is with the way in which S’pore has really been relying far too much on them in order to, and here may i borrow a cheesy slogan form the 2010 youth Olympics, ‘blaze the trail’ in the international sporting arena. Yes there’s all that talk of how we are an immigrant society, but really the makeup of the S’pore team in terms of whether their nationality was a result of birth or acquisition far from mirrors what it is on a national level. I won’t go as far as to call them sporting mercenaries, although definitely that term came to my mind with reference to them…

But even with that aside, i do pity these foreign-born Singaporeans, who have unfortunately become victims of the apparent national thirst for Olympic glory – in the sense that unrealistic expectations of a medal have become pinned on them. Of course, it’s hardly the kind of pressure that perhaps China places on its athletes, but still i can’t help but think that it is not constructive in any way… Take Tao Li as a case in point – she slices more than a second off her personal best in the 100m Butterfly, setting a new Asian record in the process, and for all that effort following a respectable 5^th place in the final this is the thanks she gets – as someone who has “dashed the country’s hopes” and “failing to top” her previous record in the final. Surely she deserves far more credit than that! It’s ironic that she’s treated this way precisely because she performed so well in earlier rounds.

Of course, the good ‘ol local press doesn’t exempt the S’porean-born athletes from their unrealistic expectations either. Today’s ST gave its report on the S’pore swimmers – and (apart from Tao Li) save a mention of one of them breaking the national record, everything else was about how they failed to make the semi-finals/finals. Maybe if the reporters had done their homework they would have realized how those who do make it to that stage are really in a different class to begin with, and have at least appeared to (cos i’m sure they are) acknowledge their effort.

And in any case, i pity the women’s table tennis team (and hey, guess where all of them were born?) should they not be able to get a medal. And if they do, i won’t be too excited either…