uncommenced

As can perhaps be gathered by this point, i was not the happiest of campers come final results time, which of course happened right smack in the middle of an otherwise real enjoyable and fun Vietnam trip. As i've mentioned countless times before, as much as i was trying not to make a big deal out of results, well it still was a big enough of a deal for me to tip the scales, souring me on nus in general. And it was along those lines that i decided to skip the much-ballyhooed commencement. It was not so much that i didn't want to go cos of the bad final results, but more that (at least at the moment) i felt that nus had caused me so much grief in general (with the results adding to the huge pile of existing grievances - although i'll admit that some of them have entirely to do with me and not with nus) that the last thing i wanted to do is to end things off with the school on such a note.Perhaps that sounds childish, but yeah at the time (and in fact now still, albeit on a reduced scale) it made (and makes) perfect sense to me.

On the other hand, i'd be a big liar if i were to say that i didn't care at all for apparently dropping down after the promise of three-and-a-half years leading up to something more uplifting. But to that end, actually by the end of the Vietnam trip i was pretty ok with that, so i didn't even bother to proceed along any avenue of appeal. However, i was not up to keeping on thinking about the results again and again, and as such skipping the ceremony (which at least imho is almost entirely a chore to attend save for the post-ceremony picture-taking anyways) was, in my typical avoidance mindset, the logical way to go. And it was this eclectic combination of rationale behind skipping the thingy that i conveyed to the (typically shocked/non-understanding) folk who asked me about commencement.

So imagine the irony, after all of that deep thinking through and rationalization that i went through over the course of more than a month, for me to receive a text from my ex-form teacher, who had attended the first of the ceremonies, offering his congratulations - he had seen my name on the book of names. Hah - in retrospect it's quite funny la, but at that point i was like hmm... although at the end of the day i'd still rather not have gone, even if it means no nice pictures, as i suppose most, if not all of what i was my own reasons for not going still holds.

And in any case, this has been a valuable experience for me, spiritually, at least, and of course i'm thankful that in the end, things turned out as they did - one thing's for sure, i'd definitely not be as (usefully) reflective had things been clear cut form the start.