YGrasping the Buddha's Foot
It was only at 4 am on the morning of the day before my SAT that I began to panic about my essay. Previously, I had dismissed any worries about it because hey, I've spent a whole year writing GP essays, so it should be no sweat right?
My cold reason then pointed out to me that my tutors are so lazy, I've only written about 4 GP essays the whole year, 3 of which were under test conditions. And I was reminded that my essays did not score very well either.
So now I am flipping through my SAT practice book, looking at the sample questions and trying to think of examples suitable for those questions. I have been trying to recall every book I've ever read and remembered so I can sound intelligent when they ask me to "Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations." I should probably also try to recall stuff I've learnt in history (unfortunately I don't do American history, though, like everyone, I am dimly aware of it) and heck, maybe econs will be useful. Can't use Singapore examples, though, I suspect. Ugh, I wish I knew more things--no, I wish I were interested in more things, like Justin. Things would probably come easier.
Can't you just give me a passage to dissect and talk about?
Stuff I Have Read Over the Past 2 Years:
--The Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
--Prozac Nation (Elizabeth Wurtzel)*
--The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)*
--Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
--Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)*
--King Lear (Shakespeare)
--King Henry IV Part 1 (Shakespeare)
--The Secret Sharer (Joseph Conrad)
--The Machine Stops (EM Forster)
--Meet Me on the QE 2! (Catherine Lim)
--The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
--Twelfth Night (Shakespeare)
--Daughters of the Late Colonel (Katherine Mansfield)
--The Screwtape Letters (CS Lewis)
--1984 (George Orwell)*
--Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
--Songs of Innocence and Experience (William Blake!)
--Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)*
--Odour of Chrysanthemums (DH Lawrence)
To those MG lit students: yes, half of the titles listed here are actually short stories and were my lit texts. If I add in Dan Brown and Harry Potter I'll get a slightly longer list but I doubt they're credible enough books. I could say I attempted to read VS Naipaul and F Scott Fitzgerald but I had no idea what the heck they were going on about. And Blake's actually a collection of poems, but I could still use that. I could talk about Sylvia Plath but I would really rather not, especially after Burge failed me on my Blackberrying PC.
So it's a grand total of 20 things (I can't even call them books) over the past 2 years which works out to 10 things a year, which makes 0.83333 things a month. And I take on average a week to get through a novel--where did all that time go? I'm sure there are more titles (random chick-lit books, trashy novels, Christian books, etc) in between but these are the ones that I can recall right now and they form the bulk of what I can remember, so CRAP I'm dead.
Maybe I could, y'know, somehow translate some math formulas into words and then work with them...
Nah, you're right, that probably won't work.
Y'know what, it's tomorrow already and I've got to wake up at 8 am and rush down to church to file the camp folder. I don't know how I'm going to survive the day, really. I've been sleeping less over the holidays--later and lesser. I'm just glad it's the holidays and I can sleep in.
NUS, lah. NUS.
(p.s. The asterisks indicate the books that are highly recommended by me. You have to read Rebecca, it's a fantastic book.)
jac was here with you
12/02/2005 05:05:00 am
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