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The epitome of annoyance in my life as at the start of this year takes the form of my classmate. His name will not be revealed for obvious reasons (and I’ve contemplated if I should even blog about this, but what the hell, I’m standing by the it’s-my-blog creed), and henceforth he shall be known as FAC (Fucking Annoying Classmate). So what about him that irks me and the rest of my classmates exactly?

You’ll first have to understand that FAC places academic achievements as the single most important thing in his life, so much so that what spits out from his mouth – which is nearly all the time I’m nearby him considering how talkative he is – are all about subjects that we learn, and more. Most of the time it borders on academic nonsense – something that vaguely makes sense but then sounds kinda stupid – as if he’s only talking about these to make him sound smarter.

He has a Singapore PR from being born there, so I suppose his kiasu-ness makes sense. He loves nothing more than to constantly ask others what their academic results are, and if their results weren’t so good, he’d ask, “Why your results so poor wan?” in an air of smugness, and that easily – understandably – generates hatred and resentment from others.

He has an odd tendency to refer to people by their academic achievements. There was once when my female groupmate Rachel went, “Eh that girl quite pretty ya” and FAC answered, “Oh, that girl who failed her Econs ah?”

Obviously as a result of his obsessiveness towards all things academic and his lack of sensitivity, he has little friends – his ex-high school mates told me so, who were in the same college. In fact, when FAC, two female groupmates, and I were found hanging out together rather often because 3 of us were Curtin transferees and thus have somewhat of a common ground to stand on, and also as we’re a team in our Marketing project, others would whisper to us and ask whether we were friends with FAC and why were we even friends with him.

To be honest, I have no idea. Maybe it’s because I’m deemed “worthy” to be his “friend” as my results were quite good (if I may add, some were better than his ). But as the days pass on, I used my very well perfected art of pseudo-listening and put up with his litany of academic rubbish.

Oh but he’s smart, I’ll give him that. He plays the violin and is involved in an orchestra, and has an e-mail address that ends with 84 just to make himself sound older (he’s a year younger than me), which I’ve no idea why he’d pretend that way.

He teaches a small group of students at Taylor’s as well, as a side income. And he has been pestering me to read the Business sections of the newspapers “because we’re Business students what” when I don’t do that as they’re usually rather dreary.

He is just so.. nerdy, except that his talkativeness presents him in another light. He reads tons of non-fiction during his free time (he also once brought a book authored by Lee Kuan Yew to class, titled something like “My Life, My Story”), he’s a funny contrast to the rest of us.

I overheard two conversations recently after a lecture that can be used to illustrate this.

Siew Hui & Siew Chuen: Ahhhhh after this go back and sleep.

FAC: Ahhhhh after this go back and study.

Oh the cake of this has to be last week when I skipped my morning Marketing lecture as usual, when Rachel told me, “Ehhh you missed out something funny today la. You know what, FAC showed me his new economic theory that he came up on his own and the graphs that accompany it!”

Seriously….. we’re just at the end of our first year of degree. I don’t know whether to laugh or to be proud of him.

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Billy contacted me recently on MSN, and he wants my Angkor Wat pics so it could be put into his architecture paper! And I would be inside his bibliography too!

For some reason I feel a little elated, especially when he added that he thought about doing Angkor Wat for his paper after remembering about the Angkor Wat pics on my blog.

Very flattering ok. Travelling is a subject I have so much passion to talk about (alongside gaming), and it’s one of the only subjects I can happily recount my experiences for you even though I must’ve talked about it a million times already.. and being used as the main source for someone’s (research?) paper makes me feel so darn proud. :P