Mamak in the longest while

Project 365 #69: Thursday, 23rd April 2009

How I Met Your Mother, Season 4 Episode 20 – a real classic as usual.

Project 365 #70: Friday, 24th April 2009

I arrived at college at about 8.30am, after which I quickly got down to work to work on my International Monetary Economics ‘assignment’, which was handed out to our lecturer for us to gain extra marks after our poor performance in the recent test – I had only 19/30 too. I had do my reading on a photocopied library book the night before but hadn’t done anything about it, so I thought I could do it the next morning instead – took me about an hour to complete the question, which meant I was late for class and only entered the lecture hall at about 9.30am.

Spotted this cute kitten walking around my college.

A female classmate sat at my table, followed by Kenneth, and then later on Khai Shin arrived. When our class ended at roughly 10.30am, Khai Shin urged us to go for this financial talk organised by CPA (and probably AIESEC of UKM, I’m not too sure) which had already begun at 10am, and so some of us did – I thought the talk was conducted in a rather interesting and professional manner by one Jonathan Qwek, ex-INTI student who purportedly holds a license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore as an independent financial advisor. It was supposed to end at 12pm, which it didn’t, so with deep regret, I had to leave, as my mum had already arrived to pick me up.

I honestly wanted to stay on as I was learning a few interesting things about financial planning – my definite area of interest of the entire business field – and basically, be inspired enough by what the speaker was telling us to try and invest and expand my portfolio of investments to reach the ultimate goal anyone could ever achieve: financial independence. :)

Jess was back! (Well, for just 3 days anyway.) It felt like ages since we ever had a mamak session like this, and it was packed to the brim too. Ding first arrived at my house at 10pm+, having gotten back from studying at his rich friend’s place, then at about 10.20pm we left and picked up Jess.

There were three of us then, and we were talking rather animatedly even with just the three of us, then Jon and Ee Leen arrived, and a long while after, Shawn and Andy. Pretty damn interesting conversations we had – serious intellectual ones like “What’s so interesting about your course?” which we asked to nearly everyone who was present before Shawn and Andy came, and a torrent of lame and racist jokes that I never get bored of hearing and re-telling to those who’ve yet to hear ‘em.

2am came, and by then I could hardly keep awake anymore and could barely concentrate on the conversations going around. It was only when I remembered a joke I heard that very morning from the financial talk about the smart investor and a man and when I retold it, my mind managed to crawl out from the blanket and I could then sustain whatever lucidity I had for a while longer.

We only went back at 3am+. All the familiar peels of laughters and our often interesting conversations that I’ve missed, I found them once again in that nearly 5-hour long mamak session at Tanjung.

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A few days ago I found out where exactly to look for at the RMIT website for Student Electives – and I managed to see an extensive array of subjects. I spotted language classes such as Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Greek, all of which have levels 1-6. I e-mailed the course coordinator who then informed me via an automated e-mail message that she’s on leave till nearly the end of June and provided an e-mail address of another person instead. >_>

Long story short, I then e-mailed one of the contacts listed in the e-mail, who then forwarded it to someone else, who then told me:

Dear Clem,

Thank you for your interest in our Japanese courses.

Unfortunately, your Japanese will be too advanced for any of our
courses. For Higher Ed, we offer Beginners Level courses only.

I suggest that you consider another elective. Our School offer many
other language electives as well.

Thank you again for your interest and please feel free to email me again
if you have further queries about our Japanese courses.

Kind regards,

Chie

That deserves an acute WTF as I certainly don’t think that my spoken Japanese would make the cut in real-life Japanese-speaking situations, although I could probably read ‘intermediate’ Japanese texts alright. Think I’ll just join a writing course for my electives instead of taking up these basic language electives (background story: I have 3 electives in my entire 3-year course, and I happen to use up one of the electives to study.. get this, Financial Accounting -___- simply because my college’s authorities didn’t thought of informing us about it (as I thought it was compulsory), nor offer enough subjects to us here), right now Writing Angles: Popular and Professional sounds really interesting, and this being an Internet course (meaning, I won’t be attending lectures physically) piques my interest further.