JYSim for jobless-yokel Sim

The endless days and nights sitting in front of the lamp, reading through paragraph after paragraph of Organic Chemistry or Media Studies which seem totally Greek to you, and the torn apart feeling when you’re deciding whether to continue studying (and be very ill-tempered later) or watch a movie on your PC (and feel so guilty later) is ending as you scribble away the last sentence of your memorised media studies essay. Handing up the script full of condemnation about how rotten the media in Taiwan is, you feel liberated. Merdeka! Liberation! Free! απελευθέρωση! (Greek for ‘liberation’).
But the blissfulness lasted only a fraction of a second. The second thought flash through now - what’s next? This is what I as a Chung Ling student feel after each and every exam in CLHS - what’s next? I will be home in less than 20 minutes, bidding Mdm. Mok goodbye, I’ll have a whole afternoon to my own. However, on this particular day I shall not ground myself to more books, the pile of reference books lying on the marble table at home will be standing there, towering to the ceiling until one day Mum can’t stand it no more and threaten to whack it down if I don’t clean up. I will watch a movie, take a long nap, and wake up to more television. This was my post-exam life as a Chung Ling student.
Now another level higher, as a university student I’m given extra freedom but with less privacy or will to exercise it. No Mum will be there nagging about the towering pile of books and papers, and my roommate won’t care if all the sheets are flying about on the floor, as if a tornado had just blown over Wall Street. Though good times lie ahead, there’s still this small constant gnaw inside your brain about things still not done - borrowing the BioChemistry textbook from your senior, study BioChemistry Chapter 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 14, 15 and 17 during the summer (to be tested upon beginning of term), arranging how the water-balloon fight for September etc. The feeling of ‘what’s next?’ is still there, though to a lesser degree. And we’re all so unmotivated and reluctant to do anything after the exams.
Exams are a part of education - a necessary evil, an absolute evil I may say. I really did study hard for O. Chem, well, perhaps not that hard. I did steal an hour or two watching ‘Hot Fuzz’ and ‘Charlotte’s Web’ (and cried), and I did spent some time daydreaming, but on the whole I do study, and why the heck when I see the questions I stupidly picked ‘R configuration’ when my fingers are doing the anticlockwise motion - it’s so obvious. And why, why and why did I wrote ‘there are 5 stereogenic centers on the molecule’ when I actually marked 6? I ought to just jump from my friend’s room from the third floor. Half the time during the exams I do not know what I’m scribbling. In fact, I’m even amazed by my performance at producing a 1000-word Chinese essay within an hour today - I never got the chance to check it through, but the amount alone is enough to shock me. If you’d ask me what I wrote, I honestly cannot reply. My brain had been rendered nonfunctional since weeks before the exams - many blunders I committed recently - calling people by their wrong names, saying illogical things like ‘the french fries looks smile ice cream,’ (my mind was going through three things - ‘the french fries looks small’, ‘why are you smiling?’ and ‘i want an ice cream, too.’
While I’m still pondering over ‘why did I stay here for such a long time?’ I’m dead envious at my classmate Hueih Ling and Jieyang in England getting to go home so soon. The feeling of going home, for us first and second graders, is even better than hitting the jackpot or being upgraded to First Class - just get us home, that alone is happy enough. My mind is so tired now it cannot do anymore sentence structuring or analyzing. I’d have to stop here before sentences like ‘my hands is with the chicken’ starts to appear.

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