It started with a morning call.

But it didn’t happen while I was asleep, which would’ve been the type of situation where one wakes up, bleary and still occupied with the tangling tendrils of pre-wake drowsiness, to answer the phone in a voice that cracked and sounded 30 years older, wondering who it is and whether a beating is impending (and then the good/bad news will come and one would sit up to make sense of all the tumultuous info).


No, this time I was wide awake and was actually discussing with my brother the fundaments and delicacy of the Wing Chun art of Self-Defence (an interesting, rather applicable bit of Chinese Kung-fu, and yes I discuss something like that with my bro. Frequently) when Pauline called and told me that the results for the Industrial Training thing was out.


(She got an A, by the way, which is very good, and particularly more due to the worry she exhumes over. Some moments later, though, she buzzed me online and we both discovered she had contracted some Spyware and suddenly she was back in the pits with the snakes and the closing-in walls, and just now she had just told me her brother saved the computer. Wow, I wonder how many times you can fall in the pits and get back up all in one day.)


So I went online and did whatever a self-respecting student of the University would do in the light of discovering his/her internship results by getting all tensed up and mildly aggravated, and you gotta have to feel that way if you’ve just spent the good of three months getting up in the morning and doing something both unrelated to your studies and personal gain only see that, in the end, everything fucked up.


The webpage displayed an A for me. Holy fuckshit.


You can say that a whole lot of load on the shoulders took flight to the sky in a flurry of feathers and white.


But I guess I’m lucky. Lucky that my work evaluation came high, thanks to the ‘small-company’ status it holds; as Ji Lin might’ve put it very well, they probably need interns badly and would give a good evaluation so long you do fine as a good worker. I was an OK worker. I did my job and tried my best. It was a fish-out-of-water situation but I guess I managed to scrape through. Got rewarded with something good, yet then again, too good; somehow, there is the injustice that would be hard to swallow, especially when knowing that a whole of other slaving students out there who probably didn’t get what they deserved.


I think I just lost my right to complain, that I didn’t get what I wanted, that I didn’t get what I actually need to learn in order to know what journalism has in store for me.


It was back to the old question again, the one I asked myself throughout the months of January to April; was I unlucky, or lucky?


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There were many things that happened this week.


There was the first class of the new semester, and boy was it boring.


There were the other classes as well, some good, some abysmal in the sense that I’m starting to have premonitions as to how I’m going to spend my time in these classes and not contract ennui.


There was the Safety Campaign, which might’ve been disastrous but -- thank goodness -- was rather OK considering the utter impossibility of it.


There was the grandee who walked, talked and balked and didn’t know how far he was threading into the lake in the utter darkness.


There was the moment which I would dub in my life story as The Moment I Received Pan-Mee (Noodles) Enlightenment; courtesy of Bryan (and indirectly, Pauline). Restaurant Kin Kin’s original spicy Pan-Mee is -- oh bloody hell -- like the beacon of power and excellence that shone and drowned all other Pan-Mee in blight; so good and utterly unique it is, other Pan-Mee (be it good, bad or passable) shall fall into the rims of the sideline as merely indifferent.


There was the new camera my father bought, recklessly impulsive he is when it comes to buying unnecessary things.


And there was, last but not least, rain the evenings. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you see the faint outline of a rainbow barely visible under the scanty, post-shower drizzle.