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Well i must say i'm very grateful to all the people who took the time to ask me about my previous post, but i promise that most of the subsequent entries will be much less emotional, otherwise this blog will just turn into a suicide note.

School is starting soon again, and i'm hoping that i'll be able to bring my grades up this semester. If i do badly again i think i'll just sit back, relax, have a snack and enjoy my slow but inexorable slide into obscurity and poverty.

Honestly though, a few conversations i've had with some of my classmates has gotten me thinking about the point of it all. (The studying i mean, not the snacking)

For most of us in law school, the be all and end all is to get a 2.1. Half of us will achieve this loftly goal while the other half will be consigned to the ignominy of a 2.2. Given my present trajectory, i think the latter fate is what awaits me.

So what does that mean? I won't be able to join the legal service, or any of those fancy law firms where the partners gather every night at the balcony of their office to smoke cigars and drink scotch and lament that "it's lonely at the top".

The question is, is that really what i want? I've always been rather ambivalent about the whole material wealth thing, so the only thing that would drive me on to such a future would be the whole mental masturbation aspect that seems all pervasive in our society today.

I'm sure everyone knows what i'm talking about. Ignatius Low got it spot on when he called it Singapore's No 1 Dinner Party Parlour Game. Different variations of it exist, from "which secondary school did you go to" to "oh what do you do for a living" to the perennial favourite, "what car do you drive". It's not a coincidence that Singapore must be the only country in the world with a facebook quiz that purports to tell you what elite school you attended. I know some of my classmates really buy into the whole mythos and i'm not saying i blame them. In a nation as fractured with class divisions as ours, it feels good to subconsciously know exactly where one lies in the social strata, especially if it's somewhere near the top.

But is this really healthy? In the end, the people below you will eventually turn bitter and jealous, and the ones above you will just view you as a cocky little upstart or a pretender. You'll end up endlessly trying to reaffirm your sense of self worth by making pointless comparisons. Something like, "well i might not be living in bukit timah like the dean's listers but hey siglap is still better than ghim moh".

I've been guilty of such pathetic and short sighted thoughts myself in the past, which is why i'm trying to take a broader view with regard to what i'd like to do after i graduate. I guess i've found something else i should try in 2010.

Interesting fact: Ignatius Low and Annabel Chong were both schoolmates and cell group mates at HCJC! Now THAT is a great dinner party conversation starter!