unlimited

First the unimportant: My A2 trials begun today! Stupid freezing multi purpose hall... but Math went well. Econs, um. I kept thinking, if I was the examiner, I'd scribble rubbish! incoherent! in big red squiggly letters in the margin and toss the paper aside. I felt like I was babbling all the way, hardly pausing to evaluate what I was writing, not carefully analysing my points. Maybe it was the emails that brought all thought of uni decisions to the fore again.

It was sometime before the Econs paper. I was in the library and procrastinating. As usual, I checked my Gmail account. I do so almost obssessively these days, hoping for good news. 5 new mails! Indicated the title of the page, which loaded in the background. After Swarthmore my enthusiasm was damped a little: no wonder I clicked 'Congratulations from Macalester College' with nary a flicker of emotion. I didn't feel the same excitement with which I received the USC envelope as I scanned the email quickly.

The curious fact that it begun, Dear Bobo, slowly worked its way up my optical nerves and knocked politely at my consciousness for a minute before kicking the door down. My name wasn't Po Yin Wong, either. So I went Back to Inbox, and read the next mail, also from Macalester. Ah. It was a mistake, they told me. No, we not givin' you $140,000 full scholarship money!! Booya!

(More accurately, they said I did get in, but had a problem with a database so I got the wrong email. And my scholarship was somewhat less that the one mentioned in the incorrect email. It's less than Brandeis' scholarship, though all in all it's still cheaper than Brandeis).
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So.
It's the final countdown. The last one to numb my head with worry anyway. After this there's Stanford sometime on Saturday, and Princeton in the mail, but I'm sure I didn't get Princeton, and Stanford is nearly impossible for a poor int'l. Tomorrow, my hopes take flight or die.

For now, I obssess over checking the sites. I have a session in my browser that will instantly load up the four decisions pages plus my self-email with the IDs and passwords (because I can't remember them I check every 15 minutes, hoping that something will change. It hardly does, though when it happens my heart skips a beat. The one that changed was Brown's:

Suddenly! there's a link saying "Click here to get your decision". Panic! Mayhem! Surge of trepidation. I click, authenticate, and... "Admissions decisions will be available in early April." D'oh. As if I didn't know. As if I hadn't been thinking about it every sane moment the past few days.

Frankly, it feels impossible. I hear reports of surges in applications. I read the credentials of that girl who got into MIT (another one of the pre-Econs emails, thanks to my mom being an alumna). Bleah. Oh well. At least employers (even if it's just Malaysian ones) can't tell the different between undergrad and MBA schools, while the difference between getting in is like climbing Everest and climbing Kinabalu. As long as the name is there somewhere on the CV, yannow. In big, bold, 16 pt. capital letters. HARVARD MBA.

But you get the idea. Here's to luck and the dreams that die tomorrow =).

I'm gloomy, but realistic =).
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Thirdly...

"I'm not dead."
"Maybe not," she said, "But are you alive?"
-Neil Gaiman, American Gods

This belongs in another post, but I want to put it here. I feel hardly alive these days. I should be crying, laughing over my university admissions and decisions. But I know that tomorrow I will face my decisions, good or bad, with the same stoic calm I've always maintained. Anything else is an illusion for company's sake.

Or is the illusion of emotion the truth and the calm the mask? I can't tell. It really is a guy thing. For better or worse, emotion is a hard to grasp concept. Sometimes I wonder at it, wonder what it's like to reach real emotional highs and lows, to really laugh and to really mourn. But guys' brains aren't wired that way, I remember reading. The emotional bit is a tiny little area, whereas in girls it's scattered throughout the brain, interconnected with everything else: hopes, fears, everything.

I suppose it's just the way I am. Very little baseline emotion, and few fluctuations, except when in company. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about life. At least I can sleep at night.