no turning back

This week has been rough, though it is hardly mid-week. Rough weeks for me these days are characterized by anxiety attacks when there are irritating-but-tempting tea sessions to entice year 4s to join the civil service. Anxiety attacks in the sense that it feels like a mental betrayal just to contemplate going in for the sake of going in. For the past few weeks, these anxiety attacks have been neutralized by a very rationalistic approach to look at the screw-up elitist system that advances the scholars and retards the brain of every other decent social sci grad. Somehow, walking towards the Nat Lib today for a Administrative Service recruitment talk was like a rite of passage to translate my rationality into something very real and tangible - that I honestly will die a mental death by slotting myself into one little chink of the whole administrative machinery. The speech acts of the perm secs, the smiley civil servants in the videos (think of the smiley IMF policeman to feel my sense of cringe ), the prominent 'senior' servants who gave their 2 cents worth, everything is symptomatic of a strange plesantville - satisfied people who measures satisfaction in terms of God-knows-what.

I guess the flipside of living outside of pleasantville is that it gives a sense of liberty for one to dare to lose, cause you already form a baseline expectation of the worst possible situations that can happen to you, and I have reasonably calculated my worst possible situations, which really isn't that bad. Historically speaking, I seem to thrive on bad situations anyway.

Today's trip to nat lib is like fitting in a big piece of jigsaw puzzle in my contemplative moments. Academia feels good, at least to me, it nourishes my brain, which to some extent, existentially speaking, is all that humans possess, if we neutralize the theory of property rights. I think I wasted too much mental energy dissecting the blah blah of this strange country, and trying to rationalize my way into its strange system. The people are nice, and they define my identity, but the system is just strange. And that makes me feel strange, like an exile in my own home. There is an escape valve, and the challenge for now is to find the right opening, in terms of space and time.