Tattered and Torn

[Quote of the post] God won’t ask us how many friends we had. He’d ask us how many people to whom we’ve been a friend.
[Song of the post] Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough

What a tangled mess I live in.

There are three ways of interpreting exam results: Absolute, Relative, and Personal. Absolute is the mark itself, its value, whether it’s a pass mark or a fail grade, if it is a 97% or an F-. Relative is your score compared to everyone else’s in the class. You might have gotten a 42%, but if everyone else in class got around 40% – 45% then you don’t have much to worry about. Personal is dependent on your own goals, and whether your results fall short of your expectations or not.

Almost everyone assesses their assessment in this order: Absolute, Personal, then Relative. Say you’ve scored 33% when you expected to get at least a 60%. But then you realize that everyone else got 30% and below, so it’s not so bad. Absolute, Personal, Relative.

The problem occurs once your Personal mark doesn’t satisfy you, but your score greatly surpasses that of everyone else, relatively. And yet you still feel depressed because you could have done better. Maybe it’s because you don’t want to feel left out because you actually got a passing mark while everyone else failed, or maybe it’s because you tend value Personal above Relative, or maybe it’s humility. I dunno. But for people who are in the low ends of all three areas, it feels very self-depreciating and… grah.

Which, in a sense, is very pessimistic. By seeing only failures without seeming to pay attention to successes, it shows a very pessimistic personality. Either that or you push yourself too hard.

Anyways, I realize I’ve been doing the same thing. In viewing my life cynically, I miss out on all the good stuff. It’s kinda like inverse Gold 98FM advertisements, where you only hear the bad stuff. I keep formulating ideas in my mind which takes the worse possible outcome. I’m trying to steer myself away from this, but… it’s not easy.

Then there’s the scenario with KW. Basically we’re in the same MEW Question formulating group, but this weekend I was in one of this angsty-homework-clearing moods and I finished setting the questions and sent them to JK without consulting my partner. Then when he contacted me yesterday I was like, OMG I already sent them. I felt so… grah, like I always hated being left out then I go leave someone out. It’s like, crashing on my own ideals or something.

Then for GEP Camp electives, there's eleven subjects to choose from and I'm not particularly interested in any of them. So I'm going to choose Drama and I don't think there'll be anyone I know and Mr. Ferdi Quek is gonna go like, "Oh no, not you again!" when I step into his class. What fun.

And then today I forgot to get my OEP file. Again. Grah. I had to go the staff room, and I forgot. Grah.