A Long Rant

I finally finished my paper for Political Economy of ASEAN. At roughly 4,500 words, the diction was rambling and at times choppy. The referencing was messy, and the content haphazardly thumped up. It was, in short, a fucking disgrace of an assignment. I endured a torrid time doing it and the best I could wish for is a borderline pass. I wish I had the opportunity to take Film Art instead of this thinly-veiled attempt at propaganda.

The people who designed this course ought to be made to take an IQ test. The module is called ‘Political Economy of ASEAN’. When I flip through the notes what do I see? The amount of material on Singapore was probably enough to cover half the notes. Read these and you will read about how capable our regime is in turning Singapore into an economic power, the various measures they use to alleviate the economic crises, about how great the tripartite system is at resolving issues betwjavascript:void(0)een the unions, the management and the regime, and the justification for lowering wages and incorporating a variable pay component into our already stagnant wages. What the fuck?! I signed up the course to learn about the POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ASEAN. If I wanted to learn about the POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SINGAPORE, I would have gotten a SOCIAL STUDIES textbook from a Popular bookstore. Five dollars for a brain-wash is still a lot cheaper than paying $500 for this module and BEING CHEATED AND BRAIN-WASHED. It is like a rapist forcing himself on a woman and then making her pay for the ‘service’ rendered. Obscene, diabolical, shameful, and a fucking disgrace!

I am not too impressed with the textbook either. According to the textbook, Goh is still our Prime Minister and Megawati is still the President of Indonesia. This is YEAR 2009. The textbook, which was printed in 2004 or 2006, is clearly outdated and to give it to us is absolutely reprehensible. It is like going to a restaurant and getting served LEFTOVERS. UniShit clearly enjoys treating its students like beggars.

The author Lim Y.C ought to take a professional writing course. I expect a doctorate holder to produce better quality writing than the choppy diction that characterizes his sloppy piece of work. I admit I am being arrogant, but I think my writing skills are better. And that comes from a guy who has only a worthless diploma! Mr. Lim may be an expert in his field, but he would have done better with a team of professional editors and ghost writers.

After suffering food poisoning and having to rush my Finance report during my convalescence, I was left with six days including the submission date to finish a 4,000 – 5,000 word report that I had not even started my research on. It would still have been manageable for a full-time student, but I had to work and the poisoning stole much of my strength. I only started on Saturday afternoon because I was so bloody drained I slept until lunch.

I had to force myself to focus; such was the fatigue that plagued me. I spent the entire afternoon doing research online. I Googled, tried my university’s online resources, which offered little (why am I not surprised?) and then dragged my sorry ass to the nearby library. I tried writing at night, but really, I still did not have much to work with. Oh sure, you can jolly well find some information on economic crises but many came from informal sources and I could not jolly well quote from these could I?

I did manage to find something on the Falling Demand Crisis of ’85. It was from a book published in the 1980s and I was glad the library staff kept it after all these years. I returned home and started to write after dinner and bath. There was not really much to write about, even with the data in the course materials, the pages I had photostated from the Library and another excellent article I found online. And I still had to do research on East Asia countries and analyze their growth rates. Obviously you just cannot go to Wikipedia and copy everything there. You cannot really comment academically on the economic situation in a country unless you have a reasonable understanding of their government (regime for some), the people (or workforce), the GDP, export and import partners, trade agreements (if any), natural resources, the relationship between their domestic, regional and international engines, the infrastructure and how investment is utilized, social-economic factors and other areas. While the textbook and notes were useful to some extent, they were Singapore-centic and touched only briefly on ASEAN countries. Plenty of material about crops, rubber and oil in ASEAN countries but little I could use in my assignment. Not much help there about China and Japan as well. I decided to delay the writing and finish all my research first.

While surfing the Net using like seven browsers and twenty odd tabs, I saw Gabby online and knowing he studied Economics in university, asked him about the economic crises in 1985-1986 and 1997 to 2003. The replies I got were nothing short of idiotic. First he said that our regime CAUSED the 1985-1986 crisis, and then, when asked about whether he knew anything about the aforementioned recessions, he said no. It was in the middle of the night; I was freaking tired and desperate for material; the last thing I wanted was this kind of bullshit. I wonder if all FASS students are like this. I don’t know if he was trying to be funny. If he wasn’t, maybe the next time I see him I should ask where he bought his Economics degree. Why should I suffer three bloody years in a flophouse university when I could just order a degree online? I dare say it would be a lot cheaper too.

The Book Guy came online and I tried my luck. J-school students do learn some history after all. He recommended several ways of doing research, most of which I had already tried. He knew a bit about the economic crises I was basing my report on but what he knew I knew even more. When he suggested helping me with my research, I declined. First, I did not want him to waste his time on my fucking assignment, and second, there was not much time left. I appreciated his offer though.

The fact that I had asked my friends clearly showed my level of desperation. Not that they were incompetent, but when you are firing blanks and hitting walls every time you turn, anything else seems like a good idea.

On Sunday I continued with my torture. I was doing research and typing out my report like my life depended on it. A perfectly good Sunday reduced to cinders…I should have been napping. I managed to finish most of the bullshit on the economic crises and wrote a few paragraphs on what EGOIN, Triple C Theory and S-Curve are. And of course, research. Sunday was just…work and trying to keep myself from doing anything…foolish.

On Monday I met XH at our university after our work. He took one look at my report and was like, wtf? He thought that it was impossible and coming from a teacher, although bringing me a tiny measure of satisfaction, brought me no further relief because I had still to finish the fucking thing and my overburdened mind was working overtime to assimilate all the information I could find about East Asia countries and trying to link them into something coherent while paraphrasing frantically to avoid being hauled up for plagiarism.

XH told me that his most of his classmates were either fucktards or arrogant whoresons. At least he had a couple of good-looking classmates to ogle. Fuck, even his lecturer is decent-looking and his Head of Programme looks good enough to have an affair with. What do I have? ZERO. NOTHING. ZILCH. HOSTILE SCENERY. Nothing to take the edge off, to occupy my hebetudinous mind with while I try to make sense of what the lecturer is saying. And I am in a fucking Business course. XH said his lecturer was quite disappointed with the lack of response from her class. Only XH bothered /was capable of answering her questions. The rest of the mobs either talked like Ris Low (the fucktards) or refused to answer and acted cool instead (the arrogant whoresons). We are talking about FILM ART! What in the Hells is so difficult about commenting on movies?! Arts students tend to be known for being ‘emo’ bastards and that sorry lot are no different. Hell, I can be ‘emo’ too. Am I not being strident, militant, extreme, raging and EMO as we speak?! Fuck. I should have been in his class. There are actually Business students in his class and why in the Hells did they not give me the option? This is a travesty! I am going to complain when I do the course assessment.

After slop with my friend, I returned home and worked until 3am. The next day I went to work and my colleagues said I looked like a zombie. They were absolutely right of course. When I got home I was left with a few paragraphs to do and tons of referencing to finish. The former I settled soon enough; the former nearly caused me to do myself in. I was looking at about 40+ citations to settle and even after removing some which were from my course materials I still had around 24. To add to my agony, the links I downloaded them from and my printed notes were all over the place, and I had an excruciating time piecing them to the correct passages. It might have been all right, but I was tired from work, I had no break after a hastily eaten dinner, the glare from the lighting hurt my eyes, and I had a few hours before the 12am timing. I kept getting the sequence wrong and had to redo the damn thing several times. Having used endnotes (Chicago style) for the first time, it was a test of my vision to see the little [xx] at the end of each sentence/paragraph. The first time they allowed us to use endnotes and I cocked it up. APA referencing might have been more familiar to me, but if I had used that I would still have puked my guts out in frustration. The fucking problem with the APA style is that it offers no in-text citation format for online sources. You can try www.apa.org I could not find it – maybe you will have better luck. These bloody English Language/Scholastic academics or whatever you call their ilk ought to make up their mind about language usage. First, these grammarians cannot agree with one another about grammar, and then these eggheads came up with so many rules and versions for academic referencing that you wonder if they might have been better off being lawyers. And all they know is to wail about the falling standards in English. Maybe they should look at themselves first before criticizing everybody else. If these nimrods cannot even convey their ideas effectively, then why should anyone waste their time deciphering their lingo?

Anyway, I was close to doing myself in when I finally sort of finished the accused thing. My referencing was shite – it looked like some article from Wikipedia and I think a couple of the numbering did not tie with the correct references. As XH told me the night before, ‘just fuck it lah!’ And I did. I submitted it five minutes before full time. I expected the bloody Blackboard to fail but miraculously it worked. I nearly took out my Bible and praised the Lord. Then I remembered if there were a good Gawd I would not have to go through this shit and I started to blaspheme. I cannot ask for much for this assignment. I would be quite happy with 40 marks.

After Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, Royston Tan should emulate him and make SORRY BASTARDS. No prizes for guessing who would be starring in it. SEE? I KNOW FILM ART!