Night-time Thoughts III

1) Recently, I was reminded of how I'd spent the very first moments of this year: running around the seaside of Nha Trang searching for ice. I'd had no idea that I'd actually ran right into 2016 (it was a few minutes past the stroke of midnight by the time I was done with my mission), let alone how the rest of the year would play out from there. Safe to say now, very close to the incoming new year, that it was nothing I could've ever predicted or even imagined.

2) It's not just the end of a crazy sem, or even a crazy year... it's the end of a crazy 4.5 years of uni. In less than one month's time I'm gonna be out there trying to be an adult, and it scares me. How does one turn all of this into writing?? Nvm, step by step and time to tap on the good old stream of consciousness.

3) Something's telling me to call 2016 the best year ever. Maybe it's recency bias, but if at the end of every year I can say that I've lived the best year ever, I think I'll be a very happy/satisfied person. It's probably got something to do with level of activity. In most years, everything melds neatly into school --> summer --> school --> December. And then there's 2016 which really hit a whole new level of epic: travel --> FYP life, Drif4st, more FYP --> IVEC, REP climbing, ubin adventures, regular meetings at dhoby xchange just acia + daiso trips, MOAR TRAVELS + first time tio cancelled flight and lying on airport floor --> omg Y5 is worse than FYP, Dare or Not, yearbookX1000 --> chill days meeting friends, sleeping, and wondering how the year just flashed by like that.

4) There must be some kind of significance if I'm remembering things in this much detail. Well I definitely was busy (and in the months of Aug-Nov, insanely busy). But it's clear now that I've written it down, that I've been doing lots of things outside of the norm.

5) Maybe, I'm just pretty thrilled at my newfound friends. Doing stuff beyond regular routines comes together with getting to know new people. Usually... I find difficulty in even starting to talk to people I don't know. Given this, if I manage to somehow click with people I meet out of complete chance, I feel it'd be a huge waste to let it just go after we all go back to our normal lives. Why let things fade into memory, when there's a good foundation for building ties? I guess that's why summer 2016 was awesome for me, all those times spent with people I'd practically just met, even though it felt like I'd known them forever. [Not much clicking going on in school, except on my mouse.] Who'd have known that my final year in school would be this lively, this fresh.

6) Of course, it's easy to say that we should continue to meet up and blah blah, and it's easy to not actually do it at all. I know how people drift and friendships fade: uni through the years was kinda like a moving picture of these changes, both on others and myself. Heck, this is current affairs, I feel it happening. It's inevitable. There will definitely be a portion of my relationships that won't survive the test of time, of differences, and of change. I don't think there's any sure way to predict which will go down this path, but only time will tell, and when the scarcity of free time hits once work starts, it will start to happen.

7) On this note, I was thinking about how my climbing friendships should be easier to maintain, as long as all the people/groups I climb with continue to climb. Coz climbing kakis don't just meet for a meal once every X months, we spend X hours losing skin + X hours after that eating together, every week or so. I hope I don't ever stop enjoying this sport, and my friends too.

8) Recent times have been good times. There's been so much free time after school ended, even during the exam period HAHA. So I've been busy doing what young people on school holidays normally do: going out with friends. The difference this time is that there's been a chunky mix of people from point 5 and much older, long-time friends. All the same, all happy, carefree moments (or hours actually) to treasure and remember. There are dozens of thoughtcatalog articles and whatnot listing the things to feel sad about when friendships fade, but I guess if it's impossible to save all of them, the best that we can do is to feel happy that they happened. And when these are actually happening, do our best and put in the effort to make them worth remembering.

9) However, there's always two sides to the coin. This year, amidst all the rush and activity, I've seen sides of people that have caused me aversion and anger. I am also aware that I've chosen to deal with these in cold ways. It probably had something to do with my perma-low social battery (because of endless meetings during the school days) -- it was always easier to totally avoid bothering with these matters. Sometimes I feel that, although we have a right to choose our actions, wouldn't it be nicer to spread positivity rather than misery? Yes I get it, everyone has to have a nice rant once in a while to complain about everything in the universe, just one example. But when all this gets too much, it gets hard for others to be understanding. I guess I'm more of an observant, quiet kind of person, so I'm not about to go tell anyone how to act. High quality feedback is sometimes very very difficult and inappropriate to give. The least I can do is remind myself never to repeat that which I see and dislike.

10) So 2016 was a people-centric year for me. It wasn't an easy year, in fact it was bordering on madness, but it really taught me to find reasons to be happy rather than to get swept along in the drudgery. I really feel a large portion of life is what you make of it, and so I choose to see the positive side of things. In the years to come when I look back and the details fade, I will know 2016 as the crazy year of great friendships. Glad to have met all you wonderful people, whether only just or we've been friends for ages, and thank you for making my final year in school an awesome one! :)

11) End of stream of consciousness, wow it's late. Tomorrow I'm heading off to Cambodia, my one and only "grad trip" because I enjoyed myself so much over summer haha. I don't really know what's in store, but I'm just gonna go with the flow and believe that I'll enjoy myself! Also, this is the 3rd consecutive time that I'll be ringing in the new year from overseas. See y'all again in 2017, here's ending off the final post of the year with a nice song:

"Each day's a gift and not a given right" 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Editor's Extended Note

Dedicated to the Yearbook Team 2016, it was a pleasure working with y'all. It's finally our time to REtire! :)


I can't design for nuts, and this led me to request the role of words person/doer of odd jobs for this year's REP yearbook (the pubs comm's yearly burden undertaking). One of my final tasks was to write the editor's note (the thingy in front that people tend to skip). So having never written an editor's note before, I went to do some Googling and realised that it could contain practically anything. Not entirely helpful, but it did get me thinking about what actually deserved to be said. Eventually I settled for something slightly more eloquent than "please enjoy kthxbye", but when you've followed something over the better part of the year and through the crushing workload of Y5, ~150 words is barely enough to summarise anything.

The main point is that nothing in the yearbook came from nothing. Everything inside and out had to be hunted (when Carina and her camera went shooting), gathered (immense gratitude to everyone we've bugged for all sorts of things), or crafted. And then there was somehow putting everything together into the form of a book - a delicate mix of creativity and anguish. But by no means is this post a form of complaint, take it as some sort of dark humour instead haha. So... Ready? It's time to describe the making of the yearbook in as much detail as I can remember - to all future YBTs, heed a fair warning ;)

Just some general stuff before diving into the specifics. The most fundamental way to describe our work is that we were essentially a team of editors - say about 30% creating and 70% wondering how to make things better. In my domain, there were a ton of edits made throughout the process. Here, there, everywhere! It wasn't just about grammar/spelling/weirdness anymore, but also consistency. Like you wouldn't want to call the same person by different names across the book. Beyond words, there was a whole host of other things to consider and tweak: photos, positionings, fonts, line spacings, brightness, this-one-better-or-that-one-better, like-this-nicer-or-like-that-nicer, and every-freaking-thing else. I can't really speak for the designers, who had to deal with all of the above on top of misbehaving software. But having contributed eye power, I must say that they deserve a hats off for their skill and intuition - knowing what works really isn't easy.

And now on we move to the "troublesome" things. Where in between gnashing teeth and frustrated outbursts, there were bouts of manic sob-laughter when things went beyond irritating and turned morbidly funny.

REClub President's message - edited no fewer than 5 times. The greatest challenge here was really in maintaining the "voice" of Mr. ex-President himself. A message cannot be blitzed the same way as a project report, not unless it is intended to sound like a robot wrote it. Then again, there were space issues to contend with, so unfortunately not every heartfelt word made it to the end. So it's not in perfect English, and overall still fairly unconventional for a keynote message, but it is these imperfections that make it as perfect as it gets. If you ask me though, not as the editor but as a friend, the final version barely sounds like him. But then I remember the reminiscent [read: long-winded], and mildly uncouth first draft, and I think I'm fairly satisfied haha.

Ah, the REP Fellows feature. Seems innocuous enough. That's before it becomes apparent how difficult it is to gather all the individual photos of sufficient quality, before erasing all of their backgrounds. There was this one photo that was so LQ it managed to set the benchmark for the entire book. So during test printing, as we crowded eagerly around the very first copy to see how it'd turned out, there was an easy test for quality. In Carina's words, "if she's OK *jabs finger*, the whole book is."

Nothing very annoying about the middle sections (for me; again I cannot speak for the designers), not until it came to vetting which we'll talk about later. Here I must stress how much I appreciated all those quick responses from when I went into journalist mode, whether it was for quotes or photos or someone's full name. Not everything made it to the end, but every bit of information returned (along with the occasional encouraging message) really made doing this a whole lot easier.

Achievements page was also unexpectedly troublesome, but in a way it was a happy problem. REP students really are a bunch of overachievers! It seems like it is the hobby of some to join all sorts of competitions and win prizes in all of them. Really like free flow. Things actually reached a point where we had to say "k cut liao this one leave for next year", and even bump 3rd placings off the main display into the "additional mentions". In future yearbooks, the achievements spread might just be columns and columns of 1st placings, no more space for photos. Which is a shame actually, because out of the whole book, this spread is my favourite in terms of design.

Grad feature. Pretty weird to be doing this for ourselves, but I guess it made gathering stuff easier. In this section, crowd-sourcing for ideas was employed to AMAZING effect. To the 5 people whose words I've borrowed and stitched together, a huge thank you, and I hope the end result works! The rationale was that we were but a handful of people who happened to be from the graduating batch - our views and thoughts may not be representative. [Esp since we were so jaded at that point] I was more involved in conceptualizing this spread, and I remember the days where it was blank white. Well let's just say making this spread was a mini journey in itself, with lots of brainstorming, chucked ideas, and on my end, countless experimentations wrt the words across the page. Maybe one day we will conjure memories of our own just from looking at this spread. Or at least, I know I'll be able to.

Pro-tip for future YBTs: PROTOTYPE. As we headed towards final printing, we thought it'd be good to defend against expensive surprises. In fact, we had two prototypes! Two stapled + taped stacks of paper covered in ink from the RPR printer, post-its with scribbles, and even more scribbles by the end of it. Some of our profs would've been proud. Taken from RE6007 notes: "If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand pictures", which actually, eerily sounds like a yearbook. Some things read differently on screen and on actual paper (I seriously have no idea why), and this means edits using the good ol' pencil. Also, only a prototype can affirm if a design works - if it doesn't look right on the prototype it damn right won't on the actual print. Good thing the RPR has a paper cutter lying around, although it went blunt and we had to manually scissor the white edges off prototype 2.0. The sheared-down size also felt more "handy" than a full-sized A4, and so we kept it that way, in case you're wondering if this year's edition feels a tad small.

Know that phrase "come out of the woodwork"? Yea, errors loved to do just that after biding their time, hiding from sweep after sweep by multiple pairs of tired eyes. Everyone chipped in here, especially to cover for my super ineptness at spotting spelling errors. [InDesign does not have spellcheck. Whut.] It's actually pretty amazing how well errors hide in the big open. Either that or it's amazing how gone our eyes were. [That's why there should be more young people on the YBT not saddled with the burden of Y5 haha] Eventually (n rounds later), we came to accept that the edits must stop, whether for design or for words, and that we had done enough. So if anyone spies anything amiss... Please be kind [unless one has the dying wish of breaking a string of hearts]. These things weren't in the timeline, like a planned "vetting period", but after working on something for so long it'd simply be very 心痛 to find a careless or preventable error in the actual print. I haven't actually read my own copy. It's like some kind of 职业病, but I can't really bring myself to read it all the way through right now. Macam traumatised ahahaha.

Ah, I mustn't forget to mention the promotional spreads and the videos that I'm guessing many people replayed more than a handful of times ;) The stars were the ones who helped us sell the book, but it took the geniuses in our team to make sure they looked their best! #editingbosses Also, those "books" in the videos were really just our trusty prototype 1.0. See the extent of its usefulness? Even if not everyone bought the (real) books, I'm sure the promos were at least able to deliver laughter, joy, and a great deal of distraction to all who viewed them >:D

The final word is reserved for the team itself. For one, I think it's a good thing we all knew how to work together with one another, especially since most of us had already spent so long as classmates. Otherwise, the final product would've been a chopped up mess. Skill-wise, we also had a good spread. Imagine if 5 of me were to do this; the yearbook would look like an FYP report. Also as with everything REP, it was tough work, but we managed to find our own kind of fun in the process! If you ask me whether those cold nights in the RPR and all those hours spent scanning through drafts were worth it, well, I can say that because of those, we can now say that our job is done with confidence and pride!

If you've got a copy handy and haven't yet done so, please sit back, turn the pages, and enjoy! [If not, please continue waiting xD] That is the best reward that you can give us in the YBT :)

YBT 2016!

Iridescent

O level year. I'd gotten 4/5 for one "define using 7 words or less" vocab section in some English paper, after screwing up the titular word. It's stuck with me since then that "iridescent" doesn't just mean multi-coloured, it also speaks of a shine.

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A level year. Song of my life following the June common tests: Iridescent by Linkin Park. Google the chorus and try to empathize with the panicky kid who just couldn't chemistry.

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Graduation year.

Sometime back, us in the Yearbook Team had this bright idea of getting everyone from the graduating batch to contribute a word that summed up their REP journey. [Soz if spoilers for Renaissance Night but it was our idea first ;)] While that plan eventually lost its way and joined the pile of rejects, I kept my word close. No prizes for guessing which word I picked but really, it was the first thing that popped up in my mind. Unwarranted lightning-fast notions sometimes come with a dubious feeling, so I mulled for almost a week trying to find a better word. Well, nothing. Therefore I had to answer to myself why I somehow felt that my REP journey was, of all things, "iridescent". Seems an unconventional allusion, but it all comes back to the definition.

Colourful should be self-explanatory. But in case it isn't... For such a small course the range of characters within it is extraordinary. Haha, and so are the things we get up to together - let's just say that the RPR lives up to its moonlight name xD [Non-REP friends, RPR stands for Renaissance Project Room and is our main classroom by day. After hours though, the 'P' stands for something else.] In Y4 we came back to an influx of unfamiliar faces, and there was definitely some initial uhh aversion (i.e. omg who are all these strangers in the RPR using the printer?!). Well, things got better! Unlike long ago, there are now too many people in the course for everyone to know everyone else's names. So it's good enough for me that I can count friends from across batches. It's something of fortune really, to be part of an environment that allows and encourages people to connect. Everyone is unique, talented in their own way, and has something to bring for the benefit of everyone else. When it matters though, we're all one REP family, one colourful community.

To create a shine, you need the light. Indeed, some of the brightest moments in my life were possible because of REP. Yea, there's that one-year exchange, heavy school support, guaranteed hall stay (this is pure gold for a pasir ris girl)... Everyone knows that. But all the promotional material in the world cannot convey the true experience of being in this course. There's something about the way we were "brought up" here, and it's a sort of environment which I think is extremely rare in tertiary education. Our relationships with one another can be attributed in part to this environment. Because we don't have to compete amongst ourselves, for grades or whatever, we have the full liberty of helping each other out and contributing in almost any way possible. People are extremely unselfish here! Just one example - where else do you get classmates who compile and share notes, and even hold revision lectures for everyone else's benefit? And the history of this goes back to Y1. All this time, I've never been denied help as long as I asked for it, both in academics and out, and I think I've been able to help others in my own ways too. Aside from the wonderful year of exchange and all the other benefits, there are many of these "small and normal" things that hold light in themselves. We are privileged.

One thing we cannot forget though, is that there cannot be shine without the shadow. Without moments of darkness, light is simply blinding/flat/2D - hard to appreciate. Everything is relative, like if you're high all the time you stop feeling so, and so that's where the tough times become essential. Working late into the night and walking back to hall in the dark is a staple of REP life. And then, there's the bigger, scarier things such as feeling lost in a foreign land. Eventually most things turn out fine, and the tougher the experience, the greater the armour and feeling of triumph. Same theory goes for people who come to give hell and teach us uncertainty - they allow us to appreciate those who are genuinely there for us, who care for us and guide us along. The best thing about going through all these though, was knowing that I was never alone. It's true that people bond through adversity, even through horrible times where the worst is always yet to come. We all have the memories to prove it. [It's also safe to say now, that all these years I've never really minded going over to the hall 8/9 side for meetings. Because at the end of crazy days, the walks back to 11 were always moments of serenity in the cool night.]

REP is challenging no doubt, but that's really what helps us grow (fast). We don't face the scary stuff alone anyway; we've got friends to walk with over all those mountains and valleys, sharing the greatest experiences and creating the best memories. It's a journey right? Well today was the end of it all, the final time we'd leave lighthearted from an exam hall as classmates to proceed with our shenanigans at the nearest malls. But those are stories for another day. When writing this post I faced a sobering transition - from today on, I can no longer write about my REP days in present tense. Please pardon any confusion this time round, it's all in the spirit of moving on.

So I guess now's a good time to zoom out and take a look back at the entire picture... That's where I see this glittering myriad of colours that makes REP iridescent, makes it beautiful.

End of Y2S2 (May 2014). I vaguely rmb there being this feeling of "graduating" coz we were all going our separate ways for one year.

(Almost) End of Y5 (Dec 2016). Well look now, graduation's really here.