August.

It's been a busy month.

It isn't that August has had that much more stuff to do than usual, but it's certainly felt that way. Besides the usual Rawang stuff, I also had to do an assignment that I absolutely did not enjoy as well as deal with all the housework that came with our maid's sudden resignation. I also managed to injure my knee playing futsal and have been finding stairs to be particularly antagonizing these past few weeks.

But it was mainly that annoying assignment that made this past month feel particularly taxing. For the first time in my life, I did an assignment with the sole aim of passing. Looking back on the assignment now that it's over, and especially in comparison what others did, I feel like I could have done much better if I'd wanted to. I suppose that's what happens when your grade doesn't matter, just as long as you pass.

Next month should be a pretty busy one as well, with a proposal defence, the Rawang visit, and a potential trip to Kelantan being the main highlights, but it helps that all three of those are (a) important and (b) not things that I hate doing. I like having things to do, just as long as doing them doesn't make me feel like I'm dying on the inside.

For anyone who's interested, here are a few things that make me feel like I'm dying on the inside:

a) Doing arts and crafts

b) Attending events that have anything to do with developing 'leadership' or 'entrepreneurship' skills

c) Selling products I wouldn't buy myself

d) Networking

e) Seeing trashy posts on Facebook

And here are a few things, while being objectively mundane, that I find to be at least tolerable:

a) Buying groceries

b) Going to the bank

c) Performing household chores and other errands

Yes, I would much rather do the dishes at home or wait in line at the bank than attend a youth leadership conference. Sue me.

Life is as much about the stuff you hate or tolerate as the stuff you like, I suppose, so maybe I shouldn't complain too much. But then again, complaining about something is one way to channel my frustration at it, and it's certainly a better way of doing so than breaking stuff or something like that.

On a side note, is the Malaysian culture of complaining also an indicator of a constant underlying frustration, for whatever reason, that most of us feel? Would we complain less if our situations were to improve, or would we just then find something else to complain about? Just a thought.

Well, this has been a rambling, incoherent post. I find myself writing stuff like this more often than not nowadays, and I guess it shows the state that my mind is in these days. Guess I'll sign off now.

Reunion.

This will be a bit of a rambling post, with an only-just-about coherent topic and mostly just a collection of thoughts. You have been warned.

It's been about a week since Ramadan ended, meaning that it's been about a week of Eid/Raya celebrations. Despite Eid being only a day, and is celebrated for as long in most other countries, in Malaysia it tends to last for an entire month. Given our culture of open houses and there only being three to four weekends for them to be held in, I suppose that's understandable.

I recently attended an open house. It was at the family home of a Rembau classmate, thankfully not too far away from where I live. He and his family had one last year as well, which I also attended. This time around, though, more of our Rembau batchmates showed up, making things into a mini-reunion of sorts.

The thing about meeting up with your old friends is that you get to catch up on their lives, and they get to catch up on yours. Inevitably, and especially when you're all the same age, comparisons are made, in quiet if not out loud. It's normal to feel inferior when your friend from school is currently doing 'better' than you, or to feel superior when he or she is doing 'worse'. Such thoughts are only natural, and there's nothing to be ashamed of for having them. How you act upon those thoughts is far more important.

The way I like to look at it is by looking at life as a really long road trip. Having being born in the same year, my batchmates and I started off on our respective journeys at the same time, give or take a few months. Each of us have our own advantages and disadvantages, which all play their role in deciding how fast or how smoothly we all move along.

The main thing to remember about a road trip is that it's not a race. It doesn't matter how quickly you move along, so what difference does it make how much faster someone is going, or how much slower? You'll still get there in the end, and at your own pace.

23 years old and not yet graduated? Cool. 23 years old and single? Alright. 23 years old and without a clue what to do with your life? No problem. Whatever you're looking for in life, you'll get there eventually. And if you don't get what you want, maybe it wasn't what's best for you anyway. Just have a little faith.

Anyway, enough of that. Back to the reunion.

There were some people I'd either not met or spoken to in years, either at the open house or at the futsal session a few of us had later that night. Maybe I'm better at reading people now, or maybe my friends have simply changed as time went on, or more likely a combination of both, but I noticed things that I hadn't noticed before. There were certain characteristics that, for whatever reason, I'd never associated with these people. Depending on what they were in relation to the certain people I associated them with, I was either pleasantly surprised or mildly disappointed. Nevertheless, it was nice to meet up with my school friends again. These people were a large part of the best years of my life (thus far), and a bit of nostalgia every now and then is always nice.

There is, of course, that niggling feeling, nay, knowledge, that things will be different in the future. We're all going to grow up, get jobs, start our own families, and eventually get so caught up in our own lives that it'll be difficult to meet up like this even on an annual basis. That's life, I suppose, and that realization should be a solemn reminder to live in the moment. We should appreciate what we have while we have it, because there will come a time when we won't have it anymore.

Personally speaking, one way I appreciate the moment I'm in is by learning from it. Quite a number of people I saw at the reunion were from rather different fields of study to mine, and from rather different study institutions as well. I think I took good advantage of that; highlights from the day included a discussion on developmental psychology, stories of money-saving shenanigans abroad, and a conversation with a friend on said friend's struggles with depression. I really learned a lot that day.

I suppose it's time for us all to return to our lives now. I'll just wrap up this post by saying that I'm looking forward to the next time I meet up with these guys - reunions don't come around often, but it's their elusiveness that makes them all the better.

Politics.

Earlier today, I spent some time reading up on the current Qatari diplomatic crisis, which eventually led me to reading about things like the Muslim Brotherhood. I then decided to stop before I went much deeper down that particular rabbit hole. When religion and politics are mixed together, it's difficult to tell how much of it is actually religious and how much is just political.

The thing about politics is that it's difficult to be unbiased when talking about it. One of the things that put me off becoming interested in the subject when I was younger was the fact that things always seemed to be so polarized - there were always two distinct sides, each with a steadfast and unwavering belief in its own superiority over the other. Anyone who knew anything about politics always seemed to already have a position which they saw as the correct one, thereby implying that anything else was wrong. It was pretty much always a case of us against them. It was pretty much always a choice between black and white, when in reality there's always plenty of grey.

Another issue I had with talking about politics, especially in this country, was that it almost always had to involve race and/or religion. To go against a political party that associated itself as being representative of a certain race or religion was to go against said race or religion. All in all, a part of me decided that it probably wasn't worth going into any of that, especially since I was, at the time, of an age where my political beliefs didn't really seem to matter.

As time went on, however, I developed an interest in the science of politics, particularly with regards to political ideologies. Reading George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 most likely played a part in that, and I found intellectual satisfaction in learning about politics away from the context of the real world, where so much more came into play.

I then started following global politics; it is easier to separate emotion and logic when you and your own country are not directly involved. As a kid, I enjoyed reading about far-off lands, and how different they were from where I lived. Today, reading about what politicians in other countries do is probably just a more grown-up version of that.

It's just part of my nature to be intellectually curious, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before I started gravitating towards matters of such complexity. My current status as a Master's student is also playing its own role in developing my mind; it's unsurprising that I've chosen to expand my thinking, outside of my studies anyway, through a field that demands me to do so at a standard higher than I've been used to in the past.

It wasn't too long ago that a former lecturer of mine, who I was helping with data collection for a research paper, suggested that I consider working for the United Nations at some point. I found the idea to be quite appealing, albeit one that I later put aside after realizing that I still had a pretty long way to go to be qualified to work for such an organization. Keeping myself informed on global matters is, I suppose, one step towards that.

At this point in time, I still don't have a clear vision for my future. There are a lot of possible paths which all depend on things that may or may not happen. That's just life. The main thing now is to keep growing and developing myself as a person. It's always good to open as many doors as possible; I may not know which one I end up choosing, but it's better to have more options.