The Path of Least Resistance

People had been posting this blog entry on Facebook today. It was about a student who score A1's in sixteen secondary school subjects and secured himself a government scholarship to the States.

He would be about 17 or 18 by now and I admire him for realizing that nobody cares if you have got sixteen A1's at his stage i.e. college. I only figured that out at university because well, I think that's when people stopped asking, I suppose.

Anyway, I was reading his blog and lol, it is true how hard you can study and get shit grades in the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM). I can't remember how many subjects I took (less than ten!) but I remember History and Moral were a compulsory part of the set. Moral... Moral... I always thought Moral studies a punishment for not being Muslim. It doesn't teach Ethics or Morality. It's just a 'study' of sixteen values defined by a set of keywords made into a sentence. Very pointless. But sounds like an easy A1 grade to bag, right?

So I studied really 'hard' for moral to remember the sixteen or so values. And, I thought if I did moral well, I could concentrate less on History. So I would get xA's and a lousy grade for History. That was a reasonable objective for the time I had left despite having started revision early.

I remember sitting in the car with my mum for about an hour reading my History book... Flipping through spotted questions at the very last minute thinking I wasn't gonna do well.

On results day. Lo and behold. Moral B3. WTF. 

History A2. WTF man.

So, I feel for people like this guy. He must really hate people like me. LOL. Study so hard but for what?

And these days, I feel myself taking the path of least resistance (and most happiness?) even more than before because the outcome is the same and it was the journey that mattered.

If I could do it all over again?

- Take up art, aced it so bad the whole country cried and employed more qualified art teachers

- Studied the bare minimum for subjects I didn't care for like MORAL studies; maybe use the free time to protest against MORAL studies; campaign for the re-instatement of mother tongue classes whilst Muslim students did they Islamic studies; and sleep even more.