We're at the open air market, the one near Elektra House, sipping white ladies and tired from Judo. It's as good a day as I can make it - I wake up at 6 for work, spend a whole day at the UiTM labs, and then I head home for a short rest before going to the dojo. Two full days like that and I'm already happier.
Right now, however, I'm at the tail-end of a long 24 hours, sitting at one of those hard-topped plastic tables you can only find in old Kuching. These are speared to the ground on rusted metal rods and surrounded by similarly circular chairs, like a mummy mushroom with her children. Malcolm and Tim are with me. We're sweaty and high on endorphins.
"Where you want to go after this?" I ask Tim. It's a question we toss around a lot these days, before warmups or after stretching, all casual-like.
"Biomedical science." Tim speaks in Mandarin. He dips his spoon back into his cup, extracts a chunk of milky ice, and takes the time to swallow before continuing: "I'm taking IELTS now. If I do well I'm planning to go UK."
I know nobody who's gone to the UK. Of the top five students in my form 5 class, I know of only one - Aidan - who's currently in France. And even that's a whole channel away from England. And biomedicine? Wow. I look at my hands and consider the difficulty involved in any bio-related subject. I never did do well in Bio. Couldn't for the life of me figure out why I needed to study mitochondria and platelete structure, especially when I wouldn't - couldn't (I cannot stand the sight of blood) - end up a doctor.
When I return from my thoughts Tim and Malcolm are talking about our drinks. "You know," Malcolm says, "You remind me of Sensei."
I turn towards him. Huh?
"He had never drank a White Lady before. Not until Clifford brought him out for a drink. He was like ... -" here Malcolm makes a mime of putting down a glass after a first sip "- 'what drink is this?' and then he asked for a lemon and then he put the lemon on his cup edge and he turned it all around and he drink finish. Wow mans he loved white lady."
We smile at the memory of Sensei. I wonder what he's doing over in Penang, and whether he thinks of us the way we think of him. But that's maudlin territory, not to be touched, so I blink the thought away and ask: "Where's Clifford now ah?"
"Plymouth." Malcolm replies. "Coastal engineering."
"On scholarship?"
"Yeah. Kinda -"
"What kind?"
"INTI."
I raise an eyebrow at that. I now know somebody who's in the UK.
"You le?" Tim asks, looking at me.
I hold a breath. "If my results aren't good, probably local U. Don't want to overburden my parents."
"How're you so sure you're not going to get good results?"
I stir the ice in my white lady. "Left about 40% blank in my math paper." I say, quietly. "And I don't want to think about the rest. What does that tell you?"
What I don't tell them is that the nightmares are back.
"So what? As long as you pass -"
"If it isn't an A, it isn't a pass."
"You can't be serious ..."
"True la." Malcolm cuts in, "For them, a B is a fail." I do not question what 'they' meant.
But then Malcolm turns to me, and the thought spills out: "Sometimes, when I see Joash, or Clifford, or you, I get jealous. Things come easy for you people. Look at Joash, man. He's now at NUS, doing business. Or Horng Eng. You know, she's like me - she's taking Civil Engineering. And you know what she got in her first sem? 4.0, mans! And Clif-"
"What about me?" I ask, and I narrow my eyes. "I mean, you got all that from just seeing me in Judo?" And this is strange - Malcolm has never seen me negotiate, has never seen me lead, has never seen me teach. The thought that he can see the other side of me - the side my friends call intimidating - is a scary one.
"From what Lee Hwa says -" (Lee Hwa is the current president of St Thomas's Judo club) "- you're the kind of person who ... does things. Who says, 'okay let's do it'. You know? You want something, and you go towards it. It's like you work hard, but not that kind of hard. You're ... committed."
But my lips twitch upwards into a smile, because for a bubble of a second I see Kenny's face, and it's Form 4 again and I'm telling him that I'm washing my hands of the Maxis CyberlinQ project and he's telling me that I'm not committed enough to the team and I should buck up and see reason or get out, and out for good. And he's right. But I hadn't seen it yet, hadn't completely given in to the Thomian culture of giving yourself wholely to a cause greater than the sum of its parts ...
"I wasn't always like that." I mutter.
And I see now. I do. I call it drive. The need to prove yourself, the need to reach for higher and greater things, to do things other people wouldn't think of doing, just for the heck of it. Reaching so hard that your fingers brush the fruit of perfection, the blades of sunlight in your face. And never settling when you win, never too depressed when you lose. And a corollary: never really happy; never really sad. The cost of drive is ambivalence, a half-life that never swings too far up or down. And I'm just 19. I was driven, but maybe in the wrong areas. I don't know. When I'm old and I look back, would it be good? Would it all have been worth it, being driven like that, at the expense of unfiltered joy, and bleak dispair?
[Update]: I've gotten rid of the bloody arrogant ending, and that teaches me a lesson for writing at 3 am. The truth is: I'm not sure whether drive is a good thing. We've all seen overachievers in action, and I'm sure we all know one or two in person. Over the past 2 years, in Form 6, I've had a taste of how it feels like, being one ... and I'm not sure if that's how I want to live my life. Dickens had drive in abundance (wrote a series of classics, edited a magazine, had 10 children, set up a house for wayward women, lectured, fought for wider adoption of copyright law - you have to wonder if he ever really slept ...) So did Trump, and Jobs, and Chanel. But look at the flip side of the coin: Einstein lived a bummer life (and a great one!) and he got far; Hubble practically had everything handed to him on a silver platter, and he got far too. (History remembers him for his contribution to astronomy; what they don't mention is that every academic and career decision he made turned out to be the best possible thing he could ever do.)
Would I want to live the rest of my life in ambivalence? The self-help books call drive 'positive energy', which I think is mostly a load of badly written money-guzzling metaphysical rubbish. Drive is best learnt from the sweat and dirt of sport, or under the iron tenacity of a mentor, a coach (or in my case, a sensei). Is drive the best way to live a life? I know that this sounds weird, asking these questions here. But my writing is an extension of my mind, and drive is something I've been thinking about a lot these couple of months. I'm adrift for the moment - driveless, if you will. What will my plans for 2009 be?
The answer is that I'm not sure. But I'll tell you when I find out.
