Remember College?

Chapter 1: Of Classes and Passes

I sure do remember college. It really was the most memorable period of my life. 3 years of uninhibited debauchery while at the same time, having done more than I’ve ever thought I’d do.

As most people would see it, college really was the time to find oneself. It is within that period of time that the world unfolds in front of you. We begin to discover what drugs are and the actual effect of alcohol although it might appear to be a surprise to some. The word hedonism then really shines through in a manner that could only be understood with experience.

You only had to take a look around. It wouldn’t be long before you notice that for some students, the hair grows long, the ideas get radical, the concept of supply and demand goes out the window, and some of them sink into a spiral of self-destruction. It’s a utopia of sorts. It was completely detached from the real world yet it was bigger than that little slice of home that was the only thing we’ve seen for most of our adolescent period. Some take it to an actual representation of the real world because it always starts off amazing (what with all the newfound freedoms and the new faces and ideals that we discover). This however, would not last long as the side and occasionally negative effects begin to thunder down at us at an alarming pace all at once after a while. It is at this period of time that the men are separated from the boys depending on the way they handle themselves. Some characters begin a downward spiral into oblivion. These are the performers. Some others learn to be just a spectator watching these performers succumb to their primal urges for self-sabotaging. And then the shows over, they go about their daily lives. At this point, even if they indulged, they’d have a limit.

For those of us who become spectators, we begin to understand the difference between rich people, and the less financially able. We start to understand that there is a responsibility to all this hedonism and its ideals. It was not so much a responsibility to the world. Just a responsibility to oneself. Bit by bit, we begin to see the world for what it actually is. It’s all in good fun to go a bar/pub/college – read on, it will soon make no difference to you – in your pyjamas and drink lots of alcohol while doing lots of stupid things. But take it from me, it wouldn’t be nice waking up the next morning in a pile of your own puke knowing it’s a blessing because it could’ve killed you while you were choking on it the night before.

My sympathetic friends, upon finding out the next day about my ordeal, told me to wait till I was famous before I go down the way Bon Scott did.

On a more personal, more academic note, it’s an open secret that some people expected me to contribute to the rising number of fail-and-repeat students or those who just disappeared without a trace. But against all odds, I had actually made it out – albeit with some luck – alive and kicking without looking like too much of a fool. On the way however, there were quite a few close shaves (one of which was mentioned above). Looking back, I can’t think of many things I would’ve done differently. Except those things I’ve done that made life difficult for the people around me.

It seemed perfect. The way nothing was actually in the way of you doing anything. This does not just apply to me, but to everyone as well. A person only really discovers him or herself when they’ve hit rock bottom. Something I learnt the way everyone does at some points in their lives. It was when I caught my girlfriend with another guy that I got outraged. See what I mean by freedom? It was the first time I felt real jealousy. The freedom a woman gets and the power she wields over a guy when he’s drunk with self-indulgence and the pretences of affection. I finally understood how Cleopatra – from the era of probably unshaved armpits – managed to bring down the Roman empire.

It was an ugly scene. I remember it as a short period of time before I began drowning my sorrows with Thursday night booze cruises. But according to my housemate, it was a really long time. Regardless, the healing process took forever. But I eventually recovered. Was fun.

Seemed more like a wake-up call. From the way I experienced it at least. I’d have realised that throughout the whole semester, I had only attended one session of my “Digital Imaging” class. But thanks to my lecturer, I passed the unit.

I mention this because the reason my lecturer passed me was very unusual. It wasn’t because the lecturer loved my work or that I was particularly nice to him or anything. In fact, the only time my friends and I went to his class was when we were drunk off our face on a Friday morning and I decided to draw something very inappropriate with Photoshop or something and was caught in the act. The friend I came with was so drunk he couldn’t tell the difference between red and yellow. Upon being told to colour the flowers in a preset picture yellow, he coloured them all in red. Two hours of fervent colouring because he didn’t know there was a “fill” tool. All that effort for nothing. Now I cannot remember what kind of flowers they were but they looked very inappropriate. So it was because of the fact that I knew this lecturer from a long time ago through one of my underlings back in secondary school. The few insignificant people I didn’t treat badly in school turned out to be my saviour in college. Because you see, the lecturer was my underling’s godfather. He was ostracised in school and I was his unlikely confidant and friend. For which, mister lecturer was very grateful and passed me. I gladly accepted the pass mark because I hated the subject and there was nothing in my profession that required me to deal with anything remotely similar to what he was teaching.

Call that nepotism or whatever it’s called. I call it karma. Sample dialogue:

Raj: “Of course you feel terrible, you’ve completely screwed up your karma dude.”

Sheldon: “You don’t really believe in that superstition, do you???”

Raj: “It’s not superstition, it’s practically......Newtonian. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Leonard pretends to be a friend and acts like a two-faced bitch. Therefore, he is reborn as a banana slug. It’s actually a very elegant system. You know...... what goes around comes around.”

                                                                                     -The Big Bang Theory-

Don’t you think that’s a point well-made?

That was not the first time I passed a class with a fluke. I had a lecturer whom I hated in my music theory module. He was a chinese guy who thinks he’s a modern day luminary. His exploits in Berkeley are usually at the forefront of his conversations with other people, always conveniently leaving out the fact that he was only there for a week because he only visited the university.

Now on this next bit, I can’t explain without telling you about the way I look at chinese musicians. Not the race, but the people who dabble in the genre of chinese music. To the many chinese musicians I know who might stumble upon this entry, please let me clarify that I personally do not mean to provoke or insult your choice of music in any shape or form. I am a person who hardly listens to chinese music but from the few that I have heard, I really cannot make sense of. I speak various dialects of chinese fluently and I can tell for one, that chinese singing is not logically possible. The chinese language, regardless of dialects are confined to four tones in regards to the key one speaks the language in. One thinks that this is just diction. But it truly isn’t. To speak chinese, one really does sing. Even though most English words have two or more meanings, each word could be spoken in any note in the chromatic scale and its meaning or reference would still be clear due to the context of the sentence it is presented in. If a word is spoken in an unusual tone or note, it would only represent distinctive accents, or diction. However, when a chinese word is spoken in the wrong tone in correspondence to the key of the speaker, it’s meaning could change completely. I have many people argue with me about this. However, the fact remains that every English speaker – no matter how lousy – would be able to understand an English song if they could catch the words and understand it. This is not true for chinese speakers. I have spoken Cantonese all my life. It could even be considered my mother tongue since my mom speaks it. Yet I still can’t understand most of the Cantonese songs that I listen to no matter how much attention I pay to it. Same goes to Mandarin which I speak fluently. Chinese music is really the domain of those who speak it as a first language and as such, many people I know who actually understand most of this music, usually don’t speak fantastic English.

This coupled with the ill-defined genres in the Chinese music world. Every chinese pop musician I’ve known fancies themselves as innovators of a genre and claim to be playing something they’re not. I know for a fact because I study the damn thing. Many of these musicians think they’re prodigious talents capable of a jazz odyssey without ever knowing what it actually means as long as they’ve completed grade 8 or 9 musical education. You only have to listen to one artist from Hong Kong to know that everyone of them compose in standard pop formats. Yet there are various TV shows and interviews about them talking about how talented they are, it just makes me sick. Their idea of mixing showmanship with music just ends up looking like a two-bit cover band entertaining you at a hotel lounge (usually consists of one guy playing all the music on a MIDI controller and 2-3 girls prancing around with hardly any clothes and usually can’t sing properly).

This is why I personally classify chinese music as a single genre. The only distinctive genre in chinese music are their opera singers or virtuosos of their traditional instruments with their signature style. Something still prevalent (albeit getting increasingly rare) in English music. It really is unlike the heard-one-heard-it-all world of chinese pop music. That being said, a good number of them are incredibly talented composers who seem to transcend genres. Sadly, these aren’t the ones who appear on TV.

Back to the story. This lecturer of mine comes from that group of idiots I was talking about. During class, one of my classmates once asked him how many instruments he played. He said he played 6. I can’t remember what the 6 were. But I remember piano and guitar being among the instruments he played. Then he hesitated for a while and changed the number to 7. Because apparently his voice is also an instrument. I make it 8 considering the way he plays himself as an instrument.

Overcompensation. The worst kind of pensation. Typical of musicians like this.

His answer was met with the biggest number of simultaneous sighs and facepalms I’ve ever heard and seen in my life. To his credit, he was a good piano player. I’ve heard him play the guitar. Now, I don’t consider myself a good guitar player. But during the many times he played it in front of us, it sounded like I was playing it left-handed. Not sure about the other instruments he claims to play though.

Either way, it was a combination of his bragging-as-lecturing method, the fact that it was incredibly boring that sort of got us frustrated with him in the first place. That incident was just the final straw for most of us.

Which leads me to the crescendo of the story. Being a good college student, I had left all my final assignments to the very last minute. It was the final week and all my assignments were due then. It’s not that I was almost done with them. It was more of a case of “I haven’t even started with them”.

As I recall, it was a Monday night. It had just dawned on me that no work was done. During the class earlier in the day, all lecturers were hustling us with submission dates and extensions. I decided to throw away all pretences and worked as furiously as I was panicking. The first assignment I thought I’d tackle was a report. Can’t remember what it was for. Point is, immediately after dinner, I buried my head in work. Halfway through my report, I had a phone call from my friend. Who was in deeper shit than I was as he was clueless about the assignments. So he asked for my help.

Being a good friend, I had asked him to come over. I had also said he owed me alcohol for my help. This was a stroke of genius or complete stupidity depending on the way you look at it. I maintain it is genius. He agreed. After that phone call, I continued with my work. Believe it or not, within a few hours, I had completed my report. Save for proof reading which, as a gud kolej student, I never doing.

Now you must be wondering, where was my friend? Was he already there already? The answer is no. Think of it, if they were there, do you think I’d have finished my report? The answer is again, a resounding, no. So thankfully, being Malaysians, 10 at night meant 1 in the morning. I was able to finish my report and start on the next assignment that was due for submission after the report.

Around 1 in the morning, there was a knock on my door and a phone on my call from this friend, telling me he was here, at my door. I went ahead to let him in. To my surprise, he had come with an entourage. It consisted mainly of two other ‘good college students’ from my class who also had no idea on how to go about the assignments and a few miscellaneous characters whom I probably will never meet again. Come to think of it, some of them might be dead by now considering the way they abused substances. Speaking of substances, there was a second surprise. A pleasant one. Turns out he was late because he went to Subang from Cyberjaya to get two bottles of vodka. Quite how a return trip to Subang takes 3 hours is quite beyond me. Also I was thinking more along the lines of whiskey. But I figured, beggars can’t be choosers.

First order of business on my front at least, was to open the vodka. For them, it was to consume it with me because they were just watching me fondle the bottle. Now, they were supposed to be there to get my help for their assignments. What actually followed was me burying my head in work whilst entertaining them every once in a while when I took a break while they were just goofing off smoking cigarettes and telling “mat moto” jokes. Needless to say, I was in my room with the door open whilst they were in the hall.

Two bottles of vodka came and go just like that. I was already quite drunk. However, because I was so preoccupied with work and I was drinking slowly, inebriation was an inadvertently nurtured pleasure rather than a blow to the gut. Still, I had lost considerable control over my motor skills and had a few difficult moments standing up. Whilst I had completed the quota of work for the day, I decided to join them. This was at 4 in the morning. The others were already plotting to go to the music theory finals exam at 9 in the morning without sleeping. Of course, since being young meant I was being held together and kept going by witchcraft, I seconded the plan without fear of fatigue.

After one of my friends puked off the balcony, we toasted to that idea. Before long, we were out of alcohol. I suggested we get some more. So off we went. With every variation of non-sobriety represented by everyone of us, drove off in the early hours of the morning to Subang Jaya’s KK Mart to get more alcohol. Thankfully, we left and returned safely with another two bottles of vodka from the shop. Things weren’t so safe when we got home though. We opened the first bottle and within a few hours, finished it among 3 of us with the other 3 succumbing to wastedness and had fallen asleep. I too was sufficiently drunk but ironically, due to the witchcraft, not sleepy at all. I decided that we should get prepared for class at around 7 so that we would have no chance of being late. This was also to prevent any of us from falling asleep and missing the exam.

I began clearing up the hall. By accident, I dropped the empty bottle of vodka on the floor. It shattered and I laughed. I put on a pair of slippers and cleaned up the broken glass of course. However, my housemate would find a piece of broken glass later in the day or a few days later. Thankfully, that was the only one that I missed. I think.

So we got prepared. Went to school. Now there was one more bottle of vodka left. Unbeknownst to anyone, I had brought along the second bottle of vodka in my bag. It wasn’t difficult to get vodka to school since security quite literally only meant a 500 ringgit deposit and security guards who open the wrong gates for you to enter or exit the building because they’re not used to the traffic flow in this country.

So I also bought a large bottle of sprite as mixer and the games began. We were outside the class and I surprised everyone with the bottle I had and the mixer. My class of about 20 easy-going people came out. There was no shot glass or even a glass for the matter. The drinks were mixed in our mouths. A swig of vodka followed by a swig of sprite. The bottles were finished in no time. Needless to say, we were drunk in no time.

We sat at our places in class and as usual, before an exam, lots of discussions would be going on. For those who drank which was most of the class, we were shouting and singing. It was to be a written test. Mister lecturer came in with the question papers and we were prepared to start. Only we couldn’t stop singing. There wasn’t really a reason for our singing other than the fact that we really wanted to annoy mister lecturer. We sang the jingle to the BOH tea advertisement that was also the subject of our assignment due later that week. All the poor mister lecturer could do was to tell us to keep quiet. He resorted to shouting and we began singing it for the second time.

At this point, the most amazing thing happened. We had a very outspoken, so-called rapper from Africa who claims to be from the UK in our class. We thought he was going to miss the exam like he misses most classes. However, it turns out he was dealing with something far bigger than what we all expected it had something to do with this particular mister lecturer. He whom I talk about, let’s call him “Awabodo” since that was his favourite phrase, stormed in the class. We all fell silent. He then exclaimed to the mister lecturer:

“IF I FAIL THIS CLASS AND MY FUTURE IS JEOPARDISED, IT’D ALL BE YOUR FAULT MISTER LECTURER. IT WAS BECAUSE OF YOU THAT I WAS NOT ALLOWED TO ATTEND ANY OF MY CLASSES!!!”

Or something to that effect. To which the lecturer responded:

“Come on, let’s talk outside. Don’t disturb the rest of them doing their exam.”

Or something to that effect......

None of us had studied for this exam. Well, most of us at least. So this was like a sign from the divine to copy. We decided that it should be an open book exam, and copied each other’s answers through “discussions”. All this while they were solving their problems outside. Needless to say, all of us finished our exam in record time AT THE SAME TIME.

After he was done with his discussion, Awabodo left and mister lecturer came back into the class. He knew we had cheated but we also sensed that he was too fucked to be bothered. In fact, something even more extraordinary was to happen. He said that considering some of you have not been able to come to class for the lectures, I’m going to hint the answers to some of the questions for you guys. And he pretty much went on to tell us the answers to the whole paper save for the essay question. Of which there was only one.

I know it sounds a bit out-worldly, but you and I know that no one can make stuff like this up.

All that did for us was just to check whether or not our answers were correct. Until today, no one really knows for sure why he did that. We speculate that it was probably due to the discussion he had with Awabodo and the fact that he cancelled and held replacement classes at his whim without prior notification to anyone about the timing on many, many occasions. As such, we had unintentionally missed many classes. Joining those dots was the only way we could come up with a logical, plausible explanation for mister lecturer’s weird actions. Though since no concrete explanation has ever been given, no one can be sure.

We then left the exam feeling joyful and drunk. Ready to immediately begin a recording session for another one of my final assignments. But that’s a story for another day. For now, that is the story of how I passed the Music Theory 2 module.