Last Chance

A lot of nice movies came out last year. Okay, so I can’t watch them all, even movies which I want to watch, either due to their killer trailers, or just great storylines, or just because they seem interesting. However, the main factor why I didn’t see many movies last year, especially in the second half of the year was because of STPM.

So I didn’t go for any movies for the second half of last year. Nothing new with that, I did the same when I was taking PMR and SPM.

But that doesn’t mean that I missed nothing. I wanted to see one movie in particular. Okay, some people say that it now has more in common with a Bollywood movie than it does with your average Hollywood movie, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t watch it. Considering that I barely watch movies, any movie does fine for me.

Okay, so maybe plotless ones with more in common with a headless chicken than a headless duck really get me turned off (not to mention sleepy), but I normally take anything that comes my way. I still do know how to enjoy the better things in life, but that doesn’t mean I’ll throw everything else away.

So when my sister bought High School Musical 3 about a week ago I watched it the first chance I got. I was busy trying to get my monitor and RAM to work with my old and slow (now no longer slow, but slightly older) desktop computer, so I didn’t catch the first screening in the afternoon. With my brother trying his best to take over the world and Smallville at half past ten, my earliest chance was at eleven thirty.

I’ll give this to the critics – The first song really does feel like a Bollywood one, with Gabriella suddenly shouting out of the middles of nowhere, but all the others are, in my humble opinion that is, not too out of place. However, it wasn’t the songs that stayed with me the most. It was the issues raised.

So, okay, with major exams coming soon, no parent in his or her right mind would allow their child to go to the cinemas to watch a movie. However, what really kept me from going was not so much the exams.

It was more about what the movie was about, and how much parallel I could draw between it and my life.

Excerpt from “Now or Never”

The way we play tonight
Is what we leave behind
It all comes down to right now it’s up to us
So what are we gonna be?
T-E-A-M TEAM!
We got to turn work it out
Turn it up
C’mon!

This is the last chance to get it back
This is the last chance to make it our night
And we got to show what we’re all about
Team! Work together.

This is the last chance to make our mark
History will know who we are
This is the last game so make it count
It’s now or never.

Okay, so STPM is not a team effort and it most certainly isn’t determined by 32 minutes of your life. It’s everyone for him or herself and it is spread out over a period of two weeks. However, as I said parallels…so…

In American basketball, teams which do well in the regular season proceed on to the playoffs, basically a series of knockout games. As in any sporting event, a team would be well known for what happens to them at the final hurdle. On the other hand, though STPM is not done in a night, nearly all of a candidates marks in the STPM examination is based on what happens in those two weeks of those examinations. So the first two lines draw direct parallels – what happens in regular season in HSM3 and in all the internal exams won’t be what we leave behind; it was our performance at the final hurdle.

Obviously, no one can study for you, so yeah, it was all up to me, and what I could manage then, or as it was known (more than seven months ago) as right now.

The chorus practically sang out what I felt during STPM. One might ask what I wanted to get back. Well, after faltering during the trials, I wanted to be top of the form. After coming out tops in the mid-year exam, I wanted to prove that I wasn’t just a flash in the pan.

But what really made me stand and listen to the song every time it was played last year was the part going “This is the last chance...” . To be honest, I didn’t figure out the rest of the lyrics until I watched it this year. However, it was truly my last chance. STPM would be the last exam I take in the school system. It would be the last major exam. It was the last chance I would get to shine in Seafield.

That’s just one of the songs, and one of the reasons why watching that movie last year was not such a good idea – at least for me.

Six months later, the results are out, and most of us have gone to the university, with the rest probably enrolling within two months time. Looks like history will remember me as part of the group that almost made it. The STPM 2008 batch will probably be remembered for three things. Firstly, for being a notoriously small batch. Secondly, for being the first batch to have everyone get a principle for at least one subject, and thirdly, for being the batch with the highest 3.92 scorer percentage, a whopping 6.33 percent.

It would probably be my contribution to the third part which I would be remembered most in history – at least, Seafield history.

As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t do as well as I should have. When it comes to this, being distracted by thoughts about a girl during study week isn’t exactly helpful. Sigh. If only I paid more attention to studies than to dreams…