fsp lastly

in less than twelve hours i will be sitting in an examination room in keble college. all of us, eighteen students from more than ten countries, are expected to be there fifteen minutes before the test begins. 

this one, on diplomatic practice, will be the first of four tests that we have to take in this coming week. 

we are required to wear oxford's traditional exam dress and follow the rule of how they conduct the exams here. and so for that today i have made sure that my white bow tie, black suit, gown and cap are ready. also if i am lucky, someone will give me a white flower tomorrow to complete the dress code. 

i also have prepared myself with some reading materials related to the topics i plan to answer tomorrow. it is my hope that the questions will correspond to what i have learned and memorised, such as international organisations, us' foreign policy, public diplomacy, and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. these are among the topics i try to elaborate tomorrow.

and then, in the following day, i should look into the debates in international relations theories, touch the fundamental idea of the 'english school' and constructivism, revisit the main causes of the end of the cold war seen from what was going on in both the soviet union and the united states, and perhaps anticipate to write something about the cosmopolitan democracy too.

furthermore, on the economics exam, hmm... perhaps i have to read more on the current account deficit, regionalism versus multilateral trade, foreign direct investment, and washington consensus... 

and last but not least, on international law, i should cover the topics from the legality of the use of force, the law of the sea, immunity of state and its officials, to states' responsibility. 

and i hope that will be all. 

now i wish to say to all my classmates this: friends, we all have studied hard all these terms. we have read all the journals, chapters of books, articles, international treaties, and pages of key readings for our dissertation; we have written over twenty essays during the entire programme; we have sat for countless hours in our tutorial sessions - with antonios too, in our lectures, in the bus that took us to the study tour; we have dined and played together too. well, now, we can see the gate that will take us to the end all of these labour is looming on the horizon. four doors, guys. in just one week. and then that's it. the last lap of the fsp.

so i wish you all the best with these exams! good luck! shine oooon!

a prelude to a finale

and so the fourth week of trinity is almost over. half way to the end of the road. and the rest will not be so easy. but this is already expected. i can see it from here, that the road ahead will go uphill. climbing is the only way to get there. no matter how slow or how fast you walk or run, the gravity will certainly demand from you an extra labour if you really want to scale. whether or not you are prepared, no one can exactly tell. perhaps no one is actually ever ready for undertaking such kind of heaviness. the best you can do, perhaps, is work steadily and keep on walking. like frank sinatra said, it's the time to bite off more than you can chew.

what i need in the coming days will be some big chunks of liberty between my hours of routinity. i will have to find those times in this trinity. and when i do, no matter how tiny, i will use them to finish my duty. to finally say to the whole party, this is my conclusion, my accomplished responsibility... inchalla.

the beauty of the future

"vahd, if you could only remember how it looked like in the future, you would see how beautiful it is. and it helps you to better understand and memorise the present and the past."

when lillian said that to me, my mind went beyond their context. a few steps across the border of meanings. my instant reaction when hearing that sentence was smiling and thinking to myself, "how could i possibly 'remember' how something looked like 'in the future'?"

i have no crystal ball to consult.

well, in fact, i don't need one. all i need is my lecture notes. and a heavier dose of focus and consentration while in the classroom.

because afterall, lillian is my native french teacher. and she was about to teach me the easiest way to memorise various forms of tenses in french.

"voila, lillian. je n'oublierai pas 'le futur'." i came so far for beauty.

time to cook

perhaps i shouldn't treat academic homeworks (essays, dissertation, presentation, etc.) the way i do poems or fiction stories. i mean, not substantively of course, for certainly the two categories do belong to different baskets of qualification. but more in terms of how to craft them.

lately i came to discover that i spend quite a splendid amount of attention and time in trying to make my homeworks tasty and delicious, which is nearly impossible. there is just not enough time to do that. it's like you can't cook a real good fancy food when you have less than five minutes.

i guess there is an appropriate limit of time to be allocated for each work that we do. circling around one single job for a long time may give you the advantage of seeing the details. but this benefit comes to you at the cost of losing the opportunity to tap the other possibilities.

i know i can not always choose what i want to do, what i want to write, or read. or eat, or cook. yet i try to be wise in administering my twenty four hours a day, so that i can remain intact and still can escape my room in the daytime to breath the fresh air outside. i can read what they want me to read, even if i disagree with the material that i read, while i also can read books about china 's foreign affairs which are compulsory for my dissertation. the same with writing.

if only you understand what is expected from your text, or your work, it will be simpler to finish the job. perhaps not necessarily easier, but at least you can focus better and accomplish the mission sooner.

that road

"...it is not helpful to gather answers when no questions have been asked first," he said. a line that made me pause, and reread it, and pause again, and continue reading...

i arrived at that passage when i was reading an article on the cold war.

yes it has been a week of a long road to international relations theory to me. and the route was not an easy one. it's got so many metaphors. often talking in images. if you had no map, you'd want to drive carefully and slowly along that windy road.

"you may have not got the right answers. or not yet. but at least you've asked the right question."

circle

as i was trying to digest the diagrams and tables presented in my macroeconomic lesson, i couldn't help to wonder if only there's an equilibrium point in life - like in one of those curves - where ideas, faiths and meanings can be just weightless again. free from the pressure of the marketplace and economic gain, free from the burden of perpetual growth and inflationary chain, free from the value set by the exchange rate and interest margins.

i think the study is partly trying to tell us and convince us that 'the economy' is an extraordinarily big 'animal', and it is so big that it covers the entire world. and we have to feed it. and some feed it with bullets.

subscription day

one by one, the essays are done. and one by one, the new ones will come. from the pages of international trade and finance - a subject which tries to convince you that capitalism will prevail; to international law with its never ending cases and chapters to memorize - believe me they want you to remember numbers of those years and articles when you can even hardly memorise your own mobile number; to the mountain high of politics where the ghosts of great philosophers reside and continue their debate; and finally to diplomatic practice classes where lessons from the able ambassadors unite.

it seems to take enourmous amount of hours for me to compose those sentences into a meaningful paragraph. let alone a page. but the lesson is perhaps there. like any labour that you are committed to do. if you stick to a labour long enough, it will eventually yield. even though long enough is probably way beyond any reasonable estimation of what long enough might be.