I find it hard to believe I could be so facepalm-inducingly fail. I shouldn't, now should I? It's hardly a new thing.

An invitation to tour the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine as a perk for winning something at the Biomed Symposium and I plain forgot about it. It's not about whether I'm interested in applying for medicine or not (still undecided btw) but rather the sheer irresponsibility of it that disgusts me. ARGH. Well, you know what they say about spilt milk, so no use crying over it. (There's also this one bout opportunity only knocking once, but let's think positive, shall we?) Just feeling a little rueful that I made myself miss out on it.

For some inexplicable reason, I don't quite know myself these days. Perhaps it's simply that for a while now, I've been able to get by without asking myself those difficult questions; simply and deliberately turning my head, averting my gaze from that which confronted me. When you decide to wield a critical mindset upon yourself; things start to get messy.

For instance, one of the reasons I do things is cause I find them "interesting". Nothing wrong there, right? But thinking about it, it really doesn't require much thought on my part to justify practically anything as interesting. Grow crops under a micro-credit scheme? Absolutely delightful. Play a higher-order tactical game with black and white stones? Why not! Sign up for some symposium that requires you to work your ass off? Might as well. But the fact is that there're so many potentially "interesting" things to do, aren't there? So I start to be unclear about the motives behind the stuff I do. The supposedly pure motive of "interest" and/or "passion" can't be the only one, since I've found myself able to sufficiently tweak my mindset when required, to find a whole spectrum of things interesting, yet you don't see me rushing off to do all of them. There has to be something else. I'd like to think that I'm not in it for the potential gains, especially given the high odds against me actually deriving some sort of benefit from having participated; that it must have been some freaking coincidence that I managed to blunder my way into qualifying for that RD or whatever. Sounds pretty improbable, huh? I don't know.

I was agonizing over something similar earlier last year, during the run-up to the exco elections. Asking myself exactly why I was running; service or for the recognition? Not getting my desired post ironically proved to me that I was in it for the former. And that's a spot of luck, cause if I had succeeded, I'd have never known.

While others may never think to question my motives, I surely will, cause it matters that much. I'm not sure how else I can act with certainty and conviction, to be positive that I'm not just persuading myself with sugar-coated lies of noble intentions, dressing and prettying them up so I can stomach them.