today i realise how rusty i am. i have not had any written test like this since i went to jc or university. for a moment i had a slight creeping of dread as to how the heck i was going to write legibly and quickly enough to complete any of it decently. and in a room all by myself with rather cold air-conditioning, which means even stiffer digits let alone dexterity. apart from pen and paper, it was nice to be offered a laptop too. although i had certain resevations about using a laptop, mainly for honest reasons, i gave in because i thought my handwriting would be an embarrassment at best, and chicken scratchings at worst.
it didn’t seem like it was just my fingers that were immobile from lack of pen use, but my mind was equally stiff too. that plus the heavy lunch i just ate before the test which was full of creamy pasta goodness with potato, bacon, asparagus, spoonfuls of a kicking full-bodied minestrone, and paper-thin pizza with more potato and spicy cod roe. but i digress. this is a feeble attempt of a colouful listing that i stuffed my face with.
for the paper i faced listings of questions instead, some of which i realised i didn’t quite give a damn about even though i should be fairly familiar with their subject matters, partly because of overloads which lead one to a sort of mental bulimia by the end of the day – retching stuff today to absorb again tomorrow. no wonder i seem to have an increasingly short short-term memory. come to think of it, i wonder if a sort of apathy actually helps to retain one’s sanity where i work.
so to avoid all this and avoid spotting of factual errors, i had to settle on an abstract question instead. this sort seemed the most fun to write anyhow, although for the life of my poor addled brain it quickly dawned on me that my mental gears were also quite badly cobwebbed. suddenly writing creatively seemed like the challenge you faced when writing a full-length composition for the first time in primary school, and presenting cogent arguments felt like the first general paper essay – except you had to juggle both at the same time and still sound like a well-read, eloquent, astute adult worthy of the stripes your university education earned you.
despite all these trepidations, i actually found that i rather enjoyed the process somewhat by the time i was done. i don’t think i wrote my best (i’m never satisfied with what i write anyway), but at least i didn’t feel it was a total disaster under the circumstances. it made me miss writing all the more, the enjoyment of playing with ideas. and made me realise just how badly working life and work reports damage vocabulary and creativity levels. truly a case of english as it is broken.
