I’m wondering if this is all a part of university.

I’m getting really sick of all the politics in school. I always thought that politics were for babies who couldn’t put aside their differences and took sides and argued with each other over small, tiny, minute matters. I thought I left all this back in primary school, back in secondary school, heck even back in per-U but I definitely never expected politics to resurface again in university.

I mean, we’re all adults here, grow up a little.

We entered university as a huge group of friends, nearly 50 people. People might call us racist, but we from the same ethnicity usually stuck together, not deliberately but because of the languages and dialects we spoke that were somewhat different. Last semester I saw little breaks in this huge continent and I guess it really was nobody’s fault that we slowly drifted apart, seeing as all of us were living in different places and had quite some different classes although we were all from the same course. But the rifts have always never been permanent, we could hang out with this small group of people one day and hang out with another bunch of people the next. We’d like to call it a community. We used to be dynamic, always changing groups we hung out with, etcetera etcetera.

I have a usual group of people that I hung out with too. We interchanged, but usually stuck together because of geographical factors. Some just live opposite my room, some live one floor above me. We used to be really close, going for dinner together, classes and all. Used to.

I’m not exactly sure when the continental drift happened, but I’d say it was somewhere around exams last semester? See, my BFFFF lives in another hostel about 5 minutes away and we often stick together 24-7 because I’d like to say that our personalities and likes were 99.99% alike. The only difference was that she could only study alone, while I could only study while disturbing other people. Yeah, I’m kind of the bad guy every exam season XD

The point is, the others took their pre-exam studies reeeeaally seriously, often seen studying in one of their rooms or hanging at the cafeteria or library. I’ve had always that happy-go-lucky persona around me and I don’t really like studying, what more alone. So I kind of turned down the others’ offers to study at the library or café and stayed in my room often. Or, I’d walk over to Sue’s room and chat till dark. I’ve even had one of the others look at me with a (kinda) pitying face, telling me that I should “at least study a little,” instead of looking for Sue to talk all the time.

So the exams flew by and everything was all fine and dandy until the results came out. The best results is a pointer of 4.0, while the worst is 1.0, you get the idea. I got 3.46, not a bad result. Sue got 3.5 and made it into the Dean’s List. I was really happy for her and then I made the mistake of asking the rest of the guys.

It might have been me, but I was thinking that I didn’t even study much to earn this pointer of mine; the others who studied way more than I did definitely had to be better than me.

Oh how wrong I was. They didn’t get anything higher than a 3.2 – even Dree, Sue’s neighbour, who used to be top student in her pre-U and studied the most – and I dared not probe any further after asking only two of them. I’ve heard rumours about the others also getting less than that but I never clarified with them.

Okay, I definitely regretted asking them about their results and making myself the badder guy. I actually felt guilty for getting what I got, and I don’t even know why.

New semester started, and things were beginning to become more obvious. Sue and I weren’t invited to hang out often anymore and at some point we found ourselves outsiders already. We definitely didn’t mind hanging out with other people but they lived so far away; in fact Sue told me that she actually felt more comfortable being around the other course mates living the furthest away. I just act dumb and play along. Being ignored and left out wasn’t weird to me anymore anyway since I had a whole history of being isolated since primary school. Politics, like I said. I always thought they were for babies.

Sue got really angry today. She asked me about my dinner plans when I just woke up from a nap, and I said I had no idea but I’d go to her room after freshening up a bit. When I got to her room she was fuming. She told me that she had asked Dree about dinner plans, but the reply she received was “I’m at xxx now with the others, if you wanna come then be here in 5 minutes flat.” Sue said it felt like Dree was treating her like a dog, and this wasn’t the first time. She’d been controlling herself not to explode since week 1 of semester 1 last year.

I didn’t know what to do with an angry Sue. Both of us ended up going to a different place for dinner, and we met a couple of friends who told us they saw Dree and the others walking in the other direction. We said yeah, we knew that, but we’re eating here. They went ‘didn’t they invite you guys along?’ and we said no, then they looked so honestly surprised asking us why. As if we actually knew the answer… Ugh :(

Sorry I just had to get this off my chest.