I Am Elie Lam

By Elie - 11:41 AM

So, after a month long break I am finally back in college on a NEAR daily basis and I'm not half as bored as I used to be...but this has just been lingering in my head since the very first day of my 6th semester and I figured that I really had to get it out.

Here's a point to what I can't do on my first days. Introduce myself. I remember joining the Ad-Venture Camp held by IACT College before actually enrolling into the college and the very first thing I was told to do was...tell everyone a bit of myself. What SHOULD I actually be saying? In fact, what on EARTH was appropriate to have been said? And no, it didn't help that I had been living in a life complete with the comfort of sleeping at 3 AM and waking up at 3 PM about the whole year. So waking up at 7 AM to make it for the 9 AM "activity filled day" was not exactly in my books of "amazing feelings". No. Just no. If that didn't help in making you realize what sort of a crappy mood I was in, here's an ungodly picture of me back then.

Scratch that. Here's an ungodly picture of both Callie and I.

P/S: I can't wait till she sees this popping up here!

Picture credits: IACT College

If that didn't appear bad enough, here's another one of the two of us. Notice how we shared a cube but had our backs turned to each another. Fun fact: she started out with hatred for me. And now, she can't live without me. I think that's how friendships kick off. First you can't stand them, then you can't lose them. God help me that I used to have murderous thoughts for Kin and now...never mind.

Yeah. Okay, you get the point. We had a rough start as friends.

Picture credits: IACT College

But the point of my tough friendship aside, yes. I do remember standing in that awkward circle during the ice-breaking session being asked to describe myself. All I cooked up in my half asleep mode was... "Hi. I'm Elie Lam and I live 20.2 kilometers away." That was it. I gave them my name and a Google Map fact. I said nothing about being 18, nothing about completing National Service (Which explains the horrendous hair, WHAT THE HECK WAS I THINKING?) and nothing about how much I missed my bed.

Of course, through every semester we would have gotten different lecturers and every first day included me introducing myself. Not only was I feeling awkward in telling everyone who I was, it was just that little bit more weird when everyone but the lecturer knew you. It would be like telling your parents who you were except with a little piece of information they had no idea about. Then again, some lecturers wanted a little more. Like why we took up mass communications. Or what we wanted to do in the future. Were we going to take up our degrees? Would we get our masters? Would we invite them to our weddings? Okay so the last one was made up, but sometimes it felt like that. ~~"Gee I don't know, if you failed me then I probably wouldn't want to see you the day I get married."~~ *Coughs*

So every semester it had to be something different. I live pretty far off from college. I didn't have a dog. I blog as a hobby. I was born and bred a complete city girl. My mother had a shop in Amcorp Mall. And ultimately in the beginning of this semester it had to be boiled down to, "Hi I'm Elie and I'm a Chinese." Don't be blaming me, I suppose all of us had ran out of ideas after all. Just as my friend said before, why do we even bother introducing ourselves during our presentations in class? We knew each others' names. We knew some secrets about each other. We didn't need the introduction. But we do it anyway. Maybe some day we'd stop doing it.

And maybe just some day I'd just tell people that I am Elie Lam. And that's all there is to me.

P/S: Oh and regarding the question on why we picked Mass Communications, this was by far the best response there ever was: There is no math in mass communications. -Aaron Yap.