I am going to hand in my Honours dissertation tomorrow, effectively completing my university education. It’s surreal, bittersweet… You name it, I feel it. In my writing, at several moments, I remembered you. Taken from my thesis acknowledgements:

My supervisor, Dr. Rebecca Suter, who has been simply indispensable in the past year – my sincerest thanks and deepest appreciation for your unceasing patience, graciousness and optimism, as well as your valued tutelage and guidance in and outside of this Honours programme. Having you as a supervisor has been a joy, indeed. Domo arigato, sensei.

Davina and Tina, my partners in crime during this pivotal stage of our lives – as we near the end of the different phases of our university education, having still kept our sanity, I am reminded of how much your companionship has meant to me. Thank you for the study sessions, text messages and cups of coffee throughout the year (not forgetting the previous three); all of which have given me the encouragement and energy to press on.

Jessie, Rosa, Preethi, William, David and Elizabeth – all blessed with analytical minds and wonderful personalities, whose corresponding journeys have been a great source of support. I hope our paths will cross in the future.

Ernest, Eliss and my cell members – I have never witnessed more generosity and willingness of heart, nor have I experienced a dull moment with you. Thank you for the laughs on the weekend and your prayers during the week. Keep in touch!

Kay-Lene, my dearest and ever-present ‘old same’ – thank you for sympathising; for listening to my gripes; and for not holding it against me when I do not have the time to hear yours. I am more grateful for you than I am able to express.

Gerard and Amy, my encyclopaedias and voices of reason – thank you for the sage advice you have dispensed, even before I undertook this thesis project.

Roger F., excellence personified – to me, he is the archetype of hard work and strength of mind.

My parents and siblings, for your unconditional love – words are not enough to convey my indebtedness to the affirmation you have shown in my choices.

Last but not least, my Almighty God – the comfort during my most uninspired days and my beacon in the darkest of circumstances. You have never left my side.

So, I said I would write with my left hand this year…

It took me a day to figure out my bearings between Zen and devastation, but I am miraculously still alive after the US Open men’s final. You just learn not to sweat the small stuff – marriage (boo hoo!), Roland Garros, Wimbledon, Grand Slams record, Career Slam, World Number 1, fatherhood; everything else is icing on an already sweet cake. It helps that I have gained impenetrable armour over the past year and if I can survive those setbacks…

What can I say? Composing this will either serve as much-needed therapy, or plunge me into severe melancholia (skyrocket or nosedive, remember?). I read match analyses and reactions; I do not write them. I am neither a commentator, nor a journalist (yet) – I am a die-hard fan. Just as how the wind kept shifting during the match, both literally and figuratively, so did my emotions. By the end of it, when Juan Martin Del Potro (his name appears first in this post, because his win was deserved) collapsed on the court, I reached a new spiritual plane… That, or I must have taken a chill pill some time between the fourth and fifth sets.

Roger Federer remains superhuman, so there’s no reason for my fandom to take a turn for the half-ass. Even so, waking up at 5 am to make a trip to the casino counts as one of the crazier things I have done in the name of ‘Fedophilia’. Do I regret putting in such effort only to see him lose? Not in the slightest! Will Federer make it 16 Grand Slams? You’d better believe it, baby! Allez!

“[...] and if you are not a tennis person, I suspect this may be somewhat hard to fathom – the idea that watching two men spend that many hours hitting a ball could actually make your heart pound so hard that you have to keep jumping up and yelling and grabbing your own head.”

I live and die with Roger Federer’s matches. When you factor in the year-long tennis season, multiplied by the number of years I’ve supported this player, I have long surpassed that clichéd expression about a cat’s nine lives. Little good comes out of being so emotionally invested in tennis. My once-upon-a-time harmless support for Federer has morphed into full-blown love for the sport. If I thought my level of fandom at the Australian Open was dangerous, then what I feel now is bordering on lunacy. Federer’s performance at Flushing Meadows will either send me skyrocketing to new stratospheres, or nosediving into a reality where Federer loses in Grand Slams.

I suppose I cannot bring up a major loss without following it up with the next natural thought; Federer’s ‘unanswered question’: Rafael Nadal. My pendulum-like relationship with Nadal swings from fire-breathing hate to jaw-dropping admiration – I hold him responsible for all of my tennis-related mental breakdowns, but his tenacity is why he is another exception to my ‘exclusively Federer’ posts.

However, loyalties do not fade quickly, so that is all I will say about the Spaniard.

And this post for that matter. Every time I start something that is beyond match narration, I meander and end up stopping – why else do you think I can spew play-by-play Tweets, but hardly anything about the aftermath? It’s hard to shut me up when it comes to the analysis, but to encapsulate the awesomeness (whoa, that’s a legit word) of Federer… Words fail me.

Inspired by Joachim (it happens more often than I care to admit)…

All evoke emotion and ambition – senses so strong that they might very well outweigh my abilities. This isn’t false modesty – little else is worse than falling short of expectations.

I thought I’d reserve such acts of tough love for my siblings, but Joachim is like the brother I actually have, who is a pain in my neck in equal measure:

1. Quite an obvious fact, but he loves The Outsiders.
2. Another oldie he likes is Great Teacher Onizuka.
3. His grammar is questionable – who leaves a space between the last word and an exclamation or question mark?
4. He and I made a pact to get together if both of us were single in December 2006 (it didn’t happen). In hindsight, what were we thinking?
5. He’s been a fan of Rafael Nadal for almost as long as I’ve been supporting Roger Federer – I’m assuming he became one to piss me off.
6. Sometimes, he forgets that he’s a guest in my house when we watch Federer and Nadal play – he is ruthless and unabashed with his cheers and I’ve threatened to kick him out several times.
7. He and Christopher bet on tennis matches – Joachim is ahead, because they forget to wager on the ones that Federer wins.
8. Joachim and I are meant to be rivals – we rooted for different finalists in the first season of Singapore Idol. Again, what were we thinking?
9. To wit, he was behind London (I wanted Paris) in the bid for the 2012 Olympic Games – we know which country won.
10. He is the only person for whom I would eat purple potatoes.
11. One of the three cakes I’ve made in my lifetime was for his 17th birthday.
12. He can be (uncharacteristically?) sentimental – until a few months ago, he frequently wore a band I got for him from Cambodia.
13. He has a crush on… Yeah, she knows.
14. The first time we spoke was on Maundy Thursday in 2004.
15. A significant part of our friendship was built over roti prata.
16. I used to call him ‘Milo Boy’, but I cannot remember why.
17. We once spent 40 minutes in Orchard Road pointing out people whom we thought were attractive… And agreed on none.
18. He has a big heart.
19. He’s smart and cool – he received an award for his outstanding grades in Mass Communication and he can play the drums.
20. A message from him makes my day, as he says the craziest things. Most recently, he commented that I look like Federer in the birthday video I did (WTF, right?) – it was either a jab at my nose or hair, and not because of my awesome tennis skills.
21. He turns 21 today – HAPPY COMING-OF-AGE!

Put simply, there is no satisfactory way to describe the Roddick-Federer Wimbledon final.

I usually am very stingy about including other players in a Roger Federer post, but I would be remissed if I did not mention Andy Roddick’s glorious display of an arsenal of skills throughout the tournament, which stunned even the most staunch of naysayers. As predicted, Roddick made Federer work for it. Their final match was a far cry from the one in 2004, when Roddick’s kitchen sink was unceremoniously rebounded by Federer’s bathtub – this time, Roddick brought along other household utilities. He swept aside Tomas Berdych, Lleyton Hewitt and Andy Murray – not easy feats by any means – and despite the popular pre-match opinion, it was a near-possible task for Roddick to scale and conquer the Swiss Alp, almost too close for comfort in the first and fourth sets. As devoted as I am to ‘Rog’, it is such a pity to see Roddick lose after an agonising 30-game fifth set, which he really didn’t deserve.

Perhaps the poem by Rudyard Kipling, emblazoned in the Wimbledon clubhouse, best surmises Roddick’s comeback, as well as Federer’s reascent to greatness (old married dudes have still got it!). I must admit that I am ‘ye of little faith’ – never in my time spent in wishful thought did I believe that 2009 would be the year Federer reclaimed his Wimbledon and World Number 1 titles, the latter being an unprecedented achievement. His victory at Roland Garros compensated for the Australian Open heartbreak and it buoyed my self-assurance of a Federer win, but that soon plummeted after the first set and brought back the nightmare of last year’s epic match. To see how visibly subdued I was, you wouldn’t know the havoc that was going through my mind until Roddick served the forehand that sent the ball into oblivion.

My head still throbs; my eyes are bloodshot from weeping; my backside aches from six hours of sitting; my heart is threatening an aneurism; and my body has yet to recover from two weeks of sleep-deprived nights. When it comes to Federer, it is ‘no holds barred’ – nothing is too long, too outlandish, too emotional, too stark raving mad… Many people cannot take me seriously, but there are reasons why he is worthy of the fanfare – 20 Grand Slam finals, 15 Grand Slams, Career Slam, World Number 1.

My head is a ‘library of knowledge’, unfortunately on a topic I cannot discuss elsewhere. I have accumulated ten months’ worth of research for my thesis paper and it irritates me (a major understatement – ‘nauseates’ is more accurate) to have to reference a title with American spelling – ‘or’s, ‘og’s, ‘er’s, ‘ze’s, etc.

And now, to top off the already not-nice process of Honours, I learn that I am guilty of committing, albeit unwittingly, ‘American versus British’ spelling crimes (‘judgment’ looks better than ‘judgement’; same with ‘jail’ and ‘gaol’, ’skeptics’ and ’sceptics’). Those who know what a Nazi I am about spelling… Yeah, it sux.

And see what happens… The end product will be a mega-hit, I can tell you.

What would your album look like if you were in a band? Follow the directions to find out:

1. Go to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random.
   The first random Wikipedia article is the name of your band.
2. Go to www.quotationspage.com/random.php3.
   The last four or five words of the last quote is the title of your album.
3. Go to www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days.
   The third picture, no matter what it is, is your album cover.
4. Use Adobe Photoshop, or similar, to put it all together.

I need to start writing my Honours paper this month (although I should have begun in May), so it’s semi-logical that I measure the extent of my vocabulary. Voilà – a word cloud of the 75 words I most frequently use on this blog:

At least I exercise judiciousness, evidenced by how small most of the words are (who would have thunk that I favour ‘like’ and ‘one’?). Out of the 20,000 words I have to emit from the scholarly section of my brain (akin to the Loch Ness Monster – both are only alleged to exist), it is safe to say I can avoid using a large proportion of the above. But I’m still going to try and slip in ‘Federer’ somewhere…