Freed to snap back into reality

And so my brief dalliance with AP has come to an end, for now at least.

When the bureau chief told me Wednesday my internship with the AP Singapore office was going to be prematurely terminated with immediate effect, I thought this was possibly perhaps the only rejection I would be able to stomach in my entire life.

Apparently, the head office told him they were not too comfortable with hiring a free-labourer like myself since it would bring with it a whole set of legal mambo-jambo that would come to a head if I do ever write a piece that would breach the press laws here.

So, in essence I could only stay if he chooses to start to pay me; but since they cannot afford to pay me because they have overspent the budget for this year, I had to go.

Chief obviously thought I was going to be devastated by the bad news, but I was actually tremendously relieved.

Even before I came back from America Sunday night, I was already mulling whether to ask to shorten this internship. I was tired, but mainly I knew I was going to come back to a huge pile of things to be done before term starts again in mid-August and I did not want to be too stretched and burn out before then.

I had dittered on the decision because I was concerned how this might look on my resume, when I apply to Columbia Graduate Journalism School -- fundamentally, I was deliberating within myself whether there was going to be a difference between a 7-week internship or a 5-week one in the minds of the admission folks.

At the same time, I was rather disgusted with myself for doing something just to beef up the resume.

I have always prided myself on how I have never done anything for the sake of my resume -- everything I have pursued so far has always been things I wanted to do. That my resume ends up looking as favourable as it does right now, is an entirely incidental by-product.

I also did not want to leave on an unpleasant note, so the way things worked out in the end, was at least on the surface, perhaps the most amicable solution to my whole dictum.

I mean, of course, like all decent journalists, there was this scepticism at the back of my mind. I could not be sure they were not using this as an excuse to let me go for other reasons that might possibly relate to my professional competence or attitude.

Which would have been not entirely surprising since I was rather unhappy, sitting there and doing almost nothing during my time there. I was not exactly trusted to do anything, partly because of my status as unpaid labour and also partly due to how I almost screwed some things up due to my lack of professional confidence.

So as with these things, it is usually a vicious cycle -- newbie who is not very familiar and thus needs time to get down to doing things fast and well, perceived to be incompetent and therefore not trusted to do any work that might ironically help him become better, stays in that rut.

I am not just giving excuses for my mistakes, but it takes two hands to clap and let me just stick to that before I start being accused of lacking any self-reflexivity.

Whatever it is, I shall leave things as they are for now, I am too tired to worry about any other underlying consequences from this seemingly amicable solution.

After all, it was also too much of a strange coincidence to discount God's hand in all of these. Deep down inside, I was just taken back at how seriously God took my prayers. I simply took it as His validation of what I thought I needed to be doing.

And since if God made it the way it is, I got reminded that I need not worry whether I would ever get to Columbia Journalism School. Not that I have been very spiritual lately -- in fact, the contrary has been true.

I have been back almost 5 days now and I still find myself jetlagged, in more ways than one. School starts in slightly over a fortnight's time and there is a whole ton of things to be done for VCF, Campus Observer, the honours thesis and graduate school applications.

I need to sort myself out and snap right back into reality.