Thursday, April 15, 2010

Reliving The School Days

It was shortly after 5pm two days ago when I made a quick visit to the supermarket near my office after work to grab some frozen chickens. As I was walking to Wisma Jubilee where I parked my car, I bumped into an ex-classmate in front of HSBC.

Upon seeing me from a distance, she started laughing. I thought I had forgotten to pull up my fly or something. When we were close enough to each other, she told me between uncontrollable laughs that another ex-classmate of ours had introduced her to this blog. And she was saying that she found something very funny here. I hadn't the slightest idea then which particular post she was referring to, since she was struggling to control her laughter—I only caught something about swimsuit—but because of her infectious laugh, I found myself laughing too! In the end, I said that I was glad that she enjoyed my blog, and welcomed her to keep visiting regularly.

Then later that night, during the 50th anniversary celebration of our company, I was seated at the same table with that other ex-classmate. Well, at least she was able to control her laughter, and was therefore able to tell me which post the other friend was referring to. Apparently, they have been talking about this blog!

And then as fate would have it, yet another one of my ex-classmates was also seated at the same table (yes, this is indeed a small world!) And we got to talk briefly about this blog which she did not know of. Well, maybe from now on, I really need to be careful with what I write about in this blog, just in case I can get into trouble because of my posts!

Actually, when I was still very young and in primary school, I was such a lazy bum. I can still remember that I wasn't exactly very popular among the teachers. In fact, that continued up till form 3, if I remembered correctly. As a result, I wasn't anywhere near the top achievers in class—far from it! On the contrary, I was very close to the bottom!

Those were the days when my entire life was supposed to be about memorising the 7 colours of the rainbow in the correct order; that the name of a state in Tanah Melayu came about because a fool from Palembang saw a mousedeer kicked one of his hounds under a tree; that Sang Nila Utama had no blood relation with Sang Kanchil. Those were the days when Hang Tuah was said to be a legendary Malay warrior, when actually he was a Chinese.

Schooling wasn't really fun back then, and I did not find it very amusing at all. I can imagine what JJ must be going through right now with learning about what they call science these days. But although people like me would find it hard to suppress a smile when seeing JJ's kind of science, I bet the subject is not very amusing to her.

Hang on there, JJ, my dear girl, it's not too bad, really. You only have to endure this whole ridiculousness for the next 15 years or so. Now surely that is not too bad?


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