let lemons be angry

Yesterday we were musing on the rj culture we miss. It wasn't rj culture per se, but rj in that part of the canteen. It was superficial and stupid, made up of the right shoes, the way one's uniform was correctly illegal, what bag was carried and how low it was carried, wearing fbt shorts instead of the thick high-waisted rj shorts, dominating tables with one's own gang, being idle and skipping classes. Yet we succumbed to the superficiality and we miss it. Now we're scattered in places where all our developed codes of conduct are redundant. Nobody cares if you once had a highly complicated and commendable process of buying an extra large skirt, altering it to fall above the knees, sewing an extra clasp at the waist, and folding the waist down and inward to make the perfect uniform. Nobody cares even if you were one of those extreme types who sewed snap buttons on the skirt to fasten your shirt to it without having to tuck it in. Everything becomes juvenile and stupid. But in those days, they were the things of greatest importance. Your entire image fell upon your skirt. And shirt, but that would take another paragraph.

But the culture stays deep within us, and i felt it most at rugby sevens. I've learnt to live forgetting the old days and ways. Yet it creeps up like a most nosy neighbour. I have to slap it on the wrist to chase it out of my prejudices.

ADM has no perceivable culture yet. It takes about ten years to build school culture, a wise old teacher once told me. So i have to exist without conformity to any culture for the first time. You'd think that this is the way it should be, but it's more natural for humans to fit themselves into an existing culture than to persist with their individual ways in a community. I've had to think up routines for myself to carry out. And even then, i don't convince me. All i have at home are my talking cats and victimized fish, and my days are planned by other people.

And perhaps, forced to know who i am without the strappings of culture for the first time, i will finally become who i'm meant to be.