let lemons be angry

Jo on the left mentioned "mgs mania". Oh goodness. MGS mania. Let me tell you a bit about MGS mania.

It was a time of notebooks. Everybody had their own notebook which was filled with schedules in glittery pen ink and that colour pencil with the multi-coloured lead. And there were shared notebooks which established who the good friends were. If you were good friends, you shared a notebook. Jo and i shared one such notebook for a Taboo Project. Because its subject is taboo, it shall not be mentioned, now or evermore. We were very fastidious and deadly serious about this project, and kept faithful logs everyday of our progress. Eventually we realised that our project would fail and so abandoned it, and never brought the embarrassing book up again. In JC we had one last good laugh at it and flushed half of it down the toiletbowl. The other half we shredded and put in the dustbin beneath lots of tissuepaper. I think we both have unexpressed gratitude to Charmian Kok Sixi, who always just contained her laughter and let us be, and never once mocked us.

MGS mania also included letter-writing to penpals from the same class or otherwise. Letters were a good way to pay less attention in class, a good excuse to buy nice pens, and a good measure of how popular one was. A single person could receive up to 5 prettily-folded letters on her desk before assembly. The typical protocol was a reply within at most two days. Our class was full of choir girls who had crushes on sec 4 seniors, because of their long limbs/hair or "crushability" (a term learnt along with "chio"), and so the letter-writing frequency created a buzz enough to be termed a Mania.

Then there were things like A Prime maths tuition and CAP that jo, paki and i experienced out of school, but anyway contributed to the feeling of mgs mania. Those were days of sugar biscuits and young acs boys, and poseur poets and high-profile intellectuals, respectively. I'll always remember the day jo and i quarrelled about some small thing, and then made up when we went for tuition and bought Mr Kok flowers to comfort him after his mother's death. Lower sec mgs days were fraught with quarrels that i can barely remember the cause of. Upper sec days were better. The most Jo thing i can remember is her always pinching her own cheeks and me protesting. And how can I not talk about MEP and the orchestral concerts we had to attend every month? Charity and her huanzugege, carissa and her harp, rouan and her fight with the woman seated behind her, miss tsien and her long hair that mysteriously disappeared into a (large)coin-sized bun.

Do i want to go back to those days? Never ever. Do i miss them? Very much. They were rather political and petty years, but our friendships all survived the bumpy ride. I think we can pat ourselves on the back for that. And jo, i wanted to tell you that i mixed your phone number up with carissa's when you got back, and that in my dream, you were wearing a styrofoam bikini that was much too big for you.