Nostalgia

I think I can be quite the anti-social person. I know, I know, that totally goes against my Gemini nature, but if you think about it, Geminis are dual personality, right? So on the surface, I try my best to portray my loud, affable self, but on the instead, sometimes I wish the world would just go away and leave me to my TV, books and computer games.

However, every once in a while I get a kick in my ass to remind me of my civic duty to act as part of the world. The kick that makes me want to reconnect with old friends, go for dinners, go for parties and basically, face the world.

Met with my OCBC team mates last night to catch up. Joel is finishing his last term, Chiraag is having wild orgies in America on exchange, and Susmit has accelerated his entry into the working world. He's now a Management Trainee at UOB. Haha, seems like I'm the laggard of the team, still drifting aimlessly through this world.

Anyway, dinner was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. We had great laughs, lots of gossiping, bitching and everything typical between colleagues who became friends and worked together for a year. I'm glad I met them. No matter how much I may bitch about them, we still had memorable moments, good or bad, I'm not saying.

After that, I felt the need to reconnect with someone else who used to be very dear to me. We definitely have a history (not romantically, lah!) and even though we only speak like once a year, every time we talk, it's like we never left off.

A bit of a digression, but do you think I'm aggressive? Probably more than most people, but hey, I think it was the result from the need for survival.

When I first entered Bukit Panjang, the guys in my class absolutedly HATED me. They took perverse delight in making fun of the stupid, fat girl who spoke only English and gave blank looks when they cursed me in Hokkien. Very, very colourful Hokkien expletives, may I add. This merciless ragging continued for a year, as I slowly shed my gentle, all-girls school upbringing and stepped up to the plate. I outcursed, outpranked and outyelled those idiots. So maybe I wasn't liked, but the ragging stopped and the leader of the boys and I formed a truce. We're even pretty good friends now. So in some sense, I had to become manlier and that may have contributed to my quite, quite masculine behaviour now.

When I rose to Sec 2, there were these 2 ah lians who took offense to me. Till this day, I do not know what provoked it, but I suspect it had something to do with me talking to my classmate whom they both had a crush on. But whatever the case, they turned super mean and when we meet on the staircase, they would go out of the way to bump me, glare at me and basically threaten my well-being.

Now, these girls are different from the boys who just played pranks. They were the pen-knife wielding, girl gang fights and destined for girls' home type. I was scared out my life. Self-preservation kicked in. Who can deal with such ah lians? Get a beng ah. I made friends with this Sec 5 guy. With lightning speed, I got him to be my godbrother. Through him, I got to know the entire Sec 5 male population. That's when the threats stopped. That year was the most smooth-sailing.

So you see, I'm forever indebted to my godbrother. Besides, he was a really, really godbrother. He listened to me whine incessantly (even while he studied), gave me some of the best presents ever (he made me a 3000-piece jigsaw puzzle for one birthday; a bottle of silk roses the next) and took such good care of me, I felt bad sometimes. We can talk for hours and he allows me to be as loud and boisterous as I want to be. I never have to put on a mask when I meet him and that level of comfort does not come with everyone.

FYI, I only let my guard down when I'm with people I'm very comfortable with. So the people who are privileged enough to see my BIMBO side are a lucky few. You can go ask around, I'm usually quite aloof and not-so-fun. So yes SHAWN, you should count yourself as lucky and stop thinking of my occasional bimbotic behaviour as annoying.

Sigh, nostalgia. I should do more to keep in connect with people dear to me.