Alumni?

On Friday, haze began to clear up, I was disappointed actually. Malaysia had suffered from pure mundane daily lives that a little excitement in the form of natural (or unnatural) disasters really help. Subang Jaya didn’t even go into a state of Emergency, imagine what fun that would be like!

Anyways, went to Shawn’s house at about 7pm (Shawn picked me up) as his sister wanted to belanja us makan pizza for her belated birthday. Woot.

Watched The Italian Job on Astro (I ate 4 slices of pizza, after downing chicken rice at home), and then Kungfu Mahjong on DVD, which is the most hiliarious shit I’ve watched in months. That’s because in those months I’ve never watched anything else.

We finished the movie at 11pm, and went home (Shawn became our convenient chauffeur).

The next day, Saturday (it’s past midnight at the time of writing), I woke up at 11.30am after sleeping the latest I’ve ever had in weeks: 2.30am.

Heng Li came over to my house, where Geok Leng picked us up at 2.20pm round-ish. Off we went to the Joint Leo Installation for fiscal year 2005/2006 at Sri Sedaya.

If I’m boring you by now, bear with me. The Installation was… alright, I suppose, some performances were good (especially earlier dances from Sri KL), but later on it sucked right till the end. If sitting your ass off seeing Leos from eight schools inducted is your cup of tea, you’ll enjoy it totally.

Everytime such an event is held at a grand scale (IUs, for instance), familiar faces popped up. My old friend Julia, from SMK USJ 4, who sat two rows behind me (and whom I didn’t notice till she miss-called), told me she stopped going to school. o_O

...although she did not stop going to school completely. Apparently, teachers in her school were apathetic and didn’t really teach, so she frequented the library instead. Wow. o_O

It didn’t help as well when my eyes began to hurt staring at bright, flashing lights which were a common occurence during the Installation, especially when they switched off the lights except for the stage’s. My contact lenses does not have (or only have a little of) astigmatism-correction, so… my eyes felt darned tired, even now.

Both Hengli and I hitched Kean Leong’s car to USJ 9 Syed Ariff to have our dinner and watch MU vs Everton. Heng Li’s dad joined our table soon after, and Shawn, Esther and Andy in aonther table.

Hengli’s dad unexpectedly paid for our food as well… woot. After father and son went back, while waiting for Esther to finish off her newly ordered drink, Andy began pouring out his problems at home, and knowing Andy’s way of telling stories, we laughed quite a bit.

Topic progressed finally to what-we-will-do-in-the-future; Esther stewardess-turned-psychologist, Andy businessman (duh), Shawn.. doctor? o_O Chef? Me.. journalist? Translator?

It seemed that Esther had a good idea of what to do within the next decade, and I’m still semi-clueless. I’m self-studying Japanese to facilitate my language studies in the future, should it even work. I hope it will.

It seemed almost impossible to meet each other again at this point, and I looked at these three faces before me, who are going to sit for SPM (if I had a mirror, I’d look at myself). Those faces in deep reflection.

Ways diverge.. paths which could possibly never cross. Can’t we have an alumni or something? An annual gathering from 5A and 5B?

It’s hardest for me to part ways with people, making new friends, leaving old ones behind with their own lives. Might be easy for those extremely sociable ones, but I still tug along on a string attached to friends, the only one tugging on that solidary string.

Goodbyes are the hardest to be uttered.