High schools in snow globes

Visited an old friend’s blog earlier whose name I chanced upon – I was excited to learn that he actually has one after years of not communicating with each other, but after reading several entries I just couldn’t read any further. He was staunchly supporting a cause, which I found to be entirely negligibly irrelevant, to the extent that he attended demonstrations and whatnot – an experience of a lifetime for him, I’m sure, but whatever image I had of a fun-loving cheeky guy I used to know eroded on the spot.

This burning issue aside which I don’t feel like debating about right now, I realised too at the same time how hard I was holding onto formed perceptions of the people I used to know – that once we went through the sole one-way exit of this protected snow globe world of high schools, there is no turning back: we leave behind an unimposing world whose only worries are getting strings of As for exams and regurgitating memorised facts, and then we enter a completely different world of responsibilities that we suddenly find ourselves having to shoulder, a political party we want to support, a side we want to take. Where did the innocence and angst of teenagehood go?

People change rapidly throughout a course of four short years – for some reason I’ve just forgotten this simple fact still does exist.

---

Project 365 #30: Sunday, 15th March 2009

I arrived with Andy at MidValley at about 2.50pm to await for our employer for a ‘music event job’, having attended the first ‘briefing’ at Pyramid some weeks ago. She was at least 40 minutes late than the scheduled 3pm so we went around window-shopping, me taking a keen interest especially on Dockers, and when we finally received an SMS from her indicating the place to meet, I bumped into Kim San, my RMIT coursemate, along with a few others.

Long story short, turns out that this attractive job which pays reasonably well for just one night (RM150) requires us to sell at least 30 tickets to this rave party as named in the picture or else we don’t get the chance to secure a position for this job (I sure as hell am not gonna give any publicity to this event because I felt duly cheated). Seriously what the fuck is this: sell 30 tickets (with a commission of RM3 per tix) to an extremely pricey event (which I doubt many would go) just to get a second interview for the actual job, wherein we aren’t even confirmed if we really would be getting said job or not?

To think that I forwent the opportunity to work at F1 Sepang just for this con-job! We were initially told that there’d be two dates we could work on, one of which clashes with F1 Sepang, and it turns out that that isn’t true after all. Bah. Would’ve worked at F1 if I wasn’t misled to believe that we would be getting this ‘music event’ job.

Seeing that a social butterfly is not me where I have less connections than a toilet cleaner, I highly doubt that I’d be able to sell 3, much less 30 tickets. I am utterly appalled by the sneaky way of this company who tried to utilise us students as their ticket sellers underhandedly on the pretext of a job offer – I initially thought of giving this a spin, but eventually I’ve just decided that I’m not going to support such an underhanded job offering by partaking in this ticket selling.

This purported ‘briefing’ lasted for a mere 10 minutes, after which we window-shopped further (bumped into Carmen with her boyfriend), went into Rock Corner and saw Eu Jin’s album as well as listened to a melodious acoustic track, before we went back home. When we exited this shopping mall, I was greeted by a strong blast of rain I had the misfortune to be stuck in – definitely one of the worst rains I’ve ever experienced, as a large body of water just splashed on our windscreen from the cars passing by next to us, completely obscuring our view for a few seconds. Dangerous.