Part-dog, part-human

During the entire exam period of this week, Inti’s library was effectively my 2nd home, spending a great part of my time there till night studying with Ding, joined by Kai Shen and Esther. This isn’t to say that we really studied the entire time we were there, occasionally chatting away about DotA’s various techniques or snapping pics or taking a short nap when we wanted to rest our minds for a bit.

Darned hard at work.

wtf at Esther wanting to smack Kai Shen’s butt.

One of the inevitable outcomes of studying hard.

Rajin siot.

We’ve also managed to come up with plans for our upcoming roadtrip, barring no last-minute FFKers or drastic change of plans. Here’s a sketch of the roadtrip of our lifetime:

...’course it’s not real – as of now roadtrip plan is still in preliminary stages as we’re lacking a moving vehicle and an elaborate plan, but I guess the best roadtrips in life don’t always have a plan.

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I was about 6 years old, playing with my snakes & ladder board game by myself – a piece of green-and-white checkered board currently missing in action – when my kindergarten teacher from Tadika Mickey dropped by at my old house in Cheras. I don’t recall her face now nor her name, but apart from her being Chinese and kindly, that was all she was.

She was chatting to my first and one of the best kakaks, Kak Yati (she remained in service with us for 10 years before moving to Singapore), and I don’t know why my kindergarten teacher did this, but she drew a graph going up and down that seemed to stretch on endlessly and I looked at it quizzically – had I learnt these words when I was younger, it would be “wtf teacher what are you doing??”. Her words seemed to have given me such an everlasting impression and impact that it remained etched in my head till now – she said, “Remember that you will never always be number 1, life always goes up and down. There are times when you will fall and get up again.”

At that moment I had no idea why she said that – it’s something no one normally mentions to a 6 year-old, and the concept seemed conveniently foreign to me – but it would probably had to do with me getting first in class for 3 years consecutively in my kindergarten. Maybe she was trying to cushion my disappointment if I didn’t manage to be top of the class, maybe she already knows that no one is perfect.

When I was 8 years old, my position in class (those days were all about being in the top 3) dropped from first to fifth, but despite being berated by my parents for such a lacklustre performance, I remembered her words shining through, reminding me about humans’ inevitable imperfection.

And now, after that amazingly horrid The Star scholarship interview at my college yesterday and my confidence levels plunged deep into the depths of the sea, somehow in the midst of my compounding confusion and questions about what I did wrong, my kindergarten teacher’s words shone like a flickering candle from the dark recesses of my head. I sucked it up, head held high almost with a hint of egoistic arrogance, and proceeded to get raped in DotA at FTZ with Ding.

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I think I have an uncanny sense of smell, being able to smell something that no one else could – and I suppose you could say it’s similar to people being able to see things other people couldn’t, minus the eerie and ghastly factors.

I base my conclusions on a single, isolated incident yesterday – I was able to smell a strong, identifiable whiff coming from Ding (I actually already smelt it since god knows when but only kept mum till now out of supposedly polite considerations), thinking it was odour, but both Kai Shen and Esther who actually sniffed him at a close range (must’ve looked completely bizarre to shoppers in Giant) smelled absolutely nothing.

It’s hard to describe the smell, something leaning to the range of sweaty muskiness. And I had always been able associate this particular smell to Ding like a unique fingerprint wtf.

Or maybe I was a really smart dog who rescues people in my past life.