it suddenly hit me today. all my four years of secondary school are culminated into this one moment that will take place: wednesday 17 dec, 10 am.

yes, posting results. where will i go? njc or acjc? or worse - neither? all the MOE, ahem, people have to do is click a few times and my fate for the first three months [and possibly two years and maybe my life? oh God] is sealed. the cold glance of my name from behind their bifocals and the detached shifting and 'click', that's it. it strikes me how much things have changed. i've always been set on HC but my grades told me otherwise so i shifted sight to AC and finally i decided to aim higher and try nj. but frankly, i am so doubtful. NJC doesn't take in 11-pointers [net!]. who am i kidding? MOE doesn't accept 11-pointers for the humans scholarship; so what if everyone else thinks i should get it. what am i thinking? what am i thinking? the only possible option is prayer, and i guess i shall leave it all in God's hands. after all He must a plan for me in whatever JC i end up going to and whichever course i take. i guess i think i need the humans prog because i'll just die if i'm forced to listen to lit lectures - lit lectures? are you trying to kill me? how dare you turn lit into something that can be taught straight up to the masses without personal discussion and exchangement thoughts? but He knows better, i suppose. i'm just having a hard time trusting now.

maybe i'm not being truthful when i say it 'hit me' as above, because i think it hasn't. i'm not an scgs girl anymore. i'm not. and i think i haven't said it to myself enough because i haven't been crying at all - i think no one has. no one has realized - that's it, the four years [in my case, ten] are over. some people think i'm nuts, 'do you want to be in an all-girls school all your life?' of course not, but i'm going to miss SCGS because it is the best school ever [why the heck didn't they publish our letter - with names like shirin's, zhi ying's, dawn's and mine -sheepish- it would've made an impact. okay, maybe only on the scgs population]. i'm not even going to bother with school rivalry because we're above that [ok, so we do have our RGS bashing sessions once in a while]. actually scgs and rgs are more closely linked than anyone would ever imagine. if i didn't get sent to scgs, i suppose i'd want to go to rgs. omg. no, what am i turning into?

we all say that the truth will hit us once we get to JC - but i think not. i'll still be wearing the sky-blue uniform, i'll still be slightly delusional about it. why do i have to grow up? why do i have to leave? it feels like i will love no other school more or even as much as i love sc - it feels wrong to.

yes, there's something about sc life that feels like it's slowly been disintegrating. it started with the moving of the canteen to the next door and the reconstruction of the primary school.

there was something i liked so much about sc: we stuck to our guns, because of The Heng. people think she's old-fashioned and a stickler for tradition, but you know what, i admire her a heck of a lot. her saying that she would not indulge in the GEP just because we qualified because she didn't believe in it- and that she was willing to let go of SCGS girls who left for GEP or RGSS because that proved their hearts weren't truly with scgs. i liked that, a lot. it says something about her, it says she has pride. i also like how we're the one of the top schools so far that have not fallen prey to that 'hey i heard she/he payed a lot to get in' trap. in rgs people do it all the time. i know of certain cases in sji. with acs, well i don't think i need to elaborate [lookit the campus, duh]. yes ri does it. maybe not tchs though. we, we don't do it because The Heng doesn't believe in it. i know of so many cases where she turned down girls who offered money. she even turned down the person who sponsored The Khoo Auditorium when the new school was built. you may think its harsh, but i think she did the right thing. and i really like that. i don't think i've actually made it known how much i admire her as a principal [the irony is that she's an rgs girl]. she's well-spoken, principled and has school pride. it doesn't matter if as a result we don't have facilities other schools have because of the cash they get [we have a 200m track. it can be embarrassing] because no one can ever take away that sense of school pride that is so alive here. and we never had funfairs or those things where they required students to sell sell sell tickets [can someone hear me whisper a-c-s?] which had things emblazoned on them which read something like, 'ten percent to bone marrow cancer fund, ninety percent to ACJC fund'. we didn't come up with gimicky school bears or ways to raise funds.

but now that has changed. i suppose The Heng has realized we are severely lacking in funds and have to keep up with the times - but i wish reality hadn't caught up. i don't like it; not one bit. call me idealistic but i long for the days when all we needed was our scgs pride.

and there are more things i like about sc, oh countless. some range from nonsensical to thoughtful. i like how we're so centred on Lit. perhaps this doesn't help those who hate the subject, but i love it. i loved the UK trip. it was, safe to say, the best experience in my life. nothing i can say can ever do it enough credit. it was the best gift the school could ever give me. we keep lit a compulsory subject. i know that perhaps in some schools i would have been pushed aside for not excelling in math or science, but here, i'm given opportunities in the humanities. the literature symposium, the literature seminar, all of it. and ms sie, as scatter brained as she is, well, i can just see that love she has for lit. and in the end i guess that's all that matters; because really, although she has annoyed me and exasperated me with her absent-mindedness, i really do like her. yes.

and uncle's mee-pok, how could i forget? his homemade chillisauce and that metal pan he used to collect money with. he refused to wear gloves because it was 'his style'. he was a celebrity; former scgs girls [incl jennie chua, raffles hotel gm] would gush about him and his chilli. people would talk about how he smoked and yet cooked still, how he handled the loose change but continued to handle the noodles, how sometimes they found unidentified lumps in their noodles, how they almost ate the hair entwined in the kway teow - but this never deterred us from buying from him. i might go so far to say that uncle is almost the essence of scgs [and he's male!]. why do i say so? it's rather abstract really, and i don't feel a need to explain it. neither can i forget the rest of the canteen aunties and uncles. the ice cream mars bars and ritz biscuits. the kind rice ladies who often gave us an extra fishcake and the malay stall that cooked chili fries on the sly. the often neglected wanton stall and of course, the drink stall with its served hot and fresh milo and coffee

and of course, the hormonal part of school life. i can't forget our neighbours - the 'josephians' as they like to call themselves. mention sji to an scgs girl and the most likely answer you will get is an 'ew' or something similar. for some reason, we loved hating them and thinking they loved us. a small notion of girlish pride i suppose. the only person i can think of who likes them would be jas. but of course they were completely forgotten when acs barker moved next door temporarily. girls would hang around behind the stores trying to be inconspicuous and stare at the barker boys playing basketball shirtless [i'm not kidding]. but they were but momentary neighbours. sji, has been around - all along it seems. the blinding white when you take the bus home on a sunny day, the snide comments we made to each other and of course the fact that mr ang was from sji [TEEHEEHEE]. i've never seen his school photo, but apparently he showed his sec one form class who exclaimed that acs was better. perhaps we sound egoistic, but we acknowledge that the general statement is - sji boys are crazy about scgs girls, but scgs girls run to acs boys. maybe that was an enthusiasm we took for granted and even rejected. somehow i think we've gotten stuck to each other, whether we like it or not. for campfires, peer leading functions, ncc programmes - they've always been around whilst other schools would come and go [acs/ri scouts were continually having spats with the guides and tchs often stood us up at the campfires]. but sji? no question, they'd be invited, and they'd come. there were never petty arguments with sji unlike acs. i appreciated it this year, usually i'd get annoyed by their antics and indulge in 'i hate being a guide' conversations; but this year, being the last, i was grateful for their support. and admittedly, for a while in sec one and two, the group i hung around did consist of 'josephians'. we don't talk to this day; in fact i only really keep in touch with one of them and even that is infrequent. and you know, sji ain't really that bad. i'm slowly getting over my in-built scgs bias.

in a girls school, naturally, there will be talk of girl-girl relationships. they were discussed with bright eyes and sometimes shock but after a while gotten used to. gossip definitely reigned - everything was a big deal; even though we often tried to conceal that with fake age and false experience. in a way we were all cooperating with one another to conceal things - it was as though the whole school were in cahoots; from the sec ones to sec fours. there would be a big flurry whenever year books were brought. perhaps they were owned by older brothers, but you always garnered the most admiration if you said proudly, 'i swapped with my kor.' it would be passed around the class, there would be giggles, and a spotting of, 'hey, i know so-and-so! from my tuition!' or 'that's him! that's the one i'm seeing!'.

there was a crazy side to us. we weren't the kim-geks people expected us to be - the teachers knew that. sitting with legs wide open and all the ten-year scgs girls growing accustomed to shorts underneath the uniforms. i still haven't kicked that habit and probably never will. chasing people around the class with uncapped markers and gazing out of the balcony in a wistful way. having break by the coi pond and trying to spot the big golden fish named 'Ms Heng'. running the 2.4 around the 200m track and almost dying from giddiness. standing up to do the SCGS cheer [which made us sound like bad michael jackson impersonators, in my opinion] after major events. eating breakfast in the canteen in the mornings and making a lot of noise. complaining about how the netballers and basketballers performance suffered because they had to alternate their trainings - only one court. skipping around pillars to avoid certain teachers [usually ATan]. the food fight on teachers day with ice cream down our shirts and chocolate icing on our faces. running around and screaming. the primary school games i played, the teddy bear skipping ropes and zero-point champions. sports day and the milo trucks. having palms read on teacher's day. collaborating as a class every talentime. watching movies on the OHP. every friday's assembly and the constant reminders to 'sit up, girls, sit up'. a whole lot of talk about the length of our socks and us turning into tribal chiefs with excessive ear piercing. my friend piercing her nose and trying to cover it up with an ear stick. dyeing our hair red and purple and trying to fake naturale. my friends chorusing, 'that's her natural hair colour!' when i got pin-pointed. the tearing up of booking slips in annoyance. asking jo if we could see our tampax at school camp when we heard she used it. chalene's recess prayer sessions. eating/sleeping/smsing in class and trying not to get caught. charm and kai exchanging grins with jas whenever they saw me fall asleep [many a time]. watching shirin and dawn have an active conversation during physics class at the back of my eye. me sending saving mint sweets to charm in her time of fatigue [and utter boredom]. discussing the complications of the teacher's professional relationships and what we thought their lives were like. talking about what they wore and exclaiming, 'she's damn rich! did you see? dkny top to toe/big diamond ring/pearl necklace/gold rolex?' whenever the topic turned to ms ma's or ms chiam's dressing. all the deep, no-holds-barred talks we had when we sat in our version of a circle and were alone in school.

i'll miss it all, and i haven't even covered it all here yet. it is simply not possible to compress sc life into one entry. the term second home is amazingly apt when used to describe SC.

+ posted by M @ 7:13 PM