alma mater

jiahao, shiny new mbbs initials and all, took a trip with me to ri to pay the annual respects to the ones who will claim to have gilded the path we now walk on. (yah right. many of our teachers were great and all that but the fact remains that most gep kids all but teach themselves. the most important job of gep teachers - at least this is what i think they are told - is to lay the smackdown when we decide that anything other than grades is supremely important.) almost a decade on, almost all of the teachers i give a damn about have left for greener pastures (or in ms. santha's case, presbytarian high - guffaw with me now) with the exception, of course, of ms. chiang who clings on to the reins of rv with the tenacity of a limpet on rock. florence lee, for those who care, is in indonesia, either being an eremite or discovering the meaning of life or both. low seng eng has disappeared through a rip in the fabric of space-time, although having said that von will no doubt leave a comment informing me not just of her mailing address and telephone number but where she had her hair done last tuesday.


emerging from the staff room, we are spotted by ms. quah. the lightbulb appears but fails to turn on and i have to supply her with a name before it all comes gushing out by association, ending with the rememberance that i was the one who (co-)wrote that play, the one with the ducks, the infamous one that was inflicted upon generations of lower secondary RI kids (though in fairness it probably took some of the edge off drunken prawns, in the same anthology). 'it spoke to them', she says, lying through very small incisors. 'we show them the video and everything and they really enjoy it.' i try not to die on the spot, and she starts babbling about how teachers are always encouraging her to publish an anthology of drama feste scripts so they won't be lost forever, and then there is rushing about and taking down of email addresses, and i ask her half-jokingly if i'll get royalties this time and she laughs and i laugh and feel a little ill.


shortly after, we finally married up with ms. chiang, trying to solve the usual crises - missing music lab keys, getting 40 teenage boys safely to orchard cineplex to watch les choristes (in lieu of choir practice - how come we never got to do that?) we had a brief, awkward chat, told her that we would try to make it to one of their christmas performances (still in the garden hotel after all these years). the last stop was for jiahao who wanted to catch up with miss mani, chief librarian and boss-of-him for 4 years. we took off for HML, still sequestered in the wooden underground beneath the boarding house dining hall. pining for the old days took a while, but we stopped short of getting the dime tour because of wanting to go catch a movie (although i couldn't resist spending a few minutes on the grand tradition of going to see my name misspelled on the pioneer boarders plaque in bayley house, something that makes me laugh to this very day).

and the movie was harold and kumar go to white castle which i actually kind of liked so there.