Ahem! Humm...
Begin your morning with a light cup of coffee;
For this morning, has ended your lifestyle so carefree;
Back to school we must go, for yet another year;
But it's a year for excitement! shed I not a tear.
Do not despair, my friend, to the sharpness of pre-dawn;
Nor the weight of your burden, do not once you scorn;
Don't worry, be happy, for the sun, she arrives;
Today is the first day for the rest of our lives.
*****************************
I don't know what came over me either, so there's no point in asking.
This came to me when I was having trouble sleeping last night. I don't know, the night before the first day of school, and I have trouble sleeping. Well, lying there all peaceful and quiet like that, a lot of things occured to me, all of which are not worth repeating. But somehow, in some way, the first line entered my head - probably because I thought I was going to drink coffee the next morning - and the rest of the poem, if you can call it that, just followed nice and smooth.
I might have done more than a second stanza, but I decided that if I spend all my time stringing fancy words together, I'll never get down to sleeping, so I dropped it right there.
All that aside, today was the first school day of the year! How did it go? Whenever someone asks me how school was, the primary answer is "Fine." I wonder why?
An uncle of mine once commented that the sun rises an hour late in Malaysia. Read up on it yourself. Only the first paragraph is important. Anyway, I don't have much to say about what actually happened in school itself, except for two things: One, I got all my text books for the rest of the year, and Two, I got homework on the first day. Additional Mathematics, so it was. Not cool. Fortunately, I'm an Add Maths average, and I'm already about halfway through with it at this time of night. I'll finish it by tomorrow, no probs!
Of course, upon receiving the text books, every year I assign one piece of homework to myself which preludes all the rest and always gets finished before the sun even sets.
Every year, once we get our text books, the first one I even begin to read is the literature study for the year. Yes, I'm a compulsive reader. Everyone tells me so, especially my cousins, but that's only because I read the instructions manual before I play any new board game. Anyway, its only literature study. In Malaysia, its not at all as bad as it sounds. Forget don Quixote and Alice in Wonderland and Moby Dick and Hamlet and Shakespear. The only real classic I've studied in school is Robinson Crusoe, and that version was too simplified. I can't really explain. Anyway, this year's literature is a book called Catch us if you Can, written by Catherine MacPhail, who can't be blamed; no one can choose their ancestors. Its about a boy, Rory, who lives with his Granda, and they would do anything to keep themselves from being separated. So when Granda starts getting old, and his friend's mom starts talking about "homes", things get difficult. When I say "difficult", I know what I mean.
But I'm rambling. On to the rest of my day. The first day of school was also, happily, the first day of tuition class. Today is Wednesday, which means Chemistry. Chemistry tuition was... very interesting in its own way. I will not hide that I was actually looking forward to it.
Right now, I'm speculating how much I should betray to you people, but I've decided that this is the internet and no one is supposed to take anything seriously.
There are... a couple of girls at the tuition who enjoy... disturbing me, in their girlish fashion. I was only mildly surprised when the first words spoken to me upon entering the class was by one of these girls, who greeted me in a way that made me stop for a while and wonder whether she was being nice or whether she had something nasty up her sleeve planned for me. I cautiosly returned the greeting, and threw in a free Happy New Year, which was received by an unsettling giggle from, it seemed, the entirety of the girls' table.
One of the reasons they enjoy tormenting me so is because, I think, for the whole of last year I had displayed nothing but shyness and embarassment at every one of their teases. They probably enjoy watching me squirm in my seat. But the holidays had changed me. With so much time on my hands, some careful meditation helped me to reason to myself that I was approaching the snake from the wrong side of its mouth. Of course, I reckon that my time in front-and-center as Christmas Carol Conductor helped too, but that's just a possibility.
To cut to the point, I spent the rest of the day countering all their assaults with a certain amount of boldness, and I even daresay sassiness, that surprised myself as much as it must have surpirsed them. Something tells me that today has completely driven them off me. I think they were more interested in the big-little boy who blushed whenever a word was spoken to him. They've probably lost fascination in me now.
Oh well, no love lost there.
I feel good about having gotten that off my chest.
P.S. To those happily english-illiterate fellow Malaysian followers of mine, I urge you to look up the word "sassy" if you do not fully understand it, lest you have any misgivings of me.
Also, due to the recently introduced burden of school, things are looking uncertain for the activity of my blog updates. We'll see how things go.
I've dicovered that I actually can comment on my own blog, which makes reader communication much easier. If you have any questions or comments, I can reply them now!
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