sore with guilt

Great, now after my last rant on my Europe trip ( see below if u haven't read it ) there's now a buncha people who think I'm upset with them or something. Turtle wrote me a email from Sweden telling me to chill and Bunnygirl freaked because I missed her phone calls [3 of them, actually] n called Juls frantically saying how upset I must be with her that I'm ignoring her phone calls and stuff. N of cos Juls tells her Aiyah She Always Like That One Lah...... which is the truth as most of you might know...... n then he tiredly calls me up to tell me what happened and that's when I find out about it.

This trip is starting to give me a whole lot more grief than I had bargained for. Bleah.

So screw it. I'm gonna write about something a bit more cheery now.

Captain's Ball at Church

It's been a long time since me and the IJers had touched a basketball now. In sec school, we used to spend all our recesses at the basketball court. Once the bell rang, me n Stingray would run down to the canteen, get our food and meet the rest of the girls. We'd usually buy the kind of food we could hold in our hands, like the hotdog popiah or the sandwiches, so that we could finish eating them fast. We'd then go to the basketball court to meet Doe, SaraJ, Jul, ( not the male one mentioned above ) n the rest and then sit in a group at the court, in the shade of a tree growing nearby. Once we finished our food, we'd grab the basketball someone had earlier hidden in a nearby grove of banana trees and start our game in earnest. Needless to say, we usually ended up going back to class hot, stinkin' and sweaty, and loving every minute of it.

After we graduated from sec sch, there was hardly any more time for us to indulge in basketball any longer. Our timetables were all radically different, some of us having gone to JC, some of us having gone to Poly. We were too caught up in school, tutorials, and projects to meet up anymore, even once a week, for a game or two. Not helping the situation was that we lived in opposing corners of Singapore. Me n SaraJ lived in central Singapore. Doe lived in Yishun, Stingray in Jurong, and Jul in Sengkang. The geography was against us. We met up once or twice to play but never managed to make it a regular thing between us.

Then last Saturday, a Captain's Ball competition was held at Stingray's church, and we formed a team of 5 to enter. Players were me, Stingray, Jul, Doe and Doe's bf. What fun.... *muses* We gave it our all against those young punks, and despite age, despite lack of practice, and years of a sedentary lifestyle, we prevailed over most of the other teams. Ok, so one of them was a bunch of er, primary school boys who were almost like, half our height. It seemed almost criminal to compete against those boys, but hey, all's fair... and besides, one of those young punks tried to intimidate me by yelling, "You watch out ah! We're going to get you!". This from a boy who's just higher than my waist level. It's almost funny, if not for the prospect that they could pull a David on our Goliath.

A huge advantage of cos was Doe's height. To those who've never seen her, Doe is almost 170, which effectively makes her almost as tall or even taller than most guys we know. And when you put her up on a bench to be our team's goalpost... Suffice to say, there was a large point in our favour. :p One of the teams we played against, a team of all boys, lost 11-6, because their defence wasn't high enough to reach her, so all we had to do was lob the ball to her and they were powerless to stop us. Legs not strong enough, guys... :p

Too bad that once we were against GoodMeat's team, we finally lost/drew. Well, Doe forgot to keep score so er, we weren't sure, although we were almost certain we won, even if by a margin. We were too tired at that point, I guess, and when it came for a rematch against that team, to decide on a victor, we decidedly lost. Thank goodness, because GoodMeat's team then had to play against the Dragonball team, [as we named it, because one of the players looked like the main character, with his hair gelled up in that style] and they were crushed as cockroaches. Owch.

But it was fun anyhow. Relived a lot of old memories for us, working in tandem to throw the ball into the net, or in this case, into the arms of the goalpost. For a moment there, we were suddenly 10 years younger once again, running up and down the court like cannonballs, crashing against the opposing teams like cannonballs, [indeed the church had this 'contact' thing, which was a foul that had occurred when someone banged against someone else too hard, and Jul was like, er, I'm fine, let's just go on... So funny, we had never played with that rule and suddenly...] getting hot, sweaty, stinky, feet aching from too much running, lungs gasping for breath, skin scraped off when we landed on our knees, [Stingray] bruised when we crashed against our opponents...... and loving every minute of it once again. :)

Funny thing isn't it? You'd think that having to go through all that exercise, with opponents probably 7-10 years younger than us, [in the case of the young boys, maybe 15 years would be a closer bet] would make us feel our age, and make us feel older, and for me, it just made me feel the opposite. I didn't even feel that tired after the game was over, and I didn't experience aching muscles the next morning. Just, for that moment, the thrill of the game, the adrenaline of the chase, and now... the memories of times past. *sigh*