CHIJ TP Open House

I figure this will make it easier for everyone:

~Blog entries

Intro - 3 old statues from the old into the new
Part 1 - A brief look at the school after renovation [published earlier in this blog]
Part 2 - My own reflections on IJ and fireworked photos [new!]

~Photos

go to flickr and search for the tag " chijtoapayohopenhouse2006 " and see photos by aki onna

Any old girls who want to add their blog links, or photos, drop me a line, at boredslacker@gmail.com

counterscript for telemarketers

because
a) it's funny
b) you never know when one of them will call you

read da script

Meet the Parents

By popular demand, I am writing up the latest developments btw the DF and I.

So it really all started with one simple MSN conversation: [highly abridged. What, you think I'm gonna spill everything???]

Me: Hey
DF: Hey
DF: You free for lunch this Sunday?
Me: My tuition ends at 1230, after that yea
Me: Where?
DF: Toa Payoh
Me: ? Why Toa Payoh?
DF: Because my parents will be there

Pause to allow sudden palpitations in heart

Me: What???
DF: Ya I told them about us
DF: And they invited you to lunch on sunday

Pause again for another aortic convulsion. Another stream of conversation follows, and then:

Me: At least you didn't tell them I drink
DF: Actually I did

Faint utterly.

So after that, I decided I had to tell my folks as well, to even the ground and all. I thought of telling them on Sunday.

Then they left for Johor the whole day. -_-!!!

Then I went to school.

Then it was Tuesday.

Truth to tell, I was a little nervous of telling them, because I didn't know how they were gonna take it. So I went through the initial part of the morning, thinking Now? Now? NOW???.

Till finally, my parents were occupied with packing up the xmas tree for another xmas, and while my mom was struggling with taping the cardboard box to keep all the twigs in, I blurted out,

"Oh yea, I have a boyfriend."

Pause.

"Just to let you know."

My parents paused a while, and my dad hollered, "So??? What do you want us to about it??"

Er, nothing much really.

My mom, caught off guard by the sudden remark and half-occuppied with the tree, remarked, "Well, can he get me a bigger box for my xmas tree?"

-_-.................................!

And that was about it, other than the obligatory What's his name? What does he do? and Of all the times to spring this on us...

My mom actually guessed it was Jules at first, to which my dad replied an emphatic "No, it's not."

I was kinda surprised at first, and then it turns out:

My Dad and Bro already kinda knew, because they saw us walking around in J8 a couple of times. -_-!!!!!!!!!!!!! *Pengpengpengpeng*

So that was it. They know. His parents know. Nothing much to hide anymore.

Are we official now? :p

Oh, and ironically enough, you know how all you guys have been asking to meet him already?

Funnily enough, the one person from the sec-sch group who met him face to face [by accident in the Esplanade tunnel] was Jubilee.

The one person who's never asked to meet him.

Says something, eh? ;)

due to some slight posting mixups, please scroll down for IJTP - The Open House Part 1. Sorry guys...

Newsflash: For all his slowness, the DF actually managed to beat me in something.

His parents now know of us before mine has.
Hey! How was I to know that mine were gonna go to JB today of all days??

And they've invited me to lunch with them next week.

Ok, altogether now:

AAAHHH!!!!!! AAAHHH!!!!!! AAAHHH!!!!!! AAAHHH!!!!!! AAAHHH!!!!!!

In other news........

The blog entries for the IJ open house are done, but because of the sheer amount of pix, will be divided into 2 parts. For those who are clueless, my old alma mater has finished its renovations and opened its doors to the public at large on the 7th Jan. And yes, of course I took pictures.

If you are impatient, or you just want to see photographs, [literary barbarians you], you can go to flickr and search for tag "chijtoapayohopenhouse2006" where you will find my photos.

I'll start off by introducing some of the people who were so important to us in those foundation years:







Stay tuned, girls...

From an Old Convent Girl

Whenever I mention to some of my friends that I was going back to my old secondary school, I get asked, "Why?" This is for 2 different reasons:

"Why on earth are you going back to that place where we were screamed at by all these old, wrinkled teachers, forced to endure dozens of boring masses, and all kinds of silly restrictions on uniforms, were subjected to the most draconian of rules, iron-handedly enforced by a fire-breathing gorgon of a discipline mistress?"

ok, this one comes mainly from the old girls, and is a little embellished under my hands.

or,

"Why are you going back? What's the point?"

What's the point? That's a better question. And one that some readers may ask, since myself and a bunch of other old convent girls recently went back to the Open House for our alma mater, CHIJ Toa Payoh. [anonymity be damned. I'm proud of my school and not afraid to show it]


Perhaps on one hand, it's the school, physically and spiritually. After all, like the old Madonna song went, this used to be my playground. [click on link for the sentiments behind it] This was where I studied, I played, learned to grow old and not like it, and where I made some of the friends that I still have till today, a kind of feat, considering how all our paths have diverged.

Does erasing the school erase the memories? Of course it does not. But what it does is to rob you of the chance of ever reliving those moments. Of being able to pretend, once again, that you were that small, that innocent, that naive. It robs you of the chance to close your common sense telling you otherwise, and pretend that you are once again young and small, and that there are grownups around ready to protect you from outside.


152 years on and counting

Maybe it's the people. It's the people who you loved, hated, made friends with only to forget, till years later on, you met in the streets and realised you two never changed that much anyway. Because the primary and secondary schools were affiliated, and because they were in the same compound, many of us took it for granted that we were going to go to IJ secondary anyway, without question. And you know what? Many of us did.

Some of my friends I've known since I was in Primary school, which is hell long when you're at my age. These are the friends who've seen everything there is to see about me, who know my past, who are still with me in the present, and who, regardless of all that, are still willing to stick by me in the future to come. [thanks guys, if you're reading this] Together, as a group, we've been through just about every human crisis you could imagine, from breakups to deaths. But at the same time, we also shared so much of the good stuff, it made it all worthwhile.

How can you forget a place where you met people like that?

And above all, maybe it's the fact that that place was my past. How do you ever forget your past? [short of physical trauma and injury, anyway] You can try to run, you can put it out of your mind, but how do you forget? You just can't.

And you shouldn't. Because it was your past that made you the person you were today. It was because of the choices you made in your past that, for better or worse, you have turned out to be the person you are today.

Even if you are the person who took this direction in order to run from something in your past, would you be running in this direction if you had not experienced whatever it is you did in your past?

So for all it's worth, this is what my school really is to me:

CHIJ TP Open House Part 1

[another photo-heavy entry. Please take toilet/drink/tv break while waiting for pictures to load fully. All pix copyright of Aki and can be found on Flickr using the tag "chijtoapayohopenhouse2006"

Others who have blogged abt this include the Slayer. If you know any other IJ girl who went and blogged about it/posted pix, lemme know so I can compile a list. cheers!]

After much waiting, my alma mater has finally finished the finishing touches on its new building, and this grand old dame has seen fit to meet the outside world again.

A group of us old girls had met up to go for the Open House on the 7th Jan, because we missed the school, we wanted an excuse to meet up and also because some of us wanted to see whether it really looked like a mosque. [which was the rumour I heard. heh.]

On approaching the school, we realised that the entire building had completely changed from what we had grown up in.

Ok, definitely the facade of the building has all changed. Not only that, but our once wide-spanning track had reduced in size by nearly half, and was now 3 lanes instead of the old six. [wah lau...] Because of the carpark, and the fitness facilities, the field had also reduced in size, and there was less grass than before. [damn]



The canteen had also changed. Gone were the creaky wooden benches, and their accompanying pastel tables. Now each girl had a seat for their butt and much more colourful [and possibly durable] tables.

Does that seem to take the fun out of recess for you? One thing we used to do was squeeze the whole group onto the bench so that we could all sit together and eat and gossip and bitch about whoever. Now it seems that the current seating arrangement would restrict the number of girls to a table.

Then again, it's probably to preserve the furniture. Why the benches were so creaky in the first place was because of all the butts that tried to squeeze onto it back then.

And remember this old bell? It used to be green, but now they've painted the frame blue. The bell itself looks just as old as before, though, and no wonder: The thing was passed down from Victoria Street. -_-!!



More pix:


Fitness Corner


The Much Bigger Hall


Inner quandrangle, prob for assemblies


The Arch


Stained glass concourse on one of the floors

Most of the classrooms had better facilities and equipment, no surprise.

After that it was over to the Primary side.

In case you didn't know, the Primary and Secondary schools, which used to be 2 separate buildings in the same compound, were now joined together in the middle, letting the girls freely interact with each other and probably allowing them easier ways to run over to each other's canteens or bookshops.

Back then, the Primary and Secondary schools were 2 buildings separated by a carpark. The Primary school girls would look longingly at the older, taller girls and dream of the day they would be as tall and big as they were. We also went to their bookstore to buy all sorts of stationery that could not be found in our own kiddy bookstore, earning us a stern reprimand from the Principal that we were to stay where we belonged and wait when we were older.

Funny thing was that when we got older and actually became those older, taller girls, we would then look back at the Primary school, and long for the days when we were there. We also went over to the canteen to buy the [cheaper] food of our younger memories, and earned ourselves scoldings that we should have known better at our age, and we were to stick to our own compound and not intrude on the little ones' spaces.

Funny how things change... and how they don't.

So anyway, now that we've gone over to the Primary school:


Canteen with benches for squeezing tiny butts


The general air of the Primary school just screamed "Cute!" in most of the things, not surprising considering that it is, well, Primary level after all. So much of the stuff here looked way better than the serious stuff that the Secondary school had:


Wayang corner with parents doing a wayang of tired parents


Different colours for each floor


The classrooms look much better now than what I went through, and guess what?


They have Macs!!! The lucky devils have Macs!!!

Apparently this is because this model doesn't have wires all over the place, and also that everything was contained inside one unit, instead of a separate CPU unit. Which made sense, because you didn't want Primary school kids knocking into the CPU or tripping over wires, or attempting to use it for anything other than its intended purpose.


The Inner Quadrangle of the Primary school... so that the kids will learn to read the name of their school... from the air.

And finally, the cutest thing of all:


Have u ever seen a cuter toilet sign?? Aaahh!!! >D

And finally on the way out:


Girls from IJTP may remember this better, but this was where the old walkway out of the primary school used to be. Beside the walkway, though, [where this new one was now at] was a little grassy enclosure with the oldest trees ever. You couldn't even call it a garden because all that was there was grass, some leaf litters, roots lying all over the place, and massive, old trees that branched out and sheltered the entire place.

The grass enclosure was separated from the carpark by the walkway, and since the schoolbuses used to drop off the primary schoolers here and pick them up after school here as well, this made the grass place a perfect natural playground for all those girls. Like, how could any kid resist? The whole place seemed separated from the rest of the world, and was like one of those enchanted magical forest patches. It was also sheltered from the glaring sun by the branches of those trees, which provided the roots for us to play on as well. I spent too many mornings/afternoons playing there.

Sadly enough, that entire patch was destroyed, and is now totally missing from the new school, as you can tell from the photo. And this is one of the things which made me feel really old, like someone I used to know alright had died or something, and that all I would ever see of him would be in my memories. Seeing your old playground destroyed... suddenly you feel your age. Or more.

And that was it. With the knocking down of the old, I had no choice but to discard my childish past and allow others to have their fun now. Now it was time for me to join the ranks of the groan-ups and the adults and do serious, responsible stuff. Nowhere was that point more forcibly underlined than the destruction of this old school.

Like all newly renovated places, I didn't quite feel as if this place belonged to me any longer.

But the memories remain. And if ever I feel like that kid playing on the roots again... :)

To those who went to the IJ open house, Pix are currently in production. Keep tuned!

I. Hate. Rain.

I hate it when it drizzles. I hate it when it showers. I hate it when it pours.

I hate it when it blows into my balcony, soaking all my shoes.

I hate it when it blows into my kitchen, and causing all my clothes to remain wet.

I hate it when the downpour prevents me from going out without a behemothic umbrella.

I hate it when I have to go out, and it drenches me all over when I do, making my feet squish in their shoes.

Get the picture? I hate it I hate it I hate it.

I get into a grump of a mood everytime it rains like this, especially during this monsoon season when it's happening more often. Somehow, the rain has an uncanny knack of choosing the moment just before I leave the house to come down in a sudden downpour, which is f**king irritating, thanks for asking. It's the constant damperer of my plans, no pun intended.

My plans today were fool-proofedly simple: Teach tuition in morning, go out with family for lunch, rest at home a while, maybe go out to library.

Because of the rain, and other reasons, one student cancelled, [though partly due to illness as well] and the other, as I type, is still wondering whether she should come down or not, despite her being 45 mins late in her schedule. >( This is another thing that irritates me, because everytime she comes late, I have to push back my afternoon plans or I am unable to finish covering everything in the lesson.

Fine. Maybe I can still go out with family for lunch. OOPS. Parents have decided to skip to Johor early in the morning, so I'm on my own. >( The irony of my life: Once I have time for family, family has no time for me, and vice versa. Should I even bother?

Ok, I'm on my own. No sweat, I can eat lunch by myself, and maybe hop down to the library.

Wait a mo, it's RAINING. It's POURING. It's getting decidedly BORING.

Ok, FINE. You had your way. I'm stuck at home. I can scrunge up something to eat for lunch.

Something like an Uncle Toby's bar and a pack of Ice Lemon tea. -_-!!!!!

Ok, the provision shop downstairs sells pau.

But at this time, all they have left are about... 8 pau. 8 miserable looking pau who've been looked over by the rest of the general public and are left languishing in their sauna prison.

I have no choice. Hunger compels me to free one of them.

In a last ditch attempt to save the day, I SMS the DF asking if he's free for dinner, so at least I have something to look forward to out of this wretched day.

2 hours later. No reply. I forget, he goes out with family on Sundays.

Unlike ME WHO'S BEEN DUMPED AT HOME WITH NOWHERE TO GO NOTHING TO EAT BUT ONE STUPID TAU SAR PAU AND NOTHING TO DO EXCEPT BLOG ABOUT HOW THIS DAY HAS ALL THE MARKINGS OF A TOTALLY MISERABLE ONE AND IT ALL STARTED WITH THE DAMN RAIN.

*Sigh*

This is so not the right time of the month for me.