Last post as a teenager! My mom mock-tearfully hugged my head and exclaimed (loudly) "I'll finally have a grown up child!" What was I for the last nine years, preschooling? Tsk.

Happy birthday to dear Diona, albeit belated! Heh. We all went to her birthday party yesterday and her theme was "ponytails", so all of us had to tie at least two. Met Lynn and Ru at YCK MRT (I swear, the little boy on the train? He gave me the evil eye. Well, I can give as good as I get. -evils-) Lynn and I were trying our best to avoid stares - I bet we looked suspicious as hell :p - and amidst trying to torture Ru's hair into pigtails we reached diona's house half an hour later than stipulated, but still really early! Pfft. So the four of us took many, many, many photos out on the lawn, on the sofa set, etc, etc. Played with her very hyperactive dog Trophy

Poor Trophy was shut up in the airwell thing (YLSNED!) because Helena was scared of dogs. Owell. She (dog, not Helly :p) was reeeeeally affectionate. Apparently she loves strangers. So eventually when everyone appeared (tardy as usual, tsktsk :p) we fooled around taking more pictures but my camera failed T-T ran out of battery (mental note - buy another battery to avoid such horrendous situation again) and yea finally settled down to eat steamboat. So reminiscent -smiles to self-

There! Poor Jun got cut out (extreme left) and some supertardy weren't there yet but owell. Four faith reunited again. I sure hope Si Ping sends me her pro pro pictures soon and then I can upload some! ^_^

I was telling my mom our gatherings were getting like hers - "So what are you doing now? What school are you in? Are you attached?" etc, etc, catching up and just totally hanging loose as normal. We all squeezed around the table and threw random things into the "steamboat machine", as Lynn/Val called it -grins- and then threw the cooked stuff onto other people's plates and people were yelling stuff across the table and laughing, giggling, screaming, doing ridiculous things - that's four faith for you!

I think I'll always love SNGS best. Because it was my second home for a decade, because all my oldest friends are from there, who I am now is because I was a SN girl. And amidst all the "did you know"s and "scandal!" it somehow came out that 1. the fierce fierce PE HOD caused the breakup of some home ec teacher's marriage and they were caught kissing in the home ec room (gasp!) 2. the very 斯文 geography teacher got someone pregnant, scandal scandal! 3. the very unpopular self-proclaimed "pleasantly plump" principal is really truly leaving 4. our precious school was going to be totally ruined/renovated! and of course all of us can still recite the class list with the help of others and locate where most people are, whether they're in a relationship, what course they're doing, where they're working. I even heard plans to go to Genting or somewhere together, lol.

How come I never caught the spirit of spontaneity while I was in SN? I was always the lazy wallflower... but I had fun nevertheless. Unless you were bad "weird" really, no one would leave you out of anything. A lot of weird incidents came up -wry- I think we made so much noise the neighbours were probably cursing :p

When will we meet again? Nobody knows. Everytime we meet up again it seems so little time has elapsed since we last met, and yet as if an eon had passed. When we next meet, who knows? all the prodigal daughters may have returned from Aust, USA, and some gone to take their place; all of us may have graduated and started working, dentists, designers and economists amongst us - next time, even fewer may turn up. I'm still glad I did, though. When we look back in time, will we be gladder that we turned down a frivolous party for a few more hours of cramming or vice versa? I don't know. Maybe I'll regret it when I see the abysmal results at the end of this semester. But right now I still feel happy. When I'm with my secondary school mates there's no ill-will, no pettiness, no exclusion - if you turned up, you were definitely wanted. No one feels awkward amongst each other, at least, I hope so. It's a return to childhood days, when we clambered on the rusty playground structure to pose for a picture, we could never pose conventionally.

We met when we were not quite seven. Now, falling over the brink of "twenty", still fairly bright-eyed and energetic, we definitely must remember Diona's wish that all of us be "happy forever" and keep that childhood spirit alive... What would we have been without it?