Blood and Wine

Twenty.

As of last Saturday, July 23, I am now twenty bloody years old. Yeah, laugh it up, kids. It seems like everyone whose age still has a 1 as the first digit has been ribbing me and asking for words of wisdom like I'm an ancient hermit from some inaccessible mountaintop.

It's not funny. Just wait until that 1 turns to 2 -- then you'll know how it feels when you can't even pretend to be an irresponsible teenager anymore. And if you really want some wisdom, if there's one thing 20 years of life has taught me, it's that Sabahans really know how to celebrate birthdays.

After two years here in Singapore, witnessing many birthdays and celebrating two myself, I've never come close to the birthday shenanigans we got ourselves into back home. Last year, my scholar friends smashed my face into wafers iced with shaving cream disguised as a cake -- after which I promptly grabbed the nearest bottle of Sprite and went on the offensive.

But that wasn't close.

Or when the other guys finally realized I was making too many comments for someone who was still dry on Jade's birthday and tried to dunk me into the hostel's koi pond. Some intense grappling ensued. Somehow I managed to stay dry; I damn well had no intention of tasting fish that night, even if I had a few scrapes and cuts and a wrecked slipper for my efforts.

Heh. I liked that slipper. I spent the next two weeks barefoot in my hall mourning the loss of my footwear. That, and the fact that I was also too lazy to go buy new slippers.

But that wasn't close either.

This year's birthday was really tame -- the complete opposite of the trouble I used to get myself into. Just a birthday song in the canteen during break sung by my classmates at the frenetic pace that Singaporeans seem to like. And a cake. A very edible and tasty cake.

It's not that it wasn't great. It was. I really appreciate it. You all brought a smile to a tired face that had not slept the whole of the previous night trying to clean up a 9000-word report on India's economy.

It's great, but in a different way. See, back where I come from, a cake doesn't seem to be enough to mark a guy's ascension in age. You have to humiliate him first, usually with a barrage of drink, water, flour, baby powder, and powdered chalk. If you're lucky, you might get slugged in the chest with a rotten egg too. Like I did.

To say that life as a member of our class back in secondary school was exciting is an understatement. If your birthday fell on a school day and you were dumb enough to let that information leak out, you knew you were in for a great workout after school trying to get the hell away from your deranged classmates all brandishing bottles filled with weird, unhygienic liquids and paper grenades loaded with equally weird and unhygienic substances. If the teacher was smart enough to sense the growing excitement in the air during the last period of the day as the final bell drew closer, she'd know better than to stick around when things started flying.

It wasn't really hard to tell. If people kept switching seats in class during the last period, it was someone's birthday. If you paid a bit more attention, you might find out whose birthday it was from whoever was trying to sit as close as possible to the classroom door. He would be the guy everyone else was denying such said seats from so he couldn't make a break for it when the bell went off. He would also be the one everyone kept grinning at while stroking huge bottles full of water.

And just because you weren't in school on your birthday didn't mean you could escape either. I thought I was safe when we were in Kuching for the 2002 Debate National Finals. My teammates apparently had other plans. They marched me down to the hotel swimming pool and proceeded to toss me in at midnight before all the hotel kitchen staff, but not before inviting the Kuala Lumpur team from Convent Bukit Nenas to witness the festivities.

Then we went upstairs to watch a really fascinating and educational documentary. It was called Faces of Death 3.

To give you an idea what the Faces of Death series is about, this was how the reserve speaker on our team who discovered this rare treasure piqued our interest:

"Oh my God, you all better come upstairs and watch this. I just watched a man getting eaten by a lion in a safari for 20 minutes."

Well done, Melvyn. You nearly sent that cake back up our throats.

Man. I'll never forget those birthdays. Or the birthdays when we went looking for trouble as usual -- and found it. Like when we 'misfired' during a high-stakes chase around school and accidentally caught our English teacher with a 1.5 litre bottle of tap water. Or when we drove a replacement teacher to tears after she took our class for one of our infamous Last Periods of Someone's Birthday.

Ah... To be young and dumb again!
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