Blood and Wine

My Golden Age.

I used to love school. That might be a bit too much to believe coming from a guy who skipped school for a whole bloody month without the slightest twinge of remorse, but it's true. There was a time when I actually woke up excited to get to school -- groggy and still wishing I could have five more minutes in bed, but excited. That's not even considering that when I say waking up, I mean waking up at 5.00am every morning just so I could catch my school bus.

If you think I'm some freak who loved going to school to worship that heathen god called Education, think again, buster. For better or worse, I've always prided myself on my independence when it comes to studying. That's not to say I don't like learning from my good tutors; I've just had too many inept and completely boring tutors who could never consider that they were the reason why no one was listening. I've had to study so much from clunky, sleep-inducing textbooks on my own that it's becoming a habit; if I can't stay awake when my tutor is droning on and on without ever getting to the goddamned point, I just let my head hit the desk and study it later when I get back.

It's my friends that kept me going to school, you fools. I loved going to school not because I could learn but because school to me was just hanging out with my classmates for six hours everyday -- a brilliant deal. I don't remember a single day of my last two years of secondary school when I didn't laugh so much and so hard in school that I'd still be chuckling to myself the rest of the day. Man, we did so many wild things together, I'm smiling just thinking about those days. It was our Golden Age, our Zaman Kegemilangan, as we called it.

Those were days when I hated to miss school. I remember being too ill to go one time and I nearly tore my hair out the next day when I heard all the madness that had gone down in school while I was at home. I swore I'd never miss another day of secondary school again -- unless, of course, we'd all decided to hit a LAN centre together to play some Counterstrike or Warcraft III the whole day.

Damn. I really miss those days.

I was rereading Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour the other day, about how he went back to France and his old childhood haunts with his brother looking for the perfect meal when he'd actually been looking for his late father all along. And it struck a chord with me: I came to Singapore looking for new experiences and learning new things like cheerleading, hiphop, and ballet when I've actually been looking for my old class. I've been trying to recapture those days of our Golden Age, our Zaman Kegemilangan Chinatown. I've been looking for another Kelvin P.Raider, another Father Edwin, another 5 Vega. I hadn't come to Singapore because I wanted to leave all my old friends to make new ones and learn to be independent when I already was and try new things when I didn't need to. No. I came because I was still searching for a memory of time quite beyond me now. I'd had a lot of fun in my old pre-university centre back in Kota Kinabalu, lots of stupid, wild adventures with my partners-in-crime, Wilson and Karthik (and more recently Robert, the German-who-wants-to-be-Malaysian), but in the end it wasn't really all that hard for me to leave. I'd not found that elusive ideal, and I was willing to start again and try to find it in Singapore, even if I had to spend another two years on my A-levels.

I'm quite sure my Singaporean readers are snorting now. Your Golden Age? Here in Singapore? Are you serious? Please wait while I laugh until my intestines burst.

But it's true. I was willing to travel the world to find those days again, even if I didn't know what I was really trying to do. And I came up empty after nearly two years. It was only in these past two weeks, basking in post-Preliminaries hedonism with my classmates -- enjoying a class barbeque together, book shopping, watching movies, playing Defense of the Ancients -- that I finally found what I've been looking for.

It wasn't exactly my Golden Age -- it was only close to those days when we just played and played and forgot about everything else. But it felt right. It felt like I was seventeen again, with Father Edwin and Kelvin and the rest of the Chinatown gang, just living our lives without a care in the world.

No, it wasn't the same. But it still felt right.

It's only now when I think about it that I understand. I understand now that deeper under my search for my old secondary school days is something else completely.

Life will not be school forever; what I'd been looking for wasn't really my old secondary school days, but something less concrete than that. I'd been looking for happiness, the kind that comes not because I've got a really cool cellphone or I just went on vacation to Las Vegas (though I'd still like those) but the happiness that comes when you look forward to each day because you know it's going to be an exciting day full of fun and laughter, a day you know you'll never want to miss, that you'll never want to forget.

You can't force these days to happen. You can't go around planning outings and movies and picnics and dinners, hoping it will make life a lot more fun, hoping it will 'bond' people together. Planned outings don't work very well. Like Bourdain, who'd recreated his childhood days to eat his oysters and fish soup to, you're trying too hard.

It has to be natural. When you try too hard, it never quite lives up to your expectations because you've expected perfection when nothing in the world can quite catch up with an expectation that just keeps growing further away whenever reality comes close. Like Tyler says in Fight Club, "Stop trying to control everything and just let go."

It's days when you let go that life becomes truly exciting. There is no perfection to meet -- it's just pure unscripted fun and nothing else. When it happens, it makes the day special unlike any other.

It's how your heart races when the Vice Principal stops his car next to you and asks what you're doing walking out of school. It's how you just decide to screw the Chemistry test on the spot so you can finish that round of Defense of the Ancients and end up playing six hours of it when you'd only planned to play three. It's how you skip school, get a phone call to get your ass back to school so the class can finally take its damned photograph, only to end up leaving immediately after with your classmates to watch Star Wars III: Backstro -- Revenge of the Sith. It's how you equally decide to blow the rest of the day and go watch Resident Evil II on a whim a week before your Promotionals. It's how you laugh when someone's shoe somehow ends up in a base's mouth halfway during cheerleading practice. It's how you somehow end up on television practicing stunts in school when you're just innocently minding your own business.

It's how you wake up, see your roommate sleeping, and go back to sleep instead of getting up for school, only to have him wake up, look at you sleeping, and go back to sleep too. It's how you both end up keeping Sophia company on her last day in Singapore because of that mutual interdependence, something you'll never forget even if it doesn't mean much anymore these days. It's how you fib to the director of the boarding school that your classes ended early when he probably knows all too well you're accompanying her out on her last day.

It's how you only planned to spend an hour writing this post -- and end up spending five.

It's how you think back on these days, on all those days past when something unexpected happened that made them beautiful, and smile to yourself. And as you smile, you reflect that it's good to be alive.
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