The Long-lost Friend

“Sounds like you are working/surrounded by very evil people…” a long-lost friend mentioned in his email after he read through my previous blog entry.

Uh, quite…

I think you can either think of those “evil people” to have behaved towards me on a half-full OR half-empty brain capacity, especially at their age (half-past six?). I’m sorry, was I being crappy mean again? I didn’t mean it, honest. Blame the gray-haired cat. Put him in a straitjacket, or whatever.

“Half-past-six” as a compound adjective is a Malaysian and Singaporean slang for “inferior” or “of poor quality”. It was much more in use in the ’50s and ’60s than it is now.

For two PhD brainiacs to be able to listen to the well-acted-out and somewhat convincing negative ranting and raving of a non-PhD gray-haired cat about JG being horrifyingly horrendous as though she’s some kind of Frankenstein-inspired monstrosity gone wrong, that says A LOT about their PhD-induced abilities to decide on and deduce between a good and bad specimen/sampling. We must therefore learn how to crap convincingly just like the gray-haired cat.

Anyway, here’s a nice little sketch and poem done by this long-lost friend of mine:

Sketch and poem created on 28 January 2000 during a somewhat awe-inspiring, totally time-wasting student leadership camp near some kind of waterfall area.

When he was done with the sketch and poem, he threw that piece of paper aside and then it was almost carried away into the river by the jungle breeze. But I thought, “NOOO!! The sketch is too pretty to be thrown away!! If he becomes famous one day, I could sell it on E-Bay!!”, so I decided to grab that piece of paper from the rocky ground, and he wondered why I was acting so weird all over one crummy piece of paper.

True enough, my instincts were right. One year later, the whole country knew who he was and almost everyone wanted to be his friend. It was that similar, peculiar instinct I had felt just like that time when a college kid kept calling me strange names in class and I said, “Stop it! Your car won’t be able to start tomorrow! Something’s gonna happen to your car tomorrow!” and it really happened, and then everyone in class freaked out, and so did I.

Here’s an old newspaper clipping of my long-lost friend (28 February 2001, Wednesday):

wannabe = one who aspires, often vainly, to emulate another's success or attain eminence in some area. Please kill the reporter who came up with that article and THAT WORD!

That year, this 13 A1s guy set a record. Most records are made to be broken. He inspired many more teenagers to break his record after that year (16 A1s, 17 A1s, 21 A1s, etc). But nothing could change the fact that it was Jin Hock who first set this euphorically uncontrollable, wildly snowballing onslaught of “Score as many A1s as possible in your O-levels/SPM exam!”- he was the pioneer; the catalyst of this crazy trend… And no matter how many A1s anyone scored after that, one can never and must never dispute the fact that it was Jin Hock who started it all, this ferociously raging "bushfire" of sorts. Aren’t you getting goosebumps already from reading this little paragraph, JH?

The 13 A1s guy left the country and went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) all the way to the postgraduate level without flunking any paper. After that, we lost contact because he’s the kind of person who creates a Facebook account and then mysteriously deletes his account just for fun.

The only reason why no one has written any juicy, sensational gossip about JH all this while is because JH has yet to be found working as some kind of exotic pole dancer in an obscure little town, or simply flunking his classes due to a mysterious form of psychoneurosis and then decided to become a hippie living in a trailer truck.

May the force be with you!

Miraculously, after many years of supposed silence, he was recently found to be alive and well somewhere out there, experiencing his first love affair with the working world.

What is to be of him after this, we know not of, but let us just wish him all the best... *moment of silence, crickets chirping- closes eyes, starts praying*

Here's a clearer version of the "emo" poem JH had written just for fun on 28 January 2000:

Am I the cruel denizen on this colossal rock,

Is it my fault to have you apart,

Would you blame me for being deviant and to change you,

Do you really understand?

~

Water flowing in turbulent tempest,

Life’s songs of ages throbbing in my blood,

The anonymous remains unknown, trickling curiosity,

Planet Earth, gentle and blue,

With all my heart, I love you.

~

Anonymous

2000

Anonymous, my foot...