“it has been a pleasure teaching you.”

(applause)

i can barely remember how the last day of kindy went down. i sure do remember weeping like a mad child on my last day in smps. we all had our handy multi-purpose button-on ties soaked with tears and mucus (and saliva and perspiration and blood and mud and food stains of every kind). tum tum, you know it’s true. must be puberty? or some sort of homo-social driven emotional intensity that amplifies with too much estrogen in the air. we sang hymns and songs of praise, and the saint margs’ school song as a cohort for the last time before prayers of blessing in the school hall.

on my last day in nh, i went wild (which in my universe is the equivalent of having ytf for the first time in year 4). i bunched up my hair in a pony tail (girls with long hair HAD to have two braided pigtails, i kid you not), changed out of my uniform and walked around school in my pe attire like a boss. are you picturing me in your head, macy? that was about as exciting as my rebellious adolescence was. if you knew me back then, you’d remember how the rest of the day went down hoho.

ac farewells are always the most epic. we sing the ac anthem like nobody’s business and valedictorians give kickass emonemo speeches of the year. but i felt no sadness, no disquiet, didn’t even shed a tear. guess that was only because acband was so tight, i would give my life for a good portion for you. i loved how we literally breathed and consumed music. i loved our classic rahrah speeches before every competition, and mass weeps after every concert. in all honesty, i doubt i’ve ever left ac. some part of me still exists within lt4 and in the spaceship. those were some of the greatest days of my music career and going back to the cpa feels like homecoming every single time. (unfortunately i bear no such affinity with my classroom, the gym and the sports track.) i’m so happy to still be on a daily conversational basis with all the important acband people in my life who are going to be my bridesmaids, my children’s godparents, my 4am confidantes and my best friends for life. acreunions are another phenomenon altogether. just ask amy. “feels like we’re home” (bakergirl, 2011). yap, tosh, jo, mar, oli, deb, deb, lo, amz. “elistist all” (tosh, 2011). until soc4 at that.

a few hours from now, i’ll be attending the last tutorial and seminar of my undergrad life in nus. i’ve been a recluse on campus a good part of my time here, but i completely blame soc4 for tugging on my heartstrings and socializing me into developing affection and emotional attachment to faces and voices i know i am going to miss. and even though mar looks super rockerchick and tough all the time, i’m sure she’s crying inside and missing us (me hahaha) like crazy too. what kind of peer influence is this! i even went into psychological cardiac arrest when the boys left last semester (the three of you had better come back for convo, or else.)

to the small pool of incredible people i will spend nights on end thinking about (not because i’m a stalker, but because i miss you all okay!), i feel like i barely know you guys (and girls) and we have to part already? what is this! because my memory is good for all things awesome and useless for everything else of worth, i keep replaying our first conversations and encounters in my head. i’ve asked many of you if we’d still be communicating friends five years from now. but of course we all proceeded to deconstruct friendship and communication and intimacy like dysfunctional inmates of THE asylum.

i love that i can say hannah is truly my kawan till the end of time, even though so many of our traits are in opposition to each other. and marissa, sha and bear too, for sharing the same ultra-complex demographic. and i’m so proud of so many of you, for being so passionate towards your cause. yus, yap, jo and bern, you are secretly changing the world one day at a time.

i really hope twitter survives till then (where “then” is a fluid grasp of time, subject to future tense.) it brings me strange comfort and joy to hear mad rants about hunger pangs at this hour from all of you (tape worms all, sexy lady, huahua and geisha). and you can’t run away from your embarrassing aliases that have already been permanently documented in my thesis, btw. what kind of name is ohtickytacky anyway? (awww i still love you okay.)

i’m not exactly sure what i’m already pining for at two in the morning. is it the honours room? the deck (are you kidding me)? the seminar room of awesome intellect? right now, part of me wants to say i will miss gana a lot (don’t lie i know most of you are already listening to bear’s recording on replay.) but come on guys, it’s you. you who have survived super tensionnnn (please imagine mat accent here) conversations with the hyper-femininist in me, put up with my re/dis/non-assertion of race (the one that is state-prescibed) and never-ending proclamations of my undying love for the penguin race (refute state definitions to assert my own identity here!)

i’m gonna miss my routines: the familiarity of (literally) walking to school and vegetating in the hons room on (what i’m pretty sure are algae and fungi infested) comfy couches, surrounded by bright yellow walls that never allow us to tell time (thanks, crew!), watching our board of creative nonsense “spaz out” (antidanie, 2011) and develop a life of its own (jiggly your time log is still up there btw.)

i think what my id (some guy, some year) is trying to say is, i really am going to miss all of this and all of you but i think i am going to be okay. if i can claim with my life that these are friendships worth maintaining a lifetime, then this is isn’t a farewell note. it isn’t even a seeyoutmrforthelasttime paragraph. we’re going to be friends for a long time, so you’d better armor yourself for more of me. you are also hereby informed that cyber-interaction on facebook and twitter may not be taken as a substitute for face-to-face communication in real life, in real time. after all, some of us are really technoobs, right mandafoo?

dutifully signed,
“the” (je_bear, 2011) pingu.