My secondary school days

This morning I dreamt of a secondary schoolmate. We were once friends when we were sec one and I had thought we were the closest within the clique. But she ended up hurting me by gossiping about me. In the end, the whole clique kept a distance away from her.
I went to read thro my autography book. I feel so ashamed that my friends had lots of praises for me and most thought that we were very close. On the closeness part, yeah, I was close to quite a few people at different stages of my secondary school life. The closeness was genuine and they would just share about what was going on in their lives with me. I had also went thro quite a few things with different friends. It's more of the comments. I don't think I'm as friendly, nice and sweet as I was. My niceness is seen as foolishness and my friendliness is seen as a mask with ulterior motives underneath after secondary school. It makes me reflect on why human beings must become more unnice as they grow older. Shouldn't we be more human towards one another as we get to know the bitterness and trials of life, rather than trying to harm one another and busy protecting ourselves from the attacks of others? It's really quite sad.

The dream makes me think of contacting some of my secondary school friends to check out how they have been. But as usual, William doesn't think it's a good idea. He feels that it's inevitable that we'll start to compare our marriage, our jobs, our qualifications and all. And they might make me feel lousy about myself if they are not doing well. I'm not sure if this could turn out to be true. I'm contented where I am and at most I would feel envious and happy that my classmates are doing better than myself. But like what he says, I wouldn't want to meet up old friends if I'm not doing well in my life. It'll only make me feel lousy about myself. I certainly don't want to do that to any of them.

Another problem is they know my ex. I'm not sure how much they know about what went on between me and him, so that raises the problem of how they might look at me also.

It's been a long time - 15 or 16 years. I wonder how they've been and what they are doing. I wonder if any of them had tried contacting me for a gathering or something of sort. For the number of times I had shifted, none of them would have been able to get in touch with me for sure.

The dream also makes me think about how important a secondary school is to one's future. And what determines where we go for a secondary education is our PSLE results. I'm glad that Coco will not end up where I was altho she certainly needs more hounding in her Maths.

I can't seem to recall who or how my secondary school Maths teacher is like. But I remember the geog teacher, Mrs Yeo, who couldn't wait to see our downfall, and wished that we would all end up as road-sweepers, the lit teacher who didn't teach us how to answer lit questions. We didn't even know that lit is about taking a position on something and defending it with evidence from the text. I flunk my lit becos at the last few periods she had with us, she told us the marker wants to see that we know our texts very well. I don't know about the rest, but I interpreted it as "reciting the whole scenario as required in the question". If I'm not mistaken, the whole class failed lit badly - even those who used to get B3 or A2 for the school papers. It's only in my pre-u days that the history and lit teachers told us that we need to answer to the questions, keep referring back to the questions, and giving evidence to support our stance.

I'm more than contented actually for where I am today. I never imagined that I could get a degree in my life. And NIE had given me the opportunity to get one. It's natural for me to feel grateful and want to do my best in the studies. I really feel ashamed for the times I couldn't do well in my studies, particularly the times at SIM. I feel that I've let my parents down very badly. This is one of the major reasons I want to get a second upper for my degree - to do them proud and to let them feel that I'm not at the bottommost of the pit of stupidity. I also need the money that comes with the degree to repay my parents. They've given me too much - for a person my age. It's embarrassing - definitely shameful - to have been supported by my parents for more than 30 years.