Just The First Of Many

And... it rolls to life again.

It's been almost a full month since I last posted. The sheer content of life in the last twenty days makes me feel like writing the entire blog in point form. Of course, doing so would serve virtually no purpose besides illustrating a level of sloth fast approaching sin.

Does the thesauraphilia get annoying sometimes?

I swear. You haven't seen anything yet.

I almost fell asleep driving to college this morning. Potentially fatal as though this might have been, I guess it really shouldn't come as a surprise. My grandmother's birthday party last night forced me to stay up until past two in the morning writing my four page-Psychology essays. Classes today were from eight to three, with a one hour break at twelve. I fell asleep sitting up during Maths, Chemistry and Biology. From three to four thirty I had a student council subcommittee meeting, and after that I dropped in to see the dance club at the ECA studio before for all of five minutes before heading home. I have to design a poster for a paintball tournament next week, consider doing a sample piece for the HELP Charity Auction on Friday, and get in touch with the Sheraton Imperial - a possible venue for the CAL '07 Prom in June. There's an e-mail in my inbox from the Taylors AIESEC about a meeting in the business school tomorrow... and I don't even plan to be in college then because our SPM results are due that morning. I'll have to keep checking my mail, too - Jason said he'd get back to us on the proposal for the Inter-College Dance Competition in April by the end of the week. Brian hasn't called me back to confirm practice tonight, but I don't think we have any other choice because our performance at INTI is this Friday (the same day as my Maths test) and we're running out of time. I have to finish my LAN video project by Monday, along with the slides for my Psychology presentation next Wednesday. Not to mention my regular homework.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my head of department at the Newsletter Club doesn't suddenly decide to contact me about next month's issue... despite the fact that he's long overdue.

I think... life probably doesn't get much better than this.

Some highlights of the past few weeks.

Alex's birthday party at Secret Recipe. Someone thought it'd be a good idea to send him diabetes in a box. I mean. Fifteen sticks of Mentos should be enough to kill a horse.

Somehow, neither I nor anyone else really took any pictures of people. The real star of the afternoon was this marvel of modern architecture anyway.

This is Alex. While there's nothing really exceptional about the above picture, I thought it would only be proper to include a snap of the birthday boy.

Free coffee day at Starbucks. Underestimating its potency, I added roughly four packets of white sugar and a further three packets of brown to my espresso. The resulting mixture took six hours to down. Refusing to waste even a single drop, I dutifully carried the cup to all my classes and even lunch. There's probably a lesson to be learned here.

The bomb scare at INTI. For one afternoon in late February, our adjacent college was literally the bomb.

The crowd gathered outside INTI was a perfect demonstration of the moths-to-a-flame cliche - human beings drawn to the scene of a tragedy, a cocktail of curiosity and anticipation overpowering the sense of self-preservation supposedly inherent in all higher beings. Darwin would have been appalled.

Though I must admit, an explosion would have been spectacular.

Our performance at the Taylor's SAM Fiesta last Thursday night was set against a backdrop of high drama, nerves and desperation. Okay, maybe there wasn't that much drama. But this is how it went down. When we first joined the Dance Club in late February, our president Jason mentioned a request by the SAM student council for a performance or two by the club's members at the event.

Auditions, he said, would be held soon.

And so we waited for these, but nothing came. By the weekend before the event, we'd pretty much given up on the possibility.

Then fate came knocking.

On the fourth of March - two days before the SAM Fiesta - we met in the ECA dance studio. Myself, Yee Mun, Shevie, Hsien Ming, Hui Ning, Melissa, Yuh Miin, Ivan, Huong Ket, Eric and Ching Yu. We were for the most part complete strangers to each other, in the studio that day for our own reasons. But when Ms Yeap came in to tell us the SAM Fiesta didn't have any performing crew, and asked us if we could please do something that night, although it was on extremely short notice, for who ever heard of a dance night without a dance performance? - none of it mattered.

That night, I called Ellen and Hau, who brought in Tze Shen, completing the crew.

For practice space, we put the old staff lounge next to the cafeteria to good use, even bringing in a couple of laptops and speakers. We had only two days, but we were determined.

And the rest, they say, is history (thanks to Shevie for the screens).

The video is shaky and the lighting awful, but you can get a rough idea of what we were doing on stage that night. Not enough and all too much at the same time. Well, under the circumstances...

The rest of the night was pretty awesome too. The dance floor at the SAM Fiesta, once it got warmed up, was one of the best I've ever experienced. The crowd danced wildly and sang along to hits like Me Love and Low. There was even a rapper, and the photographer could beatbox. All and any incidents of shuffling were brief and isolated.

Now that's how you throw a party.

Not all of us are in this picture, but... oh well.

Here's to the first of many.