  since i feel like talking about myself, i will, um, one several choice question from ms dream girl's exciting latest instalment: would you rather cause misery?
what kind of a question is that? did you do comparatives in school? anyway, causing misery has its tradeoffs, but the major boon is that you can wake up in the morning and say to yourself in a loud, steady voice: "boy, i just pissed someone off yesterday, and i am proud of it, for the world is fucked up and i just cemented that factual expression into the truth books! " well, there's a class gathering on saturday, which i am not keen on, honestly. but i liked the tranquil days of primary two. i forgot who i was sitting with, but on tuesdays i believe the last period of the day was physical education, and we swept across moist, cool grass blades, against friendly breezes and so forth. i don't remember so much of what we did, i just remember it was cool and i could not care so much about little seedlings getting stuck on my socks and all that. and we had social dancing, i think. mine was with a taller girl, and also somewhat of a tomboy if my memory is right.
it had the air of oldness in it, something that others schooled in denser, modern concrete jungles will never ever understand, like we were living through the old days again. we only had chalkboards, and i still remember our worksheets were one of those papyrus-like fibre sheets that yellowed very rapidly and had primitive looking drawings. (our only exposure to white paper was this so-called "mahjong paper" which had a blank space on top to draw things and lines below to write a wordy description.
) and of course, i scored full marks for mathematics that year (and the next). whatever happened. i could've become a food-adoring mathematics genius like kenji, but it was never to be. cy says she always wondered what life was in my school (she lives nearby, but her parents did well to send her to a far away but vastly better school), but she stopped asking herself when she got a bit older and saw my schoolmates yelling and shouting and smoking and all that outside school and managed to convince herself for so long that it probably was some kind of a shit hole. and she was mostly right. 
