okay so i turned 33 today. when i woke up i received several smses from my tesl buddies fai n mozie n linda. thanx gals! went to school with my durian mousse cake and slightly cair lemon cheesecake. the durian mousse cake was a hit in the staffroom...hmmm...nobody could resist the durian smell. received more birthday wishes from students n teachers alike. but couldnt bask in the glory of the day bcoz i had to handle the 2nd phase of the pmr camp.
yes, i've come a long way. being the youngest, it didnt help at all when your siblings just spoilt u rotten with sweets n soft toys...n ur mother fed u nestum n raw egg yolk (euuwww!!! i ate that??). yes, i'm a part of the generation called the baby boomers, when comfort n abundant food began to exist in the malaysian society. when i was growing up, big plastic cassette was the trend when we wanted to listen to music. cant remember wat it was called, but i grew up listening to Boney M n the Bee Gees. when i was 5, my parents sent me to St Theresa's Kindergarten. while the rest of the girls' pinafore hung loosely to their bodies, mine was a perfect fit. i remember the breaks of tiny cookies n grape cordial drinks... then i went to SS1, i was either the top or the 2nd in the class...
then, i was offered to study in sek. seri puteri KL, where the seniors terrified me more than the teachers. yes, hostel life was tough at first, esp. when u've never been away fr home n u were told to cry a bucket full of tears to get a senior's signature. but it was fun after that, i got used to the life in a boarding school. it was fun watching scary movies under the black velvety sky on friday nites....n fun going shopping wearing our yellow baju rasmi (we used to think it looked better than tkc's green ones). at this time, the boy group to rule the day was NKOTB but i wasnt a big fan of them... but anyhow, i used to hear that the 80s has the best songs. i'm even listening to some of them now... like Heart's Alone.... or A-ha's Take on Me,... Tears for Fears' Everybody Wants to Rule the World which is the soundtrack for Real Genius, Spandau Ballet's True which i think epitomises the 80s, n Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time. the best movies in the 80s? Top Gun...the girls went crazy over tom cruise. he shot to stardom bcoz of that movie. i even wrote a story that was almost similar to top gun for my 1119 essay. the scariest movie at that time... must be the nightmare on elm street. the funniest? the police academy.
then, after spm, i got the federal scholarship to do b.ed tesl in ppp/itm n later ukm, where i got to know more than a hundred personalities. this is the time when i became a young adult, going to class n when the classes were over, it's shopping time with frens. we even negotiated with the ever so obliging n sporting lecturers so that we could have the fridays free so weekends started early. there's an eating place which is fondly called as The Junction by the ppp students bcoz it's located next to a junction...the name stuck until now...the place is crowded with students...n there're even certain stalls frequented by a levels students, tesl students, n mucia students. oh yeah i forgot...i MUST tell this story...i'm sure my tesl frens remember this clearly...the libray is known to be the place where u skodeng or cuci mata...n of all of its chairs, there's one that one must avoid or else face the consequences of being sniggered at. there's this 1 chair, when u sit on it, would emit a farting sound. yes, a farting sound... so just imagine a guy trying to act suave in front of a girl n sat on the chair...yup...very funny indeed...
life in ukm was quite hard...we had to leave our having-fun-days-in-ppp behind. it was assignments, assignments, as well as climbing the 96 stairs to our kamsis to n fro...to go to class...there were times when there's no water...so we had to wake up at 5 in the morning to bathe in the faculty building....bad bad experience... classes were ok, we were in jeans most of the times, the most interesting lectures n tutorials for me would be literature classes, n the most hated ones - everything to do with linguistics - morphology,syntax n semantics, phonetics n phonology - so when mr imran ho (now dr imran ho) gave his most-of the-time very incomprehensible lecture, i would come out of the lecture hall with very clean n blank exam pad...couldnt get wat he was saying since i was gawking most of the time...may be bayam understood him, she was the top linguistics student. my fav lecturer who became my mentor is mr hazidi abd hamid. he s very funny, n regaled us with his funny n interesting stories when he was a student in the UK. he was also, incidentally, the only lecturer i know to fall asleep during our weekly literature lecture in the hall... i could hear him snoring gently. he denied it of course. he became my academic exercise supervisor n told me to read jostein gaarder n kazuo ishiguro (i read both) n i thank him for opening a whole new world for me - that the mind can absorb so much through reading. i guess that was when i thought of doing my masters in literature.
the 90s saw the emergence of alternative music n the cranberries. my tesl batch had a band called kojo gilo... they actually bought electric guitars for their band n performed Zombie to us - with flair i think, after hours of jamming in kajang. i'm not really interested in alternative, by this time, i'm into hip hop n R&B so i had many many albums by boyz 2 men, all 4 one, babyface, keith sweat, r kelly, blackstreet, tlc, swv, silk, color me badd...bla bla bla...
then in 97 i graduated...wearing orange coloured robes!! geez...the teslians were loud enough...but did we have to wear the orange coloured robes? then the hundred of us parted ways...most of us became teachers or lecturers while some began to work elsewhere...i was posted to tok jiring, n it did me good. it was here that i1st wore tudung. but after teaching for 3 years i realised that i needed more...i missed the learning, the life of the scholar. so i applied to further my studies in UM, n i also applied for a scholarship. i got both. yes, literature is very interesting but it's very very tough... to be able to study literature, u've to be able to open ur mind bcoz discussions can be controversial n sensitive at times. we discussed politics, religions, sexual politics, cultures...it is here that i learnt to be critical minded, thanx to those scholarly discussions under the supervision of very good lecturers.
when my 2 years of sabbatical leave finished in nov 2003, i was reposted to sultan sulaiman - the school where all my siblings went (except for my eldest bro who was a true mckkian through n through). yes the students r colourful, they make me angry, they also make me laugh....
which brings me back to the present. in salman rushdie's midnight's children, saleem sinai claims that he is the sum of all the experience n the people in his life, i m also shaped by all these memories. a hotchpotch. a melange.happy birthday to myself.
1 comment:
hepi belated birthday... :D
Post a Comment