~JcZw

Finally! The weekend! Saturday afternoon's great... heh. Its been a long week man... Never had more than 5 hours sleep every night... No matter how early i sleep or how tired I am I could never shut off my motor functions until 1.00 am at least... pah... I'm gonna SLEEP after I do this.

A few thoughts that may seem a bit bo liao.

We changed our uniforms on friday. So ended night after night of fingernail straining work of pulling the button rings off their buttons.

I remember after sec. sch registration when I proudly brought home my new uniforms. White shirt and white shorts (wah, that time still wearing shorts loh!). When I pulled the first shirt out the packet, my first explosive reaction was "I've been had!!! NO BUTTONS!!!". Following went a frantic period when I looked through my three shirts and discovered that the Anglican High suppliers seemed to forget the essential piece for any shirt are the buttons (assuming you are not a barbarian).

Then my mother pulled out from the bottom of the plastic bags.... three packets of buttons. 3 pairs of eyes (the last one belonging to my sister) stared. And stared. After the seemingly ordinary uniforms of Kong Hwa and of Raffles' Girls that my family had experienced, the start of my secondary school promised the "exotic" attire of a SAP school. Bah.

In retrospect the uniform wasn't too bad actually. The white uniform was still relative comfortable to wear (although the shorts had very small pockets), and besides the irritation of having to put on 5 metal buttons every morning and night (we were jealous of the girls who only had 3), besides the occasional toilet bowl-related scare, it was quite nice.

My uniform/s gave a lot of memories. On the third day of school, on my way home, a lady stopped me at the MRT station and asked if I was from Chung Cheng. This was my first introduction that NOBODY asks "Why is Chung Cheng's uniform like AHS" but "Why is your uniform like Chung Cheng's" and our response is invariably ".........."

Our PE T-shirts also gave us some amusement as well as some irritation. White with green sleeves and green collar, we looked EXACTLY like shopping centre cleaners. In sec. 1 we went on our Learning Journey and met a group of cleaners wearing exactly the same things as ourselves. Hence started the great push to change the PE shirt. The PE shorts were also a lurid green and were comfortable enough.... But one had to make sure you either had a well made one otherwise it was not advisable to run TOO fast...

In sec. 2, we still stuck to our nice white uniforms. The PE shirts changed.... A darker green, this time. But BOY! the green ran fast after we washed them! Soon we had PE shirts of varying shades. Interesting.

Sec. 3 was a momentous change. For the guys at least.... We finally got our long pants! And with deep pockets to boot. It was then that I started to fill my right pocket with the essential contents of my pencil box. It started with a simple pen. Then a pen and highlighter. At present its a pen, highlighter, pencil and ruler =)

But meanwhile I recall the first day of sec. 3 was filled with hysterical shrieks of laughter from various girls as they saw their male counterparts appearing in too long or too short pants for the first time. It took me about 2 min before I got laughed at by a passing squadmate... Not bad really... haha...

One of the pains of wearing long pants was keeping it clean. Suddenly leopard crawling across a "burning" room in st. john didn't seem quite as novel as before, when you knew you would face arched eyebrows when you went home. Putting on your pants after PE was a pain in the somewhere. But besides that actually it was still a nice addition. It was a dazzling sight to watch the upper sec level in the parade square in the morning light.

Sec. 4 was still ordinary, except that the PE shirt changed again. This time with two additional stripes, to distinguish it from that of the above-mentioned parties. Also was the elimination of buttons from the shirt to give it more ventilation so to speak.

There are so many memories that my uniform could give me. These include franctically searching for missing rings in the morning at home... Circling the toilet bowl to find errant buttons that went missing at a seriously inopportune moment... Doing displack in the hole-y puddle covered parade square n getting wet, with the synthetic material clinging to your body... Getting a hole in my long pants while defending the goal during soccer.

And it finally culminated on friday yesterday, when we all put aside our uniforms for good and donned the beige of VJ. What will I do with the old ones though?

Mebbe laminate, frame up, n show it to my grandchildren.... hehz....

AHS rulez! (the friends there at very least anyway)