Basket.

On Sunday I returned home from a fun day and night at Sean's house, and the first thing I noticed was that there was now a considerably vaster amount of space than there used to be. It took a few moments for me to realise what this meant - my notes were gone. For me, that was the most potent symbol of the end of an era: thirteen years (everyone forgets pre-primary, with us being the last batch to go through it) in the mainstream Singapore education system is now at end. I feel like getting a t-shirt that says "Thirteen years in the Singapore education system and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".

As I predicted, the weekend was great fun. Mr Loh's wedding (the first thing that I can call him is still "sir" and probably always will be, although technically I can now call him "Aaron") was... well, what can one say about weddings? At least it wasn't as boring as I thought it would be, or as the last church service I attended, which was nearly four years ago. And the cake box was amazing. Just for its design and the copious amounts of work that must have gone into creating it, I'm keeping that thing. It's contents didn't taste half bad either.

After that, it was over to Sean's house for a nice class gathering and barbecue. The food was good and in great amounts and mahjong was fun. Then, as I was forewarned, I was septuple-teamed by the guys (resistance would have been futile, so I didn't bother with much) and flung into the pool in shirt and pants. It actually felt kind of good, very cooling. And Sean's maid was nice enough to wash and dry the sodden mess I had to peel off later for me.

The night that followed was quite a madcap affair. We sat around talking for a while as a glass of peach tea mixed with gin was passed around (I consumed more alcohol that one day and night than I had the past seventeen years; previously I had stayed teetotal, but I didn't want to be a spoilsport here). Then we played cards (with the forfeit involving the consumption of yet more alcohol), tried to watch some stupid American b-grade horror film, swapped racist/dirty jokes and renditions of the college anthem that would have made Jesudason do more than merely turn in his grave and finally, decided on walking to Chooi Mei's nearby residence to acquire the VCD of From Hell.

So I ended up walking in an utterly quiet HDB estate at 3am holding a Scrabble board. As I said at that time, life doesn't get much more surreal than this. We never used the board though, as during the movie people started dropping left, right and centre. Myself, I don't remember very much of the first half of the film, so I must have dozed off there. By the time it ended, it was 5.30am and the birds were calling. I grabbed an hour of very fitful sleep (no idea why I couldn't sleep well), then got up for a few rounds of cards with the similarly insomniac. We then generally waited around for the rest to get up, and by 10am we were on our own respective ways again.

Yesterday I was out again, with Yihong back from Australia. We wanted to watch Shutter, but after a bit of a scramble from Cineleisure to Lido then to PS because of a lack of good seats, we had to settle for Saw instead. Not a bad film at all, I'll admit I was fooled by the ending, though I should not have been because I did harbour suspicions as to why they ever showed the (supposed) killer's face. Better than a few I have seen, certainly. A night out with a good friend is always nice, too.

Today I stay home for once. Trying to finish two novels at once and making good progress. Life is good for the moment, but I still get bored a lot of the time. maybe it isn't so bad after all that in a while I won't have to decide what to do with my time.