guess what's on today. rockfest and chingay at the same time.



chingay. i remember going to one with my mother when i was little. she brought me to the front of the crowd and sat me on a road curb and told me to stay put as she went to burger king to get some food for me. so i sat there watching the procession. and after a while this policeman came and told all the people around me to move in so that they could shift the barricade. me, being just maybe 5 or 6 i think, just followed the people and soon i was stuck in the middle of the crowd looking at people's knees. so i think that's when i started to cry, wondering where my mother was. according to my mother, i was wandering behind the crowd and whimpering "mummy, mummy." i don't deny her account of it. but i was soon placated by fries and some stuff from burger king. sometimes i wonder how come my mother was brave enough to just leave me alone in the crowd. probably an attempt to ditch me.



chingay. in secondary 1 i made many new friends. and amongst them was this guy called freddy tan. he had small eyes, neatly combed hair with a side parting and was one of my talk cock buddies in class. he sat near me. so came the time of year when chingay was looming around the corner. and freddy one day very wittily started calling me yap chingay when i think i brought up the subject. so he loved the name, probably cos it's a good diversion from people calling you freddy the frog. but with a name like freddy, it's bound to happen. he loved the name he made for me so much he wrote it on my pencilcase. or it could've been this other guy but i can't really remember. ironically, whenever he got into the mood he would hop up and down from one foot to the other and chant "yap chingay yap chingay". it's ironic cos he really reminded me of a cartoon frog when he did that. but i was nice. i never called him freddy the frog. 1. cos it's one of those stupid nicknames. like when you have a name like aloysius and people all over your life call you alloy thinking it's horrendously witty and that you'll think so too and you're damned to a life of people trying to be witty (and of course due to pck there's a new way to impress people who are named aloysius). 2. well...there's no 2. it's just a stupid nickname. i never really spoke to freddy after secondary 1 after we went to different classes. i don't even know where he is now. but he'd probably call me yap chingay if he ever saw me on the streets now. maybe he'll even get into the hopping act. he really loved it.



anyway, regarding the stupid nicknames thing. i'm not bitter about it. i'm like way over that. i'm 22 fer feck's sake. that's practically middle-aged already.