JP

He wakes up in the early morning, realizing thats its far too early for a Saturday like this. A glance at the bedside clock confirms this, and as much he consciously want to sleep in, the chronobiological settings ingrained into him prevents him from doing do. Lying on his back, his thoughts go back to last night; a party, much laughter, good music, good company, one crazy stand up comic, some sleight of hand and magic. He thanked God that it had all went well.

But even after the night of festivities, he feels strangely empty. Looking back he remembers his unease 12 hours ago. When the sun went down at the foyer, and the soft orange lights gently illuminated the the grounds; the mellow music played on into the deep blue night sky and general warmth of the people permeated the atmosphere. It was a flawless way to end the school term, save for one thing. Setting his drink on the table, and politely excusing himself from the conversation, he moves to a more secluded spot at the party, his eyes slowly searching the crowd for the missing element. Where is it? Who is it?

Friday was the day we got back our results, only by God’s grace did I achieve them. He has blessed greatly, and I am much satisfied.

Psalm 23

A psalm of David.

1 The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.

2 He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,

3 he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.

4 Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.

5 You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.

6 Surely goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD
forever.

In the past week, along with something like 119 other unsuspecting Year 5, I was recruited into the Gifted Education Branch as a temporary clerk. This was my first real job, and I sure hope my working life is nothing like the first taste that I got at Ministry of Education.

Actually, it wasn’t all that bad, I exaggerate greatly under some sort of truth bending creative license. While the tasks that we were given were tedious, and involved a lot patience, I had fun and learned a bit of something here and there. The company was pretty good too, it was pretty fun hanging out with my team mates, especially Gideon, Hadi, Clifton, Bobbie and Daryl.

What did we do? Well, going into specifics would be inviting much flak from the Ministry, the school and quite possibly (if history is anything to go by) the law. The thing is, working for the GE Branch, somewhat resembles working for a clandestine government department like the CIA. We were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, to avoid looking at certain classified things as we carried out certain classified tasks, to not leak any information to parties that might want it, to always be vigilant and the list goes on. They even had cellophane tape that was printed with “Gifted Education Branch Secret” and the state crest, which was used to seal the can’t-be-named-documents.As you can tell, a lot of cloak and dagger; give us each a hand gun, a badge and mirror shades and we’re the secret service.

Today, I went cycling for the second time with ANZA, which is an organization of expats from Australia and New Zealand. They’re a pretty nice bunch, and have quite a few people who like me are not from Down Under or Middle Earth. After the first 12 km, it started raining, lightly at first, then really hard. Visibility was bad and it didn’t help that my contact lens don’t agree with the rain and that dirt was constantly sprayed into my face by the wheel in front of me. By God’s grace, I eventually arrived in school, very wet and dirty but in one piece. Had noodles across the road at Wah Chee, which by the way is really great, before waiting for my mom to pick me up.

I have at this point run out steam, although I have loads more to talk about and will hence end here.

At long last the period of testing and revision drew to a close this morning, hopefully there’ll be no more revision for a long while, although I’m pretty sure that the work will kick in before the Year 5 cohort can say: “Freedom!”. By the grace of God, the exams have gone well, and the revision and absence of fun distracting stuff hasn’t been all that bad either. None the less, I enjoy the change from trying to study to slacking.

As per the after exam tradition, I went out with the KKK (which is not the Ku Klux Klan, but the Kyle Koh Klub), and watched a movie. Unfortunately, we picked a Russian fantasy action movie called Daywatch, which was preceded by the prequel Nightwatch, which none of us had watched before. The result was that we spent most of the movie trying to make sense of the plot and the rules of the fantastical world of the film; it did not help that a single piece of chalk had the power to alter reality and that all the dialog was in Russian. It wasn’t all that bad though, having figured out the gist of the story, it was pretty satisfying.

Oh, and the over due Charity Bike’n'Blade post? Well, just take a look at the photos. There are like 400 more photos on the web if you’re interested, I just took those relevant to me.