In Continuum.

Last Friday night at the beach was a blast, although it could have created a bigger crater. In the words of Naz the Great, it was better than expected, though still somewhat of a letdown. The moment we set eyes on the notice on the portal, none of us actually gave too much attention to it. Past events organized by the school haven't had a very good track record. All of those events were either canceled or turned out to be epic failures, events you wouldn't be very proud to be a part of. It is true that the majority of the student body does not have a lot of faith in school organized events, but at the same time it's not like we have much of a choice most of the time. If this is as good as it gets, it'd be better if we can make the best out of it all. So a few friends were asked to go to the barbeque last Friday after school, and the turn out at the beach turned out to be pretty good - or, better than expected. There was a similar outing at the Siloso Beach sometime last year, but I heard that the weather was very generous with its precipitation that afternoon that everything came to a grinding halt. Everybody remembers how the Halloween party turned out, and I am just glad that I was never there to give a first-hand account in the things that came to pass. 

The idea of a barbeque irks me, and I am sure the same can be said for a lot of people out there. All the preparations, all the fire and all the dirt from the charcoal - it's perhaps the most uncomfortable way of cooking your food out there. As if cutting and slicing your own food isn't already a chore by itself in the Western culture, you have to make your own fire if you want to have a barbeque! Some people enjoy the whole rustic lifestyle I suppose, very soon people are going to start fires at barbeque pits with twigs and branches instead of lighters and fire-starters. Oh, that is not to mention a barbeque pit made out of the bones of slaughtered moose and other small animals, if possible. Anyway, I am not a fan of barbeque, and certain not a great fan of the beach either. I am a creature of comfort, and the beach just isn't a place where you'd find people like me. It is nice at times, but not when you are going to have little particles of sand in your shoes and pockets for the next three months or so. It's true, because I just found a handful of sand from Krabi in one of my shorts a few weeks ago, imagine that. So barbeque and beaches, though they usually come together in a package, isn't very welcoming. But here's why I decided to go last Friday anyway. 

For one, it was a barbeque organized for the Japanese and American exchange students, and it is always nice to show the hospitality that is so 'uniquely Singapore', as the tourism board would proudly proclaim. Secondly, the advertisement on the portal boasted a six dollar buffet, with the free flow of everything - including alcohol. Nobody is going to turn that offer down for sure, which was why the turn out was much better than expected in my opinion. Lastly, I guess I needed a place to hang my head on a Friday evening, and a lot of my friends were enthusiastic about going to the event anyway. So I mustered a couple of friends, bought the tickets, gathered after school and made our way to the beach for the first time in a long time. Come to think about it, it was our first time at the beach with each other, and it was pretty exciting just for the thought of that. On the way there, Kerri entertained us with her chocolates from Russia and her amazing MacGuyver-like trick at the club that other night when she stuffed ice cubes down a girl's dress just to get her out of the club because she was dead drunk - very, very, very clever. No sarcasm intended. It's amazing what a film with Amanda Bynes can teach you. Now I am wondering if a gold ring can really make me disappear. 

There is always that initial inertia for any two cultures when they meet. That invisible distance between the two groups of people that needs to be crossed before anything happens. That was pretty much the demography of things, with the Japanese students hanging out in one corner together while the Americans in the other. The volleyball game acted as a great reason to bond for certain members of each group, but people were still pretty much staying away from each other for the most part. The student council members busied themselves at the barbeque pit when we arrived, and the inertia drove us to the jetty where we met Travers, Jonno and Lionel - whose hair was being blown into his face by the sea breeze. The three of them arrived much earlier than anybody else, and they have found the furtherest point away from the group of foreign students as possible at the jetty. Or, maybe it was just a nice place to hang out with the indian man teasing the passerby with his kite flying tricks right by the edge of the shore. We waited for more people to arrive from school, and for the inertia to quietly settle itself down. 

We found a frisbee buried in the sands then, and what's a better way to bond than team sports? It has been a while since I played ultimate frisbee, but I have a thing for flying discs in the sky. So the private game between Lionel, Jonno and I soon became a game between the people in white and the people in colored t-shirts, with some of the foreign students amidst the crowd. I guess the wind was to my team's favor back then, or maybe our team was just better than the other. In the words of Nick, an American student on the other time, we were crushing their team almost literally. I never knew my hidden talent in catching flying plastic discs, but I guess I realized that last Friday - and it made me feel good about myself, however trivial it is as a talent. My teammates were awesome, I cannot say enough good things about them. I guess the game turned out to be the greatest success of the evening. 

I bet Shaun, or Sean, or Shawn (Don't you just hate the fact that that name has a million different spellings with the same pronunciation?), the American student from Buffalo. He looked like the kind of guy to be fascinated with online games and perhaps some extreme sports like rollerblading down steep slopes or something. He was flying everywhere with his frisbee, and I was just secretly thanking the fact that he was on my team rather than the other. There was this Chinese girl from the States as well, I think her name is Deyi or something like that. She reminded me somewhat of Hannah from school, with the same hairstyle and the same tone of speaking. She was great, and really ferocious with the frisbee as she went into a collision course with Jonno halfway through the game - not a lot of people in the right frame of mind would challenge him. There was Lauren, whose goal line did not match with the one I drew from the other side of the beach. So we improvised, but drew a rather curvy one with our feet dug deep into the sand. She was tall, and it's always nice to have a tall girl on your side when you know that you can't tackle the female opponents, as a guy. 

People were at the barbeque for different reasons, and some more obvious than the others. Naz, Kerri and I were really there because we were curious about how the event was going to turn out. After all, we didn't actually have an expectation for the party at all, thinking that it'd probably tank pretty badly. The question was how badly it'd tank and to what degree, which was why the barbeque started off at the rock bottom at the back of our minds. Lionel was there for the food and the food only. It wasn't particular tasty or anything, with everything being the standard sort of food you'd expect at a barbeque. However, Lionel always has the ability to make any food taste absolutely amazing for some reason, especially the delicate ways he has with his salmon from school. Travers was there for the ladies, as usual, and that wasn't really a surprise for the most part. After all, most of the videos he watches at home feature naked Japanese ladies, and what better place to find them than a school event at the beach? Well, you don't actually get to see naked Japanese girls at the beach, but we just have to make do most of the time. He was probably there for the soccer too, but that didn't turn out too well because everybody wasn't being cooperative. 

Joyce was there for the socializing, and she went into a frenzy when the night was closing in and she still hadn't gotten herself a name yet, much less a phone number. So she went around talking to random students from overseas, while the rest of us like Kerri and I went around attempting to climb the palm trees. Like an orientation at the beginning of every semester, there were games being organized through the night which the students participated in. The limbo dancing was great only until I failed to clear a certain height, a height in which Kerri and Jonno cleared with so much ease that I half expected them to have no spine at all. I guess all the clubbing Kerri did paid off in the end, and Jonno is the bionic man - he can do pretty much everything. Still, in the end, he lost to this American girl who was crowned the limbo queen, though I thought he should have won anyway. The tug of war was a no brainer, it's not difficult to guess who won and who didn't. You should have seen those American boys, they were bigger than cars. They made Travers and Kevin look like kindergarten children, and they were complete crushed. Even their women team were strong like vikings, and it must be the kind of food that they eat, I reckon. Still, it was all good fun, and I spent the rest of the night getting to know more UB people than foreign students, which was strange. 

It's always nice to stroll along the beach at night, to see the constellations in the skies. Kerri strolled along the beach with her hair down, and the fact that she was wearing a white dress must have freaked out a few random couples that were making out in the dark. While the crowd back at the beach started to bond, most of us went our separate ways along East Coast Park. It's strange how people like me do so badly in strange crowds sometimes, I guess it is the inability to put myself in a position to blend in. I talked about it with Naz in the car that night, and I realized that I wasn't alone in this. I guess for some people, we just have to have a natural thing like socializing to become somewhat of an obligation, much like why most of us would dislike the idea of ice breaking games during orientations. They work, they really do. But it is the idea of being thrown together in the same room and forced to make a friendship out of it that we do not particularly fancy. I don't even do well with a room full of relatives, I don't think I would do well with a beach full of foreign exchange students. 

It was still very nice talking to some of them, knowing how Buffalo is like since I am going over next year - hopefully. From the talks I had with some of them, however, you start to realize just how small and meaningless your life can seem in relative to theirs, at times. They are the ones going for parties, having fun, working day jobs and still scoring well in schools. We are the ones studying our heads off to manage a B+, and it is stifling how all our lives revolve around some random alphabets and numbers that aren't supposed to dictate who you are and what you are. You can always argue that the standards are different, and that it is much easier to score a better grade than over here. Still, sometimes it becomes a little depressing to learn that your society has placed such a great emphasis on career, on money, or anything aside from the things that truly matter. I'm not saying partying or whatever is, it's just that I am sure those foreign students are more capable of telling you what life is all about than any of us bookworms here. 

It's not nice to know that people out there are leading much more meaningful lives than what you have here. You comfort yourself by saying that the local university students are having it much worse - which is true. That is how our society has been shaped for so long, the way people always say that Asians live to work, not work to live. It's all about education from the moment you are born, and you live through years and years after that only to be forced into the workforce with no breaks, no breather, and no chance for you to really enjoy life. Yeah, you get a few holidays and vacations in the middle, but it's all back to work right afterwards. Society is never going to loosen its grip of the leash around your neck, unless you make a break for it somehow. You cannot deny that the grass is indeed greener on the other side, even in a white country like Buffalo that is covered in snow for the better part of the year. You can't help but wonder how it'd be like if you can just not live your life for a month, or a year, or maybe for the rest of your life. 

I guess there are things that are not going to change very soon. It's not like our education system is going to allow us to party our heads off and, at the same time, score good grades. Things don't work like that here in Singapore, people care too much about their grades here. So we work hard, and we work harder, and we make sure that we are better than the others in everything we do - for what? Blinded by those goals, we usually forget that it is the simplest things in life that we really should care about, more than just a career or a marriage, or a steady income. I remember reading about Evangeline Lily's house being burned down in Hawaii due to a short circuit, and everything that she owned other than the clothes she was wearing and the car she was driving, was gone. But she said that she never felt more free than the moment when she saw her house in a smoking wreckage, and we have all heard similar stories from all around the world. I guess what we can console ourselves is this: we still have our families to lean on to, our friends to be with, and the knowledge that there are simple things in life that we still care about. We should always keep those in mind, that is the only way we are not going to lose ourselves in the midst of things. 

I do hope that someday, I am going to live a life without regrets, a life in which I know that I have lived to the fullest. It is worrisome sometimes, when you think about it, the kind of life you are going to have in five, or maybe ten years' time. What if you are hungry all the time, what if your job pays peanuts? It is all so complicated here, and sometimes you just wonder how it'd be like to ride a bicycle all day long, to work in the fields and to live in a wooden house. Maybe, going back to nature is really where the answer lies. If I get rich, I am going to buy a house in the middle of nowhere, buy a few horses and build a stable, then live there until the day that I die. It is a dream, and if we are going to dream then I'd rather dream big. At least it's better than working for materialistic goals like, cars and credit cards, and all those other Cs the government so actively encourage. But, you know how it is. Simplicity isn't so simple, and even friends aren't that easy to come by. That I have learned, that I have realized.