In Continuum.

"Stop pressing and then run off, idiot.

Stay, so that I can slap you."

But then again, if you think about it, pranks like these are really harmless. They are not keeping me up at night, waking me up at the wrong time in the mornings, they are not really causing me any major problems whatsoever. Besides, I suppose, we are all guilty of a prank or two, big ones and small, from brushing the tip of your friend's nose with your finger when he looks down at the spot on his shirt where a stain is supposedly at, to putting styrofoam flakes in the air-condition shafts in your friend's car. We are all guilty of some form of pranks, I suppose, guilty because they are just so much fun. Practical jokes are fine, if they are not going to cause harm to somebody else, I feel, and everything else is just A-OK. Boys live with pranks, boys relish in it. Boys are known for the pranks, and girls are usually at the butt of their jokes, of our jokes rather. At least that was the case in primary school, when the boys supposedly hated the girls, and would do anything to humiliate them one way or another. One boy went as far as taking the mirror off the back of a pencil sharpener and then placing it under the skirt of a female classmate. That was just tactless, and I've never went there. But let's just say that I had a few tricks up my sleeves in my younger days. 

I found that little laser pointer in my uncle's drawers, and it really only took a few minutes to replace the old batteries with the new. I perched myself on the window sill in the bedroom and start pointing the laser pointer at innocent pedestrians downstairs. Some of them were dogs, some of them were with their kids. Some of them were children going home from school, and none of them were spared. I liked how they'd always touch themselves and try to wipe off the little red dot first before realizing that it is actually a laser pointer. They'd always look up towards my direction, and then that'd be when I throw myself away from the window and onto the bed, trying hard not to be spotted. Though, I am sure, the opened window and the fluttering curtains must have gave me away while I took refuge. I started pretending that I was in a top secret mission of some sort, talked to an invisible walkie-talkie and picked a random target off the streets to kill with my "sniper". The innocent victims would then turn around just in time to see me looking at them through my scope, and that'd be when it is way too late for them to run. In my head, their heads usually explode and then blood would splatter all over the white tiles below. But that never happened, and they usually just move on with their lives, as if knowing that my sniper really was a fabricated mass of air. 

My friend Kim Yuan was infamous in school for three things. One, he was the fastest sprinter in school, and was always on the podium receiving fake gold medals during Sports Day. Two, he also owned the once popular Baby-G watch, the yellow one and the blue backlight. Third, he got himself in trouble one day at school when he messed with the wrong teacher. Chinese teachers usually are not very fun in the books of local students, because they tend to be old and they tend to be old (I know I repeated myself, but I was just trying to emphasize the point). Anyway, there was this particular teacher from his class whom he decided to pull a prank on once by pulling away the chair underneath her butt before she sat down. She was an old teacher, and that was certainly a very dangerous stunt to pull. Just as she was about to sit down, he tucked the chair away from her, and she fell backwards and banged her head hard against the wall behind. Thankfully, she wasn't seriously injured because of the fall, but it did get my friend into a truckload of troubles with the school and his parents. He was notorious like that, the way he went around getting himself into troubles and then telling us all about it in the fitness corner during recess. 

Pranks in high school became bullying, and I was the butt of many of those pranks for many weeks and many months. Pranks in high school were rather cruel, and it usually involved the exposure of genitals or nudity of some sort. If not, physical pain or the destruction of property, however way you want to call it. I think I have mentioned these a few entries ago, but basically pranks are rather prevalent in high school. They go hand in hand, high school and pranks, alongside a whole lot of other things teenagers go through in puberty, like the breaking of your voice and the growing of facial hair. Of course, you get to take a break from all of those evil pranks when you advance to a higher level of education, because members of the opposite sex are there to regulate your stupidity. So you pull smaller pranks, pranks that are easier to pull rather than completely mean. That is not to say that high school was complete hell for everyone, though. I had some fun with Timothy back then, when we stayed back after school to plan our pranks on other fellow classmates. One of them involved filling cups with water from the water dispenser and then placing them on top of each blade of the fan. We left the school with the cups up there, and the first guy in the classroom the next morning automatically was to be blamed when the cups flew off the fans and splashed onto the tables and the chairs below. That was comedic gold, right there. 

Timothy himself was the original prankster of the class, planning elaborate pranks at the back of the class just to kill time. One of which involved a self-induced prank that usually allows himself to run away from responsibilities. This stunt involved a penknife, an empty bottle, an apron, and a door knob. So we were done with our Home Economics  lessons, and that rendered our aprons completely useless. So, at the back of the class, he started shredding the apron into strings, and then tying them together to make a longer string. He then sliced the bottle into half, and the poked a hole in the side to pull the string through. One end of the string he tied to the knob of a door, while the sliced bottle was filled with water and then placed on top of the door. I think this prank was meant to be pulled on a teacher, and the cup did fall down and hit her when she came into the classroom. It was a roaring success, but the teacher surely did not share our enthusiasm. She didn't really have a sense of humor, and that caused us to be punished as a class, for some reason. 

I remember my friend Varun from the army, and he was always asking people to clean the toilet because he was in charge of it. So he appointed people to scrub the floors, to clean the sinks, to wipe the mirrors, and to scrub the toilet bowls as well - nobody liked him very much. He slept next to me for three months though, which was why I grew used to his strange and queer ways. I decided to pull a prank on him one day in camp with my tube of Oreo cookies. Split the cookie into half, I licked off the side with the cream and replaced it with some toothpaste that my friend provided. The end result was an Oreo cookie that looked perfectly normal, with the middle just a tad bit too watery. Making it less obvious, I placed it as the third cookie in the packaging, and offered the first two to different people in the bunk. Adrian took one, Ravi took one, and Varun was next when I offered the toothpaste filled cookie. He took it, placed it in his mouth, and started eating it like it was any other cookie. We expected him to taste the difference straight away, we were expecting ourselves to burst out laughing. But he just kept on going and going with the cookie until he was finished, and that was when we revealed to him that we actually used toothpaste. "What? I thought it was a mint flavored cookie!" 

Still in camp, we all have what we call the E.T. blade, and it stands for "Entrenching Tool". It does have a fancy name, but basically it is just the metal part of a shovel, which can be detached from the stick itself. It usually comes in a tattered pouch when given to us, and it is common knowledge that they usually come together. Keep in mind that these blades are pretty heavy, and it is probably going to crack skulls if thrown at somebody else directly in the head. I remember bought a new pair of boots from the mart, and the shoes came with curved up cardboards inside, which I thought to have been shaped like those blades. So I took out my own E.T. blade from the pouch, and replaced that with the cardboard. I waited for someone to come into the bunk, and the first victim was Adrian. He came into the room, and the first thing he noticed was me sitting on the bed with the pouch in my hands. With full force, I threw it at his face, and he screamed so loud that it really could have been the voice of a girl. He bounced off the top of his head and landed on the ground, and disbelief was written all over his face, blended with shock and surprise. He picked the pouch up, took the cardboard out, realized that he was being pranked, and tossed it back towards my head - this time, it hurt. 

So yes, to the kids who have been trying to mess around with the doorbell, you guys might want to reconsider this. I could really amp myself up and give you guys a prank that you will never forget. Perhaps emerge in your bedroom in the middle of the night as a children-eating shadow of death - you'd never know. So go ahead and press that button again, go ahead and press it. You might regret it for the rest of your life, or at least as long as I want to torture you. Be warned, and don't say that I haven't. I have, with the note above.