Living and Story-Telling

Yes I'm still here.

Due to a sudden avalanche of work-related activity (notice how I didn't say 'work' per se) my return to blogging suffered a slight break from the internet. It's a shame, especially since there were many times when I felt the stirrings of a post but didn't have a laptop nearby.

Either way, it's been an eventful 3 weeks, and I feel I have made it out relatively unscathed. As I type that sentence out, I once again realise how 'survivalist' I sound. Honestly, I think I need a break from all this 'fighting' and 'surviving'. I just want to live for a while, no matter how teenage-angstish that may sound.

---

Recently we went out for dinner with some family friends. My father had schooled with him, and he regaled us with stories of all the mad things they did while in school to their lecturers and classmates, ranging from theft to forgery to faking suicide. It was all done in 'good humour' though, where the students often owned up to their pranks, unlike nowadays when students seem to commit pranks for a more sinister agenda. Many times I wanted to interject with some story of mine from school or college, but every time I had to stop myself because it just didn't fit. I wanted to tell the story of how some guys got caught smoking weed in the chapel at night while drinking arrack from the chapel chalices, or that time some kids broke into a lecturer's chambers to change their marks, only to be expelled a week later (the lecturer had a backup and just checked which grades were changed). But none of them seemed to be appropriate for the kind of humour that existed among students 'back in the day'.

As I sat there laughing by guts off at their stories, I wondered what kind of stories I'd tell when I was in my 60's, and whether I'd be able to tell them at all.