The Great 5-0

Merdeka month is here. We're 50 this year, and for some reason, this number is super special and Merdeka celebrations are threated with extra hype. I don't know why... I mean, isn't every year special in it's own way, whether it's 49, 33, 76, 12? Each year is a great blessing that our country's getting older in a good way. Why is 50 apparently more special than the other years? Cos' the number is more 'sui'? More rounded, more easily divided??

Ah well... that's just me. :-p

'Neways, a competition between schools is going on to see which school can decorate their schools nicest. Ex-headmistress, Pn Sharifah's words have never ever left us. "Whatever we do, we do it well." And heck, yeah, we did it darn well.

Anyone who had passed our school these past few days will do double-take in surprise. I'm telling ya', if a guy's parachute failed him, and he fell into our school, he won't hit the hard solid ground. No, he will get tangled up in the strings and strings of flags we have strung across the buildings. We even got featured in the newspapers! A short article on 'Student's Show Love for the School'. When we read it, especially certain parts on how patriotic we were, we went, "Really meh?" Such is the 'dedication' of us warga CGL.

But nothing says 'dedication' (or stupidity?) more than spending the whole day in school decorating our classroom.

Every class was given a Jalur Gemilang to photostate, colour, and hang all over our class. At least those were the orders given. We, being 3 Biru, could only bring ourselves to obey 2 out of 3. We photostated the flags (we... ok... fine, I went overboard with the number of copies and now I dunno what to do with the spares...), coloured them beautifully like all Malaysian youngsters should, but we didn't hang them all over the place with rafia string. Nope. Instead, we snipped off their edges, and made a bee-yoo-ti-ful border for our notice board.

This is either called 'inovative', or 'order-defying'.

But it came out nice anyway. Articles of sorts were posted up. You know, our 5 Prime Ministers, monumental buildings and what not. Then, Nadzira came up with this smart idea of using colour paper to cut out the words 'Happy 50th Birthday Malaysia'.

Notice how these things are so much easier said than done? We diligently drew the letters onto the colour paper. Or should I say, Jo and I attempted to draw them diligently while Jessica fixed all our 'wonkey' curves and lines, shaking her head tiredly.

Then, Jessica did some funky patterns on the letters. We started off with the first letter fine, 'H'. The red colour went really nicely with the black sugar paper.

Then, 'A' went up nicely as well.

And, as most things do, it went wrong.

'P' was next. After I snipped out the many funky patterns, leaving a abstractly classy 'P', I got out of my seat and took a step foward, looking down at the yellow 'P'.

My thoughts: Waitaminute... this ain't right...

I flipped it over a few times, suddenly realizing that it was laterally inverted.

Nadzira: Oh... no....
Jo: Oh-oh......
Jess:*long pause* NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! *thumps head on the table*

So all our symmetrical letters were fine, but the 'S', 'Y', '5' and all the other non-symmetrical letters were facing the wrong way.

Can you believe it, 7 brains were working on this for more than two hours, and not a single one of us noticed the error.

So by the end of today, only the word 'HAPPY' went up. Wonder what the afternoon girls will make of it... heh.

That's the way the cookie crumbles. Tomorrow will be another day where we attempt to finish our 'masterpiece'.

Oh, and I commited an offence that could lose me my citizenship. For the dots of the 'I's, we used the stars of the Jalur Gemilang. Guess who had the honour of snipping our national flag into pieces?

I wouldn't be surprised if I get sent to Thailand to live with Chin Peng soon.


Gotta go now. Hope that little piece up there brightened your day. ;-D