there beneath the blue suburban skies

because i'm in a vaguely emo mood now i've decided to have one of those lame blog entry dedications to friends things. i actually wanted to do one during the new year, when i read this article in the papers, but my photos are all on the computer in my room so it was a bit hard to transfer them to and fro, i'm rather lazy haha. but i've missed quen and jon and ian terribly of late hence the post. ok but before i talk about them this post wouldn't be complete if i didn't pay tribute to abi and stella. so this is my dear lovely stella who went back to melbourne on monday (and i won't see her for two years unless i make it down to the land of oz this june but airport taxes are so high!!) :

and she hasn't changed one bit from our mg/ac days. that's her sitting in my brother's chair when she came over three fridays ago, we got really bored and started taking photos. it was really very good talking to her about everything and just being able to call the same handphone number knowing that she was on the other end of the line.

this is abi and me on the last day of school in j2. okay i think i look so majorly chubby?

my friendship with the two of them has survived almost thirteen years - abi barely remembers primary school, though i vaguely remember she didn't really like me in primary one. i'm glad she's still in singapore even though she's all the way in jurong and i'm not in youth anymore so i hardly get to see her on sundays. i'm also glad we've started doing the whole cooking thing. more sweet treats to come and hopefully proper meals too!

THIS IS SPECIALLY FOR LINUS CHUA KEE LUN. haha i'm not sure if that's how you spell his hanyu pinyin name i just assumed that that's how it goes because lester is kee tian, no? err okay i've only known him for - about a month? or less, because prc camp was at the end of december - but nevermind he merits a mention in this post too. also because i told him i'd put up the photo of us. don't worry linus in 5 years time i will blog about our friendship PROPERLY, if it (and my blog) survive that long. that's how lester looks like too hahaha duh because they're twins maybe. so don't complain, lester, that you aren't mentioned here ok.

this picture was taken at ac open house 2006. yes we were that lame and had nothing better to do just a few short months ago. i mean, hello, 2006 marked our j4 year?? and if jon was wearing his school uniform as well this would be one of my absolute favourite favourite pictures. partly because i've lost weight since jc and the way i look now is the way i always wanted to look then, and also because - well it's just the three of us i guess, and it's a nice photo and we're happy and we're in the void deck which is where we had most of the conversations and random playing guitar and singing and praying which were the foundations of our friendship. i spent hours with quen in the HR too, choir rehearsals and all, and i will always remember that i met jon at the first detention class of our j1 year. that was january 2003. hello guys, we're old.

ian merits a picture all to himself because he never seems to be around when we have a camera and the four of us are together. this was taken at jon's house sometime in 2006. or 2005. i can't remember. that's bearie in the foreground, a soft toy which was sitting around on jon's sofa the night we were there.

so we've seen each other through break-ups and exams and miscellaneous other things - our whole ac experience and finding God, jon at the world battle of the bands, quen and the shooting home project, NS - ian (and tim!) and the ptbf scheme, the sun sets. the journalist who wrote the article i brought up in the beginning said something about meeting up with her old school friends, how it was such a nice, safe and comforting thing to do because you know, bad blood or whatever everything's been said and done and it's all water under the bridge and if you've wanted to offend each other, you already have and we've all gotten over it. that bit about having gotten over things hit home. i thought of them when i read that - abi and stella didn't strike me at that point because we've known each other for more than half our lives and with friendships like that it's just - like that la! but i thought of quen and ian and jon because we met at a time when we were just discovering things, just waking up to the fact that there's a whole big bad world out there. when our ideals were challenged but we persisted in sticking to them anyway. endless conversations about love and life and God where we never came to any real conclusions, conversations we will still have in time to come, i hope. the things that matter, you know? and these are friends who've just been there and done that with you and hopefully we won't ever fall out and not be friends anymore. the older you get the harder it is to make friends, really. there's also tim and joses - we would've formed the mai tai club if joses had gotten himself home from korea one day earlier. it's your fault, twinnie!!

and it's not that i don't treasure everybody i've met in uni - eh linus there's a picture of you ok. by default that means there's a picture of lester too. i'm sure i'll come to be really tight for life with some of the people i've gotten to know better in sem 1 (yes we will see each other in court next time hurhur) but it's just different. like i said, with old friends, you've just gotten over things already and you don't really need to worry about offending them or whatever because you just know. you know what i'm trying to say?

people come and go and life goes on but i believe there are some things that will more or less remain the same. to friendship, then. and to complete the absolute cheesiness of this post, in the Father's hands we know, that a lifetime's not too long to live as friends.