Least Resistance

How strange it is, then, to find myself at this juncture.

On request from the School, I've agreed to go back and take up a relief teaching job that gives me three classes to teach English to. Not Literature, however, but English, the more technical, basic business of proficiency with the language and its uses. Appreciating the beauty of words should not come before you respect what words can do, after all, to prevent that adoration from being just plain blind idolatry.

And so I find myself on the verge of beginning my first lessons tomorrow. Will be going through Ray Bradbury's The Pedestrian, a text that I remember using in my own classes there more than six years ago. And will be working side by side with teachers that, after six years, have changed so little. A surprising number of them, I find, are still in the school, still shepherding batch after batch of students through secondary school. Contrasted with the impressions I got of encroaching change at the dawn of 2008, all this constancy and permanence seems a bit oppressive, way beyond what I needed to feel like I was coming home. A part of me finds this exercise to be an indulgence in the past - in the way I am seeing things from the other side, now, it is as if I am building a monument of memory to the time I spent in the Chinese High School.

And a part of me also recognises this as a cop-out, as giving in to the path of least resistance. Nothing much wrong with that, per se, but I had told myself before that I would do something that I'd probably never do again in my life this gap year, and top of the list was working with the Duck Tours. But now, I see my schedule filling up with relief teaching, with tuition assignments, with, basically, the things that anyone would expect me to do, and it is not a matter of searching for a job but of prioritising what I should be doing, and what I should give up. Add in travel, and this is fast becoming a year of indulging in safety, in doing things that I am familiar with and will conceivably continue to do in the future.

That being said, though, I am still eager to go back to teach. Call it the fulfilment of my first ambition. Returning to school and seeing it from a different angle, from the angle of a teacher, and from the angle of 21 years of experience, is a thrilling prospect, and everything seems to be coloured by the rose tint of nostalgia. Those hallways, those classrooms mean something to me; have been part of the lore of my memory for so long, and I daresay being brought into close proximity with them at this juncture will irrevocably modify my impression of the time I spent there. And the sunlight of dawn, falling on the familiar vistas of Bukit Timah Road this morning, seemed warmer and more promising than usual: it was one of those special mornings when you notice everything more acutely. But perhaps this latest twist in the plotline doesn't change anything; perhaps the romanticisation has already been happening subtly, and this new proximity merely highlights an already established fact.

Ah, style, perception, interpretation: what does it matter? All this is just fluff - leave it to the debaters to glorify a shade in meaning. I am after the meaning itself. Tear away the ephemerality of romanticism and sentimentality, and if the meaning underlying it is worth cherishing, then that will be evident enough by itself.

*

And soon, it'll be time for Jes to leave again. This winter return has not been very long, and it was shortened by my Borneo trip, leaving little time to actually meet up. But I am glad that we met up anyway. For some people, my memory of them, idealised and venerated by repeated relivings in the absence of fresh input from continuous interaction, would not survive renewed proximity. But I don't feel that is the case for most people, and definitely not for this, one of my oldest friends.

And Kay Hwee is bringing back the Holy Grail itself from the States. Heh, I don't know if anyone else knows friends who would go to such extremes to make someone's day. It will be a special day when we finally unveil this treasure, I am certain. And I will say it again and again - I have been very lucky in my friends. And if I am mistaken, then so much the better, because it means that the world needs must be a more welcoming place than I thought.