Mischief

Even if I have wings, I still need to rest #2: Riding the Jam

A school principal I was having coffee with today was telling me about school gangs. Well, they are not quite gangs until they do something "criminal", she clarified. Until then, they are just "mischievous". I asked her what exactly would constitute something criminal, as opposed to plain mischief. Waving a parang around and chopping off someone's arm off with it would be, she said as she recounted an incident involving students at a park near her school. And though it was not exactly criminal, getting caught smoking four times in a row will actually warrant a stay in boy's remand! But ripping a leg off a chair in class and throwing it at a teacher, for no apparent reason, while she is writing on the board is just crazy - even if the psychiatric test results are ambivalent.

OK, my schools days are way dull compared to all this.

Being in an all-girls school then, I suppose we had a penchant for the theatrical instead. So in place of a real fight, I remember that our class had choreographed a fight between a dyke-ish girl and someone she hated. We even had blood pellets made with a drinking straw and food dye, which the girl bit into as she was "punched". It was after the school examinations and in that brief lazy lull before the O-levels, we thought up this drama to scare an especially timid history teacher. The teacher cried (something about having been traumatised by a street fight she had once witnessed. Rrright).

Once, the entire school brought alarm clocks and synchronised them to all ring at 11am. Another time, I think it was April Fool's, all the classes in my year brought umbrellas to morning assembly and opened them simulataneously after the national anthemn and pledge. With all that energy, I say we could have orchestrated the entire National Day Parade. And just as well, girl gangs weren't all the rage way back then.