Unfinished Business

Nearly 4 days later, what I didn't do continues to haunt me. There is always next year, I say, but the wait is torturous—and even then, what I didn't do continues to haunt me.

I always take great pride in planning everything to the last detail, and having a list of things to accomplish. So when something I absolutely look forward to, make great preparations for—no, *extraordinary* preparations for—does not get achieved, firstly, I have myself to blame, and then I can point the finger at other things.

Nobody will understand, because no one has even tried. It is too easily dismissed; it is deep. What on the surface seems superficial, to me has become my sustenance. You know how after some time one looks forward to the same little pursuits, the highlights of every year? That's how it has become for me. And the worst part is, it is never guaranteed and the people are *never* constant. It's like your hometown; over the years, everything changes around you, and although you change as well, you are only hanging on to fragile memories which no one will care about.

I tell myself, it takes time—everything will pass, eventually. But the reality remains. The sliver of comfort I can take in this is that well, some things have already been decided for the future. But there is that bitter taste in the mouth: what did I come for—work? Why did I linger? Why didn't I get there faster? Why did I sleep in the day? Useless, it was. Why waste half the day? It's not the first time I've sacrificed for this, anyway. For them—anything! As the last legitimate event, why not pull out all the stops and then laugh about it afterwards? Too many things went wrong, too few things went well.

You could say, "Concentrate not on what didn't happen, but on what did." I tried. It backfired. Some things *did* go exactly to plan. But what *didn't* happen was so huge and so basic that it stares at me in the face every time I don't see my face. Because it is a personal choice, a personal plan, not fulfilling it gnaws at you slowly from the inside.

I now depend on a new but wholly antisocial event to uplift me. I hope it goes some way to mending the open wounds that remain. It is completely different by nature, so I don't expect closure at all. But if I plan my day, and take a step back and sense what is important, I may be able to heal some things. But nothing will compare to a hundred and thirty people over a fire by the sea.

In the meantime, what I didn't do will continue to haunt me.

 

NightWalk: How did I get into it?

Everything has to have a beginning, doesn't it? I didn't step into SP with the desire to scare people. (That would be a tragedy.) As an interested Games Personnel in MIT FOC 06/07, I tagged along during NightWalk XX (Xploration and Xperience, as we called it) and participated in the planning recces in the dead of night with my seniors and peers: Chalk, Yap Meng, Jun Hao, Teck Chau, Joshua etc. I had no interest in them other than the excitement of exploring the school at night. Often we would end at 1 or 2 in the morning!

Even though I helped in making props for NightWalk 06/07, and made a few breakthroughs, my interest in NightWalk wasn't really there. I did find out that my prop-making methods used a LOT of masking tape, though. (It was the main ingredient. To this day Joshua, my senior PropMaster, still reminds me of my voracious appetite for masking tape.) As a scarer, my interest was only in perfecting my assigned scare point. MIT FOC NightWalk 06/07 was largely considered to be a success, I am pleased to say.

A serious interest in NightWalk stirred within me somewhere in the middle of 2006, well after FOC 06/07 in April. It began as a series of scare ideas in a notebook I used to keep track of school assignments and the like; a leisure activity. My brain was constantly thinking of ways to scare people: I couldn't walk anywhere in school without chancing upon a perfect place for a scare point. They were always simple ideas: a figure appearing, a sudden sound.

The scares were visualised in vivid detail. Having been intimately involved in theater and the arts since young, my methods for bringing a scare point to life were decidedly dramatic, and I strove to recreate what I imagined in a NightWalk setting, in real time. Thus all my ideas were rather elaborate, requiring a whole team of props people in the background operating the different effects in a single scare. Not very practical in a NightWalk setting, where manpower and ease of setup is paramount, I confess. But the main Idea always was: make the Scare seem Real. Something that will make you go: "Was that...?"

Black light theatre helped a lot. It involves doing something against a black background, such that a puppeteer wearing black can control a prop ghost without being seen. It was easy to see how it could be applied in terms of NightWalk scares, where darkness is a given.

The natural progression was to think of the Route itself and how to improve it. The best parts of SP could be strung together to form a route that is scary as well as easy to demarcate. I asked for advice from my friends and seniors who had organised NightWalks before, whether in SP or secondary school camps, and they helpfully offered their tips and knowledge. I proposed a split route to take advantage of all the hotspots in SP, and to this end, in February 2007 I set off on a photography expedition on my own, where I took pictures of this proposed route.

Sad to say, the proposed route never did gain any following, due to lack of manpower. But the pictures were useful somewhat.

The biggest event was the loss of the notorious MLT2 and Childcare Centre, in late April 2007. I regret not conquering my fears (yes, I was fearful of the MLT2 area, with all its stories!) and not taking photos of the MLT2 and Childcare Centre, which were part of my proposed route. I only took pictures of them from far away. I daresay if someone was there to accompany me, I would have ventured into those areas. And explored them to death. (Pardon the pun.)

Those ideas expanded until I decided to gather all my thoughts and put them together, and this I did. The rest, as they say, is history. My NightWalk Folder grew and grew until today it holds records of nearly everything about NightWalk since FOC 07/08 (and a bit of FOC 06/07). DMIT NightWalk Event 2010 forced me to think of everything else in a NightWalk, from traffic control to route setup, and this I did in collaboration with my juniors at the time. (It didn't go smoothly, I'm afraid.)

To date, I've participated in close to 10 NightWalks, inside and outside DMIT. All those NightWalks and recces I've taken part in have really deepened my knowledge of the school. There may be some things I don't know, but I'll leave it to my juniors to further their knowledge of the school on their own. I'll only facilitate them and offer help where requested.

However long my involvement in NightWalk has been, I dislike to bog down my juniors with my ideas on what a NightWalk is supposed to be. So now, I'm in the process of collecting my discoveries into a Manual, and then leaving it to them to reinvent and innovate the NightWalk. Some rules have to stay, like noise control and clandestinity. Others? They decide.

You should never forget something just because you must. I will never deny my involvement in NightWalk. It has been a hallmark of my time in SP, and I hope others will receive insight from what I've discovered.

Thanks to Yong Xian for this photo. My Signature Scare; the Sadako-Goes-Towards-You. Perfected in FOC 06/07; original location W4/W5 Emergency Corridor. (Here it is located behind W13.) Never fails to scare the living daylights out of campers, especially as the first scare point in the NightWalk. =D

Recent Developments

I'm looking for the soundtrack to The Lost World Jurassic Park. That movie. Hope it doesn't become too difficult. Usually things that I search for are hard to find. And I only find that out when I actually begin searching. Terribly frustrating, isn't it?

A case in point is my 26-inch saw (refer to Dec 20, 2006 and Jan 22, 2007 for the full story). And a more recent item was a toy I saw in my childhood called the Big Big Loader (which I will elaborate upon in subsequent posts). You never know how hard it is to find something until you search for it.

Had been reminiscing recently about my Tekong experience. Thought of posting it, but these things are better said than written. My experience in HTA now is also not worth recording, I feel. Some things are better recorded immediately, like holidays and such, and some are better in retrospect.

Lots of things hanging in the balance. The Black Book (vérsion écrite), I mean. I don't know why, ever since MIT FOC 05/06, I became subjective, and endeavored to record long events like camps in their entirety, which required tens of pages or more. Writer's block would halt production, and the Book would be closed to new stuff till the current one was finished. That was the fate of the second book.

And because of that, my whole poly life went unrecorded (except for camps). Somemore got a lot of things to write. Now mostly forgotten. A bit sad. I've since begun new Books to fill this gap. One day I'll try to remember all the singular things that happened in 3 years of poly.

I rarely end posts at such a low note.

WAWAS! - The Second Performance

--7 of 19--

The schedule for today was a full dress rehearsal, plus the curtain call. Nothing much happened, except that Cikgu suggested changing the character of Ray & Do in SHIT to a blind man and a half-blind man. Jeff and I played these roles, and so we were the most affected. We went through the full dress as these disabled people, and decided at the end that they were not suitable.

The idea was scrapped.

That night's performance seemed very prestigious! Even though there were lesser people than the first night, those that came were more renowned. (My parents and grandparents came too!)


A small LED light was set up backstage. It was used as illumination during the show because backstage lights switched on would spill out onto the stage. Sash (our lighting woman) said it did not matter because no light could be seen, but I disagreed with her view. Thus the lights remained turned off and the LED light plus an electric lamp provided sufficient illumination for the backstage area. All makeup and costumes were done outside, and during the show the backstage served as a waiting area for the actors.

The highlight of the night (of every night, come to think of it) was the part in Kucing where the prostitute seduces the old man. Nizal was the prostitute, and Jihad was the old man. On the first night Nizal did not sing his song! He simply forgot, and said out the lyrics as dialogue. Dressing up for him was a hasty affair: he only had about a minute from Pelita to Kucing to get into costume, and even then it was without his purple corset. *That* went on just before his seduction part. Very flustered, the costume people were.

The audience there was very cold. They didn't laugh much, and on the rare occasions when they found something funny, most simply smiled. So the jokes prevalent in our plays carried on in silence.

Jihad's sarong was quite loose. It came off twice in two nights. He managed to hide behind some boxes and correct his sarong, we were relieved to see.

I had the Bright Eyes Syndrome, an anomaly which happens when only one eye is exposed to bright light, and the other left in darkness. Peeping through the curtains led me to suffer this, and I walked for some minutes slightly disoriented.

Didi looked at the box.

3 seconds passed.

Why didn't he kick it?

Then he continued.

All the Kucings were left wondering why he didn't remember his actions. Mai was left to carry the box into its rightful position.

And in SHIT, Jeff mixed up his lines. Luckily I recovered in time with the tempo. "#@!x*& memang hebat..."

WAWAS! - Mama Asmida, and our First Performance

--5 of 19--

The past few days were not without adventure. Many events have occurred, some which are humourous to the extreme, some which are singularly unusual, and some which I am not at liberty to disclose. I shall describe them as they come to me and as I remember them.

There are two kinds of Mama. One is Mama India. Another is Mama Asmida. Well, Mama Asmida sent a message to Sarah Atiqa on Wednesday afternoon, enquiring about our general health and well-being, also mentioning that we appeared in the newspaper yesterday! It was an interview about Wawas, conducted about 10 days prior to our departure. How thoughtful of her!

Back to the plates of chicken wings laid before us on the table. It is an appetizer before our dinner on the night of our first performance. This dinner is also a post-mortem for the performance (the fastest one I can remember; usually by the time it is held, we would have already forgotten everything.)

Earlier on, there were lots of mistakes and shortcomings (the most fun part of any post-mortem, in any case!) Jihad related how he rushed into position during Kucing.

"5...4...3...2...1.......Vroom!" he darted to his spot. It was Very Dark. And there was a box in his way.

(Crash!)

Nizal's error was a more appalling one. This was what he was supposed to say:

"...menjadi angin, menghembuskan bara..."

And this is what he actually said:

"...menghembus gembra..."

Even worse, he could not help but chuckle to himself! (In full view of everyone!)

During SHIT, Didi startled a makcik in the front row. Twice. Once with Asmida when they screamed at each other and another time during his "Gol!" solo. The makcik nearly fell off her chair!

Kucing had mistakes of the Late, Forgotten and Untuned categories. There were forgotten tails, tails that came off, dropped cat's ears, and tails that lengthened themselves in an alarming way as the show progressed! It was Didi's tail that had this defect. By the middle of Kucing his tail was encircling him haphazardly.