Week 23: I am like Aesop from Aesop's Fables.

remember your first year in secondary school? everything seemed so new and strange and strangely intimidating. finally, after 6 years of looking up to those impossibly tall kids wearing the aquamarine blue pinafore THAT HAD NO SIDES (or olive-vomit looking trousers, if you're a boy), if was finally your turn.

check out the school compound - it's so fucking huge until can get lost that kind!!
look at the size of the padang - wtf la, i can finally realise my dreams of playing kejar-kejar All-Stars and improve my stamina and track-time for the 1500m track event at the same time!!
omg look at the F5 seniors - da ge, wo ai ni!!
see the canteen - WHY SO BIG WAN!? wah so many choices i feel like i just died and went to food court heaven!!

yup, it was the canteen of SMKJB which had me most enthralled. you see, back in primary school, the canteen was really tiny (for tiny people la) and the selection of food back then was only so-so, although in their defense they had amazing chicken rice which i still think back fondly about till this day. but the SMKJB canteen? the SMKJB i LOVED. why? because they had the greatest selection of bottled carbonated soft drinks i've ever seen!

ok la, let's backtrack abit first to my sad childhood. you see, when i was a kid, i was only allowed to drink milk, rose syrup/bandung, juice, soyabean and water. i don't remember having been allowed to drink coke or the like - even when i ate in kfc or mcDs, my dad would order orange juice. and i was cool with that, you know? i didn't really care, cos i liked orange juice! yet, i always knew about the near mythical coke and the properties it had (ahem). which is why something snapped in my synapses the moment i saw the bottles and bottles of soft drinks in the SMKJB canteen! it was there, it was within my reach, i had the money to pay for it and lastly, MY PARENTS WEREN'T THERE!

oh holies of holies.

and they weren't in the ugly plastic bottles ok? they came in authentic 1970s looking glass bottles with the metal cap (which i would fervently collect to play bottlecaps - if you understand what i'm trying to say - and i was quite awesome at bottlecaps too ok, don't play i exhibited boy-tendencies growing up) and they were all neatly stacked into those plastic crates. i can still picture the scene when i close my eyes...

mel walks up to the kakak dibelakang kaunter.

Mel: kak (actually, i never knew if it was a kakak or an abang cos she looked like an abang but acted like a kakak), coke satu botol.
Kakak That Looks Like An Abang But Acts Like A Kakak: Iya.
M: Brapa? (even though i know it's rm1.10, i still have to ask everytime auto-reflex)
KTLLAABALAK: sringgit sepluh sen, amoi. ais kat situ, amoi.
M: ah tankew. grabs a plastic cup filled to the brim with ice and walks off.

every single day. and sometimes, i would buy up to 3 bottles a day; one for consumption in the canteen, and the other two to fill up my plastic water bottle in case i felt like drinking some coke whilst working out the intricacies of Zaman Kegemilangan Melaka.

needless to say, by the end of Form 1, coke, pepsi and the likes had wrecked havoc on my system. i became fat from all that sugar, and i mean, omfg why is she so fucking fat wait is that a hippo waddling and wheezing in the padang playing kejar-kejar?! and not only did i become fat, all that carbonic acid had eaten way at my stomach lining. everytime i had a sip of coke, i would get terrible stomach pains akin to gastric pains and i would cirit-birit..HAHAHAHA!

that was when i knew, my love affair with soft drinks had to end. i was locked in a destructive relationship and any continuation would've seen me in the hospital with a ruptured stomach wall. so i stopped. cold turkey. i drank only water and nothing else. the stomach pains ceased. the weight dropped off - i was no longer a hippo trying to play kejar-kejar, i was merely chubby , like how i still am now (hangs head in despair). i avoided the canteen during recess after that (all through the end of high school wtf) and when all my friends were sitting at the long tables eating their mee goreng or nasi lemak ayam or WHATEVER, i was at the padang on those impossibly hard and uncomfortable cement benches daydreaming, emo-ing, or watching the love of my life Chooi*, play basketball. HAHAHAHAHA!

now you know why and how i became so emo. i had a lot of free time to think and ponder. 5 days a week, 30 minutes each day.

and that was how i learnt my first ever lesson in life: no matter how much you love something, if it starts becoming toxic to you YOU FUCKING TURN YOUR BACK ON IT! because at the end of the day, all you actually truly have is yourself. no coke is worth it.

*ok la, he's no longer the love of my life ok? don't go spreading rumours.