When the fog creeps in ...

 

Vancouver in September looks like something straight out of a Ghostly Kisses' album cover, doesn't it?

It's the end of September already? 

With all the shenanigans from the beginning of this chaotic year, I could hardly believe September is coming to an end. It was like yesterday that I was still lolling on the armchair with Sapiens on one hand and a bag of chips on the other -  and here am I, with the new school year getting on my nerves at 10pm. Honestly, the last few weeks of summer flashed by, carrying many goals that I had not ready fulfilled: places to be visited, boba meetings to be taken place, and people to say goodbye to. Apart from spending the last bits of summer sweating from the heatwave and getting jabbed (at last!), I could just return to my all-time habit of downloading e-books and fumbling with the annotation tool. Then all of a sudden, an email popped in my inbox with the name of a vaguely familiar place listed as the sender. As unnerving as it sounded, this email, along with the arrival of September, announced with all of their glories: I could finally go back to school - after 18 months!

It should take me quite a while to travel back in the vast stretches of memory to figure out how much my education had been messed up for the past two years. Right from the middle of March 2020, when a spring break turned into a whopping summer vacation, I could sense something fishy in the air - not because I lived on an island back then 🙃Little did I know that just some virus half the globe away could prevent me from attending graduation, deafening my ear at my first semi-prom, or cleaning my locker up before moving across the country. For the next 18 months, my school was entirely in front of a dull computer monitor, with assignments piling up like there was no tomorrow.  I was merely caught in a series of endless repetitions, just like the characters in Palm Springs. I only had the entire empty living room as my classroom, and the windy balcony with the plots of vegetables as my school field. Although online learning has some perks, such as allowing me to sleep in every single morning and having no due dates, I - an all-time introvert - was actually feeling loneliness seeping in.

But thank heavens, before the vision of talking to my plants to pass time became realized, school reopened again. Going to school for real - even while suffocating under a mask for 8 hours - couldn't make me happier. After the strangest summer I've ever had, I eventually set foot inside a school hall with all of its glories. And blimey, wasn't I prepared for that. The sight of thousands of students flooding the hallway, shrieking to each other while adjusting their mask strings will never cease to imprint in my mind. Believe it or not, I was also grinning under my mask for the whole first day at school, for this day was so surreal. When stepped into my homeroom (where, strangely, I wouldn't set foot again for the whole year except for a few red tape reasons), I could as well as scream in happiness: High school is a real thing! It was just a constant surge of dopamine sweeping in, a fish returned back to the water, a day long-awaited became true.  

Very excited, huh?

What I love so much about school is that it brings in so much about life while bringing me out to my best self. The unique set of feelings at school, such as frustration from failure to open up, or joy after learning that the person sitting next to you gets your sense of humor, suddenly returns. Although I still yearn for freedom at home, when I get to shake off all of my worries and just be me, school is truly a place for me to step out of my comfort zone. Just in this first month of school, I got to talk with everyone in my Math class (thanks to the capricious seating plan that my teacher insists on every single day), practiced my French while chewing fried rice, and tapped my foot on the fascinating rhythms of Rasputin in History (admit it, don't we all do that?) All at the same time, I was fortunate to learn many things that textbooks have never taught: how to spot a smile by the gleam of the eyes, how to appreciate how close we actually are despite social distancing, and how to cherish each second passing by, knowing that we can only see each other through Zoom again any time soon. 

The school principal himself handed in this button to every student at school to commemorate the National Day of Reconciliation (30/9)

Anyway, it's getting really late now, the night of a day off from school in the middle of the week. The classic Vancouver rainy mornings totally ruined my hopes of getting a long-awaited gelato since school started. Before I could complain why tomorrow should also be a day off (because it'll be Friday, after all), I'd just remembered that tomorrow would be a practice day in Math - a break from new cranky derivative problems hurting my brain. This also means a golden opportunity to add a new photo to my wacky album of weird things at school...such as this one below. Till next month!

A rather curious scene at lunch...



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