My letter, cyber, virtual affairs recollected

Happy 2008!

Today I remember the fun times I had back in CGS and I actually had my days of writing to pen pals! But none as exciting as XY's jailbird penpal who could had been doing his time for theft or maybe rape or maybe murder!!! But that's all our speculations, never got round to clarifying...

Anyway, one of the penpals that I wrote most often to was a german gal [*gasp!* the german connection started way back when I was 15]. She made me send her all the stamps she pasted on the envelope so that she could recycle it. She was as smart as my ah pa who is Singapore's top of the tops stamp recycling activist. Anyway I stopped writing, cos she's a she getting boring or rather our exchanges were getting insipid. To be honest, I can learn all I want about german culture through the encyclopedia (there wasn't wikipedia then). I think my intention of penpaling was really living the fairy tale of how love can develop over distance through stamps, ink and papers. Penpals must be out of fashion now, heh?

Then came poly days when I got addicted to....(ahem...it's a bit embarassing to admit) *whisper* ircing. All those time-wasting days in the computer labs, doing nothing but chatting frivolous small-talks with folks whom I fantasized to be cute, lanky and who knew, turned out to be oily kwalis. And there was one senior whom I've been apparently in contact with (but never met) even after he graduated - I wiped him out of memory so cleanly that I seriously got no freaking idea since when I had a sworn brother who addressed me as "dearest pi** mei mei" in his last desperate letter to me, to ask why I haven't been writing... I quit school-ircing about 4 - 5 months after I first started. To be more specific, I quit after all fantasy bubbles burst.

After graduating, amid the struggles over boring work life, I actually found time again to entangle myself in cyber web of friends. The whole head over heels cycle repeated and I imagined a possible high-class Gucci get-together (derived from Khoo-Chee, and I shan't explain why...it's simply too embarassing). This time it wasn't that horrifying, and I actually entertained the idea of turning virtuality to reality. For those who knew, the story didn't end that way of course. When the shield of virtuality vanished, the magic of imagination dissipated too....

This saga, ends, once and for all, any future indulgence in building a friendship that started on the basis of mystique. The face-to-face getting-to-know-you is the still the best bridge in bringing people together. I speak from experience.