Hort Park: Not bad a place for a nature freak but a horrendous rendezvous point for anyone with loathing for the sun (or someone like Eddy Cull [I think that's what his name has become on the class blackboard]). Lacking creativity - e.g. the lawn is named 'HortLawn'.
Art: Hella fun.
Art Competitions: Totally sucky and utter waste of money and time.
Beautex: ?
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Today wasn't bad but the fact that I had to wake up at freaking 06:45 kind of killed the mood. Of course, I started stirring an hour before that (blame my physical memory for remembering the time I usually wake up at to get to school), fell asleep again, woke up, decided I still had time, fell asleep, woke up, grumble about stupid 'wake up spells', fell asleep, hears mother yelling at us (my bro and I) to wake up, woke up, wanted to sleep in another 5 minutes, fell asleep, woke up exactly 5 minutes later.
Lol. That pretty much summarizes my waking up today.
My mum drove me to school and I got there really early, by, like, 07:20 or something. I spotted Kimberly getting off the piano and going off with Awa (introductions came a little later) to the Art Room. She was a little unsure of who I was, but then welcomed me with a broad smile (like always). We marched down to the Art Room (well, I kind of ran, but still) to grab Kimberly's stuff for the art competition we were heading to Hort Park for. Some kind of design-the-tissue-box competition. Grace walked in a little while later.
We ended up bringing with us a box full of art materials (that somehow was only shared among Kimberly, Grace, Awa and I) and some boards for drawing on. Registration took many, many minutes. We just stood around until it was our turn to flash out EZlink cards to confirm identification and pay S$5 for registration fee and then collect our drawing paper, a briefing sheet and a goodie bag. The goodie bag was awesome, but a little overflowing with tissue related contents. There was like 5 kinds of drinks, 2 maggie mee packets, 2 lollipops, 1 huge tissue box, 3 packets of tissue, 1 packet of mosquito repellant wipes, 1 packet of milo cereal and 2 mini packets of biscuits.
Briefing started long after we registered and found comfortable seats in the multi-purpose hall. While we were waiting, there was a short slide show of tissue products by Beautex. I noticed they really liked flowers. There was one design that caught my eye so I decided to imitate it to an extent. Briefing was really brief and we were let off soon. We didn't wander off far when we came across a really favourable spot. We initially wanted to sit at an area a little left to where we ended up but there were too many ants so we scrammed to the huge open concrete platform in the middle of freaking nowhere. Wonder what it was there for. Kimberly went to get the water and Awa went away doing something. I know Grace and I were the only ones not doing anything during preparation.
_BEWARE_BORINGNESS_
I couldn't think of anything really original to draw so I 'imitated' the design I saw before the briefing. Everybody was using pencil to sketch out their artworks but I just started with painting immediately. Since I wanted a straight edge, I was so smart (EGO!) to use the briefing sheet handed to us during registration and used it as a ruler as I painted the blue. So I kind of screwed it up, but so what? Anyway, I originally wanted to drip paint over the blue are (you know, like 'pop-up' strings of acrylic all over) but figured I couldn't without proper equipment and resorted to forming them with brushes of various thickness. They were all of strange colours. I mean, yellow and green?
When I was done with the stuff in the blue area I picked up some green and made some leaf shape thingums along the only line that got out of the blue (that was intentional). I then figured it looked a bit empty so I added 5 red dots spaced close together to form a flower (Beautex IS obviously obsessed with flowers, I mean, Hort Park?). A few more here and there and it looked better. I thought the blue area looked boring, so I picked up the brust I painted red with and drew a red line in the blue area. Then I inspected the whole image and still found it's composition ugly. I picked up my brust and painted 4 purple hibiscus of various sizes at the top right. I was pretty happy with it and then slacked off for the rest of the 45 minutes left of 2 hours.
_END_OF_BORINGNESS_
Grace's was turning out very nicely in a style I greatly admire. Awa's was...wow. If not for the fact that the deers became black at the end. I liked them better white. She'd probably have won something if not for the seemingly inappropriate air about it. I mean, it looked really emo and the theme was 'Life is Beautiful'. Kimberly's was good too, if not a bit hasty during painting (damn their short time limit). We turned them in with 10 minutes to spare then set about washing our stuff in the drain right beside the platform. I think we stained it sky blue and purple permanently.
It got really hot out there so we quickly gathered our stuff and trudged off under the shade (which many people were taking refuge under too). We just sat around and talked about Bleach and stuff. I read the Chinese book we were supposed to read for Chinese PT but I think I left it at the bus stop before I boarded the bus home (that happens at 13:45 or something, much later than the point I'm narrating).
Mrs. Lai found our hide-out at the edge of the empty koi pond (seriously, no water, no koi) and brought us over to the rest of the RGS people. So we sat around and talked more. When it was time to go in we did, bathing in the cool air-con. Kimberly and I couldn't find seats so we took to sitting most unRGS-like at the back of the room on the floor. We were both going on about how we wouldn't win. Kimberly and Grace seemed to have some sort of confidence in mine because it was 'very tissue box-like'. I had to admit it WAS very tissue box. I mean, it looked like the typical design except 100 times uglier.
That aside, prize presentation began and they started with Junior category and went on to Tweens (what the hell is that?) which Kimberly mistook for Teens until I told her. Teens consolation prizes started to be handed out and I was feeling really nervous. I mean, I was shortlisted, but so were at least 19 others. So I just sat there not doing anything. I had a feeling that consolation would have felt like a loss to me. The first consolation went to Grace, and we clap for her. I mean, hello, our school, our club-mate, our friend. Consolation prizes went on and at the 5th and final consolation prize, Victoria (Sec3 from SAP) got the prize.
So I didn't get into consolation. I thought mine would have at most merited that, so imagine the utter shock and numbness when I found out I got 3rd. Okay, third's really just the 2nd loser, but still, to win something above consolation? I was really close to consolation but I scraped past it. I think I would be in the consolations if Awa made it. What a close shave, not that I was really glad she couldn't because her painting technique is really, really good.
I took my place beside Victoria with a proud smile on my face, well, as proud as you can get when you are wary that there are many people staring at you. Then 2nd prize went to another RGS student, Sec1 SAP (yes, I know I suck, losing to Sec1, but hey, you can't blame me, it's probably only the fifth time I've picked up a paintbrush in RGS). Victoria said it'll be cool if first prize were also an RGS girl, so we held our breaths and YES! RGS too (Sec1 also, help me, I'm feeling a bit depressed). Okay, a bit elitist here, but yes, we were all glad that we dominated the Teen's category. Oh yeah, they handed us envelopes when we went up stage. We took a few group photos with prize winners of all categories. We were later told to collect our prizes. I was like, Isn't it the envelope? I mean, it does say 1st, 2nd, 3rd or consolation prize...
Then we opened them and found they were empty. The table clearly stated that all of us were supposed to have some resort stay voucher or something. So we came to the conclusion that it was all a hoax and scam and waited in a long long queue to get our stuff. While waiting we took a few RGS people photos, then got interviewed by some Beautex people. I think we badmouthed a bit too much about Mr. Wong.
The collection took so long we finally decided to leave before we collected it first hand and they said they would mail it to us.
*shrugs*
We then took the mini bus back to school. Kimberly was emo-ing something about not getting a prize and her parents killing her for both that and losing to her mortal (the one who got 2nd). So I locked my happiness away and emo-ed with her.
EMO.
