Once In A Lifetime

It was just noisy. There was no one on stage but the microphone was still there. It was like the microphone was calling me to hold it and speak. I shut myself from the world and was reluctant to get up. Moments later, I slowly opened my eyes and looked right into my handphone. Oh damn, I was late!

It was supposed to be a big day. My school was having a function to celebrate the students who had scored straight As in last year's SPM and STPM examination. I had asked my sister to wake me up at 5 o'clock in the morning but she didn't.

I've always had this problem of waking up from sleep in the morning. Even when a few years ago when we felt the tremors of an earthquake happening in Indonesia at home, I was sleeping soundly until my mum woke me up. Don.t ask me why but I just can't hear the alarm (most of the times) when I'm asleep. And my reliance on others doesn't pay much dividends either.

Everything was in a rush that morning. I skipped a few exercises in the morning. I had to gush in my breakfast because I need to eat a lot in the morning so that I won't feel hungry easily. And that wasn't even the worst part of that morning.

The previous afternoon, as I was watching Naruto Shippuden episodes, I received a call from my school. I didn't recognize the voice but the person just asked me if I wanted to give a speech during the function the next day. I thought it would be ok to just go up there and speak. How wrong I was!

I always have a problem with self confidence when I have to speak to a big group of people. I stutter and sometimes sweat and have jelly legs. About 2 years ago, I knew that this had to stop and I decided to boost my self confidence. Ever since then, I've been trying to take up challenging confidence boosting tasks to complete. I knew that this speech would just be the right tonic to further increase my confidence.

I did feel the pressure though. I purposely refused to prepare a script because it would've been too troublesome to write it down and memorise and then talk while trying to look at the paper and the crowd at the same time. I just decided to speak out my mind.

With one mind on my speech, I was drove a little too fast to school. My mum took the car back home as she had to go to work after that. As I laid my feet right outside my school, I decided to forget everything I was preparing (like I always do before exams) and enjoy the moment with my friends.

It was so good to be seeing old faces again. Some have changed but many were pretty much the same. Some were surprised to see me as I had changed my hairstyle to suit my longer hair. I received lots of good reviews about my longer hair but I'm sure many were startled when they saw me at first because I've never kept my hair long before.

About half an hour after after the supposed starting time (haizz.....Malaysian just love to maintain their insanely bad timing), we were asked to take our places in the hall. Just out of curiosity, I asked the teacher in charge about when I was supposed to give my speech. And she gave me quite a shocking answer.

My speech was going to be the first thing on the agenda after we sang the school song. My pre-speech blues were creeping up on me again. But, thanks to one of my friends who kept on giving me the encouragement I needed, I managed to remain calm as the moment just kept inching closer.

And then as it was supposed to happen, I was called up to give my speech on my secret to success in the SPM examination. To put it exactly, I just said what came to my mind that time. I did prepare of course but I wasn't thinking about the order or anything like that. I just said what I wanted to say (the typical me).

I told them about how important it was to set a goal in life. Then I gave a few tips about how they can work towards their dreams and added a few study tips afterwards. I also touched about the common misconceptions among students these days.

Maybe the teachers didn't know about it when they decided to ask me to give a speech but I've got a very unorthodox, out of the world, style of studying. I went to school to have fun and listen during lessons, had lots of fun doing stupid stuff in school, only studied at home and that too after finishing every ounce of energy while training and never bothered burying my head in books right before the exams. I used to think that some people might have been happy if I had done badly in exams because I just did the things I love while they researched the entire book. But......too bad for them. :P

Once I was done with the speech, I was relieved and happy. As I took my seat again, one of the teachers in front of me told me that I spoke like a motivational speaker. I received lots of good reviews from my friends. One of my friends whom I considered the best one could ever be on stage told me that my speech was really good and admitted he wouldn't have been able to do the same thing.

After my speech, there was  another speech, this time by an ex-student who was representing the STPM top scorers. Then, there was the prize giving ceremony as the top scorers were given plaques and certificates and the ones with the straight A+ were given an additional RM100. The last part of the function was the photo session.

As my friends and I were making our way to the canteen to fill out hungry tummies, one of my friends said this "Dei, damn chun lah." ('dei' is like the casual 'bro' in Tamil, 'chun' is awesome in I-don't-know-what language, and 'lah is just a Malaysian slang which means nothing). And then I replied "What is chun?". And then he told me something that took me back through years and years of joy, laughter and tears.

He said " Damn chun lah seeing you in Standard 4 (the year I met him, my first ever friend in my new school) and now up that stage". I can't put the tone or the feelings he put in that sentence in this blog post but what he said was just nostalgic because he was the one who had been with me through all these years. And the words he said really made me realize that I had grown up a long long way from that little boy who used to read Harry Potter books to the matured (ok, maybe half-matured) teenager I am now.

Although I thought my speech was quite ok, I didn't want to type it back in my blog because I considered it a once in a lifetime speech. It was a once in a lifetime speech for me to tell my school friends how I did it in examinations and a once in a lifetime speech that my friends will hear from me about the kind of person that I was. Honestly, I'm just happy I left high school with a bang and gave the students there something to ponder upon for a long long time........