No event would best capture the essence of all this than Prom. Not just any prom, but the ACIB Class of 2008 Prom. And it being the eve of Prom, I shall espouse some stuff I got to thinking about while out running prom errands this afternoon.
The first thing that cannot be overstated is the significance of Prom. I know that it is nowhere as huge here as it is in some other places, but I do hope it'll be all that it can be, seeing as it is the last time before Jan 6th. As I've mentioned before, people plan their year around Prom. I'm not one of those though, despite having gone ahead and bought the stuff I'm gonna wear half a year ago. That has proven to be both a relief and a mistake. A relief because, after the trip, I do not have enough time to cobble together everything that I already have thanks to some early shopping. A mistake because it limited my ability to buy anything new or make any large changes. Recently, I've adopted a picture of the 8 players at this year's Shanghai Tennis Masters Cup as my desktop wallpaper, and I've been trying to decide between replicating either Roger Federer or Jo Wilfred Tsonga. The difference is merely in shirt colour, the former white and the latter black, both with black skinny ties and the ubiquitous blazer-pant ensemble.
The second, and apparently last, point that I shall attempt to talk about coherently is the inter-schoolmate dynamic. Being friends with someone because you share the same school, and more importantly the same class (or classes, though this has not happened to me, and subject classes count only for those in the very very non-intact), co-curricular activity or some other collective that requires spending extended periods of time together (more often than not in familiar spaces on a regular basis) is very different, at least for a person of my ilk, than, say, being friends with someone from the extra-academic realm (we talked about our "other" lives outside this common setting one of the evenings at Wah Chee when Mel mentioned that she couldn't imagine any of us in any other context other than school). No matter how far-reaching our lives beyond school stretch (and the range of this is pretty large and extreme I realize), the person one becomes is directly correlated to the people one spends the most time with in this context, by sheer quantity of time and degree of contact. I think each year in each school will have a unique mix, but in my experience that has been wider than most (but only by a year), there is something additionally interesting about the mix here at ACIB '08. This stems from 3 things. First, the nature of the programme is entirely different from anything offered in the local context. Second, the cohort is far smaller, and therefore far more connected. Third, the inflow of people from outside the system during the last 2 years impacted the dynamic more than it would have if everyone came in from different backgrounds, and yet impacted it less precisely because so many of us shared a similar background.
One thing that has been on my chest for a while and which I'm reminded of on an eerily constant basis is the secretive nature of the human condition. Trust me personally when I say that everyone has secrets. I bear testament to the sheer depth to which secrets can go and can remain undiscovered. The reason I'm talking about this now is because, like I mentioned, Prom is the last time we'll be meeting communally. It is more than likely that if these things aren't talked about now, they will remain secrets or gossip fodder amongst those who know (a very select collection of people, which is larger than I had first imagined but exactly those I had thought would be in the know) in the immediate term or amongst the wider community during reunions and such. On so many levels, we meander in between (as adriel would have said) the weight of things left unsaid.
What this post lacks in coherence I make up for by the degree to which I'm revealing my thoughts publicly. Those who reads this will either nod in knowing acknowledgment or try to put names and faces to allusions I've made. I'm under no illusion that I know even a fraction of what goes on, but the stuff I do know is the stuff that matters. Information revealed and kept is the key that keeps the balance of all things related to the inter-person dynamic.
