Murder One

Because it isn't enough to have a spike in COVID-19 cases, we now have murder in a local secondary school.

Yes, it's a little Johnny-come-lately of me to talk about this. No, it's not to capitalise on a tragedy. I am an alumnus from there, and the news simultaneously shocked and not shocked me; it shocked me in the sense that someone actually managed to pull off a killing (granted it was stupid because the person still got arrested), and it did not shock me in the sense that it really was going to be a matter of time when something like that happened, if the culture that I was exposed to some twenty odd years back still holds.

I am not going to lie. I did not have many fond memories of my secondary school. Much of it was spent being a social outcast for the most part, partly because I didn't come from some prestigious primary school, partly because I didn't like speaking Mandarin as my default language, and partly because I lived way out in the north-east as compared to the westies that dominated the school. Mind you, this was back when the school itself was nearer the west-south-west side of West Coast Road, before it moved off into the deep west that is Boon Lay. Despite the many averse memories of the place, I would say that studying there during my teenage years have shaped me into the crazed bastard that I am today---the impact of that place on my psyche is definitely undeniable. Almost anything that counts as a success/failure that I have today can be traced back to something that happened from that era.

But I digress heavily, even though the intent was to establish relevance.

I said that it did not shock me because that place had pretty strict rules on what is permissible, and what isn't---this went beyond that of the usual school rules and veered into the social rules. Cliques were the norm, and unlike regular cliques, these were elitist in nature. The elitism is not at the level of snobbery where there was no way out---they were lily-livered enough that if one had a strong enough personality, they would rather stay the hell away instead of attempting vengeance for conformance. Grades were important, but that was a given from the get-go due to the special status of this class of secondary schools---they were a part of the SAP schools, the second most elitist schools after the so-called Independent schools. The history of these classifications are better explained through the monster article on Education in SIN city on Wikipedia instead of an out-of-school middle-ager like me.

So much back-story for digression. The point is, I would not be surprised if the oppressive environment played some part in causing the outburst. This is strictly armchair theorising---I was never there, do not know the people involved, and am only writing down what I feel/think about the situation here because it involved a school that I was once a part of. Anyone who dares to claim otherwise about me is lying through their teeth.

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The day's been a tad weird. I started off trying to advance the main quest in Grim Dawn, but quit [totally without raging] when my Blademaster got pulped one too many times due to limited fighting space by enemies that are a tad too high-level for me. Enemy levels are weird in Grim Dawn---generally speaking, one is incentivised to play longer if one wants an easier game in general, since the scaling of the enemy levels in the session are tied to whatever the level of the character is at the start of the session.

Subsequently, I carried on reading some more A Thousand Sanities by Adam Gopnik. Then the news of the murder came up, and a couple of hours later, I decided to react to it here.

And so, that's what it is. I'm heading out for a long walk tomorrow, my first in a long time. Let's hope that all the weird tiredness that I have been feeling isn't going to get in the way tomorrow.

That's all I have for now. Till the next update.