forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past

i wanted to share a nice moment i experienced on the bus the other day..basically my mummy had asked me to buy some groceries..and given the messy me, i just had so many things in my hands, held haphazardly as i boarded the bus, in a bid to rush onto my long awaited 178 without leaving anything behind..and given the lazy me, i didn't file my notes into separate folders but simply stacked them beneath the cover of my file..as i got to my seat, while i attempted to look into my ntuc bag to ensure my bread wasn't crushes by the cans of condensed milk, MY WHOLE STACK OF (UNSTAPLED) NOTES SLIPPED OUT OF MY FILE AND SPILLED ALL OVER THE FLOOR! i was so argh cos i was irritated with all the nonsense in my hands and paiseh cos the surface area my notes covered was so huge! haha..(i sound so drama!) but anyway, what made my day was really the helpfulness of everyone around..two middle-aged guys immediately bent down to gather my notes and passed it to me after that, while the lady on the seat beside mine (whom i thought looked unfriendly at first) helped to hold on to my stuff on the seat to prevent them from falling off..what started off as an embarrassing moment turned out to be one which made me see the goodness in people, however small their acts of kindness might have been :)

on a sadder note, i feel this ache in my heart whenever i see this old man on his wheelchair at the swimming pool downstairs..he's not exactly old i think, at least he doesn't look so..my guess would be 60 plus? but he looks like he had a stroke, but he looks aware of what's happening around him, but resigned to this fate of not being able to move about on his own..his maid brings him down to the poolside everyday (which is good cos he's not cooped up at home) but she simply leaves him there to sit while she chats with other maids..and i feel indignant about it! i know i have no right to cos i'm not doing anything for the old man myself and i'm not aware of wadever family arrangements they had as to how to take care of him, but i just feel sorry for him..he sits with his head drooped down, probably out of tiredness, and somewhat facing his maid who's nonchalantly in conversations with other people..i wonder what he must be feeling..does he feel helpless? miserable that the only way he spends his day is to sit on the wheelchair like this? i once saw him practise using the walker..which heartened me..cos he could walk! and i felt hopeful for him..but ever since, i never saw him using it again..i wish his maid could bring him for more of such therapeutic walks..

and on another separate, but happier note:

finally met up with steph! together with kwa..it's been a really long time since the three of us got together like that..and it was heartwarming for me..our paths may now be rather different, each of us in different schools, but being together still gave me that sense of familiarity and security..that we could just be ourselves once again..that transported me back to those days where we'll store all our heavy textbooks in those A4 boxes under our tables we'd get from the photocopying room (not cos we were muggers like everyone else thought but cos we were lazy to carry those books to and fro!), where we called ourselves the powerpuff girls (haha! omg), where we (ok maybe only liow and me as kwa would furiously deny) collected our apple-aloe vera juice bottles in the drawer at the back of the classroom (to the wrath of yanzhen who was on 'cleaning drawers' duty those weeks and found a trail of ants leading to our bottles hehe!), where we did leg raisers to train our (almost non-existent, except for superwoman kwa) abs during lessons, where we kept talking and making so much noise that anna fu scolded us (yes, the us which comprised her favourite student, kwa!)..where we forged deep friendships i hold dearly till this day..i love these two people!

to end off, here's a question i've been pondering about- how do bus drivers get to work, if they don't stay within walking distance to an mrt, or if the bus interchange is not beside an mrt? or for that matter, how do mrt drivers get to work? who's there to drive the very first buses?

hehe pardon my randomness :p

HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR EVERYONE! :)