Confessions of a Cat-holic (97)

It was the time when internet boomed. My ICQ account was often hacked and Vicki my neighbor liked to drop by my home after school and secretly steal my keyboard in my studio to send random messages to my guy friends when I went to the bathroom. She would send "I love you" to every guy on my chatting list. What should I say? People in Hong Kong endured a lot of pressures in life, and they needed to vent out their craze, I supposed. Thanks to my sneaky friends, I never trusted the internet as a result.

This could be the reason why I was not ultra-aggressive even though I had Rex's phone number and ICQ. I did not remember chatting with him on the internet much. I guessed I liked to observe more, online and in person. I paid attention to his profiles and all the lyrics he wrote in the box. I pretended to like socceer by registering an email address that said amyshevchenko@acmilanfan.com when I found out that he loved watching ball games. And he then changed his nickname to Takahashi Keisuke Rex afterwards, as if he liked Japanese anime.

It was a highly competitive world in Hong Kong. People liked to steal my stuff. They stole everything. They tried to steal my personal belongings, my forks, my underwear, my bra, my pens, my money, my friends, and even my boyfriend. I knew very well that I could not tell that many people that I had a thing for Rex, fearing that a naive revelation of my feelings could make ripples and repercussions that ruined my love life.

The songs I always picked in our karaoke events were "the prayer of a teenage girl" and "miss cutie", both by Miriam Yeung.

I wanted to use the two songs to express my frustration after failing everything in life. Very rarely I succeeded in getting what I wanted. Even my school, for example. I did not intend to transfer school, even though many people saw that as an escalation to a more promising future. Little did they know the scenery along the way as I ascended to more selective schools and environments.

I never won any awards. I had stage fright. I had acrophobia. I had germaphobia. I had trypanophobia. I had trypophobia. I was an introvert with talkative manners. I was in disguise most of the time. I never received any accolades. I could not code. I could not cook. I could not do physics. I could not bake. I could not make my bed. I could not draw spatial drafts. I could not do needlework. I could never play the piano. I could not sing. I was not athletic enough in my alma mater's standards. It was only in the new school that I started to discover that I could play basketball, thanks to the ultra short height and weak physique of my new schoolmates.

I seemed to fail many things. I was full of flaws. I was clumsy. I had bad memory. I was a bit messy. I was not particularly organized. I was a bit absent-minded. I had short attention span. I had bad eyes. I had bad body coordination. I was round faced. I was a bit chubby. I could not hack. I was not manipulative or calculating enough. I was big headed. I was forgetful. I was not attractive, at least not in my alma mater's standards. I was not outstanding in any sense. The only thing I was kind of good at was studying and I didn't think it meant much. I was greeted most with the acclaim that I was cute, because I looked and sounded like a kid with the face of an angel and the pitch of a baby. That was it. They said that I looked younger than my age, unlike most of my peers in the new school. They also said that I was sweet and adorable like a mashmallow.

The lyrics of "miss cutie" by Miriam kind of spoke my heart. I often thought to myself, if I was that cute and adorable, why was I never approached by an opposite sex? Maybe I was not the prom queen or beauty pageant of my year, but I was not the ugly betty anymore. So I prayed to God day by day that the love of my life would somehow discover my love for him too.

My singing session really was intended for self expression of affection only. Not sure if my friends noticed that I picked these two songs every single time I sang, they started to have hallucinations that I was trying to mock them, because my new friends were slightly delusional.