NODA

It transpired over an evening coffee on Valentine's Day with SL LLG where I was grousing how the day was all about people trying to outdo one another. As you would appreciate, in NIE where trainee teachers are pseudo-students with a big wallets, guys and girls were armed with their "I'm off the shelf big time" by having big balloons, giant bouquets, humongous teddy bears, enormous chocolate kits etc etc... with no apologies that they have been the winners and accentuating the fact that size does matter (I do not need to repeat that their balloons are big, bouquets are giant, teddy bears are humongous and chocolate kits enormous, which is essentially what I am doing now)...

Anyway, as soon as I finished class in NIE, I zipped to the other campus for evening class. As you would appreciate, NUS students also believe in "If you have it, flaunt it" mentality. In an almost deliberate manner, some girls came into the class halfway through the lecture, adorned like a Christmas tree except that there are balloons and big bouquets.

If you think that I am just jealous of these people, you are half right - where do their bf get all the $$ from? I assume they must be damn rich or damn V-day trapped. Either way, it would have blown a hole in my wallet if I indulge like these people... then again I have no one to indulge on.. haha.. so it may not be a bad thing after all.

As I met up with SL LLG, the propaganda part of me started to scare the ShiL out of the Loong. I reminded him of the NODA conversation we held a few months back. Then, starting almost innocently with a question, "Have you heard of this organization called NODA?" SL LLG was most perplexed. I explained that it is an acronym for "No one dies alone" and it is an organization started by some nurses who would stay around some moribund patients so they they do not die alone. Obviously, only those without kin would render the service of NODA. This immediately sent SL LLG a shiver down his spine.

But he was astute enough to use NODA as his defense weapon when his ingenuous students asked in a matter-of-fact manner earlier in the day whether he would be lonely and friendless in his old age (Students nowadays are so resourceful - whether you are single, eat Ferraro Roche choc, has a blog, travel to Vanuatu, live with your mother, has bad relations with other teachers... they read you like a book or should I say stalk you as if you are Edison Chen)

Anyway, despite this smugness in deflecting the students' sugar-coated realism, SL LLG was crumbling inside. But I assured him that he wouldn't have NODA knocking at his door... After all, I would be at his deathbed singing hymns and seeing him take his last journey!