To Whom It May Concern #4: The Puberty

This one will be about my days in middle school. 

I went to SMP Negeri 5 Bandung. It is located on the intersection of Jalan Jawa and Jalan Sumatera. I went to middle school for only two years, since I was in acceleration class. For those who are not familiar with it, acceleration class allows the students to graduate a year faster than those in the regular classes. This class kind of has its own academic timeline. A regular class has 2 semesters for each grade, each semester consists of six months. In the other hand, an acceleration class has four months in its each semester, so we didn't take exams at the same time with the kids in regular class.

The struggle in acceleration class was that I didn't like it when the teachers skipped some parts that they considered not essential for the sake of saving time. I mean, I prefer taking my time when learning something so I can learn more about the tiny, even trivial details. In this class I couldn't really.. savor it. Realizing how much I didn't like the learning style in the acceleration class, at that time I immediately made a promise to myself not to take this kind of class again in high school.

In my class, I had only eight classmates. Um, no, sorry, seven. Eight including me. Three boys and five girls. Sounds lonely, eh. Before joining this class I tasted like a couple weeks in the regular class and it got like, 40-something students, so yeah it was kinda drastically lonelier in the new class. Also, at that time I wasn't really BFFs with my classmates, I didn't really play or go out or do something with them, inside and/or outside class. I guess we were just different types of people, interested in different things. Haha. When you're in a class with 50 people there is way bigger chance to find somebody(s) with similar interests, but with 8 people? Not so easy.

So then I ended up spending most of my free time in class with my walkman (yes, it was the golden era of walkman), listening to some Green Day or Simple Plan. Or Peter Pan, the hottest local band at that time. Or sometimes I just chilled on the balcony in front of the class, looking at.. people. Sometimes I got lucky and I could see my crush in front of his class, chilling on the balcony too. Oh talking about crush(es), I had plenty during middle school. Mostly those cool guys in the school bands. I remember having a crush on two bassists, one guitarist, and one vocalist. They were probably the main reason I always spent the whole day in front of the stage during school festival, didn't care about the heat, the rain, or whatever.  

Hey when I think about it, I did have quite close friends outside class. They were my classmates in my former regular class. One of them was in the same extracurricular activity with me, probably we're close because of that. Or probably because our angkot route was the same, so we often went home together. Or maybe because we liked to go to that comic book rental after school. Well, maybe all of the above.

My other quite close friend, she was fun to be around. A little tomboy but not so much. She introduced me to this magical world called the internet. I made my first email address in Yahoo when she took me to an internet cafe behind a mall not far from school. You know what, to this day I still use that email address. Another step after making email address, I signed up on Friendster. Facebook hadn't even exist at that time. 

Okay what else was interesting. Oh, this one. We had a traditional dance class in middle school. It was a mandatory class. But it was just for girls. The boy got pencak silat class. And for some reasons a lot of girls I knew didn't like that class. But not me. I secretly looked forward to that dance class every week. I mean, who would have guessed. I was not a very girly girl. But I really enjoy learning traditional dances. Probably due to my previous experiences with traditional dances during kindergarten.

So overall, I think my middle school life was not so bad. Although if I could do it all over again I probably would prefer being in regular class, because of.. reasons. But there's a bright side too. Some people maybe had a difficult and/or confusing time during middle school years. You know, the emotional and physical transition, the hormones, the new relationships, the chick flicks, and everything. Well I think I was too occupied with the acceleration class thingy so I didn't have time to pay attention to those stuffs. 

Actually I don't know if I was unlucky that I missed out so much, or if I was lucky that my puberty was problem-free.

But the important thing is that I survived. Haha. Isn't that what this life is about: surviving?