You Are Where You Sit

I come from a junior college where, depending on your seating position in the canteen, it's actually possible to tell (i) whether you're a Science/ Arts/ Commerce student; and (ii) your degree of happeningness.

Like, if you're "with it", you'd be sitting at the end of the canteen right next to the drinks machine, the running track and the gym where you get to see all the toned athletic types jogging, playing netball or just walking around in short shorts.

If you're reasonably cool, you'd be sitting in the middle of the canteen watching people walk in and out, and just chillin' with the dudes.

I sat at the end of the canteen next to the carpark, with all my JC1 classmates. We had a great view of the carpark, the road and ... the sky. Mostly the sky. Every now and then, someone athletic in shorts would wander by, and we would look up in amazement. Like this one time when a JC2 student walked into our neck of the woods by mistake (he was looking for the chicken rice stall). As if to underscore the deeply uncool locale in which he found himself, he stepped on and over the table at which I was sitting and almost landed in my bowl of noodle soup. I was honoured.

Anyone who spent the early 1990s in a junior college would almost immediately know what college I went to. And that I was a triple science student. "All you RJC snobs." they would say. "It's an RJ thing." they would say.

Well, why is it even now I am still identifying my NUS classmates by where they sat in the Lecture Theatre? "Who the fuck is that?" a classmate would say, in reference to another classmate I've just mentioned.

"She sat in front lah. Front, centre."

"Oh. Not cute lah!" Like that's the whole point.

As far as I can understand, the classification is thus:

1. Front Centre: These are the mighty morphing power muggers. They sit in front so that they can copy everything on the slide and if they can't make out what the lecturer is saying, at least they can read her lips.

2. Middle: These are a mix of people who came for the lecture on time/ wanted to sit in front, but there were no seats left.

3. Back: Latecomers/ Don't give a crap about the lecture/ Want to catch up on sleep/ Not dressed properly even with the low standard of dress code and therefore could catch it if the lecturer could see what they were wearing.

Like there was one time this girl in the lecture theatre in front of me stood up and there was suddenly this overwhelming smell of ... sperm. Not in the sense that she was a he, but in the sense that she might have had a good time last night. Gross.