How people grow.

There several things in my opinion that make life worth living for, and one of them is good dinner conversations.

If it is a good dinner conversation with someone you just met - it promises a lifetime of good conversations, and even great friendship.

But where the friendship has already endured through many years of growing pains (jc friends fall into this category in particular) and solidified with our shared life experiences - then a dinner together is guaranteed to bring back lots of laughter and reminiscing.

Last night's re-union with 3 of my deaest girlfriends was made even more momentous with the attendance of our history teacher, Mr M.

(Mr M. is British, gangly and tall. He's in his late forties and is married to a life of teaching, and reading. Throw any subject at all at him, ranging from the Reformation to how to feed birds, and he can keep you entertained for hours on end. He also happens to be quite well-travelled thanks to his many years of taking history students all across the African and European continent, so once in a while the cultural gaffes and odd misadventures he commits as a bumbling british tourist slips out of the bag and delights his listeners no end.)

we were first to arrive at Sanur, a relatively affordable Indonesian restaurant at the top of the 4th level in Ngee Ann City, and the last table to leave.

In the 3 hours we sat there, we talked about getting married, about the difference between marrying a Singaporean man and the allure of the Caucasian male - where Mr M correctly interjected and questioned the need to pigeon-hole "singaporean men" and along with that the "caucasion male" - we talked about our plans for the future (something I find only girls tend to talk about, or am I stereotyping again).

We remembered falling asleep in history class, and how we'd love to revisit those years in junior college again just so that we can undo the precious hours of history lessons we slept through.

We asked Mr M. how much of us he remembered. And how he found us now. Have we aged? Do we look different? Have we become better people?

And this was what he said (as badly paraphrased as it can get, but I try to get the point across):

"There are some students who come back to visit who do drastically change - their appearance, sometimes their accents, but I don't always like the way they have changed. some of them, I actually thought found to be at their best when they were 17 or 18. .... more open to ideas, more searching, more hungry to question the things that other people take for granted."

"Some people get narrower as they get older," he says, gesturing with his hands the metaphorical thinning that sometimes take place.

What happens between the age of 17 and 26, or 30, 65 for that matter? Somewhere along the line, we decide that this is the way we want to see the world, this set of values is what we are comfortable with and we decide we'll stick by it, no matter what. And that's how people grow narrower.

Fewer questions, less anger. Less anger, fewer disappointments, less disillusionment.

Less pain.

I wondered at what he said ... still do. Have I become narrower as I get older?

At some point in her past, brainjuice remembers actively and carefully shedding the years of Singaporean Asian values that she made herself see as shackles of a chauvinist culture that had little relevance to the here and the now. She was free! Alone in the London! A young lady with time to kill and a virginity to lose! An English Lit student. To get her Lit honours she HAD to see what western disillusionment/ western decadence was all about. She had to have her heart broken. She had to find out what LOVE!!! was. She had to question the small-mindedness of Christian mores of the East. How else to invoke the spirit of transcendentalism of Hemingway, the learned cynicism of Oscar Wilde? She was free to be wild.

But I look on it now not with a triumphant cry of "I've lived!", but a deepening sense that all the events that unfolded had so much more questions than answers for me. More shame than pride. More brokenness than healing. A diseased love. Disorientation. What is there to gain in all that?

Today I put on my face every morning - stand before an audience of 26 every other hour and talk about the way they should see things. How they should, or more specifically should NOT live. I teach because although something inside me wants them to see for themselves, I hope against all hopes that they can be spared from some of the pain we talk about in class in intellectual, academic discourse. Because behind that face and under the thinking hat I'm afraid my own pain will spill over and give me away.

Does that mean I'm narrower now?