The thank-you messages are flowing in from quite a few people on my phone. I suspect that it's only now that they're coming in coz all of us would have been flat-out concussed after Rag yesterday, and after sleeping for about the whole of today, have finally got sufficient rest to construct a complete sentence, and can muster up the extra brain cells to compose a short thank-you message.

This year's Rag has been really different from last year's for me: there're more people, firstly; then there's the house, which has just really facilitated a lot of bonding; and last, but most important of all, there're the freshies, who've been really enthusiastic--I'd say maybe they're even more so then we freshie raggers were last year.

And I suppose there's the fact that I'm now a senior.

It's odd, somehow, to think that a year ago I was just like the freshies who came to join us, and when I looked at all of them cheering away yesterday both before and after we presented, it was even harder to imagine that just two months ago, they'd just been sitting in the house, watching a laptop presentation and Jianwu talking, wondering what Rag was all about.

And from there, they've become techies, dancers, costumes people; everyone likes to say that we shouldn't have divisions, but I feel that with the divisions, at least you know what you're best at; and apart from having a sense of belonging to Rag itself, you have a smaller group to belong to as well.

We had such high hopes when we started out, but the long stretch of this year's O Week and the hype over it, and the lack of publicity for Rag really drained our manpower; the freshies still came back of their own accord to Rag after O Week activities in the daytime though; that was the period of time when morale had to have been the lowest, when only about five of the seniors were working everyday and falling sick because all the freshies were doubling up as freshie councillors and away at O Week in the day, and those seniors who weren't around were involved in O Week as well. So to see freshies coming back even after the day's events were over was a heartening sight indeed.

Even when everyone was despairing that maybe we wouldn't be able to finish the float, and Lionel and Reuben were joking about a "back-up plan", we just kept working anyway, and I was so thankful that the freshies had taken up that attitude as well; the whole idea of how it isn't over till it's over.

Float construction really picked up in the last few days before the 6th; and morale had to be at an all time on the night of the 4th, I think, when we finally had our dry run. The dance was beautiful, synchronised, the music was good, and our main float made it all the down the slope and back up; even our steps worked. :) It was great to see all the dancers coming back and staying over; admittedly, given how late it was even after O Night, staying over wasn't really an option anymore, but I was so happy that no one was complaining.

At least, not until the dancers who weren't bunking in in friends' halls took up all the sleeping space upstairs and the techies had no place to sleep. :P

But we thought, what the heck, let them sleep, they're probably tired after O Night; most of the techies had come down to the house before O Night ended, so we didn't sit through the whole thing.

All that was left to do then was work till the sun came up (and hopefully the dancers would wake up with it).

Yingchao, Terence and Shu Ning were outside papering over the exterior of the back of the float; Wenhui was moving around, cutting styrofoam and sticking it wherever the design called for it, and I came out at about 7 am, after sitting inside the house for an hour or so, talking with Rachel and Ian. Settled myself in the front of the float to continue with touching up the white paper for the interior, and at about 9 am, a car pulled up at the main road, a guy got out of the car, came up the grassy slope next to the house and asked if we were Arts Club people. Turned out that he was a fresh freshie named Ian; a *really* "fresh" one: he hadn't gone for Arts Camp, hadn't gone for O Week, and he'd just called Xinyan up to ask about Rag; he'd been told that he could come down to help, and so he had. :D So touched, haha... :D

Managed to squeeze in next to Ivan at about 9-plus am, only to wake up at about 12-plus, when the remaining dancers in the room woke up and about 5 of them (Don, Xiaofen and some others) were sitting around and talking softly. Apparently, they thought I was Charlotte. Or Fiona. And then when they realised that it was me, Xiaofen said, "You all think just anybody can sleep so close to Ivan, meh?" -_-... Right. Okay. :P

The most stupid thing happened though; I talked myself awake. :P Let me explain what I mean: I was actually quite tired, and having not slept the whole night and my nose being a little blocked from sleeping right under the air-conditioning, I was a little... er, out of it. :P There I was, rambling silly nonsense with my eyes only half-open and in a funny voice thanks to my blocked nose; I think I probably made for some light mindless entertainment though, in both senses of the phrase. :P

So, yeah, I talked myself awake, then walked around the house a bit, found the rest of the techies who'd been awake with me previously, asleep in the meeting room, so decided to go back to sleep; this time, succeeded in about 2 hours of uninterrupted rest, I think. I can't remember. :P

Seniors and "super-seniors" started coming back in the late afternoon; float and side-prop construction and touching up took on a feverish pace after 7 pm, considering that all work was to stop at 2 am. Wan-Tsin and I, being validators, had to leave the house at about 12.45 am to report to the NUSSU Secretariat. Wan-Tsin was one of the validators for the Medicine float and I was one of the validators for the Dentistry float.

I thought that maybe I'd see Yonghe, seeing as he's a Dentistry student, but sadly, when I asked the Dentistry validators if Yonghe was doing Rag, they said that the Year 3s usually don't do Rag. Oh well. Dentistry's Rag site also turned out to be the most unusual Rag site of all: it was very quiet; only about 6 people were awake when James (my co-validator from SDE) arrived; the rest, according to their Rag Head, Daniel, were asleep in the SoC building (they were building their float at the carpark just next to the SRC field). They even offered us some of the extra food that was leftover from their dinner, some chicken wings and other stuff; later on, my breakfast was courtesy of the Dentistry Club as well: a muffin. They're quite nice, I find, and they also didn't give us any trouble concerning the touching of the float and the "hands-off after 2 am" rule. So I like Dentistry people. Haha. :D

James and I accompanied their float the short distance onto the SRC track when it was time and we sat there next to it, talking for a while and watching the other faculties' and halls' floats come in. Saw our lovely (not so) little treasure box come in and wandered over to talk to Aaron for a while, after which I came back to Dentistry's float, only to find that James wasn't around and the Dentistry people were all either stretched out or curled up on the track, asleep. Looked comfortable enough, so I did the same, curling up a little on my side, trying to use the document bag that NUSSU had given the validators to do their job as a makeshift pillow.

Reminded me of last year when myself and a few others were on "guard duty" to watch the float at SRC in the wee hours of the morning; we ended up lying in front of the float and watching the stars, eyeballing the occasional passerby who dared loiter around our beloved float for too long, heehee. It was much colder last year though; there was a constant breeze blowing, making the temperature of the cool night air drop even lower; I was wearing two shirts then and I was still shivering.

This year, I think the cold woke me up after about an hour or so; I saw James asleep not far from where I was, and when I happened to glance at the tentage for the faculty clubs' dancers, I saw a lone group of dancers already there. On closer observation (and putting on my glasses), I recognised one of the guys as Ivan by his way of walking, and realised that they were our dancers. :D

Talked to them for a bit before coming back and hanging around the Dentistry float (as a side note, Ivan looked quite fetching in his makeup :P); lots more mundane, trivial stuff happened which I won't bore you with, but when our turn finally came to present, I noticed that despite the fact that our float was less impressive than other faculty clubs', it didn't make us any less proud of it.

Somewhere along the way, winning the Vice-Chancellor's Shield had come to mean less and less; I mean, we'd like to win, who wouldn't? But it had shifted to be more about the people and the friendships over time; don't know when it happened, but it sure felt like it. I'm not sure about other faculties, but I'm pretty sure that this is what makes an Arts Rag different from a Science Rag or an Engin Rag or whatever else have you.

To illustrate my point: after all the presentations were over and we were waiting for the awards to be presented, the small crowd of FASS supporters (we probably numbered about 70 in total, including the raggers) were just going crazy dancing to the music that they were playing over the sound system; I remember seeing the Dentistry people, who were sitting not far from us, laughing as they watched us having fun. When they played Bon Jovi's "It's My Life", Bobby and some of the rest even got Ivan to lead them in an impromptu Mambo dance (I still don't understand what's so great about Mambo; my personal opinion is that it seems like it's a dance for deaf people, since the whole point of it seems to be acting out the words of the song), and I saw Daniel in the stands with his faculty mates, laughing with his friends at what we were doing. Not laughing as in making fun of us, mind you; laughing in that way which says you can appreciate the fun that others are having.

And it didn't really matter that we didn't win anything (aside from a Bronze award for Flag collections and later, a Silver Colours Award for our Rag float which didn't really involve giving out an award proper); we could care less that SDE won everything; and we couldn't be bothered that while SDE won everything, Science still won the Shield. I think that at that point, looking at everyone's faces, all that really mattered was that it was over and we'd actually made it all this way together; that all of us there at that point in time had not given up when morale was at its lowest and that even when it seemed like it would be too late too finish the float, we refused to give up.

The best moments of the whole day had to be when I saw a video of the first half of our presentation while we were all having lunch at the new University Hall and I saw how beautiful it looked when the doors of our float opened; and when Hock told me that he finally understood what Rag was all about-- I came to understand that as a freshie and found that it was something that I'd wanted to experience all my life without actually knowing it, that feeling of building something from nothing, being part of a group of people who can see the same dream taking shape before their eyes, and seeing the final product being presented on the day itself.

It's a different feeling altogether, leading others to find that same experience, to find the same goal, and to find the same purpose in being a ragger, but when they find it, hold on to it and tell you that they'll be back next year for more, you can't help but suddenly feel like the world is different and everything's come full circle. And you know that because they're a part of this, their lives in University will be so much different from everyone else's.

There's this one super-senior named Jasper, who's well-known among the raggers; if he were still schooling, he'd be in his eighth year now. He's well-known for saying that "Rag is blood and sweat and tears", blood and sweat during the building process and tears during the presentation maybe, but tears definitely during the time when it's all over and you tear down what took two months to build. Last year, when I talked to some of the graduated seniors who came back to help on the day before Rag Day, they told me that Jasper had "conned" many of them into helping for Rag, in a joking kinda way. That opinion is still widely held, but we realise one other thing.

Every year, we "con" ourselves into coming back. I guess there must be a reason. I don't think any of us will ever be able to pinpoint exactly what this feeling is and why it feels so good despite the fact that we receive no material reward for our efforts, but I do know that for the rest of my undergraduate life, as long as I can help it, I never want to be in the audience, watching on Rag Day.