My twenty-first was neither one filled with grandeur nor splendor. No lavish parties, flowing lager or clinking wine glasses. Just fifteen minutes of understated celebration before the stroke of midnight. That’s how I like my celebrations – low-key affairs. Yup, if you know me well enough. So, here’s how I spent my twenty-first.

It was indeed memorable as the day began with make-up lessons in school on a Saturday morning. What’s more, I had a class presentation due that day, which you would ordinarily expect isn’t something that I would look forward to. But as luck has it, the presentation went on pretty smoothly without much of a hitch.

Fortunately, I had a few hours of break before heading to Boat Quay in the evening to conduct a survey with my project group. While on the way there, we almost got pulled over by the traffic police, but again, Lady Luck shone, and we realized that he was just signaling for us to switch on the headlights.

While survey response rate was dismally low, we managed to secure interviews with two firms which is decent progress for our project. My group also threw a surprise ‘celebration’ which I really appreciate even as I was relegated to eating the cake with my fingers.

After that, I had to rush down to the airport to send off one of my friend, as I had done the day before. But I don’t mind sacrificing the time and effort to do so because they are really close friends and it would take at least another year before we would have the chance to meet up again.

I do not like to name names but you guys should know who you are. To all my friends, thank you for being part of my life for the past twenty-one years, and hopefully, we would still be friends twenty-one years on.