Cryptic Time!

Do you have armor?

Not literally some kind of physical armor, but the kind of metaphorical, mental armor that you wear all the time, because the world isn't something a person should deal with without some kind of protection.

I have armor. It's not terribly strong armor, but it was made in the Cempaka Forge, which basically means that it's good for some things but horrible in others, and it scrapes my psyche in the wrong places and occasionally leads me astray.

I'm inclined to believe that any child leaving that school leaves with cursed armor, myself. Hani said it rather succintly herself: “I don't think kids from that school are capable with dealing with the real world”.

That did mean I had to learn and reforge the armor I wore into something that wouldn't get me cut into ribbons in Battlefield Life. And it still means that I occasionally overestimate the strength of my new, refurbished armor, and I take unnecessary risks.

Take this and last week, for example. It started off with Jennifer Tai's treatise, Scarfer's reaction and Jennifer's counter-reaction, and it's ended up like this. Amazing how it went. Another mild disagreement turned major turned catastrophic, at least for poor Jeff Ooi.

Enough of that. My armor actually dealt very well with a lot of blows I had suffered during this period: some negative emails, one negative blog post, and two IMs, one fairly eh, and the other managing to score the biggest wound I had this week. Not because it was remarkably witty, mind you, and to be honest, one that was partially self-inflicted.

The reason why it hurt was because in a sense, I had forgotten who the sender was. I had thought that she was probably ‘just an acquaintance’, but it turns out that I had shown her where my weak-spots were. So when she lashed out, more out of her own sense of betrayal and hurt rather than what I said, well…

Critical hit. Blood everywhere.

I'm sorry, my friend. I'm so terribly sorry.