Thom, our P2P rockstar, was talking to me last Sunday about how nice it felt when he sang onstage and everybody was screaming his name. Afterwards, lots of people even wanted to pose for pictures with him (including me – guilty as 
charged!). No wonder people crave the spotlight, he said. I can relate. During our review days, we had an acquaintance party in our dorm and each group had to give a performance. It was during those times that the Meteor Garden mania was in full swing, so four of us girls made ourselves up to look like the hunky F4 guys. I was made to look like Vic, and accordingly, among us four I was the one who most closely resembled who she was impersonating. Chalk it up to my chinky eyes, I guess. We were supposed to dance and lip synch along to one of their popular songs, and I worried that our act wouldn’t hit it off with the girls. But to my surprise, when it was our turn to face the audience, everyone was screaming so much that I wondered for a fleeting moment if they knew that we were actually just girls pretending to be guys, or if they even realized that we were not the real F4. But of course they knew and still they screamed, and it felt so wonderful. I wonder when that’ll ever happen again?
However the spotlight is not the sort of thing I love all the time. Some people find it hard to believe that I get stage fright, because most of the time I exude confidence in the limelight. Little do they know that infront of huge audiences, especially people I don’t know, my palms get sweaty and my heart starts hammering in my chest so loudly, I hardly hear anything else. It gets a bit of getting used to, and I learned to overcome this shyness in College when I joined the SALT community org which requires, among many things, that its members go from one high school to another and talk to High School seniors to convince them to take the ADZU entrance test. It was the first time I had to talk infront of huge crowds, and though at first I wanted to faint, in time I actually started loving the feeling, until eventually I developed into a very good public speaker. But eversince I started working, I have begun to lose “practice” which probably explains why my voice squeaked when I was asked to sing with a band in one of our company’s acquaintance parties and why I could hardly even speak up in our department’s monthly meeting. Man, I badly need practice. Maybe it’s time to go back to College. Or maybe I just need to give speeches for a sideline. Now there’s an idea.