Because of them....

A girl came up to me one day after I cracked a particularly bad joke at the climb gym. She had this very concerned look on her face as she approach me. She placed a hand on my shoulder and ask me in all ernesty: "Frou, you are quite irritating. Do you have any friends at all?". I told her I have only 4 friends in Singapore and asked whether she would like to be my fifth. She gave it some thought and finally agreed.

That is how I met my new BFF (if you don't know what that means, please visit perezhilton.com). She is my Friend No. 5, also can be known as "Lumber 5" or "Lam Pah 5".

Friend No. 5 is as crazy and neurotic, if not more, than me. She has a lot of pent-up angst much ado about everything. She is anal about cakes, working-out, drinking, sex and grammar. She is also loud and obnoxious like me but just slightly less irritating.

Friend No. 5 and I go to the same rock gym but never spoke to each other for a year. She calls me an unfriendly cow secretly behind my back and in her blog. I suspect the reason why I never spoke to her is because she is this tall, lanky, giraffe-like creature that takes up a lot of space on the climbing wall. She berates her height saying that no Singapore man want to go out with her cos she can see the top of their head. She says she wishes she can be short and stumpy like me instead.

Friend No. 5 is very serious about speaking good English. That is why I love to annoy her with my bad English. When provoked, she can speak even worse English than me ("You ownself cannot ownself do meh?"). She also gets very wildly excited during discussions and would gesticulate widely. I always have to stand away from her because she swooshes her giraffe limbs about.

Last night, I invited Friend No. 5 to come for drinks with me and Friend No. 4 ("Lam Pah 4") - an incident that can be crudely referred to as the "Merging of the Lam Pahs".

Friend No. 4 is my drinking buddy whom I meet up once in a while to drown sorrows and exchange miseries with (though he is not so miserable nowadays). He is a good friend of my family and treats me like an obligatory younger sister even though he knows I am the irritating kind. I like to hang out with him because he drinks, smokes and understands my bad English. He also listens to my laments and gives insightful comments ("Yeah, you are as shallow as a film of water").

Within the first five minutes of Friend No. 4 and Friend No. 5 meeting, we started discussing menstruation particularly Friend No. 5's recent period. We asked Friend No. 4 whether he understands the female reproductive system or not. Friend No. 4 started explaining fallopian tubes and the breakdown of the uterus lining to us. "I am pure Bio student, you know", he said smugly. Cheh!

From there on, our conversations became more and more animated. At some point during the night, I asked Friend No. 5 why everyone else is staring at our table. She answered by breaking into a Kelly 'I-should-go-on-a-diet' Clarkson song: "BECAUSE OF YOUUUUU....."

If there is one good trait in me at all, it is that I am a very co-operative person. So I started singing along with her. We don't know the lyrics but we continue singing anyway: "BECAUSE OF YOUUUUU.......DA DA..DADADADA.."

Suddenly behind us, we heard a chorus. Little did we know, our crass conversation was being observed by another table. They too tried to join in our bad singing: "BECAUSE OF YOUUUU....I NEVER STRAY ER...TOO FAR...ER...FROM....ER.....ER...."

I felt like we were in those musicals where people around you break into a song and dance at an opportune time......

Someone was kind enough to approach a bandmember (we were at a live band pub) on our behalf to get us the right lyrics. The drummer came over to our table and taught us the words to the song.

We sang and we sang and we sang the night away.

My jaws are still aching as I type.