Bluergh.

House. Deco. Can. Kill.

It causes heavy loss of blood from too many paper cuts and penknife scratches, possible risk of tetanus from rusty blades, back and shoulder aches, headaches, bruises, possibilities of swallowing poisonous mural paint when you're too lazy to wash your hands and eat anyway, binging and lack of sleep.

But it can kill in more ways than that.

House deco is a time-consuming, tiring, thankless, unique-to-SMK Taman S.E.A. activity. In it, students from different sports houses compete to present the best decorations among the other houses on Sports Day. A theme is given to students from two to three weeks before Sports Day. Previous years' themes include 1Malaysia and Malaysian ethnicity. 2011's theme is flora and fauna. Based on the theme, the respective house deco teams must decorate their half of their tents as artistically outstanding as possible. Students usually resort to coloured paper, paper mache, losts of newspaper, paint, tissue, PVA glue, tin cans, cardboard, etc. to complete their creations, which are typically take life-sized or larger-than-life forms.

On Sports Day, it is common practice for deco teams to arrive in school at five in the morning, while it is still pitch black. They use torchlights to guide their way to the tents and begin setting up - still in darkness. The tents are located on the far side of the field, opposite the audience and the track. The audience can only see the bright and colourful front of the tents while deco teams rush to complete the inside. However, the audience is not allowed to cross the field and visit the tents of their respective houses. Basically, nobody gets to see the marvellous life-sized creatures living inside the tent. However, a number of teachers come to view the tents and judge which house has the best decorations. A winner is determined. At the end of Sports Day, the winner is announced, and the respective house receives a small amout of cash.

The decorations, which took so much painstaking time and effort, must then be destroyed or stored in a dark, musty cupboard so that it can possibly be used for the next year but usually never seeing the light of day again considering how themes change. So much time, effort and resources put into this competition is then gone to waste - without even being seen and fully appreciated by the rest of the school. Not only that, for three weeks, the deco team has to work overtime just to be able to remain standing among other houses. Since SMK Taman S.E.A. usually has its Sports Day at an unusually late date, students who should be preparing for their major exams are instead wasting time creating magnificent beasts only to have them abandoned and eventually demolished.

But then, it's SMK Taman S.E.A. Certain people up there just have no common sense, no sense of responsibility towards the proper holistic growth of their students, no sense of timing and basically NO COMMON SENSE. Oh, did I mention that they're money-cheaters who expect students to "willingly donate" their cash prizes won in competitions to the school because we "appreciate the school" so much? Like the school has ever really done anything for us like encourage us to 'membanggakan sekolah, meningkatkan imej sekolah dan menjaga maruah sekolah' by giving us the necessary resources to go further in areas we can excel in?

No other school in the district has this kind of deco competition. In fact, I think it's safe to say no other school in the country has this kind of deco competition, all the more on Sports Day. Does that make SMK Taman S.E.A. any better? No. It just makes the school look the fool when their students go around complaining about house deco and how the school is commits daylight robbery on its students and how some people just don't deserve the respect their title commands and how most of our rules are just plain...lame.

So really, SMK Taman S.E.A. and the people who are running it. If you want us to uphold a good image, you're going to have to bleeding create one first.