GCB

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Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.

MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.

OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.

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Friday, November 02, 2007

ON PHOTOGRAPHS AND MEMORY: YEARBOOK

Do you remember your yearbook photos from school? i remember all of mine, from form one to form four. i've got them all in an album. you can see how we grew up. i remember also the day we took our form five class photos. i remember where i stood. what the day was like.

i don't think i missed a normal schooling day in form five. at least not until a day when i had a fever. went to school the next day and they told me the photographer came back yesterday. something happened to his film so he came by to reshoot my class photo. just like that. no announcement, no forewarning. i was out of my final year's yearbook and it was over a silly fever.

i never claimed my copy of that yearbook. i remember wanting to dissociate myself from it, knowing fully well that i wasn't represented there. so today, i have no form five yearbook. i don't regret not owning it. it would hurt a lot more to have it lying around knowing that i remember everything about the photography day and still not ending up in the pictures.

i wonder, when my school friends grow old and look at that yearbook, will they remember all the faces in the class? chances are, they won't. being photographed is no guarantee of being memorable. but not being photographed doesn't make things better. an unmemorable but photographed face can still conjure an imagination of who a person was, regardless of how unfaithful that imagination may be. but an unphotographed person, no matter how memorable, has no place in the pages of some of life's inane histories. his place is in the hazy recollections of forgetful people. and while photographs never fade, memory does.

when i woke up this morning, i remembered my form five yearbook. and i feel sad for all the boys like me, who also didn't show up on that random day when the photographer came back. i'm sure some of them don't care about such memories.

somehow, that seems to sadden me even more.

Labels: melancholy, memory and nostalgia

Genusfrog [ 9:45 am ]

2 Comments:

I remember what a big deal our form 5 class pages were back when we were bunch of self-important 17 year-olds. Even now, I sometimes think that form 5 yearbook photos matter.

But most days, I don't. My memory of school life and the fuzzy photos don't really match anyway.

By Anonymous, at 1:08 pm
your cool kl yearbooks had lots of fun pics. for mine... you have one picture in the whole book, that's your class photo. two or three if you're a somebody in a persatuan. it's crazy, but it still means so much.

By Genusfrog, at 2:46 pm