Cup-A-Soup

I'm having Cup-A-Soup right now. Golden Vegetable.

It's drizzling.

Oh and there's a really really really fantastic Korean show that I've been watching on Ling's laptop recently. It's My Name is Kim Sam Soon/My Lovely Sam Soon. It's awesome, it really is. I can't begin to explain how lovable and endearing the characters are in the show.

I don't think I'm feeling pensive. Just, something, mild and like the aftertaste of green apples. Well I'm saying that because maybe I just had 3.

Time's flown by. It's March already.

Just yesterday I was walking back to my block and as I passed by the ground floor flats I noticed my moving reflections in the windows. Times like these I find myself imagining that I was someone else peering out and seeing this girl half-prancing along the walkways. Then I fast-forward my life by a little and look at the people and things in front of me with a projected retrospect.

I almost already miss being 20 going on 21.

There's a conversation with my mama I remember. She said, back then, that when I turned 21, it'd be a happy and almost congratulatory event, with plenty of food and glee at home. You see, I was quite tiny then, must have been about 9, and the prospect of turning 21 was almost inconceivable. Not incredulously impossible, but just something I never spent much time anticipating. And now, 10 over years later, I do know that 21 years ago my mama was carrying me, going about everyday life, preparing my dagor for primary school, etc. And as I turn 21 in about 2 months, I would never have guessed that it'd be in Nottingham and in the midst of exams. Well, I never had or wanted the whole lifeplan mapped out for me, to be where doing what at what age. It's with such equanimity that we take things which come our way, don't you think?

We're far from our twillight years but someday, sometime, it'd be quite novel to have been born in 1980s Singapore, and through the 1990s, then the new millennium.

I guess this is what my Grandmother was talking about when she said in Hainanese, "jia yian gwey jia yian", which means one generation passes another.

And from where I'm looking now, this seems somewhat different from the whole weight of rebirth and relentless cycle of life which can suffocate. Like sometimes passing on the flame of life can appear dreary because we tend to fixate value and worth to a before-life, after-life and things which are forever. Maybe this explains the search for immortality, where we came from and where we're going. Diamonds and monuments alike. When perhaps the simplicity of it all is that maybe we all have this one forgiving chance to be here. When the time is up, it just is.

Whether our births were out of the trends of the times, out of a fervent desire to make a better world for us, for us to take on the responsibilities of taking care of our elders, I hope I'm not the only one who realises that these are laden upon us while we too adopt independent existences. So like my mama says, there are some things which don't have to be emphasised or analysed to precision. And it is a blessing to sail down the river where the current takes us sometimes. Whether we label it "natural" or "it's just the way it is" or "no choice la", these can be welcomed at times, at times.

It makes me wonder at how much choice we want in life, and how little choice we may want at other times. And isn't it funny when we choose to have less choice, and have no choice but to have so many choices? And in the rhetoric of pro-choice or pro-life campaigns on everything, from abortion rights to homosexuality, often these are unable to capture the grey and the life among the polarised black versus white, conservatives versus liberals, etc. When really, we can't cookie-cut everything around us.

What beings would we be if we didn't live with contradiction.

And I need another cup of soup.