Despite that there have been some 20 or so revisions to my homepage/site/whatever in the past 7, 8 years or so that I've maintained a personal online presence, I've written fresh descriptions about myself only some 3, 4 times--with old words being reused again, and again.
But the time has come, for a fresh, new start--to both this page about myself, as well as to my life.
I am standing at the crossroads of life, on the brink of adulthood, with some 26 months of life in green behind me already, and the grim, somewhat macabre reassurance that the worst is over (if you can survive NS, you can survive anything!--so they say)--as I prepare, to step into the next stage of things.
In some 2 months' time, I'll be headed some 16,000 kilometres away, to live on my own, and embark on the greatest adventure of all time, for the next 4 years--as an undergraduate at what I sometimes call the Cannot-Make-it-University, or more correctly, the Carnegie Mellon University, to study Computer Science, and to learn 10,000 things along the way.
In these intervening 20 or so years, I've had plenty of fun, on hindsight, doing things that never seemed fun to others but that were plenty of fun in themselves.
I've done my 12 years' obligatory time in the gruelling Singapore education system, moving from the hardly-known, yet very good Pei Tong Primary School, to The One Place that I still feel I belong to, and finally on to That Place I Really Shouldn't Have Gone To--but at any rate, the latter two are now one, so it's just The Place That Still Feels Like Home--why shouldn't it feel that way, with six of the most exciting growing-up years of my life spent there?
I've seen a tiny modest bit of this vast world that we live in too, from the 5 weeks I spent in San Francisco and the Bay Area and those amazing days of non-stop seafood and silicon dreams, to the two trips I made to the second most populous country where I saw a really different kind of world altogether even if I didn't step out into the reality of it all. And then, there were the few other miscellaneous trips I've gone on around the region, and while in green as well.
I've had fun travelling the world in the comfort of my home as well, to India through the words of R. K. Narayan and E. M. Forster, to Spain and the West Indies with Ernest Hemmingway, to the fantasy worlds of Roald Dahl, and even to outer space and back, all during Lunchtime, with Douglas Adams; and I reckon I've done a couple of million other things too, through the eyes and minds of many other of my companions.
More recently, I've gone about showing people the world through my eyes, and what my world looks like--it's a fun, and sometimes deeply introspective and meaningful, exercise, to discover what goes through your mind, and how things work between your eyes and your brain. To top it all off, it's a great way to get to know this place that we call home, yet often know so woefully little about. Best of all, it captures the most beautiful moments, for all of eternity (or as long as your harddisk lasts).
That's hardly all that I've done in these past two decades, but the rest, I reckon, is for me to know, and you to find out, if you really want to. :)
But, what I really want to do now, is to uncover all there is to uncover, and find out what really is out there, and what really makes this world go round--to get beneath the facade of things, the beautiful smiles plastered on everyone's faces, the beautiful glass panels and cement wonders of the civilised world, the beautifully rustic surroundings of the countryside of the unspoiled places, and take a peek, at what's under it all.
Yet, that's not what I'm headed to do--instead, I'm taking the hard-earned monies of my father, and my mother, and many fathers and mothers, and most probably yours too (unless your family makes a combined DECLARED gross household income of less than S$30,000 a year, or you aren't from my country, or your parents evade taxes), to have a whale of a time at a place where there are no whales to be seen, much less beaches that I've come to take for granted living in an island-state.
In the end, I guess, the whales will go home, and perhaps the dolphins too, and things might not be so different after all as I fall back into the old routine of reaching out for those impossible numbers, putting myself through masochistic rigours that I know I will enjoy only on hindsight yet do it anyway for the heck of it much as I know I'm supposed to be trying to broaden my horizons instead of just trying to hit the high notes (and grades).
And, amidst all the lamenting that things aren't so different after all, that they're the same everywhere you go and that the grass is always greener on the other side, and that I ain't going to be very much different, deep down inside, I know I will smile at myself, knowing that things are different, that I've seen what I've gone (come) to see, that I've moved on and changed, for the better, and I'll secretly believe that it never is any greener on the other side--it's just the refraction of the colours as they travel to your eyes.
At the end of it all, perhaps, dreams do come true. You just have to know the right dreams to dream, and the right way to sleep. Ask me about it :) Cheers.
It's been a whopping eight years that I've had a homepage!--or some form of online presence, at least.
It all first began as an innocuous challenge in class by our teacher to come up with a personal homepage, and it all kicked off from there. There were pages with words, and words, and more words of nonsensical teenage rambling, for some time; then, it was the blog thing, some 4 years back.
Only recently--slightly over two years ago, that is (quite a long time at net-speed already)--have I started writing for an audience--for friends, and whoever else who actually bothers to read--as I repackage bite-sized thoughts and pad them up into what-I-hope are things worth reading; never mind if you don't, I get enough fun out of writing these things :).
And of course, my photography is all over the site as well, because there's nothing much else for me to have here ;).