Over the last few weeks, a couple of seemingly unrelated events made me realise that I might have been unwittingly been too caught up in this liminal period, and consequently am what anthropologist Victor Turner might term, "in betwixt and between."
But it was really the news of the sheer number of impending marriages of friends in my age-group that got me contemplating.
First, it was my primary six classmate Ying Ying in December. Then at her wedding dinner, I found out two of my other female classmates are also married. Alicia, my secondary four classmate, also got hitched in KL in the same month.
And then in the new year, I found out a couple of my other secondary four classmates are also going to get married. Like Peiru and her JC sweetheart Weiming (both of them are MY age) and Karen Chan and her boyfriend who is a few years her senior. I heard another secondary schoolmate Norman Chua also proposed late last year.
Then there is Jianming and Joanne's wedding in June this year, and Kelvin Mok and Jiayuan's in May. And just the other day at the ASEAN Football Championships semi-final, I bumped into my secondary four cohort-mates from school, Tongli and Karen Yap at the National Stadium and guess what -- they are also going to get married within the year.
Going-to-get-hitched couple number 9 is Carl Rajoo and Gerrie, both my friends from Pre-U Seminar and the former was my OCS wingmate and we are in the same year in NUS. And get this, both of them are 1 year my junior. Oh, make that total number 10 if you count Aaron and his financee.
I got reminded of my singlehood and wondered if I should feel pressured. I honestly don't think I am ready for a relationship now, but I think I don't want to die old and alone.
The pressure was real enough to get me thinking of my options and all those times in the past. Like when I liked her for three whole freakin' years in secondary school and it turned out to be only a mega crush. And all those times when I didn't have the guts to do what a guy had to do.
It was then I was convinced there must have surely been plenty of suckers who must have gotten sucked into this internalised, self-inflicted social pressure and got married for the functional heck of it. I was determined not to be a mere statistic.
Some time back, on tomorrow.sg, some bigot who came back after spending a while in the States said that Singaporean people marry for all the wrong reasons. I wondered what are the "right" reasons for getting married (which he didn't suggest) and then shuddered at his impudence.
xxx
Watching re-runs of the first seasons of ER, Judging Amy and Friends on Hallmark over the last few weeks brought me back to the time when these shows first screened on television.
The late 1990s still feel so recent in my cognitive memory, but it was more than 10 years ago that ER and Friends were first screened. I was barely 13 and starting in secondary school then.
Looking back, I found it quite amazing that those droopy fringes and oversized clothes were in vogue back then. I remembered when Friends ended its run a few years ago remarking that it had to end just when I am beginning to appreciate the jokes as a twenty-something.
I bet this was how my mom must have felt about leaving the 1970s and 1980s behind -- she had me when she was 24 for goodness sake. The 1990s have evidently become the new retro.
Judging Amy, which began its run in 2001, represented a more recent period for me. It was a time when literature classes in Jurong Institute fired my imagination and shaped my social consciousness.
The legal dramas like The Practice and Judging Amy appealed to me also because it offered me an intellectual and social engagement at a level that was lacking at where I was studying at. Watching the short-lived Felicity, when it started in 1999, was when my desire to study in the Big Apple first got germinated.
xxx
In Uncle Chua's contemporary social theory class, I was instantly reminded that my intense sense of nostalgia was a manifestation of my fear of the future. And then the sad, sad truth hit home -- it meant that I have been fearful ALL my bloody life.
Reading how Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas bicker what modernity means to them got me thinking of what my own position is. On one end, is my attitude modern in that I constantly question and live on the edge? On the other hand, is my own modernity project incomplete?
One thing's for sure. I have been looking back at my past way more than I should have all my life. Every time I reach a new epoch in my life, I would constantly look back at the might-have-been's in my life -- instead of seizing the moment and living out my present.
At 24-going-on-25, I find myself in danger of wasting my youth in such a manner. Somehow or rather, I find myself still in the 18-21 range in my mind. All those things I said I wanted to do, the options and all -- I realise the time for them to materialise seems somehow suddenly very near.
Journalism? Academia? Does the States beckon for me? DTS? Gap year? NUS sociology post-grad? Or more immediately, what do I do in my final year, in VCF, in church, in Campus Observer...or do I not do anything at all?
At Crossroads a fortnight ago, I decided that there was just simply too many things to think about. I was swamped, and more crucially, I was tired. Very tired. Of every single thing. There's no point in thinking so much, things are totally out of my control. I know I need to trust.
I just don't know anymore.
It did not help that I was sick most of the week after that. The foul aftertaste of my puke in the wee hours of last Tuesday morning sure had a way of triggering my thoughts of my mortality and my mom's. Especially after the second puking fit which saw me puke all over my room floor.
I asked a lot of basic existential questions like why the heow is the first thing that flashed in my mind when I puked, was the amount of work that would accumulate as a week of my enforced down time and my Biosemiotics mid-term last Thursday.
But I think I want to start to live.
I am only 25 once. And this is supposed to be the start of the peak of my life. I should really start living, otherwise I would always be playing catch-up like how it is always with the course readings. I don't want to be stuck in the past. It sucks.
"Don't look back in anger. It's not too late."
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