Wednesday, August 23, 2006
reality bites
its true. the minute you get back home, everything's different, yet everything's the same. my home is the same. everyone has new practices and a new schedule, they behave weirdly and structure their days around different activities and schedules, but yet the old preoccupations and indeed, fears, are still exactly the same. its disorientating. with friends, its been the same. i've heardd (not yet met) people who apparantly have changed drastically within these 9 short months. changed beyond recognition. yet, when i meet up with people, it seems as if life has just been humming on uneventfully while i was away, and i feel like a strange alien whose just crash landed in the middle of a party and is trying to pick up on a conversation that's been going on for an hour.the rubber hits the road. nobody really cares that much what i did the past 2 months. some people don't even know where i've been the past year. i don't blame them. how many of my friends have i been keeping tabs on? do i know where they all are right now? how far people can seem to be after such a short time!
yesterday i met bry, mich, liz, cher, huishan and kaimin. it was wonderful to see them again. i'm finding, with every meeting and parting, that i'm getting worse and worse with words. there's simply so much to say and so much that i feel that i don't even know where to start. i feel just happy to sit and listen to the stream of talk around me-- talk about familiar things which are unfamiliar to me. it gives me a proper feeling of being home. yet, i also makes my sense of being absent huge to me. today i met leb, teaching at acjc. i'm so happy to see him. exactly the same. and later in the evening, with toshi and zhiwei. toshi cracks me up, as always. his life in the army singing thing could be seen as totally degrading and depressing, but somehow, the way he told it made it seem like a huge, hilarious in-joke that he shared with god knows who. as he told random stories and reenacted his cheesy sequences, it just seemed like clips out of some american comedy. it was funny. it was nice to see him. we talked about alot of things. i remember feelign like zhiwei. i know i;m on fire right now, and i can talk like i do because of the almost fantasy that i've been living in for the past 2 months, and the things i;ve seen. yet people around me don't share that, and there are reasons why they don't. real life gets in the way, though strictly speaking there shoudl be no such division. i have to remember to be sensitive. its such a challenge, learning how to channel the energy and extraordinary enthusiasm i've suddenly got, into encouraging tired people as opposed to being obnoxious and pissing them off. i feel weak jsut talking. i want so much to do something. maybe my time here being short is just an excuse. is 1 mth not enough to get sth going?
we'll talk about it on sun. like i said to zhiwei, i don't believe that god put me on that mountaintop just so i'd have a stack of nice pictures. he put me there cos he wanted me to come back and make it count for something. i've changed, and i can feel it. things which i once accepted now seem unacceptable; things which i once obsessed over now seem like non-issues. yet because of this i feel like i have to try extra hard to relate rightly. i really want my difference to help, not hurt. i've seen how the latter happens. its easy.
tmr will be another interesting day. i'm looking forward to seeing zing. and designsingapore. and then van and co. gosh there are just so many people i want to meet!
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