iconocaust (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} iconocaust) wrote,@ 2007-12-26 23:54:00 |
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Chasing Yesteryear
As anybody who spends a lot of time moving knows, the science of packing is never the most exact. As much as you may try to keep things clean and orderly, by the time you get around to emptying desk drawers and other collections of random junk, you're far enough gone that you throw all ideas of organisation into the wind and just dump everything in a box before calling it a day. In this case, I speak entirely from experience -- when we started packing up our life in Malaysia almost ten years ago, most of my possession were up-ended haphazardly into plastic containers and then left almost untouched for the next half-decade. Last week, I started looking at the stuff again for the first time in memory -- partially because I actually had things I wanted to get out of storage and couldn't find because of my piss-poor packing skills, partially out of morbid curiosity. And while I'll be damned if I can find the stuff, the other odds and ends I've encountered have really been an embarrassment of riches.
Well, actually just an embarrassment, per se, since most of what's been boxed in effectively represents some of the most desperately uncool years of my life. Finding a decade-old tube of Clearasil and a KFC receipt from 1999 in the same box probably qualifies as some kind of ironic juxtaposition, but I can't really find any nice way to dress up stuff like Star Trek bookmarks or ancient, rambling plot outlines for fan fiction that never saw the light of day. Then there's the abortive attempts at hobbies -- two big stamp albums full of weird and probably worthless material, old Citadel acrylics that had degraded to toxic waste in the meantime, more empty drawing pads than I'll ever use in my lifetime... it's kind of sad, really, even if it's the perfect testament to the classic ADD lifestyle.
*****
A few days before Christmas, we sat down to watch footage of Kuala Lumpur my parents had taken during their vacation earlier in the year. It was sobering stuff, not least of all because I barely recognised a fraction of it; many of the hangouts where I'd spent so much of my schoolyears had either been warped beyond recognition or disappeared altogether, and the city scale had altered beyond all recognition. High rises have sprung up everywhere, highways soar over the cityscape, new light rail and monorail lines abound. Central Market is shuttered, a horrendous roof looms over Petaling Street, Ampang Point has turned from shopping center to up-scale bazaar.
But there were exceptions: Kelab Darul Esan with its swimming pools, icy air-conditioned buffet tables and omnipresent bad jazz, all alive and looking no different than the day I first set foor there back in '92. Naan Corner, that little curious row of shops I passed on the way to school every day for the best part of nine years, might as well have been frozen in stasis; seeing the supermarket owner actually recognising my parents after all this time was oddly touching. And that little house at Jalan 1/4, with its unassuming green gate and bathtowel-sized garden... barring a discreet satellite dish on the balcony and the BMW in the driveway, it's still the same place we left all those years ago. Seeing it again has been kind of bittersweet, but I hope it'll be as good to the next generation of renters as it was to us.
*****
On a tear -- and no doubt motivated by misplaced by newly welling reserves of nostalgia -- I decided to try and use the power of the internet to track down my small cadre of old friends from my Malaysia days. I don't hold much truck with the whole 'alumni' thing, and barring one exception, I haven't had significant contact to any of them in years; still, maybe '08 is the year to get things in order and redevelop some of those old connections. Pity Google wasn't up to playing ball; of the four, I could only track down significant information on two, and those hits were limited to a neglected Friendster profile and a wedding album -- and as radiant as they look, what is it with everybody I know getting married of late? Still, it's good to know that they're kicking around out there somewhere and haven't gotten so fabulously successful that my self-esteem ends up taking lumps.
As anybody who spends a lot of time moving knows, the science of packing is never the most exact. As much as you may try to keep things clean and orderly, by the time you get around to emptying desk drawers and other collections of random junk, you're far enough gone that you throw all ideas of organisation into the wind and just dump everything in a box before calling it a day. In this case, I speak entirely from experience -- when we started packing up our life in Malaysia almost ten years ago, most of my possession were up-ended haphazardly into plastic containers and then left almost untouched for the next half-decade. Last week, I started looking at the stuff again for the first time in memory -- partially because I actually had things I wanted to get out of storage and couldn't find because of my piss-poor packing skills, partially out of morbid curiosity. And while I'll be damned if I can find the stuff, the other odds and ends I've encountered have really been an embarrassment of riches.
Well, actually just an embarrassment, per se, since most of what's been boxed in effectively represents some of the most desperately uncool years of my life. Finding a decade-old tube of Clearasil and a KFC receipt from 1999 in the same box probably qualifies as some kind of ironic juxtaposition, but I can't really find any nice way to dress up stuff like Star Trek bookmarks or ancient, rambling plot outlines for fan fiction that never saw the light of day. Then there's the abortive attempts at hobbies -- two big stamp albums full of weird and probably worthless material, old Citadel acrylics that had degraded to toxic waste in the meantime, more empty drawing pads than I'll ever use in my lifetime... it's kind of sad, really, even if it's the perfect testament to the classic ADD lifestyle.
A few days before Christmas, we sat down to watch footage of Kuala Lumpur my parents had taken during their vacation earlier in the year. It was sobering stuff, not least of all because I barely recognised a fraction of it; many of the hangouts where I'd spent so much of my schoolyears had either been warped beyond recognition or disappeared altogether, and the city scale had altered beyond all recognition. High rises have sprung up everywhere, highways soar over the cityscape, new light rail and monorail lines abound. Central Market is shuttered, a horrendous roof looms over Petaling Street, Ampang Point has turned from shopping center to up-scale bazaar.
But there were exceptions: Kelab Darul Esan with its swimming pools, icy air-conditioned buffet tables and omnipresent bad jazz, all alive and looking no different than the day I first set foor there back in '92. Naan Corner, that little curious row of shops I passed on the way to school every day for the best part of nine years, might as well have been frozen in stasis; seeing the supermarket owner actually recognising my parents after all this time was oddly touching. And that little house at Jalan 1/4, with its unassuming green gate and bathtowel-sized garden... barring a discreet satellite dish on the balcony and the BMW in the driveway, it's still the same place we left all those years ago. Seeing it again has been kind of bittersweet, but I hope it'll be as good to the next generation of renters as it was to us.
On a tear -- and no doubt motivated by misplaced by newly welling reserves of nostalgia -- I decided to try and use the power of the internet to track down my small cadre of old friends from my Malaysia days. I don't hold much truck with the whole 'alumni' thing, and barring one exception, I haven't had significant contact to any of them in years; still, maybe '08 is the year to get things in order and redevelop some of those old connections. Pity Google wasn't up to playing ball; of the four, I could only track down significant information on two, and those hits were limited to a neglected Friendster profile and a wedding album -- and as radiant as they look, what is it with everybody I know getting married of late? Still, it's good to know that they're kicking around out there somewhere and haven't gotten so fabulously successful that my self-esteem ends up taking lumps.
