The other night I spoke to an old friend for the first time in more than eight years. Just talking about what we were doing with ourselves brought up a lot of things from the past and what could've been.
Online reunions of this sort are proof that Facebook is not a complete waste of time. No, it's only really 70 - 80% wastage. It was through the site I discovered my friend had already been married with a kid with another on the way, and he's a year younger than me. I saw his baby photos online and he's possibly the most adorable thing you've ever seen. He told me he was taking up further studies at night school, presumably to provide a better life for his new family. It's a lot of work but I love the feeling that he's preparing for such an exciting future. I think part of me is jealous that he seems to have found exactly what he wants in life at such a young age, I wish things would line up for me so easily. We used to be that close back in primary school, I guess he'd classify as a best friend during those simpler times. Goes to show you never know what time will do whilst you've been away.
While our conversation was a welcome respite from the happenings of uni life, I lay in bed for what felt like an eternity lost in thought. Regular readers will notice I have a fairly vivid and weird imagination, and that night I found myself dreaming up scenarios where I'm living an entirely different life based on my memories. It's sad enough when you have to move away from what you know and all the people you have come to love. I've been doing that for a lot of my early years and truth be told I never fully got used to it. I always picture each significant move not just as a separate part of my life, but an entirely new life altogether where people and places are left behind for a new incarnation to take hold.
And what else do we leave behind? Besides these things, in my mind the greatest thing left behind is possibility. Because I left Hong Kong to come here to Australia I dropped out of contact with so many people. And I am often left wondering how I would've turned out if I had never left. My nagging suspicion tells me I may have turned out like some of my nastier relatives (being in a place like HK does things to you after a while) but the personal relationships end up feeling like loose ends without a satisfying conclusion.
Yet despite all these things, I do not wish that this path never occurred. While I certainly regret doing certain things I suppose there's no point dwelling on them all day long. The other day I was chatting away with some of my fellow studio detainees and some of them suggested that taking it was the worst decision of their lives. While I admit the workload has been ridiculously high for such an invisible outcome and a lot of stress has come out of being at uni almost every day from the beginning of semester up until now, in my mind I still feel that the silver lining makes some of it worthwhile. In this studio I have met many wonderful people (and some not so) who I may not have met otherwise.
Having this conversation was pretty good for me though. It's making me think I should head back there again some time soon. I definitely need a break from uni, especially given I haven't had much of a winter break to speak of. At the start of the year a friend floated the idea of flying up to visit my other best friend from my former high school life who now lives in Singapore. That now seems like a very good idea indeed, now to get some money and make it happen...
In case I forget down the track, the title of this post comes from the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse-Five. It's the first real book I've had the chance to read in what seems like forever and it's a great read. The main character becomes 'unstuck' in time, causing him to randomly leap back and forwards through his life. In this way even though he experiences his own birth and death several times over, he does not really die because he can see the entirety of his existence. It's definitely worth reading and I'll be looking for a copy of my own some time down the track.
I could blame Tandy for going to losing Bushrangers' games. I could blame Cameron White's "Six or Bust" batting. I could blame my sister for not bringing me another free piece of food. But nothing will take away the fact that we blew yet another final at the G'. This has all the beginnings of a trend, one that I don't care for at all... I sure hope we don't become the Geelong of cricket finals.
My sister is now a sports journalist in training which in short means she gets to go to the press box and go to press conferences afterwards. That meant I had a fair but undefined amount of time to waste after the cursed innings so I went with Tandy to a HK style cafe restaurant in the city and got what I always got in HK... French toast!
I only now realise I have developed this strange habit of taking photos of my food whenever I eat out. But how else will I memorialise that egg and ham on instant noodle? I also realise I could easily make that at home for nothing, but you can't go wrong with HK style cuisine... unless the MSG and grease does something awful to you down the line.
In an entirely unrelated note, in my complete and utter boredom/supreme vanity the other day I set up a Twitter account, you can locate it here and via the widget on my front page sidebar. So far only two people I barely know use it, but if this thing takes off like everyone says it will then I might have a reason to use it 2000 times a day. Then you will all know when and what I'm eating...
I chose this photograph because I spent a good 30 minutes with my dad here waiting for the rest of my family to find a toilet. There's something about the elderly that requires some of them to report to a urinal every couple of hours, and when several of them congregate at once there is no escape.
Here we have two fine specimens of the ancient and noble order of the Starbuck, a mystic organisation devoted to serving you every possible combination of coffee imaginable, no matter how diabetes inducing or caffeine shake effecting it is.
Food in general is fairly cheap in these parts of the world, but being in a casino as part of a captive audience tends to inflate prices somewhat. The silver lining of sorts is that the prices becomes about the same as food would cost back home so you feel slightly not so bad about it... well self delusion was worth a shot.
Need a clinic run by a complete professional? Apparently there's now one run by yours truly in the middle of Hong Kong. Just quietly I didn't know I had my practitioner's license. You learn something about yourself every day, eh?
Here's a place I haven't been in a while. They really shrink buildings down with some sort of magical ray when you grow up, don't they? Being there was really great and weird at once, but being there again after all those years makes me wonder how they fit so many of us in this little school. They did build an extension while I was away which is now home to two sessions of students from all sorts of different cultures. It offers a place to those who do not fit the traditional Hong Kong background such as myself, where culture or language barriers prevent us from fitting into a regular Chinese school. 
I visited my old school with an old friend of mine from my old life. It was pure coincidence that we both happened to be visiting Hong Kong during the same week, let alone the same year. Not all of us former Hong Kongers have the chance to head back every year, and indeed not all of us have good reasons or desire to. Being back on old ground means a lot more when there's someone else to experience it with.I took the next pic at the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. It's a countdown clock letting you know how soon the looming 2009 East Asia Games are. Can't you just feel the excitement building up?
I like to think if I were pretending to be a professional photographer, I would come up with shots like this all the time. These guys must really love Buddha, there are exactly 1000 statues of different sizes on site. That does sound pretty impressive but they cheat by having a lot of tiny ones in the room underneath the giant Buddha. 
Seeing this anti-drugs ad while on the train somehow made me think of that Jennifer Garner movie "Suddenly 30", but with a different set of numbers.
(Scene: young Chad, a surly teenager with a lust for sloth visits his grandfather in the nursing home and observes all the equipment keeping him alive.)
"Aww man! Look at all that neat stuff! I wish I could have a machine eat, breathe and extract my waste for me!"
(Chad then goes home to his closet and breaks out the jar of fairy dust that's been sitting on his doll house. Chad's a confused, lazy kind of sloth who will grow up to become the lead singer of Nickelback but of course he's skipping it all, thank Christ for that. He proceeds to sprinkle a liberal amount of fairy dust on himself.)
(Chad awakens 53 years later in the closet, only to stumble out and fall down the stairs and dislocating his hip in the process. He later finds out all his friends are dead and he can't afford all those nice things his grandfather had and has kidney failure from his days as a propagator of bad stoner rock music. On his way back to the house to gather the fairy dust to return him to his adolescent state, he is attacked by a mob of former PoWs who were tortured by the US government with the use of his music and the theme to Sesame Street, which he also somehow wrote before he was even conceived.)
Ok, so it starts out like a screwball comedy but ends up like a tragic drama. You might think that this is the worst script idea ever and that it'd never work but then they did make Hancock. I just need Will Smith to play Chad.
Join me next time when I buy a new record!