All Things Change

So I’m thirty-one now. What is there to say about that?

You might have noticed that time speeding up has been a recent theme of mine. And I swear, last year’s birthday was just a little while ago. I wrote a tribute to my twenties. We had a party. This year we didn’t, which was just as well: it didn’t feel like much of an occasion. Today is the anniversary of the day I was born? Great, fantastic. Then I blink and it’s a week later. One of my cousins mentioned telling her students why she didn’t want to celebrate her birthdays either: they were growing up, while she was just getting older. That’s pretty relatable if you ask me. 

I always used to look forwards in life. The past only interested me in terms of lessons gleaned from bittersweet memories. It was something to get away from. Now, though, I have this nagging feeling that I’ve lost some innate piece of myself along the way and don’t know how to get it back. I used to read every book on the shelf and dream of being a fantasy author. Now I barely read or write at all anymore. Well, I barely read books; I spend plenty of time on the internet following the news and video game reviews and so on. But that’s a subject for another post.

It’s going on two years now since my mom died. Our lives together weren’t the best. There were so many times that I wish I’d had more empathy or been a better son. But we had some good times too, after the chemo did its poisonous work and cleared the cancer out of her system for a reprieve. We went out for pizza every month for years before that, long before the first tumour began to grow. Those were the good old days. If only I hadn’t taken them for granted.

I’ve been working at the same place for over nine years now, and I’ve seen it slowly decline over time. Vehicles wore out and could no longer be repaired. More and more people retired. Sections were closed off, damaged by landslides, reclaimed by nature. There was a gentle old uncle I used to take the bus with; he died in his early fifties before even reaching retirement. People I knew have had strokes, heart problems, kidney failure. Someone who’d been a little girl when I first joined grew up and had cancer in her teens. She passed away last year.

Entropy is the natural order of the universe, as they say. Change is the only constant.

I’ve been at the same place for nine years, but maybe 2022 will be the last. On Monday I start working somewhere else; temporarily, perhaps. Or maybe this will be the start of something new. I don’t know, and that bothers me, the not knowing. It’s at times like these that I feel unsettled, unsure, lacking in some vague and insidious way. There are things I should have done, that I should have more experience with, at age thirty-one. What does it mean that I don’t? Does it make me less of a person? There’s plenty more life to live, and yet I don’t feel like I’m growing up anymore. I’m just getting older.

I’m thirty-one years old, and if I live as long as my mom, that puts me squarely at the halfway point. Other people my age have gotten married, had kids, built stable careers, travelled to far-off places. What have I done, exactly? Written half-finished novels before losing interest? Carried pythons and handfed hornbills? Memorized animal facts, acted like a frightened tourist, gotten comfortable talking to strangers? I’ve got a lot of stories, to be sure. That just doesn’t feel like enough.

When I was a kid, the land our house sits on now was all paddy fields. My grandparents worked in them before I was born. Then the times changed, and the land was filled in for our different family members’ houses to be built. There are kids running around here now who’ve never known anything different, my nieces and nephew shooting up like weeds. Someday they’ll grow up and find that the world has changed for them as well. I wonder where I’ll be in life by then.

I don’t have a tidy lesson or ending to all this, because, well, there isn’t one. Life keeps moving on until it doesn’t, until an ending which is rarely painless or peaceful in any sense of the word. Normally I’d try to make this into some kind of inspirational bullshit like not thinking the neighbour’s grass is greener when they probably feel the same way about yours. Not today though.

Perhaps this is the human condition; to be constantly dissatisfied, uncertain, wanting just that little bit more out of life. To feel adrift in the ennui of it all. Perhaps tomorrow will be better, or it might be worse than today. We never know, do we.

All things change eventually.

Time Flies Forwards

 

At the end of last year, both my glasses and my smartphone needed replacing. The lenses of one were getting blurry, scratched, and yellow; the other one could no long hold a signal and the battery was draining faster than ever. Both of these items were almost four years old, incidentally. I bought them with my mom. That seems so long ago now.

Anyway, before this I always used basic lenses which corrected my myopia and nothing else. My eyesight there has remained unchanged for the last ten years. Heck, the optician said it might actually have improved a little. That’s something to be grateful for. But my astigmatism has only gotten worse over time, no doubt due to all these screens I’m always looking at. To that end, in December I finally bit the bullet and got Kodak City Lenses. These bad boys filter out UV light, blue light from screens, and improve night vision. They were, ahem, a bit expensive. But I feel like I’m seeing clearer than ever.

One thing stood out when I first put them on: even colours looked brighter, sharper. It was both incredible and mildly concerning to take them off and feel like the world grew faded, not just blurry. The view through my new glasses wasn’t just clearer, it was more colourful too.

For the new phone, I got an Oppo A74, which is a decent midrange entry that will no doubt be outdated in a year or two. A phone with 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage used to be a huge deal; now I’m just glad it runs smoothly with a dozen apps open. I no longer need to be constantly clearing out my photo album to make space. The camera’s not bad either.

So I ended the year kitted out with new and improved ways of seeing the world. They’re an improvement on their predecessors in every way, and I’m already taking them for granted. It’s making me think about filters. We all see the world through viewpoints molded by experience and personality and perspective, which grow and change as life goes on. The one filter which we all have in common is time.

***

It’s 2022 already, huh. I swear the years are going by faster and faster.

So this is the point when I write something reflective about 2021. It was a year of natural disasters, multiple floods and landslides in Sabah and across Malaysia. Climate change is happening, people.

2021 was the second year of the pandemic, and just like 2020, it was marked by recurring lockdowns. Unlike 2020, it was the year that vaccines became widely available. Though a minority of people remain anti-vax for various reasons, ranging from perceived infringement of personal freedoms to concern over potential long-term side effects to outright conspiracy theories about microchips being planted in our bodies (newsflash people, our smartphones already track us and harvest our personal data); the vast majority of Malaysians are now vaccinated. I’m sorry that that isn’t the case in other parts of the world.

It also saw the rise of multiple COVID variants: Alpha and Beta and Delta and now Omicron, these increasingly mutated strains with alternate symptoms and increased infectiousness. Will there be more? Probably. Booster shots are recommended to defend against these new and improved viruses, I’ll be getting mine soon. But by now it’s clear that COVID isn’t going to go away. Wearing face masks isn’t just required by law, it’s become normal social etiquette. We’re all carrying around little bottles of hand sanitizer and scanning QR codes everywhere we go. This is the world we live in now. You can go with the flow, or you can go against it and reap the consequences.

It seems like 2022 will mark the end of the pandemic. Not a sudden ending, but a gradual fading into the background, the latest addition to our rogue’s gallery of familiar illnesses. Only time will tell.

***

It’s funny how when I was a kid, a single year took forever. Now at age 30, I blink and it’s Christmas again. Me and my generation aren’t kids anymore. We’re uncles and aunts and parents. I look at my nieces and nephews and they seem bigger every time I see them. That line about kids growing up before your eyes; it’s all true. But you have to be there to believe it.

In many ways, I like who I am at 30. I’m more confident now, more articulate in person, not just in print. I still get depressed; life gets me down sometimes. But you know what? I’m alive to experience it all. That doesn’t mean I don’t look back in sorrow. I still miss my mom. I wish I could turn back the clock and spend more time with her, knowing now that she’ll die when she’s barely into her sixties. Pardon my language; but fuck cancer.

Life is always bittersweet, isn’t it? You can’t have the good without the bad.

At the same time, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of living life on autopilot, forgetting the dreams you used to have because the day-to-day is all that matters. We have so many distractions nowadays. I still love video games and fully intend to write more about them; but then I haven’t been writing much at all, have I. Too much time spent on social media and not enough on healthier habits. We always believe in the fantasy of tomorrow. Time flies forwards, and none of us have as much left as we think.

So here I am, getting back to writing and spinning just a little bit of order out of chaos. Just trying to do better*. Here’s hoping that 2022 will be better to us all, eh?

 

*Yeah, that was totally a Spiderman reference. Have you seen No Way Home? You need to watch No Way Home.