Tuesday, September 15, 2009

happy birthday me.

since it's my birthday today, i thought i shall reward myself with a rare post and retrospection.

How does it feel to be 22 years old? I used to think that people who are in the 20s are old, mature, able to make life decisions correctly and, well, basically life is more or less settled. Hah how wrong I am! I still feel like I'm 19, not surprising as I think I'm still being treated like one. Although I do feel that life decisions are getting more frequent. Having made a few already (what type of degree would I want to read, etc), I am living in those choices now. I wouldn't say that most choices I made were the right ones, but I think I can say that they were the best ones for me. Mistakes made, mistakes learned. That's how life unveils itself.

Having lived out maybe 1/3 of my life (maybe 1/4 if I'm lucky), and being the person that God made me to be, I question myself regularly if I have lived out my life to the best that I can. To be honest, I don't know. People have their mid-life crises at the age of 30odd, and I really hope that I won't be turn out to be one of them. I have already vaguely planned out my life about 30 years in advance (yes, kiasu, I know, but I like to be organised) , having already decided what I want to be next time, how I am going to achieve that, further education, what type of ideal housing (which part of Singapore), what car to drive, what dog to have, dog's name, etc, etc. Of course I have alternate plans, and being receptive to what God has in store for me. But at the crossroads in life, I feel both excited and afraid of growing up. A part of me wants to stay young forever, but I guess that wasn't part of God's plan (except Peter Pan, maybe).

Today, peeping at my book boxes, I noticed some changes in reading preferences. Two years ago, books that I would have bought include The Time Traveler's Wife, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, The God of Small Things, etc. A year ago, I got classics like Alice in Wonderland, 1984, Trainspotting, Oliver Twist, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Brave New World, etc. Today, at Kinokuniya, I decided to self-present myself with two books: Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History in Time. Good or bad, I don't know. I do know, however, that I'm spending more money on books than time reading them.

Have a good week ahead, happy birthday me.