Recently in Recollections Category

It's fun to look back at old, outrageous photos of yourself and swear never to do it again.

Pang and I.

Those were the days...

When I thought this was cool.

When I thought having my hair bleached for 8 hours straight was cool.

Oh my... what a mess.

I drove past Spottiswoode Apartments out of curiosity. I wanted to see how things have changed since we moved out in March this year.

Tearing down the place.

Michelle and I grew up there.

Michelle and I standing near the playground.

Jessie turned to me and asked, "Nostalgic uh?"

I don't know why, but I felt really sad as we drove off.

I wanted to smoke badly. My parents were outside in the living room. There was no way I could leave the house to smoke. Then I thought of a plan...

I locked the door, took my smokes and climbed into the cupboard. I figured out that even if the cigarette smell escaped the cupboard, they would be contained in the room.

It was really cramped. My school uniforms were brushing against my head. I lit up the cigarette, careful not to set the clothes on fire. Every time I took a puff, I would tilt my head backwards and blow the smoke upwards. Based on my theory that smoke is lighter than air... so if the smoke goes up...it won't come down again, therefore there would be no smell.

My parents were outside, totally oblivious of their 15 year old son smoking in the room.

The next day, my clothes smelled like shit. When I put my uniform on, it smelled as if I just escaped from a burning building. Everything went into the washing machine.

Iced Gems Biscuits

While Michelle and I were very young, we would always eat biscuits like these. We would first eat the brown part, leaving behind an entire plate full of colorful clumps of icings.

Same goes for Oreos, leaving behind only stacks of white cream.

Then we would take our time and enjoy the so-called nice portions which were left. We were just saving the best for last!

I found some newspaper articles dated 12 years back, laminated and neatly tucked away at the back of my drawer. I took them out, read them, and laughed real hard to myself.

I was in Primary 4 then. My mum had an obsession with tuition teachers. I had tuition almost every single god-damned day. It came to a point where I dreaded those tuition teachers. Shopping trips would end early simply because, our dear son has tuition in 45 minutes so lets all wrap up and go home. While mum fed the tuition teachers well with good cash, I fed them with lots of homework, so I had additional time to play without having to worry about deadlines. They did my homework and I learnt absolutely nothing from all the tuition.

I read The New Paper a lot when I was young. And I was all too familiar with the Dear Mr Wijey section. He seemed to have the solutions to all the problems on earth. And I enjoyed reading his section. So one night, I went into my room, took out a piece of paper, and I wrote a letter to him. Slapped a stamp on the envelope, and mailed it over to Mr Wijey.

Days later, people from The New Paper started calling. Reporters rang my house asking to speak with my mum. Some spoke to me, asked me a few questions here and there. You'll bet a million bucks that I complained to them with all my heart and soul. I told them precisely how fucked up having tuition everyday was. Mum, on the other hand, was more than happy to share her superb parenting techniques with the whole world.

And one day, an article (which was heavily edited and in no way like the letter I wrote) got published in the Mr Wijey section :

Check out the day and month.

Eventually a photographer came over to my place, arranged stacks of books on my computer chair and told me to hide behind the books. He snapped a few shots and left. This article talks about how fucked up my Chinese grades were :

They changed my name to Brian.

Well my parents are Singaporeans, they want me to go to EM1 very badly.

Yea right! See how the reporter tried to suggest the typical Singaporean kiasu culture? FYI, my mum and dad were both P.Rs at that time. My mum was from Malaysia and my dad was from Indonesia. My dad got his citizenship only when I was in secondary school and my mum just got hers recently. Obviously the facts weren't right.

Looking back, I felt totally stupid and naive to have written that letter, which was blown up to epic proportions by the reporters, without realizing the good intentions of my parents. I felt even more fucked up thinking about that huge sum of money, wasted on tuition teachers who did nothing but my homework. 6 years of primary school tuition fees which could have been better used to finance my university education.

Click on ALL SIZES in Flickr, to read the articles.

The first game console I ever got was the PC Engine. I think that was way back in 1990, when Dad bought it from Chinatown. I had an entire drawer full of HuCards (game cartridges) worth hundreds of dollars.

I was only allowed to play on the weekends. Not that the entire console was locked up or hidden high up somewhere during the weekdays, the problem was with the seemingly impossible task of connecting the 3 different coloured cables from the back of the console to the TV screen. Whenever I did it myself, there was only sound, no visual.

Dad wouldn't teach me how to fix them up (Mum would kill him), so I had to wait till the weekends. Saturday morning, to be precise, where he would hook up the game console to the TV, then leave for work. I woke up extra early on Saturday mornings, spent the weekends hammering on the pathetic two-buttoned game pad. On Sunday nights, Dad would disconnect the PC Engine from the TV. That brutally selfish act of his, disconnected me from my one and only source of happiness.

Then "Command and Conquer for PC" came in 1995, and the PC Engine was left to collect dust, subsequently thrown away years later.

I found Youtube videos of my favourite games :

Son Son II

The Kung Fu

This was Dad's favourite game.

Vigilante

Super Star Soldier

Youkai Douchuuki

Shinobi

Mr Heli

Found two old class photos while packing up my room. The covers were pretty dusty and yellow. Taken in 1999, when I was in Victoria School Class 2I. Our form teacher cum Literature teacher was Mrs Poon Soo Lee.

9 years ago...

I thought about something from my younger days. And that thought made me chuckle.

When Michelle (my sis) and I were young, we used to gather in my parents bedroom to play "Sampan". A sampan is a small chinese wooden boat. We would both carry a mattress over (the sampan), and place it on the floor. The floor represents water. How deep? Very. Rules onboard were simple :

1. If you go overboard, touch the floor with one or both feet, you have at most five seconds to get back on. You're in deep deep water.
2. Or else... hmm... no idea. You drown? Maybe? So far we've had no drowning cases because we were pretty quick and nimble.
3. We are NOT allowed to climb onto our parent's bed (located right NEXT to the Sampan), unless clear instructions were received from me, the honorable Captain, that we have docked. The bed usually becomes an imaginary market of all sorts, where Michelle would disembark to "buy" stuff and I would ride my motorcycle.

Once the game started, we would load all our stuff onboard that little sampan. Michelle would bring her toy stove and her toy ingredients onboard. And I would bring on the weapons, just in case we were attacked. I had this mini Lego airfield with lots of fighter craft on board. They had UNLIMITED lasers, bombs and health. And oh yes, how could I forget, my Ninja-Turtle grey sword. Our architectural skills were legendary, we placed pillows and bolsters at the side of the sampan to act as railings. The TV across the room provided on-board entertainment for the crew.

My roles on board the ship were :

1. Captain - I steer the ship. And my word is final. Usually we'd travel to Malaysia, sometimes Indonesia.

2. Pilot of the planes - When I was flying the planes around, I was so-called ALLOWED to walk on water, until they landed. And while the planes were firing, I would yell "tew-tew-tew-tew-tew-bish-a-boom" very loudly. No enemy was too difficult for my planes. Sometimes we suffered a few losses (just to be realistic, crashing into mountains..etc), but new planes would almost instantly emerge from the airfield. Everybody would go hungry after the battle, so Michelle had to cook for the Lego men. Funny, because the plastic eggs were nearly 20 times the size of Lego men.

3. Lookout - I would lookout for imaginary enemies, usually the kangaroo soft toy was the main culprit.

4. Motorcyclist - At the marketplace, I would always have a motorcycle to ride on. It was very fast and went "vrooooooooooooom". Take a pretty stiff pillow, put it horizontally on the bed, grab the pillow between your legs, sit, and lean forward. There, you have a motorcycle. Michelle would sit at the back. And we would turn together, an amazing 30 degrees from the floor. The motorcycle would never skid.

5. Swordsman - Sometimes when the planes were out of fuel, I would leap out with my sword towards the target. Give it few hard smacks on the head. Threat eliminated. After the fight I would be very hungry, and Michelle would cook. And the Lego men would cheer for their new-found hero.

6. Lifeguard - Michelle would sometimes ignore the 5-second rule and I had to reinforce it by counting loudly, yelling, then pulling her back. There, I'm the hero again.

Michelle's roles were simple :

Cook (always plastic eggs inside the plastic burgers)...

..and cook somemore. Sometimes she played lookout and called "enemy". Mostly she played with her dolls onboard. If we needed to use the toilet, we would leap from the sampan into the toilet (toilet floor tiles were safe to step on). And we did our business in hurry, because the sampan would leave without us. I remember being yelled at by Mum for pissing all over the toilet seat when I had to return to the sampan in a hurry.

Time passed really fast when we're playing, and as we grow older, start to miss those days when we were young, stupidly creative and carefree.