Why Would I Write

Category: Random

  • The Tiniest Things

    I’m the king of procrastination. Believe me, there’s so many things that I wish I would finish and haven’t gotten around to it yet. One of those things was cleaning out my room. Despite starting it in January 2018, I finally finished it last weekend. And if it wasn’t because of certain motivating factors, I bet my room would have stayed unclean for the rest of the year.

    What motivated me? Believe it or not – mosquitoes. Yes, those pesky flying blood suckers. Last week I had the worst bout of mosquito attacks in my room. I’d wake up every day with new bites on my legs or arms, and when I was awake, I would notice them flying around the room. Despite my constant spraying of Ridsect every time I went out for the day, and tubs of mosquito repellent I left around my room – they still wouldn’t leave me alone.

    I knew that there was one thing left to do: I had to clean my fucking room. And so I did. I took me two days to go through the boxes of stuff I had (things I had been hoarding for over ten years), packing them into trash bags and other boxes. I threw out tons of stuff. I turned off sentimental mode. I didn’t care that it was a book of drawings I did as a kid – they were rubbish anyway, I threw them out. After that, I gave my room a complete wipe-down, getting rid of dust, dirt, hairs, and whatever left that was lying around.

    The mosquitoes haven’t completely disappeared – I’m sure there are some left for me to destroy, but the bites have stopped. On the plus side, I now have a clean room and boy, it feels good. Also, it felt great to finally finish something that I started back in 2018. At least this year wasn’t such a waste. The next step is maintaining my room’s condition.

  • 60 minutes of fame

    I spent my weekend being quite productive, I must say. I organized my keyboard spare parts into plastic boxes, and threw out a lot of cardboard boxes and plastic bags. Now I have extra space in my closet for more keyboard stuff.

    I’ve mentioned about having thoughts of recording my own podcast in the past before, and while that hasn’t taken off, I managed to do the next best thing: by being a guest on a podcast I regularly listen to! Over the weekend, I took up Don’s invitation to be a guest on The Board podcast and it was a lot of fun. I was expecting a lot of awkward silences and dead air, but conversation flowed pretty well. I had never been interviewed about keyboards before, so that was fun. I get to speak about something I’m interested in.

    The audio quality of my microphone is pretty terrible, I should have recorded locally so he could merge the files but it’s listenable. If you’ve ever wondered what I would sound like on radio, feel free to listen to the episode. Thanks again to Don for having me on! I’ll be up for another episode down the road if the opportunity rises again!

    I think my body might be telling me to quit drinking. Last night I was out for some beers and I noticed that every time I took a sip of beer, my jaw started to hurt for no apparent reason. It kept happening throughout the night. However, whenever I took a swig of water, my jaw was fine. No pain at all. I’m not sure what the cause is and googling doesn’t give me anything useful. Hopefully it was just something fucky in the air (or drink) last night because it would suck if my jaw hurt every time I drank alcohol.

    In addition to drinking beer, I had a lot of water which helped my body immensely the following day – I didn’t have to sit on the porcelain throne for most of the day (something which usually happens after a night of drinking). I guess I know what to do whenever I go drinking in the future. Water = good.

  • Sea of Bodies

    When I was younger, my family and I went to a New Year’s Eve party in the city. I can’t remember what year it was but it was long enough ago that I didn’t have a cellphone of my own (remember those days?).

    Anyway, for some reason I let go of my mom’s hand in the sea of people at the countdown. Within a matter of seconds, I was lost in the crowd. A tiny young boy, all alone but surrounded by people. I wasn’t tall enough to see past the hundreds of heads around me to find her. There was nowhere to climb for a better view.

    I cried my eyes out. Eventually I borrowed a concerned stranger’s phone to call my mom. Couldn’t get through to her phone (there were that many people in the area, the networks were overloaded) so that was futile. I had no idea what else to do. We didn’t agree on a meeting point in case any of us got lost. I didn’t even know the way back to the car to wait for them. I thought I was separated from my family forever. I can vaguely remember what that felt like.

    I returned the phone, thanked the stranger, and started wandering around, looking for a familiar face. At this point, fireworks were going off, welcoming the new year. While everyone around me cheered and celebrated, I didn’t revel in their joy. I was just a teary-eyed boy stumbling through the crowd, lost and miserable.

    I didn’t know how long it took, but by some stroke of luck, I found my aunt in the crowd. She didn’t even know I was missing! I held on to her until the end of the night when she brought me back to my family. I had never been so happy to see them again.

    Because it all ended well, my family didn’t think much of it. To them, I had only disappeared for a brief moment. To me, at that time, it was one of the worst experiences of my life. Maybe I’m being dramatic, but I was just a kid.

    I’m not sure why I decided to recount the tale, but it came to mind today as I was making my way through a crowd of people at a night market. Was that incident so many years ago the first manifestation of my disdain for crowds? Possibly. At least it’s not so bad these days. I’m now tall enough to look over other people’s shoulders and I usually have a cellphone with me. I still stand at the back of the hall during gigs – not because I’m too cool to hang with other kids – I prefer the space a lot more.