The Lethe

I don’t think it’s possible for an interface to be more obtuse. It takes so many steps to get what I want. Perhaps I’m just being ambitious. But I really think that making a text box look like an instant message shouldn’t take me a whole-ass hour. I’m probably self-reporting how technologically illiterate I am but I don’t care! I’m mad! >:|

…

2003-2008

My earliest memories are kind of vague. It’s hard to discern what I truly have in my brain and what has been extrapolated from photos and stories. So, I’m focus on what I’m pretty sure on, for this thing. I remember the foam letter matts we had in our playroom, my brother and I. I remember the wicker couch I used to pretend was a control panel for a spaceship; Tugging at loose and broken ends, unwinding them as if they were switches. As far as I can tell, I was always a natural sportswoman: I sat out Taekwondo practice all five times I went and swallowed so much water when learning to swim that it was nearly a traumatic experience. There are names and places that mean something from when we lived there – Phillip (my best friend), The Aberdeen Marina Club, Red Hill, Stanley, Ocean Park. While I would never say myself that food played a big part in my life, it’s undeniable that a few key memories are linked to it. Our kindergarten had a bakery right next to it. I think they were even connected. My mum used to buy me a gingerbread cookie from there after school a lot. Ocean park used to have the best grilled squid with this sweet sauce but when we went back, years later, they didn’t make it right anymore. There’s also the fish paste siew mai that I used to love but in hindsight, taste pretty gross. We used to mix the sodas from the soda machines at AMC; horrible concoctions of Fanta orange and cream soda (side note: Coke had a weird sense of taboo about it, I guess because my parents thought its caffeine was worse for you than other drinks?) that we thought were the drinks of the gods. That, combined with the buffet containing pizza under heat lamps, the chocolate fountain and the jungle gym makes AMC a pretty vivid picture to me. Also ice lollies. The orange ones. Huh. I used to be a much bigger fan of orange flavoured stuff than I am now. I never noticed that. Anyways, why all this? Well, I (on the 16th of October 2022, 2:00am) was thinking too much, as I often do at this time of night and I realised there are things that I might one day not know. Nobody reads this so it may as well be my diary. I don’t really care about leaving a “legacy” or a “mark” or “making an impact”. I don’t actually know why I want this down. Maybe I’m self-absorbed. Maybe I’ll realise by the time I’m done.