Saturday, September 09, 2006
It's just past 12am and now I'm 21. The long-awaited moment is finally here, yet I don't feel particularly excited about it now. In fact, I'm far more *excited* about the myriad presentations, projects and papers that await me in the coming weeks... =___="
Turning 21... it's supposed to be a big deal for a teenager to be recognized as an adult, to be able to vote (not that that amounts to much in Singapore) and to be able to watch R21 films (now this is what I'm more interested in). So now I'm legally able to waltz into a cinema and watch a Tsai Ming Liang film without my lecturer bemusedly laughing at the fact that I am underaged. Hurray!
But apart from the (government-constructed) symbolic value of turning 21, what does it all mean to me? I guess it marks the end of 20 years of childhood and adolescence, which have flashed by rather too quickly. It's ironic how we often complain about being treated like kids and indulge in all that teenage rebel angst, only to realise once it's over how much we want to be kids again, to be carefree, devoid of adult responsibilites, to be pure and fresh and innocent. But this is only wishful thinking and ultimately, I do value the consciousness (I hope) I have acquired over the years.
I suppose I have changed much over the past two decades. From a timid, silent girl who always got bullied, I've morphed into this strange being with secret (and not-so-secret) perversions, who speaks her mind confidently and unabashedly during CCA meetings but turns into a bundle of nerves when explaining her reading of a text, who is both the suave Mrs Dalloway and the schoolgirl fraught with gaucherie, who likes solitude but fears loneliness, who is outrageously frank and sharply ironic yet prone to bouts of gentler maternal feeling, who prides herself on her 'masculinity' yet cannot shake off the unease of not being 'feminine', who sometimes wishes to hold others in her arms and at other times to be held in others' arms, who claims her ideological project is to be androgynous and thus solve the problem of gender, who rails against the patriarchal order and contemplates romantic relationships with girls, yet dreams of being an Emma to her Mr Knightley.
As much as I've changed, matured even (I hope), through the small trials and tribulations of the years, I would also like to keep something of my younger self intact. I would like to go out into the adult world with the mind of an adult and the heart of a child. Perhaps I simply like to infantilize myself (another one of my perversions), but I think there's something to be said for trust in others, for distaste towards the crude, the petty, for the imagination, and for heartfelt appreciation of the simple things in life.
I wonder how possible that will be but I'll try my best to live life to the fullest in the next 4 decades to come. Here's to being 21!
kaoru said at 12:30 AM
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