2 posts tagged “sentimentalism”
I'm feeling sentimental. This always happens to me when I go trawl through other peoples' blogs. I'll stumble upon this random person from my past who has links to and obviously has kept in touch with A LOT of other people from my past. And then I'll trawl through THEIR blogs and I'll very quickly have a fast forward of how their lives have been going since I've last seen them. And then when I get satiated with their life stories I get sentimental.
Another surefire way to get sentimental is to listen to music from way back when I was still a pimply teenager (and dinosaurs roamed the earth). It amuses me how the older I get the more stories I have to tell about my life and how much more I enjoy telling them. A stark contrast to the teenage days of being awkward and brief about these things. A prime example: "So what did you do today?" (typically from parents), reply: "Nothing". In school as well, especially coming from an all boys school, we could be as noisy as anything (until the headmaster came strolling by the classroom) but I really can't remember what we used to talk about. Mostly about girls and computer games I think. Good times. We still used MiRC back then. a/s/l anyone? I remember when I was in Form 3, man this is so lame but heck, I liked this girl I met on iRC and I ended up sending her an e-mail telling her that I liked her and would she be my online gf (i know, i'm cringing too). She ended up printing it out and posting it on her class notice board. The bitch. No seriously I think I have a right to call her a bitch cos that is seriously nasty.
The things I used to do in high school... There was one fine day after exams were over and we were waiting for the school holidays to start, typically those times we'd be playing little games amongst ourselves, reading (or rather checking out) chicks mags and just generally having a good time. Well that day there was a double period when the whole form was meant to go to the AV room for some boring assed presentation of some sort, but a bunch of us were too cool for that so we decided to skip that and just hang around the class doing our own thing. Things were going well until the discipline mistress came sauntering by and saw us having a good time on our own in class. Oh we were in the shit now. She demanded to know what we were doing and why we weren't in the AV room like the rest of the form and obviously we all kept our traps shut. Then the bell rang for recess, talk about saved by the bell. She told us to go see her in her office after recess. So we all went to the canteen, had our food, and then come the hour of reckoning we all trudged along to her office buuut she wasn't there. We waited for about five minutes and she didn't turn up, so we all fled back to our class thinking that we were off the hook. Nothing happened for the rest of the day, and the last class was PJ (or PE as it is known in english) so we changed into our sports gear and went off to the field to play football. Unfortunately but ultimately quite fortunately for us the discipline mistress showed up mid-lesson demanding all the boys who cut the AV session see her there and then, but everyone was dispersed all around the field and could not be rounded up. So we got a stay of execution, but we were all to see her the first thing the next morning. Do you think anyone took her up on that? By the time the next day came, we all agreed that we'd just sit it out and see what happens, and true enough she forgot and we were off scot-free. Sweet, sweet escape.
The lesson from all this? DO NOT even attempt have an online relationship. That is SERIOUSLY lame. And don't ever take the initiative when it comes to answering to trouble that you got yourself into. Put the onus onto the person who wants to discipline you and more often than not that person will have better things to do than to make you answer to your crimes.
[This post has since been revised due to poor writing quality. I blame lack of sleep when I penned this. Read at your own peril]
I'm feeling sentimental. This always happens to me when I go trawl through other peoples' blogs. I'll stumble upon this random person from my past who has links to and obviously has kept in touch with A LOT of other people from my past. And then I'll trawl through THEIR blogs and I'll very quickly have a fast forward of how their lives have been going since I've last seen them. And then when I get satiated with their life stories I get sentimental. Yet another complicated mental and emotional process dissected into sterility by Thad.
When I get sentimental, I'll sit and think and imagine and reminisce about my life up till now. There's a saying that as you age, every opportunity missed seems golden. I know it's not true though. I know that every choice I've made has taken me to where I am right now, and every decision defined me for who I am. And I'm happy with who I am. No-one should ever look back with regret and think what if? We've made the choice, we've moved on. As much as we'd like to go back and correct all our mistakes, we've made them and felt the consequences. And now we know better. If you didn't make that mistake, you wouldn't have learnt the right way to do it and put in the same situation you'd do it all over again. So count yourself better off.
It's amusing to my strange engineer mind that the sum of many small negatives can be a huge positive. I guess it all depends on the overriding multiplying factor, i.e. X(-a-b-c-d-e....-z) > 0 if X <0. If we tend to see mistakes and failings as being negative and adopt a victim mentality, then the sum of the equation will always be negative. Buut, if we adopt the opposing view and learn from our mistakes, we can actually turn our mistakes around to our great benefit. Of course we'd all do well to learn vicariously through other peoples mistakes but to fully comprehend the complex mental and emotional processes involved in the decision making process we've got to experience it for ourselves a lot of the time. Heck, it's not bad to make a mistake at all. At least you had the guts to step forward and expose yourself to the possibility of failing rather than shirk back and avoid that possibility altogether.
Okay that was a total sidetrack, and now I've hurtled my train of thought down a dead end path. Back up Thad, back up. The point that I really wanted to make was that when it all comes down to it, it's not really any particular milestones or achievements that we tend to want to go back and change. It's not that exam that you should have studied harder for or that class that you shouldn't have skipped (unless you're regretting not going to class the entire semester and living it up instead, but that's soon forgotten post exams only to hit you hard again when the results are announced but life goes on, unless that means that you failed the entire course and it's the fifth time you are repeating a degree and you're 40 and you've done nothing with your life up till now except avoid responsibility and impose yourself upon other people, if I'm describing your life verbatim really you're beyond any help that I can possibly offer so don't go pointing out to me that my viewpoint is wrong because there's always exceptions to the rule). It's usually our relationship or lack thereof with people around us that we regret. And at a ripe old age of 24 I've concluded that nothing is as important as building relationships with people around us. Not with the toxic sap your energy and leave you feeling like crap time and time again people, but with good and generally emotionally healthy people. Because that's what matters in the end. That's the thing that gives you the most satisfaction.
Man, I'm sounding like Dr. Phil. Y'all go an' be nice to all ya folk an' friends an' such ya hear?
