photo essay (to 020407)

just what is the point of taking photos? to see whether we have grown fat/slim? (ms wong says i look a lot slimmer now.) to laugh at the incident where a classmate drew a whacky circle? to capture nice memories?

well, some things, like wine and cheese, get better with age. but, like a bottle of expired and opened bailey's, some things get more and more sour over time. so they can make you smile/glow from within, or they can make you shed a single tear.

the sadder thing, though, is sometimes you don't even have photos to help you with the memories, so you can't choose whether it makes you happy or sad. what you do is try very hard to hold on to what you can remember. yet the more you try, the more they disperse; like grasping at cotton clouds.

云在半空中, 被微风尖碎(/牵随?)
回忆也许美, 可是正在飞走, 对不对?

when you live a normal life, you'll discover that taking the train from tiong bahru to marymount costs 15 cents more than if you stopped at bishan and walked further to school. and when you step out of the supermarket a woman will ask you for your receipt so that she can accumulate $50 worth of receipts to 'go upstairs and redeem [something]'.