We're still here
Listening to M83's Hurry Up We're Dreaming. I love how a French ambient band has now reinvented 'pop' though some or most would argue it isn't really pop. Maybe not specifically the latest album, but their last one, Saturday=Youth definitely had a lot of pop synths in it. The first time hearing it, I imagined this must be how contemporary pop sounds if the Japanese studied it exhaustively, obsessively as they're prone to, and created their idea of 80's pop. There's something so unrestrained and celebratory in the music and drums. This is as uplifting as it gets without being cheesy.
It's 10 to 2 and I really ought to sleep but I'm not sleepy. I thought maybe I ought to write something because the urge is there in the finger tips and as I type now, my fingers are frenetic like they're getting ahead of my thoughts before I can organise them, like I'm bursting. Maybe it's the intermittent fasting I'm doing, or the new supplements I took this morning for gym.
Parents. Mine. I used to think they were forever, illogical as that is. For the greater part of my youth, they were just there and it seemed they never changed. Till I hit my late 20s, and probably because I only saw them once a year, or perhaps I was coming into my own mortality. The physicality of time abrading their faces, their bodies. All of a sudden they were old and older, and they were real.
It was then that I experienced a radical shift. When my parents sent me overseas, they set off a chain reaction that they could never have foreseen. 10 years of resentment and guilt trip. My relationship with them was never the best even in my teens in Singapore. It deteriorated drastically after. We argued, we fought, everyone was stubborn and righteous and wronged. I don't believe my grandparents knew how to talk to their children because my dad didn't know how to talk to us. He commanded, we were expected to obey. My mum was the good cop, laying on the guilt and the risks of my father's health.
But in my late 20s, I stopped fighting. Maybe it was the cumulative effects of LSD and MDMA, ha. Or like I said, it was my own mortality, or maybe it was really a matter of time. Or ... this just occurred to me as I type ... maybe I'm growing into them, what a dreadful fearful notion. But suddenly like a light bulb coming on, I saw. I'll never forgive them for that 10 years, but I could see it from their points of view, and I cannot deny where or who I am now, so in a way, I came to terms with those years.
And all the fighting now seem meaningless. After all the tears and shouts and anger and hurt and guilt-we're still here. We made it. Have we arrived? I'd like to think we've arrived somewhere, at least, presumably, my parents mission to do all the things they did for me in the name of parental love and duty.
But they can still get on my nerves big time.
It's 10 to 2 and I really ought to sleep but I'm not sleepy. I thought maybe I ought to write something because the urge is there in the finger tips and as I type now, my fingers are frenetic like they're getting ahead of my thoughts before I can organise them, like I'm bursting. Maybe it's the intermittent fasting I'm doing, or the new supplements I took this morning for gym.
Parents. Mine. I used to think they were forever, illogical as that is. For the greater part of my youth, they were just there and it seemed they never changed. Till I hit my late 20s, and probably because I only saw them once a year, or perhaps I was coming into my own mortality. The physicality of time abrading their faces, their bodies. All of a sudden they were old and older, and they were real.
It was then that I experienced a radical shift. When my parents sent me overseas, they set off a chain reaction that they could never have foreseen. 10 years of resentment and guilt trip. My relationship with them was never the best even in my teens in Singapore. It deteriorated drastically after. We argued, we fought, everyone was stubborn and righteous and wronged. I don't believe my grandparents knew how to talk to their children because my dad didn't know how to talk to us. He commanded, we were expected to obey. My mum was the good cop, laying on the guilt and the risks of my father's health.
But in my late 20s, I stopped fighting. Maybe it was the cumulative effects of LSD and MDMA, ha. Or like I said, it was my own mortality, or maybe it was really a matter of time. Or ... this just occurred to me as I type ... maybe I'm growing into them, what a dreadful fearful notion. But suddenly like a light bulb coming on, I saw. I'll never forgive them for that 10 years, but I could see it from their points of view, and I cannot deny where or who I am now, so in a way, I came to terms with those years.
And all the fighting now seem meaningless. After all the tears and shouts and anger and hurt and guilt-we're still here. We made it. Have we arrived? I'd like to think we've arrived somewhere, at least, presumably, my parents mission to do all the things they did for me in the name of parental love and duty.
But they can still get on my nerves big time.