The personal version of this post

Should we hold onto the past, clinging on?

I was reorganizing the shelves in my room this afternoon. I use one of them as a reminder of my life I guess (sidenote: I am so unsure of myself, in nearly every entry, an 'I guess' crops up). In it I've placed momentos of my past.

In one corner, I've propped up my old NPCC beret shiny crest and all, along with my rank thingy and on it I pinned the only award badge I could find (marksmanship). Standing alongside it is my unit's patch (Anderson Secondary School logo on a red field, the word ANDERSON running along the bottom of the logo).

I'm not sure if I would call NPCC a happy memory for me. I was only really active in it during my lower secondary school days, and then I wasn't really a very good cadet. Secondary school on the whole wasn't a really happy memory for me, especially when I started out. My losing interest in NPCC was a result of my unhappiness I would say. Secondary school really was quite stressful for me and I really turned introvertd during that time. In a domino effect, my introvertedness never let me really express to anyone how I was feeling, excaberating the loneliness I felt then. Still, I think the main reason for my unhappiness is myself. I never made any effort to change myself, to evolve to the reality that secondary school forced on me.

In the book I'm reading right now, a character figured that if you bottle up your feelings long enough, you'll feel nothing after a while.

Lying in front of my momentos of my NPCC days, three years worth of secondary school class photos. When I had entered secondary school, I was placed in the special stream, the creme de la creme, as my english teacher during my first and second year class had said. The three class photos I have are of my third to fifth year classes. In the third year of secondary school, I had done bad enough in the first two years to warrant being dropped down to the normal academic stream, only the second worst class academically. I don't know what happened to the class photos from my first two years, but I only have these.

On the photos I placed my green nametag and school badge. I remember walking around school in my final year, wondering to myself as first years passed me by wearing their green nametags. I hadn't believed I would be in school long enough to see my nametag colour cycle around. I remember the dread I felt when I stepped into school in my thrid year. During assembly, I passed by old classmates who greeted me and asked which class I had ended up in (classes were reshuffled at the third year). I remember walking to the classroom with my new class, the snatches of curious conversation behind my back, "Wasn't he from 2/1? What's he doing here?".

When I was leaving NYP, I took along with me two booklets, an orange one with course information on the Digital Media Design (DMD) course and a blue one on the Information Technology course. When I had enrolled in NYP, my first choice of course was the DMD course. Before enrollment could be completed, I had to undergo a medical examination, where the subject of my colourblindness came up. It turned out that my colourblindness could not allow me to take the DMD course. I felt empty when I came out of the examination room. I had worked my butt off in secondary school for my results and that I couldn't do what I had so wanted to do just because of this minor medical condition, it hurt.

These two booklets now sit in my shelf, the orange one tucked behind the blue one. When I went to NYP to do IT, the kicker was that the DMD and IT labs coexisted in the same area. Whenever I walked past the labs, I'd look longingly at the class as they learned photoshop, flash, video editing and 3d studio max.

Not everything is a sob story in my recollection shelf though. I have a photo album of my classmates from NYP, taken at an outing in the beach. I have a reminder of my final birthday in Singapore in the form of a birthday card from Jamie. I have reminders of family vacations. A decorative license plate to remind me of the first time we went to America. A menu from Ghiradelli, taken from our trip to Chicago (where we got to see snow!). A boomerang (never thrown) reminds me of the family vacation taken to Australia.