Writing About Writing.

I must have been about six when I first started writing stories, maybe two years after first learning to read. The earliest I can remember was a comic (I'm counting that as a story) involving some original characters my then-very-young mind cooked up. The notebook I wrote it in had one illustration per page, and the content was heavily influenced by my favorite comic at the time, Calvin and Hobbes, of which my dad had a number of compendiums at home that I was able refer to.

Outside of the pages of that notebook, my characters would also regularly manifest themselves in the shape of my hands, which I would play with as if they were toys. I didn't need much material to create characters back then; I remember having a red pair of scissors that I would pretend was a character in my imagined universe and used to play with it all the time, even in class. That pair of scissors was eventually confiscated by my Math teacher, but we had some good times together up until then.

I continued making comics into primary school. A friend and I worked together on an entire series of comics set in outer space that had almost 30 volumes, though many of them are still (and realistically will always remain) unfinished. We then went to secondary school and started on a new series of comics, but at this point it was clear to both of us that he was the better artist and I the better storywriter, and so we divided tasks as such. The protagonist this time was a superhero, influenced by my friend's newfound love of Marvel comic books. We didn't get very far with this new character, however, especially after I moved to a boarding school in Form 4.

Aside from the comics I used to make, I occasionally tried my hand at writing fiction. I started becoming obsessed with football at 13, and twice attempted writing football-themed stories. I never finished either of them. I was perhaps, at the time, more suited to writing essays, which was always my favorite thing to do in school besides math and playing football. During Form 4 and 5, in particular, I reached my storywriting peak - I somehow managed to come up with a new, original story for every single English exam. Only for the actual SPM English paper did I resort to recycling a story I'd used before as, for whatever reason, my imagination chose that very moment to desert me.

Maybe it was a sign of things to come. I've been finding it difficult to write fiction ever since, as my mind seems to get less and less imaginative the older I get. Nowadays it more readily absorbs the cold realities of the real world and its ills, rather than coming up with fantastical new ones. Where I used to dream up entire universes with my hands and pairs of scissors, it is now a lot more natural for me to see the harm they can cause and have caused to the world. As time moved on and my mind developed, there became increasingly less room for fantasy.

While I have accepted that I am maturing into an adult and that this is a normal thing that happens to everyone, part of me still wishes that I still had the same imagination I did when I was younger. I enjoy writing, and I always have, but I have missed being able to write as freely about whatever popped into my head as I used to. I guess I still do, as evidenced by my regular updates on this blog, but writing vaguely about what's been happening in my life isn't the same as writing fiction. What pops into my head these days involves more memory and realism than imagination and idealism.

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Last Saturday, I dropped by the KL International Book Fair to pick up a copy of Micro Malaysians!, the anthology featuring the short story I wrote (the one I was so excited about a few months ago). My family and I used to go every year, but at some point we stopped because, well, I guess we just couldn't find the time to do so. To be honest, I didn't really want to go this time around because there'd be so many people (as always), and I could have picked up the book from the Fixi store at a later date anyway. But on that Saturday afternoon, there was one object - or person, rather - of interest: a primary school English teacher named Anwar Hadi, who edited the anthology and was the one in charge of picking the stories. He would be at the Jelajah Lejen Fixi booth for a book signing.

Before he was a schoolteacher, the man used to make these entertaining videos on YouTube until, well, he just stopped. He still makes videos these days, every now and then, but the content has understandably changed. Nevertheless, as someone who enjoyed watching his stuff back in the day, I was quite excited to meet him (though you could hardly tell from the below picture).

He turned out to be a nice, humble, soft-spoken guy who thanked me multiple times for sending in my story. Which was pretty much what you'd expect from a YouTuber, I suppose, and in particular one who was around before all the loud, extroverted vloggers came into the YouTube picture. In fact, he seemed so introverted that I think I might have been the less awkward one during our conversation. That's not a slight on him, of course - I love people who are awkward.

There are two types of people who I can see myself getting really excited about meeting: footballers and YouTubers. That's because they're the two types of people I watch on a regular basis. I would have probably gone nuts if I'd met a footballer when I was in France during the Euros last year, or if I'd bumped into PewDiePie when he visited KL not too long ago. I say 'probably' because I don't really know; I'd never actually met one from either category before prior to Saturday.

Anwar Hadi is the first YouTuber who I'm a fan of that I've ever met, and I guess my behavior on the occasion (not too out of control, I suppose, which is good) is a glimpse of how I would act if I were to ever meet another one in the future. Though I was expecting to meet him and could thus prepare myself; it might be different if I were to literally bump into someone like Ryan Higa somewhere.

The thing with meeting people you respect and admire, however, is that you realize that, in the end, they're really just regular people like yourself. They just happen to be very talented in a certain way, and worked hard enough to get the opportunity to be in the position to receive your respect and admiration in the first place. And I guess that's kind of inspiring.

Rewatching The Sound of Music.

I decided to rewatch The Sound of Music with my sister, mainly for the nostalgia, but also because it's a great, iconic musical. The last time I'd seen it was years ago when I was a little kid, and I found that there were many scenes in the movie, and many other things about it, that I didn't seem to remember at all. For instance, I didn't remember it being almost three whole hours long. Of course, the runtime was padded by a lengthy opening sequence and an intermission midway through, but even so, that must have left about another two-and-a-half hours. I really didn't remember it being that long. My memory of my childhood seems to be even sketchier than I thought.

The thing about rewatching movies as an adult (I'm using that word loosely...) that you first saw as a kid is that you pick up on things that completely went over your head back then. As a kid I only noticed the music, and had maybe a basic understanding of the plot. I remembered Do Re Mi, Sixteen Going On Seventeen, Edelweiss, and that yodeling song with the puppets, among others. I remembered Maria being a sort of nun who went to the Von Trapp household as a governess, falls in love with the children and eventually becomes their mother. And for whatever reason they all sing together on a stage at the end.

(Sorry for the spoilers, but come on: this film first came out in 1965.)

Today I watched it again with older, wiser (and slowly deteriorating) eyes, and this time I was able to grasp the finer nuances of the movie. From the seriousness of the Nazi occupation of Austria and the tension of the final act, to the body language the characters displayed and certain moments where even the very camerawork helped to portray the mood - I couldn't have been able to appreciate any of this in my primary school years. It was a reflection of how far I've come since then, in terms of understanding films as well as life in general.

Understanding childhood films as an adult is just a microcosm for life itself - things always seem clearer to you as time goes by and you get older. You understand more why things happened the way they did. You understand more why people did what they did. And you understand why everything had to turn out exactly so, even if not in the way you would have liked them to at the time.

Young me would probably have liked The Sound of Music to have a lot less talking and a lot more singing. Older me now gets just how important the talking parts were to the movie, and that if I wanted to just listen to music I'd be better off going on Spotify or YouTube (though to be fair, neither were options back then). Older me understands that it probably wouldn't be classed as one of the greatest musicals of all time if there'd been a lot more singing than there already was, as well as a lot less talking. Musicals aren't all about the music.

Life is like a musical, in a way. And there's a young child in all of us that wishes that there would be more of the happy singing and dancing, and a lot less of the boring (and in some cases depressing) talking parts. But just like a musical, we really have to have both for it all to make sense.