Reunion.

This will be a bit of a rambling post, with an only-just-about coherent topic and mostly just a collection of thoughts. You have been warned.

It's been about a week since Ramadan ended, meaning that it's been about a week of Eid/Raya celebrations. Despite Eid being only a day, and is celebrated for as long in most other countries, in Malaysia it tends to last for an entire month. Given our culture of open houses and there only being three to four weekends for them to be held in, I suppose that's understandable.

I recently attended an open house. It was at the family home of a Rembau classmate, thankfully not too far away from where I live. He and his family had one last year as well, which I also attended. This time around, though, more of our Rembau batchmates showed up, making things into a mini-reunion of sorts.

The thing about meeting up with your old friends is that you get to catch up on their lives, and they get to catch up on yours. Inevitably, and especially when you're all the same age, comparisons are made, in quiet if not out loud. It's normal to feel inferior when your friend from school is currently doing 'better' than you, or to feel superior when he or she is doing 'worse'. Such thoughts are only natural, and there's nothing to be ashamed of for having them. How you act upon those thoughts is far more important.

The way I like to look at it is by looking at life as a really long road trip. Having being born in the same year, my batchmates and I started off on our respective journeys at the same time, give or take a few months. Each of us have our own advantages and disadvantages, which all play their role in deciding how fast or how smoothly we all move along.

The main thing to remember about a road trip is that it's not a race. It doesn't matter how quickly you move along, so what difference does it make how much faster someone is going, or how much slower? You'll still get there in the end, and at your own pace.

23 years old and not yet graduated? Cool. 23 years old and single? Alright. 23 years old and without a clue what to do with your life? No problem. Whatever you're looking for in life, you'll get there eventually. And if you don't get what you want, maybe it wasn't what's best for you anyway. Just have a little faith.

Anyway, enough of that. Back to the reunion.

There were some people I'd either not met or spoken to in years, either at the open house or at the futsal session a few of us had later that night. Maybe I'm better at reading people now, or maybe my friends have simply changed as time went on, or more likely a combination of both, but I noticed things that I hadn't noticed before. There were certain characteristics that, for whatever reason, I'd never associated with these people. Depending on what they were in relation to the certain people I associated them with, I was either pleasantly surprised or mildly disappointed. Nevertheless, it was nice to meet up with my school friends again. These people were a large part of the best years of my life (thus far), and a bit of nostalgia every now and then is always nice.

There is, of course, that niggling feeling, nay, knowledge, that things will be different in the future. We're all going to grow up, get jobs, start our own families, and eventually get so caught up in our own lives that it'll be difficult to meet up like this even on an annual basis. That's life, I suppose, and that realization should be a solemn reminder to live in the moment. We should appreciate what we have while we have it, because there will come a time when we won't have it anymore.

Personally speaking, one way I appreciate the moment I'm in is by learning from it. Quite a number of people I saw at the reunion were from rather different fields of study to mine, and from rather different study institutions as well. I think I took good advantage of that; highlights from the day included a discussion on developmental psychology, stories of money-saving shenanigans abroad, and a conversation with a friend on said friend's struggles with depression. I really learned a lot that day.

I suppose it's time for us all to return to our lives now. I'll just wrap up this post by saying that I'm looking forward to the next time I meet up with these guys - reunions don't come around often, but it's their elusiveness that makes them all the better.

Politics.

Earlier today, I spent some time reading up on the current Qatari diplomatic crisis, which eventually led me to reading about things like the Muslim Brotherhood. I then decided to stop before I went much deeper down that particular rabbit hole. When religion and politics are mixed together, it's difficult to tell how much of it is actually religious and how much is just political.

The thing about politics is that it's difficult to be unbiased when talking about it. One of the things that put me off becoming interested in the subject when I was younger was the fact that things always seemed to be so polarized - there were always two distinct sides, each with a steadfast and unwavering belief in its own superiority over the other. Anyone who knew anything about politics always seemed to already have a position which they saw as the correct one, thereby implying that anything else was wrong. It was pretty much always a case of us against them. It was pretty much always a choice between black and white, when in reality there's always plenty of grey.

Another issue I had with talking about politics, especially in this country, was that it almost always had to involve race and/or religion. To go against a political party that associated itself as being representative of a certain race or religion was to go against said race or religion. All in all, a part of me decided that it probably wasn't worth going into any of that, especially since I was, at the time, of an age where my political beliefs didn't really seem to matter.

As time went on, however, I developed an interest in the science of politics, particularly with regards to political ideologies. Reading George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 most likely played a part in that, and I found intellectual satisfaction in learning about politics away from the context of the real world, where so much more came into play.

I then started following global politics; it is easier to separate emotion and logic when you and your own country are not directly involved. As a kid, I enjoyed reading about far-off lands, and how different they were from where I lived. Today, reading about what politicians in other countries do is probably just a more grown-up version of that.

It's just part of my nature to be intellectually curious, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before I started gravitating towards matters of such complexity. My current status as a Master's student is also playing its own role in developing my mind; it's unsurprising that I've chosen to expand my thinking, outside of my studies anyway, through a field that demands me to do so at a standard higher than I've been used to in the past.

It wasn't too long ago that a former lecturer of mine, who I was helping with data collection for a research paper, suggested that I consider working for the United Nations at some point. I found the idea to be quite appealing, albeit one that I later put aside after realizing that I still had a pretty long way to go to be qualified to work for such an organization. Keeping myself informed on global matters is, I suppose, one step towards that.

At this point in time, I still don't have a clear vision for my future. There are a lot of possible paths which all depend on things that may or may not happen. That's just life. The main thing now is to keep growing and developing myself as a person. It's always good to open as many doors as possible; I may not know which one I end up choosing, but it's better to have more options. 

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.

***

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.