A burst of nostalgia in the middle of the night

My goodness. I cannot believe how uncensored and vulgar I was in the early 2000s.

I couldn’t sleep on a monday night… so I did what every person who could not sleep would do in this day and age — i surfed the net on my phone.

Actually who surfs the net anymore? People scroll through facebook and instagram. They hop from one youtube video to another. They may read articles but only because the headlines caught their eye.

But no. Tonight I was surfing the web. I read random blogs and suddenly I remembered that I used to blog a long time ago.

I couldn’t find the URL anymore. It must’ve been taken off google’s indexes too, coz I can’t search for my old blogs. But luckily, I tried logging in to Blogger and found my profile with just one blog available.

It was a blog I created during my Poly days. See, I used to create new blog sites for different phases of my life. I remembered there was a really rich one for my NS days, but I could not find it.

Regardless, when I read through the old Poly blog… I could not believe how candid I was. Writing like no one would care to read… Writing for the sake of writing. While it was kinda crappy… it felt… pure. It was somewhat vulgar at times, but yet… it felt clean. Clear of any self-imposed censorship. Clear of any ‘what if people don’t like it’ mentality. Clear of any acceptance issues. I just wrote. I did not care about grammar, spelling or language.

Words just flow. It was singlish, malay, queen’s english (sometimes i do write well) all rolled into one single piece of pure expression.

Sadly, the images are all gone. A lesson I constantly preach — never host on free sites.

One thing for sure is that I felt somewhat invigorated. As if awoken from a deep sleep of censorship and giving too much thought to what others think.

Not sure why I do that.

No more.

I wrote about how sucky my life was back in 2004, and when I just sat for my last paper in Poly… and I’m looking at this deep void called adult life, where my first stop would be NS.

Another nostalgic moment I came across in the old blog was how I was starting to play around with web design. All the way back in 2004. I mentioned geocities… using MS Word to create a website… and playing with HTML and dreamweaver.

I had a room to myself. And I was so proud of my little studio back then.

The scanner. The CRT Screen. The DIY PC from Sim Lim. The old historic guitar. The panasonic video camera. Oh man how I loved making videos. I would blog or edit videos while waiting for friends to rally at the coffee shop. It was a time where I started drinking so much coffee, that it became a bit of a problem for me today.

Right now, I’m sat at my couch, in the living room… in my own house. Married with a kid. Running a design practice.

I’m just thinking… maybe… just maybe… my old 2004 self might just be a little proud of how he is turning out to be. I’d really like to talk with that kid… over our favourite beverage of teh tarik. He probably wouldn’t appreciate how out of shape he’s become though.