Now that I am officially "old" ...

... I wonder what I should do differently. I do like to write, so one resolution is to write more regularly and also record my comings and goings. It's not really to create a following, but more like a chronicle or journal. The girls came with a bunch of ideas and gave me the most wonderful photo album with memories.

Memories makes me think of a play I saw on Friday evening in Singapore. "The Blue Mug" was directed by Atul Kumar and partly based on a book that I owned (but only partly read) back in the mid 80's called "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" by Oliver Sacks. It was a very simple production, but the structure was based on the memories of its characters in a semi-autobiographical kind of way. There was a bunch of stuff that anybody who has grown up in India could identify with. In the end the memories come together and unite the characters, who forget what they are there for.

It is funny that a lot of what we remember goes back a number of years. I find that I do not remember most things which have occurred in the most recent past. Why is that? I think it's because we have the most intense reactions with our experiences when we are young. You know how a child plays with the same toy endlessly? How (s)he wants to listen to the same 4 page story day after day, night after night? They find something new in each repetition and that is perhaps what sinks deep into our memories. At my age, I suppose I am skeptical, cynical and uncaring about many of the things that touch me. Or my mind is too cluttered to experience each moment with intensity. Or I am not expressive emotionally (for a variety of reasons). Or, quite simply, it's ADD.

Technology has created a lot of simple ways to record our experiences. Facebook is perhaps the best example. It has made us willingly want to share moments of our life that we would not have dreamed of sharing, at least not with all 678 of our friends. Perhaps with 6 or 7 or 8 in an intimate moment. But this is 2010, and hey, a lot of our daily conversations also revolve around "Did you see what XYZ wrote on FB?" I must admit that it is addictive in a voyeur-ish kind of way. As far as gossip rags go, I am not a big fan (Twitter excepted), but FB is all about gossip from people we actually know, rather than people we want to know!

I am meandering ... From memories of the past to voyeurism. But that's the fun ... nobody to control or stop what I am writing! On to the next!