zeekie: take two.

I packed up my Singaporean belongings today. My family has been considering a move early next year, so I decided to preempt any throwing out of my stuff in absentia. Minus my clothes, everything I considered of value was boxed.

In the end I had three boxes - and two were filled with books.

Like I told Lk, I wasn't sure how to feel about this. On one hand, one box seems a miserable showing for twenty-two years of living (I'm not counting the New York years). On the other hand, my friends and I have never been the type to give and give a lot.

Of course, I'm also missing the items that were sold, casualties of the period I was addicted to gambling and in massive debt. Cash Converters made a bundle off me in this time; I remember selling, variously, a DVD player, a pair of speakers from Mel, and a camera that was a group gift from my bunch of closest friends. That period - which stretches years - is a part of my life that's definitively over, but I didn't quite realize until today the losses I incurred.

I think in its aftermath I simply lost interest in items. Actually, to consider it, the five years post-secondary school was a long renunciation of things: things I gave to Calvin in junior college and to two crushes in the army, each gift only reminding me, in the end, of their horrible futility; things given to me that I kept only to convert later to bet slips; phantom things that I stopped considering because they were beyond my shrinking means.

A long period of poverty will do that to a person, I think: because I could no longer afford to buy gifts, I stopped attaching value to giving things altogether, store-bought ones because they were out of reach, and hand-made ones because they were proof I couldn't give otherwise.

And I think even after I got the scholarship - and stopped gambling - a variation of that thinking remained: I simply lost interest in things altogether. Sure, I still love me some presents, and my spending has never been more outrageous, but I don't feel much attachment to the physical fruit of my or others' money: I could live without just as easily, because I've already been there. Come to think of it, that probably explains my frequent losing of things post-SPH.

(This is not meant to offend those of you who have spent time and money on your gifts; as that classic line goes: it's not you, it's me.)

And so, considering my complicated history with things, perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised to find myself with only one box of them. Besides, I'd like to think I carry the things I lost and sold in my head (probably not true, but comforting nonetheless).

And in the time I've taken to write this, it has also occurred to me that the best presents given to me didn't involve any thing at all.

I can't box the memory of playing SNES with Mel and Lun, no more than I can box the memory of these past weeks spent playing Wii with Jm, Wh, Mel and Janus.

And all those coma-inducing nights of supper (and more)? Can't box any of them either.

I think my current philosophy, as evolved from those early days of bric-a-brac, is that things are ultimately only a means to an end. If they've been used properly, it doesn't matter if you lose (or sell) them, because the memories they'll have generated by then should be enough.

And anyway I'd like to think that, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I'll be judged by the things I've done and been, not by some box left in a corner of my room.

So one box really isn't all that bad. In fact, it's not bad at all.



...now go buy me a MacBook please.