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The air conditioner’s kind of wack right now, bursting gusts of air that sound especially like waves galloping towards the beach.

My brother and I haven’t really had the best relationship. His words are sometimes laced with arsenic and his mischievousness often crosses into cruelty, doling insults in my direction without a single prompt from my end.

We’ve had our fair share of laughs and arguments; it’s the back-talks that get to me.

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Over the past couple of years, I guess I could say that my horizons broadened and the “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” (Marie’s words) ol’ kid I was had been swept away by the currents of love, loss and curiosity into the realm of taboo.

I remember being a staunch book-smart kid who turned his nose up against smokers and drunks and those with tats and the ones with piercings and noisy, druggy clubs and all those things Mediacorp loves to cast in the shadows of taboo.

I remember my first taste of alcohol (I’d noted it in a blog post way long ago) and how I was tipsy as all hell in public (months later I’d spend nights in a whiskey / vodka fueled haze in my bed, staring vacantly through the grain of the walls) Throughout NS I would head to clubs every once in a while and feel like a secondary school kid being somewhere too noisy and violent.

I laid in the grass at the 8km mark before my POP route march, chatting merrily with a fellow platoonmate who had inked dragons around his left arm and a solid black tattoo on his right, and learnt that the presence of the ink doth not a character make.

I saw you smoke in Thailand, and I stammered mentally to make sense of the statement “Good People Never Smoke” which I’d been told all my life; a few nights later I shared a puff with my sergeants and my entire body collapsed into relief (albeit after several racking coughs) . I’d proceed to purchase cigarettes when overseas in secret every time the boys would start getting abusive, and toss the butts into the sea with a withering hiss. Looking back, there was no way they wouldn’t have known; your breath would be dense with the haze of chemicals which would weave into your clothes and every pore of your skin.

I used to think of myself mightily as the bastion of moral correctness in the J1 pants of mine, and nothing would stop me, not even years of losing competitions and average results. Perhaps giving into the taboo has stripped whatever identity I had away, because right now I don’t know what to do with myself.

I don’t actually know where this post is going, but it’s 2am and there’s something taboo about thinking too much at this time.

How do I know so much about this girl just by reading her blog and yet a photo of her and my cousin still seems so… off? Is my life not as meaningful because it’s relatively comfortable and not as Tragic?

I just wanna watch Finding Dory.

I haven’t been hurting for a while now, which is good. The self-doubt still exists in some form, but in general I’ve conditioned myself to just bow my head slightly against the thoughts and play a few rounds of Tsum-Tsum.

Reservist felt like speaking pretty-broken Chinese to mom’s friends; I try to respond with as much enthusiasm as they do, but I’ve forgotten this language we used to share and the struggle to remember just complicates it further.

Hanging with the Stage fellas feels like watching dad’s blocky company van drive to the pickup point in the midst of all the sleek cars; bulky to the point of being sore and even though nobody points it out, I feel inferior at the craft and I struggle with my very existence in this matter.

I keep moaning about my age, the big ol’ double two’s and a voice in my head constantly chimes in with a “you gotta act your age, bruv” (not sure why he’s a chav but whatever). With the age comes maturity, but you have to work to fit the britches you’ve been thrust in. There’s been too many times I’ve caught myself at the brink of ignorance.

The Stage elections were horrendous, with me cracking jokes and doing cringe worthy things as a product of anxiety. I’ve skimped entirely on my gym routine ever since Zach’s left for Canada. (I miss his cologne in a platonic way) Chee and I have completely ignored Orbital and milestone 2 is due tomorrow, Jesus. Don’t even mention how I’ve Orbital, Stage, CS2010 and Student Fellowship clogging my holiday’s drainpipe.

I make up for these by forging forward; speaking to more girls and not being afraid to ask people out.

I’ve come to see myself as a person only capable of following, only preferring to lead when the spotlight’s on my toes (Stage Managing, CFC etc) Otherwise, I’m just a lump of fat just slouching in a corner playing minecraft.

To be good at writing… you must write. To be good at acting… you must act.

I’m so tired of the voices that say I can’t.