|
|
|
read between the lines
the simple things am listening to jason mraz's absolutely zero now and the rest of waiting for my rocket to come (how on earth did i miss this gem of an album? just goes to show that judging mraz by his kermit-the-frog's-banjo-ripoff-sounding-i'm yours cover was an inaccurate decision...cover, hah, pun intended), enjoying my little moment of sleepiness-induced peace in my parents' air-conditioned room away from the sweltering heat of tonight, before real life (read: work! lack of private space!) kicks in. after fighting the pain that partly came from an unexpected anti-climax that last week's switchfoot asia swansong in kl left me with (they came, they rocked, they loved us like the proud-of-you-kids parents i never had), i find myself now at the stage where i am ultimately grateful for and more receptive to the simple pleasures derived from the little things in life. speaking of pain, jon foreman's the cure for pain was anything but, and in fact it was very hard to remain composed listening to "i've had these doubts for 10 years, but the water keeps on falling from my eyes" while at my rather exposed desk at the office (it's just next to the aisle where bosses and colleagues alike walk past anytime), simply because this line has so accurately summarised the story of my life that there is a painful recognition that comes every time i hear jon sing it. as expected, shortly after the above was typed, my peace was slightly shattered and i'm now sitting outside in the microwave oven of a living room and right now, i can't recall all the simple things i was able to take a moment to appreciate and thereby draw small but vital contentment from. i just remember that they were moments where time seemed to slow down just so i could capture whatever i was experiencing or sensing like a mental photograph, which would most probably pop up randomly at a later time like it usually does. speaking about time freezing, i unexpectedly wandered into one of my old haunts this evening after dinner, and the feeling of walking around and looking at the place ten years on was...a shock to the senses. there was this ghost of a shopping mall (read: poorly frequented by shoppers) just down the church i grew up in where i used to retreat to whenever i just couldn't take being ostracised by my fellow churchmates, young and old alike (which was most of the time). just catching sight of and walking towards the relatively untouched-from-the-past basement food court where i hung out was...definitely not a case of respectful remembrance but one of like, oh my gosh i think i just stepped back in time because everything looks and feels the same, even the cool air-conditioning (with the exception of the television which is now gone). i sat down at one of the two regular spots in the still almost-empty food court as my eyes adjusted to the exact same sights i saw ten years ago, which is incredible in this fast-paced world of ours. the stationery shop was still in operation directly across me, and the blank counter walls faced me to the far left (the amusement centre next to it was gone but it was always far from where i sat anyway). to the distant right, the same closed food stalls with the same signs were lined up in a row. the hair salon had closed and a malay food stall had opened right next to it, but it wasn't that obvious a change. as i settled down in the chair and rested my hands on the faux-wood plastic table, i started to remember. this was the exact same place where i sat, in this exact same position, thinking about my loneliness and why the kids were so mean to 'weirdos' like me, how dry i was finding the sermons because they were just rehashes of the same sermon every few years, and how it was kind of unfair because it's not like i wanted to skip church but it just felt so terrible that if i stayed i would cry or have to put on a mask and leave with that horrible knotted feeling in my stomach, and how it just didn't make sense because the bible painted christians as a loving and forgiving group of people but most of my church people were anything but that, and even the old people hated us youngsters as much as we hated our peers..and how i would string out all these thoughts as a form of a conversation with god, almost every sunday. for me, that food court, with that seat and that other circular one near the back where it used to face the muted television where i later got up and went round to (just to feel the wood on the table and half-sit before i had to leave) was my church, because i never felt closer to god more regularly than there when i had nothing but my thoughts, my bible and my conversation with jesus (for some reason i refused to bring any form of distraction over because i was deadly serious about spending sunday specifically with god). we talked about my future, pain, the meaning of life, death and its inevitability, ethics, the holy spirit, god's characteristics -- basically we discussed serious topics, god and i. i learnt so much from those quiet moments with god in an empty shopping mall, more than i did from a packed church during those formative years (i mean the church was really great in establishing my foundations and accepting me back when i was a 'normal' child, but once adolescence kicked in, things weren't that simple and clear-cut anymore). and now here i was, from the future, remembering the place that started it all. whoops look at the time. 5 more hours to another day of work. thank god for god.
switchfoot's final asian leg despite parental objections (or should i say my mother, who'll never understand a lot of things including why it isn't a "waste of money" to watch a band i'd just seen perform again), i flew up to kl to catch switchfoot at the close of their asian leg and was extremely thankful i'd done so. the local organisers didn't do a good job of controlling traffic flow as the event, on the 6th floor auditorium of a community mall, saw thousands of us squashed together like flies in a trap outside the auditoriom.all i know is, i unsuspectingly rode the escalator up from the 5th to the 6th, only to almost have my footwear squashed at the top. i had to bang into a girl standing (which i now saw was not her position of choice but was because there was simply no place else to move) at the top, apologise to her, and try to squeeze myself into some other pocket of space before the unsuspecting tudung-clad fan a few steps behind me also ended up in the same predicament. the last time i had this panicked escalator near-accident was a few years ago on chinese new year at the top of level 5's entrance to city square jb's only cinema. anyway after a lot of apologising over elbow-bumping, i made my way to the wall only to be stuck there for a good twenty minutes, as the doors were still closed despite it being past the scheduled time that the event was supposed to commence and despite people piling up at the escalator and lift entrances. none of us could feel any air-conditioning and eventually we all worked up a good sweat. unsafe and stinky, the crowd unanimously sang "wo-oh-oh, woh-oh-oh, oh-oh-ohh" (hello hurricane's intro) in an attempt to get the organisers to let us in. five minutes later, the doors finally opened and the tide of the crowd eventually pulled me towards that direction. i nearly missed my cordoned-off entrance to the 'intimate zone' (a fancy name for the mosh pit, basically) because the tide of the crowd was so strong and i happened to be at the fringe of it -- thankfully the crowd was pretty respectful and didn't erupt into a stampede. security made me trash my waterbottle just so i would be forced to buy the organisers' waterbottles, selling at a costly rm4 per bottle (talk about blatant moneymaking).the majority of us were unable to get our admission slips exchanged for real concert tickets as keepsakes because in a terrible oversight, the organisers didn't have enough of those to give out (what were they thinking?). thankfully these are about the only faults the organisers made. their tie-in with airasia red tix (contributing to better-than-sg event promotion), absence of chairs (which we were told to remain seated in at the singapore leg for the opening acts), workable sound and lighting systems, sufficiently air-conditioned auditorium, less time allocated to opening acts and longer duration of concert minutes contributed to an enjoyable concert experience for all present. i believed it this time round when jon foreman said that all of us in the auditorium were a big family (not really the singapore audience's fault, considering that security shushed us whenever we tried to yell or clap too loudly and only allowed us to stand from our seats after the opening acts were over) because the majority of us (me included) sang along with all their songs and cheered/jumped/clapped/screamed at the appropriate moments. a 'safe' and 'united' moment for me was when the band sang this is home (from the second chronicles of narnia soundtrack) -- at that point it just felt like i was in a worship segment of a church service, except one that was made up of different races and religions. i later described the 'safe' feeling to a friend as one of those rare times in life where you feel like you don't need to hide or look over your shoulder anymore, like you're finally safe and free to just be yourself without getting criticised or ostracised for it. [note: i actually went through a week-long anti-climax after the unexpectedly climactic feel of this event...something i hardly experience these days.] the band was clearly feeling the vibe, because they came back for not just one, but two encores (compared to zero in sg), possibly from mass numbers of us calling them back by spontaneously singing hello huricane's intro and chanting "we want more" respectively. it made my (and a lot of people's, since the band said it was by popular request) sadly, there was no autograph-signing or photo-taking session at this venue either, although a lot of us (like me) took photos with life-sized posters of the band and took whatever memorabilia they could get off the venue (posters, the mat topi cap that drew threw to the crowd at the show's end, what looked rubberbands that the tech crew threw to the post-concert audience as the crew dismantled equipment onstage). we definitely got our money's worth tonight. |
|
|
.jpg){kind=link}