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I am slowly going blind ):
And while the spec shops salesgirl was fixing up my 3rd pair of contacts since 2007,
she told me some interesting stuff.
I don't really know if she remembers me (or just referred to my records and looked at the years or something) but we started talking about how fast time was passing by.
How I was almost graduating and how she used to be the youngest and freshest girl in the shop.
But now, it's no longer the case for her, having been there for 7 years.
I can't judge since I don't know her all that well, nor anything about her dreams or vision of her life,
but I felt for her.
I can't imagine myself working in a spec shop (nor in my office now for that matter) for 7 years and not having something to show for it.
Schooling have trained me to achieve grades and certificates, and I think I am addicted to those little tokens.
But work is never to going to be all that clear cut, is it?
Everytime I whined about work to my mom and how tragic working life appears for everyone (the office people, those hawker aunties and uncles frying things night and day, weeks after weeks after months...) and all she tells me is how work is work, and money needs to be made. As if it is an absolute truth. An unchangable fact of life.
I don't believe that.
I once had a colleague back at MOE who talked about how he, like all young people, wanted to change the world at some point in their life, only to realise, as they aged, that it was never really going to happen. That the job they end up doing is probably not going to be all that great nor inspirational.
I heard that when I was 19.
And I didn't believe that.
I thought to myself "what a sad man", and believed that I WAS one day, going to change the world.
3 years on, I still believe that.
But I am not getting any closer to it, nor do I have any plans to get closer to it.
Closing on 22, the one-day-I-will-do-it is now.
Suddenly the job I had secured 3 years ago seems a burden, a weight, an anchor tying me down.
I've heard stories, seen people (in real and reel life) lament about a life gone by, things undone, a time passed by.
Suddenly, 4 years seems too long.
I will most certainly get by, learn things, pick up experiences.
But what if I forget how to live?
4 years in my twenties are not going to be the same as any 4 years in my fourties or sixties.
I have a list of things I want to do this holiday and I realised with a crashing revelation that I haven done half of them, and holidays are inevitably coming to an end.
What if this becomes the story of my life?
As the salesgirl went on to tell me about the pros and cons of hard lenses (which will prevent me from going blind),
she told me about a theory her christian friend had.
I once had a theory about why time goes by faster as we aged (I probably mentioned it some blog posts ago), but her friend thought differently.
Her friend believed that the seemingly faster pace at which time passes by is a sign of the end of the world.
My first thought was "hmmm, in that case, maybe I don't really need new contacts after all".
But I told the salesgirl not to think too much, lest it leads to madness, and we laughed it off.
And though it was a very short conversation, it was the first real conversation I had all day.
All day long I was in a real estate course, surrounded by people from my company, and every single one of them were passionate and excited about the real estate market, the cycle, the trends, the money.
I don't know all that much about these things, and I realised I couldn't really care (guess where all the abovementioned doubts about my future job came from).
All these things seem really, for the lack of a better word, shallow.
They are not really going to matter when the world (or our lives, whichever first) ends, is it?
All day long I was talking to people I (increasingly realised) didn't really care about, about things I didn't care about.
A working scholar told me at the end of the course that despite all her complaints, our company is not all that bad, it was only just as bad as any other.
The job I was once looking forward to, is now, just another job.
I don't really feel like I belong.
Then again, where do I belong.
Is my dear old mom right?
My belief is wavering.
But I certainly hope not.
