ohm.

Sunday, May 11

11:46 PM

danielle posted this, and she's a REALLY REALLY REALLY cool writer! and i really like this post from her, it's just so. moving, thought-provoking, so i dont care. YOU ALL BETTER READ. :)

If We All Thought Like Children
The poems we have been analysing this week have inspired me to revisit my childhood.

When I was young, I believed in a great deal of crap. Having been trained in fine arts from the age of 5, I used to see everything in shapes and tones. Under the influence of colouring books, I believed that all humans had outlines. I used to look at my arms and visualise outlines on them. I think that's why I had a particular flair for anything still life or copied -- I looked at things in shapes and lines and not objects, and everything was in vectors and not complicated.

When I was a child my younger brother and I used to make an imaginary flying car out of bolsters and pillows, and fought over who could drive it. We had our own travel television show, called Travel TV. The car flew from country to country, and we always visited Columbia to recommend to viewers "Columbia's favourite Capati". Of course, cars do not fly, viewers get bored of watching us go to Columbia every episode, and capati comes from India, not Columbia. But we sang our jingles with pride nonetheless -- "Travel TV, nanananana, Travel TV, nanananana" and "When you're feeling sad and bored, you go for Columbia's favourite capateeeeee". After 2 hours or so, we would fight over whether capati was pronounced "cha-pati" or "ka-pati", and who should be the lead singer for the show's jingle when advertisements came round, and whoever was not driving would blow up the car's engine in jealousy and the show would end. But we never stopped visiting Columbia, or eating Columbia's favourite capati.

I used to wonder why scoops of ice cream could eventually fill up empty cones. I suspected with all my heart and soul that they would take an empty cone in front of me, but when I turned away, they would take a cone pre-filled with ice cream and just add the scoop on top. In my mind I had visions of secret fridges underneath the ice cream filled with cones that already had ice cream in them. Whether it was true or not, one thing's for sure -- I always enjoyed my ice cream more than others knowing the secret behind why there was ice cream in the cones when you reached it, that there was more ice cream than even my parents knew.

My religious beliefs when I was a kid was extreme. I believed that Jesus, only Jesus died on the cross and no one else was allowed to die on the cross. I even made up a song called "And there is no one else who will die on the cross". I didn't know that he was reduced, physically, to having 2 criminals beside him, and that execution on the cross was exclusive to him. But, do you see the difference? I believed Jesus was so special, I believed God was so good, there was nothing to challenge my opinion even if my facts were unforgivably wrong.

Now if we all were still children, we would be a lot happier. Not because we did not have to study or worry about university, but because there was a side known to us and unknown to those older. Sugar Candy Mountain educated me more than school. I believed that the world was simple because I read it in shapes, and I travelled to places unknown in a flying pillow car, and I ate more ice cream than what the amount really was, and I never doubted God or was cynical in any way. Somehow along the way I lost these, some early and some late. I stopped believing in Art when I didn't do as well as I wanted for the 'O' Level Art paper, that was late in my teens. When I was about 5 or 6, religious freedom was stripped from my family and I left Sunday School to engage in a Chinese cult group not by my choice, and now I am plagued by doubt.

I just...feel so empty reading all these notes, thinking about how much I know, and how much I really know.
***
maybe now i'll go think about my childhood, and see what i can come up with!
:)

oh, and we're playing ACSI for the Rugby finals tmr.
whoohoo.