Auld Lang Syne

I recently discovered Friendster as a resource for tracing friends from highs school - or secondary school as we would call it back home.

Wow. It's been 3 years since. How very quickly it has passed.

It's been interesting to see where people have ended up and what they look like. Some of them have become more of what they were before. Others have made 180 degree turns. Some of my Malay friends are now married. It's all very strange.

What struck me in particular was how foreign that past life of mine is to me now. I look at pictures of my friends and I think, They are so Asian!

I wonder what my friends would think of me now. Would they think I have changed much? I was different from them then. Am I much more different from them now? Or did time even out the differences? Am I what they expected me to become?

Part of me wants to laugh because I recall being unpopular in school. Everyone in Malaysia was "white-skin" crazy. Everyone loved white boys - though few of them knew many (boybands were popular back home). I had a serious allergy to girls that liked guys merely for being white. Hah. Ugly, awkward and a misfit, I remember thinking to myself once, "I'll show them. I'll be the one ending up with the white pretty boy."

So much for being anti-whiteskin-worship. All the boyfriends I've ever had have been white American. Go figure.

It's strange to look back because I realize that people who know me here and now have absolutely NO CLUE who I was then. It's like this secret past life that people forget is part of who I am today. Including me.

I don't think that I've changed too much as a person. But my environment certainly has - and it has inevitably affected my personality. Or at least how I am allowed to express it.

At least one thing has still maintained the same, though: I still wear braces.