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Had it not been that it was E-lin's birthday and that as a group, we were celebrating for the first time, our lazy bones would never take us this far to this Thai restaurant tucked away amongst the old railway tracks and the jungled areas of Bukit Timah...
The Food:
Spicy, Salty, Sweet
The Favourite Folks:
Rene, Cynthia, Darren, Diana, Nanfang and her children, Jonathon and Amanda, the birthday girl E-lin and I.After celebrating more than 15 birthdays with E-lin, this one feels really special. For one, it's been more than 15 years of an amazing journey of friendship, things lost and found, dreams celebrated, visions shared and fears comforted. 2nd, to see everyone get together is indeed heartwarming. Many things in life should be shared and I personally feel that great finds, like friends, are one of those.
Thanks to the aspiring photographer, Diana who lent her age-old Polaroid to the ocassion, we now have these great memories to keep. And how entertaining Polaroids are too! Did you know that you must never shake the polaroid in a bid to help it "dry"? Shaking causes the pigments to "spill" and distorts your images! The thing about Polaroid is that there is something romantic about the idea that these will be the only images available. This is as real as it gets. You can't reproduce more of these, except digitally. And they wouldn't be the same. There is only this one set - and it's now being compiled into a picture-book for E-lin. When Diana gets down to it... that is..
I remember how in the 80's, if you went to places that served the tourist market, like the Newton Circles Hawker Centre (well it still serves the tourists today!), people toting these machines would take your pictures and you could buy them for $5.00 each. Quite steep even in today's terms! So enterprising since this same method is still shamelessly deployed at theme parks around the world, including at Singapore's own freak circus, the Flyer. Except the pictures are digitized now.
So there indeed is value in recording images that say, "I was there". Perhaps pictures speak a thousand words. Pictures capture a moment in its essence - some expressions caught in an instant by the camera's uncensoring lens. One still frame captures how you felt at that instant. Because feelings are fleeting, what's captured can never be replicated.
Birthdays are simple occasions and I don't know if I am the only one but I tend to get somewhat thoughtful (and then I get depressed) around my birthday. And I finally learnt why. Because no single person can find enough perfection not to find some fault if they thought hard enough about themselves.