really an essay about addiction, coping mechanisms, behavior change<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PSA: i\u2019m going to be talking about cigarettes a bunch in this post. you know all the health advisory stuff. cigs are bad for you, etc etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A couple of hours ago when I was in the shower i was thinking about what sort of essay i might write tonight. i had this idea that i would start by talking about cigarettes, and how if you told me when i was 10 that i would be a cigarette smoker through my late teens and 20s, i would have found that kinda strange. My father was a cigarette smoker all my life. there were ashtrays everywhere, the smell of marlboro reds still reminds me of my childhood home. he\u2019d smoke in the he still smokes today. i don\u2019t think i\u2019d ever have said \u201cmy father is uncool\u201d, but i\u2026 did not model myself after him. i wanted to be someone different than anybody in my family, than anybody that i had in my immediate social reality, really. for many years i didn\u2019t even encounter anybody in my country (Singapore) that made me think \u201cyeah I wanna be like them\u201d. as a singaporean i\u2019m always conflicted about singapore. there\u2019s a part of me that loves it, in the active sense of, i want to love it, i want to be a good citizen, i want to give back to my homeland, i want to contribute. i romanticize it sometimes. then there\u2019s a part of me that has been just so unimpressed. i\u2019m reminded of a line that Dwayne Johnson said about his dad, something like, \u201cmy dad loved me to the best of his ability, which was limited.\u201d I feel that way about my own social reality growing up. I feel bad for saying that, but that\u2019s the truth of how i felt. i have all these notes i\u2019ve collected over the years of all the criticisms people have had about singapore, both from locals and outsiders. it\u2019s so sterile, boring, superficial, materialistic, money-minded,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
i wanted to be someone like the people i read about in books, or the people who wrote those books. i wanted to be like Tom Chiarella, a staff writer at Esquire who wrote beautiful articles. though i suppose i didn\u2019t read him until i was a teenager skipping school to \u201cstudy\u201d in libraries. i used to stay up late at night posting on internet forums, then i\u2019d wake up, get on the bus \u201cto school\u201d, and catch up on sleep until I got to the esplanade library. there i would pick up stacks of magazines to read \u201cas rewards\u201d for making progress on my homework, and then really ignore my homework entirely to just read the magazines. in hindsight, the wild thing is that this was exactly the right thing to do<\/em>, for me! and I felt so much guilt and shame for it. if I could retroactively redesign my life, i would have skipped school almost entirely apart from a handful of classes with a handful of teachers that i liked, and spend the vast majority of my time reading books and magazines and posting online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n i wanted to be like calvin from calvin and hobbes\u2013 clever, witty, rich inner world, irreverent, cheekily disdainful of authority. i wanted to be like the detective kids in those enid blyton stories, solving mysteries and confounding the adults. i wanted to be like so many anime and RPG protagonists, bringing together a ragtag group of unlikely friends to save the day. as a teenager i wanted to be a rockstar, though i\u2019m not sure if there\u2019s any particular guy i\u2019d point at. the rockstar i most admired and wanted to emulate was hayley williams from paramore, and she\u2019s still someone i study and learn from to this day. for a while i liked to use K\u2019 Dash from King of Fighters as an avatar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n