End of an ERA

Listening to...The Carpenters - Solitaire .. (& their Best of Album)

*[Youtube videos attached] below

You know how you associate certain songs/movies/whatever to certain periods in your life?

Say for example, you would associate the smell of chicken porridge to memories of you as a kid sitting at the dining table having ur chicken porridge bfast b4 going to school. While Mummy combs my hair back ala Calvin-taking-photographs-with-exasperated-Dad style while maid wears my socks for me (look, only for a while as a very very young kid ok? I eventually stopped being so spoilt) while the driver prepares the car to take me to school.

Or, Puff Daddy's I'll Be Missing You brings back memories of high school everytime you hear it.

And Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit reminds you of the dances (Halloween, X-mas etc) held at the school hall and of solitary moments in ur room headbanging to this new discovery, this wonderful grunge sound you never heard b4.

Or fried chicken wings makes you remember lining up for 20 mins just to buy an overpriced, overgreasy and undersized piece of wing from the school canteen.

Or Friends evokes strong nostalgia of nights spent sitting on the couch watching it with your best friends and having a laugh/cry/emotional moment (eg when Chandler proposed to Monica).

Yep, I'm sure we all have such triggers. Recently, something sad happened that triggered me back to my life as a uni student in volatile-weathered Melbourne.

Peter Boyle is dead. To the uninitiated...Peter played Raymond's dad in Everybody Loves Raymond. For a year or so, I was very obssessed with that show, and never failed to watch it. It came on after Simpsons and followed on with Frasier (another favourite). Ray and Debra's rship mirrorred in many ways me and my gf's, and we had a fun time gorging ourselves while laughing our heads off on the sofa watching the show and waving greasy fingers at each other saying YAH THATS SO YOU. Yep..so many evenings with Everybody Loves Raymond, and now, to officially close the chapter on that, Peter is dead.

All of which made me reminisce a bit...I miss watching Friends on the couch with my buddies. I miss laughing at their Foosball antics, at Phoebe's cat song, Joey's blurness, the annoying cleanliness of Monica, the occasionally irritating cuteness of Jen, and Ross' long cucumber face. I think I just miss the times when we were all younger and hung out together. Coz eventually Friends got a little too sickly sweet and yucky for me.

This is a video we took in younger/happier times, during one of our holidays back in KL, at HG's place, where we attempted to do a poor man's cover version of Joan Osbourne's If God Was One Of Us..thats me on guitar, HG on drums, JB on piano, and a ventriloquist on vocals.



And this is a short photoalbum JB made herself, a time when we were less stressed, less bogged down, not yet needing to face the realities of life...just simple 20 year olds, carefreely n selfishly indulging in happy activities, unaware to what was to befall us.