It takes some getting used to living on two sides of an island. In the ancient past when ancient villagers lived on islands, I'm pretty sure they didn't traverse from one end of the island to the other without good reason. For one its a pain getting from one end to the other, unless your island is the "cartoon" island, the one with one coconut tree and one unlucky marooned guy often depicted in cartoons.
Which reminds me, people like to ask others the question of what'd they'd bring if they were suddenly marooned on a deserted island. People tend to say stuff like the most beautiful lady in the world, a book, an mp3 player or whatever. I can tell you these people are either really stupid or just horny. The first thing I'd bring is a working auto-roaming handphone with GPS. The second would probably be a spare battery for that phone. The third would be another spare battery. You get the idea. Only idiots would choose to actually continue staying on that island. You can't eat coconuts forever, nor would you want to.
Back to the topic of travelling cross-island, as much of a pain as it is travelling around in an MRT, I still have to do it to get home from camp. However last friday the trip home on the MRT proved a little different. While I was daydreaming on the MRT this large extended family came in and sat on the row of seats opposite me. Well, it would have been just another family had it not been for this one little girl with two ponytails who just refused to sit still. One moment she would be climbing the metal pole, and the next moment she'd be hanging by her hands on the overhead handles and swinging around. Sometimes she would look at her own reflection in the wall and shake her head while making monkey faces at herself. Otherwise she would be swopping seats with the rest of her family members. If there ever was a tireless ball of energy I think she would be close to it.
I watched her antics with a sense of amusement and a tinge of sadness. The amusement probably stemmed from the fact that I was getting a free circus show from a very enthusiastic performer who never stopped laughing and smiling. The sadness probably came from the realisation that I was once a little kid like this girl who swung round the poles and ran helter-skelter from end to end of the train, laughing and carefree as I did so.
Somewhere along that line I became more reserved till I wouldn't be caught dead doing what this girl was doing, although there was this part of me that really wanted to play along like this little girl. It seems that as one grows up, one gets robbed out of a very basic need to just have fun. Why does it even seem wrong to enjoy one of life's simplest joys, to do what the heart wants? Its as though that as one grows up, one forgets how to have fun, however much we know about time being money and making pots of it.
The thing I noted about this family was, no matter how much of a "disturbance" this girl was, her parents never once stepped in to stop her, only watching from the sides to make sure she didn't get hurt. The amazing thing was, nobody seemed to mind the girl either, despite the fact that she was definitely quite prominent. The family didn't seem to care whether their face would be lost because of their little girl, like the typical chinese family. To them it was more important that their little girl was happy. And surprisingly, it was the same case for the rest of the occupants in the cabin, although people were giving up their peaceful rides for her. Maybe the occupants were just bochap, but I think there was more than that. It gave me a lot to think about.