It’s Hari Raya and I haven’t got any commitment in particular so I got down to packing my stuff, an event planted on my calendar 2 months ago. I’ve initially wanted to change the layout of my room but then the plan failed because I didn’t have time to do up a proper floor plan and too many things needs to be cleaned.
As I dug out relics of the past from my drawers, my Mum told me to dispose of the ‘Childish Stuff’ that were still with me: nice keychains, nice stickers from propaganda campaigns, pictures for Chinese oral examination that I didn’t throw away because I find them too cute, souvenir badges from more campaigns, and more. I had to confront the realism of keeping these stuff for too long. When I was really young, and with an overly inflated ego, I thought I’ll make it big someday and open a museum to showcase my life: every little thing will be featured, the pencil case I used since Primary 2, the backpack that lasted 7 years of use and still looks new to this very day, the little badges I earned for reading lots of books and such. Today, when I see some of those ‘artifacts’, it dawned on me that if they’re really going to make it into that museum (assuming it’s going to open at all), I’ll still have to keep them for a really long time.
I wondered to myself, ‘how I wish I could just open a portal to the future and dump all these stuff to the future self’. Then I thought again in the perspective of my future self: a grown-up, busying with family or work and then all of a sudden his place is filled with all these junk of the past. His typical response would probably to dispose all of them, or if he’s still keen on the museum, he’d procrastinate, open another portal and throw the junk further ahead in the future. The idea just won’t work out. In the end I just threw the useless stuff away.
The other thing I uncovered was a huge bunch of unprocessed stamps. I’ve been a stamp collector since 9 years old and was super active with stamp collection, pestering uncles and aunties to keep a lookout for used stamps at their workplace. Eventually even when the interest somewhat died down, people continued giving me stamps and I kept them. By P6 or so, I probably have 5000 over stamps in my collection. The work involved with stamp collecting can be quite intimidating: I’ve to soak the stamps which are still on envelopes on water, wait for them to peel out, harvest the wet stamps, discard the loose pieces of envelope paper, then put the wet stamps on a plastic sheet and leave them to dry. After the stamps are processed, I’ll still have to arrange them on my albums and that explains why I’ve loads of stamps that were processed but still in a box, untouched.
So after most of the packing of the room is done, I sat down to classify the stamps according to countries or at least region, guessing that ‘Magyar Portal’ is probably some European countries’ stamp. I eventually sorted out the everything, place them in separate envelopes and stuff them back into the box. Someday I’ll get busy arranging stamps again. Meanwhile I might have to decide between exhibiting the stamp collection in my museum and selling them away.
