Having a sedate Saturday night in yesterday, I watched the Singapore-made film ‘The Girl in Pinafore 我的朋友, 我的同学, 我爱过的一切’ on DVD and was brought back down memory lane. The film is set in the early 1990s when I was around the same age as the characters. It was a time where we didn’t use the Internet, we had no smart phones and friends actually wrote snail mail to one another.

While the plot is rather predictable, parts of the film a little slapstick and the Chinese dialogue a little bit too polished (I mean, Singaporeans don’t really speak Mandarin that well), it was a simple film which was enjoyable enough for  some lighthearted viewing. It made me think about the idealism of youth and how most of us lose that as we age. Actually I felt a little sad for myself because I don’t remember having that kind of fierce idealism and big dreams that some people hold in their hearts.

I only remember ever thinking I want to be able to live and work abroad one day. Well, I have made that happen for myself. Then now what? What else should I be aiming for? I don’t know, and I haven’t found the thing that makes my heart burn with the desire to achieve.

I watched episode 16 of How I Met Your Mother a few nights ago. In the episode, the mother was telling a friend how she didn’t know what she was doing with her life and her friend asked her, ‘Even if it sounds completely crazy, what is it you want to do with your life?’ She says, ‘I want to end poverty’, to which her friend replied ‘Great, then every decision you make from here on now should be in service of that.’

I don’t have an answer to that question. I have thought of it, but I realised I have never really given myself a definitive answer to it. It’s time I do ‘cos I hate plodding along life like a piece of drift wood in a river, not knowing where I’m going or I’ll end up. I don’t know if my married friends, especially those with kids, think about such things because they seem so settled and sure about their lives.

Well, just another rumination of a single 30-something on a cold and rainy Sunday in Hong Kong.