Blank Doll thinks about it.

Today is the last day of my life as a 17th year old. You know, being a 17 year old has always been strange for me. There is something not quite right about 17. It straddles the coming of age year that is 16 and the yet more coming of age year of 18, not much credit given to being 17.

I think the past year has been great for me. It truly has been a very fruitful year in which I have changed alot. I like to think I've changed for the better, that I am now a more confident person and that I have conquered at least some of those little buggers hiding behind the closet. There have been friends that I know I'll cherish and there has also been the little wisdom of 2006 that amity is always a bilateral affair.

The year 18 ought to be a clean break for me and it would be were it not for the period of two years I have to spend in NS. Let that be my little sojourn through the desert. I hope it doesn't dull my edge, I hope it doesn't break my individuality even by the tiniest bit the way my dad says it will.

But I suppose in a way, it is a clean break. The two years I have spent in RJ have been great. Lots of garbage from the past have been thrown out. Two years of great harvest to be followed by two years of drought. Hooray for me and my lousy biblical references. The thing is, I wouldn't be who I am today if I had indeed gone to some other school because this school has shown me alot. For one, I now know I have an irresistable urge to laugh when somebody talks about giving back to society and that alleviating poverty is a moral duty.

I don't have enough time. I think all of us are aware of our mortality, it looms so far away at the vanishing point on the horizon yet like all things to do with perspective, that far away thing could really be larger than the event at hand. I think I'm a little desperate because I keep telling myself that, I don't have enough time.

I need time to succeed. I need time to break through. I need time to establish, to create. I need time to love, to lay to rest the rage that I have carried from my childhood. I need time to have a family, to teach another generation to love. I need time to learn about myself once more, to finally understand what objectives I might have in life beyond taking a high seat among the devils who wear prada (I for one, prefer Hermes so maybe I'll take a higher seat). I need time to wreck my life and to mend it again. I need time to breathe, to be acquainted once more with solitude. I need time to live.

If I work really hard, I might have another sixty years left. That's a little over half a century. I don't know how the world would have changed. I look at my grandmother and I can't help but wonder about what she sees. Her world has changed so much! I hope the future will engender as much change, that in the blinding optimism of youth lies a brighter future for Mankind.

I hope the European Union picks up and eliminates their bloody labour restrictions before I have to work. I hope they vote Jacques Chirac out and get a tough liberal capitalist.

I will be the generation to witness the new century, the first of the third millenium. It is an altogether too frightening thought. Let it be that Singapore should prosper even when I exhale my last breath.

Happy birthday to me.

C'est tout.