CNY is just over and I was just wondering about how people in the past bai nian. Can you imagine this scenario:

(taken from the fictional diary of a Chinese farm in Hunan in the year AD 1026)

Chinese New Year is here again and it is time for us to prepare for it. I spent the day tending to the crops and feeding the chickens, then harvested as much as of the vegetables as possible. Not too much, but I guess it'll suffice.

We need to travel about 500 li to our eldest brother, where we will be having our reunion dinner together with our 3 other brothers who will be travelling just as far, if not more. Our only sister has long married, and is no longer considered part of our family, so we definitely cannot expect that she'll be with us.

It can be a chore bringing the wife and our two children along, a son and a daughter. My son is my pride and joy; I hope that when he grows up he'll be a better farmer than I am and own a cow or two even. My daughter is a drag though. She is noisy and often cries. I'm so sick of her. Really glad that I drowned the other three daughters in the well behind our house before they reached their full month. Can't imagine what it would be like to have 4 useless food sinks running around yelling my head off.

I have nothing much to offer; I'll be just packing on the vegetables I gathered today on the mule and perhaps slaughter a chicken and pack it in salt to keep the meat edible. Damn, I'll have to give red packets, what, 15 children? I should have kept those daughters around, at least this is the only instance where they would come in useful.

The New Year sucks, actually. Visiting relatives is such a chore.

Ok, that was a moment of madness. But fast forward to today in Singapore, where relatives are so much closer. Isn't it funny that we don't even bother to visit them more than once a year (well, most of them, at least). It seems like staying closer doesn't really make kin closer. Well, I'm referring to the generation gap of the young and the old. I guess the rapid evolvement of technology has further distanced the young from the elders, coupled with the erosion of traditional Chinese moral values with regards to the eldery.

I wonder, no, I cannot imagine being a father, or worse, a grandfather, and having the kids come by to visit me. That's such an old thought.

Not getting any younger myself though. 26 this year. That's not funny. Its like 25 is the peak, and when you hit 26 you are at the wrong end of being a twenty-something. This makes me want to watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. If that's what I think it is, its about Brad Pitt starting out old then going younger? Kinda like the Mercedes commercial, where they claim that life should be where you work hard when you are old and stuff, then when you are in your youth, you buy the Mercedes, instead of the other way round.

Life's funny like that. You have to work hard during the time when you get to have the most fun, and when you get to have the most time, you have nothing much to do except to take care of your grandkids. I always thought sex was like that too. When you were young (guys mainly), you are always trying hard to get as much sex as possible, but when you are older you don't want it as much while you can get as much as you want. Or perhaps its more of like you can't get as much as you want being married and all.

And for the ladies its the other way around. When you are young you try hard not to be taken advantage of, and sex is like a learning journey. When you finally discover what gets you going and how to get an orgasm men your age slow down and all and you can't get to enjoy it as much as your husband gets caught up with work and loses libido. And you can't even look for other men much because you have to think about the kids.

Life is topsy-turvy like that no wonder people get all screwy and upside down. Kudos to those of us who can somehow keep up with the rapid pace that life puts us through; before you know it you are whisked off to the next stage, and the previous stage is nothing more than a memory.

Ephemeral.