she's lost control

i'm just a few days away from the first year anniversary of the last ever exam i took, and that also means it's already been a year of me 'doing nothing.'

recently i was thinking about this and it came to me that this working thing is not just a loss of freedom, but also a loss of control over my life.

ever since we were young, our lives have been governed by all these random people who put up all sorts of rules that we have to follow, or else. all these happened without any of our agreement at all.

most guys only feel this the worst when they go to NS, because it is the worst, but they don't realise that it has been on-going since the day they were born.

first of all you were born in this country so the government has control. your parents made you, so they had control, then they put you in school, and your teachers had the control. after that the males went to NS.

when that was all over, some went back to school, and the rest, they were adults now, so their parents were out of the equation, no teachers, no sergeants and officers, the only one bit of control which is out of their hands is the government.

in other words, they now have the most control over their lives as they've ever had since birth! and if you noticed, all these random people who were in control of our lives, it didn't matter if they were complete idiots, incompetent fools, pedophiles, psychopaths, they still had the control and we had to accede.

with so much power in their hands, what do they do? rush to get any random job and hand it all back to their new boss, and of course we've all heard the stories of the fucked up boss, useless boss. what they don't realise is that all of the power their bosses have was what they had happily passed over to him in the first place.

from the top rope

recently i've been watching some wrestling (WWF) on youtube and it reminded me of the good days from year 2000-2002 where WWF was in its heyday amongst my friends.

when i was young there used to be wrestling on tv and sometimes i would watch it with my dad, but over time it was removed, all the way until 2000 when it suddenly appeared on channel 5 again.

back then we were still young and impressionable and WWF was really the coolest thing. some kids said wrestling was fake, but when we did the moves on each other it sure hurt like hell. how could that be fake? it was violence and entertainment! that's gotta be the best shit ever!

when i moved to secondary school, we took wrestling to a whole new level. wrestling in class, wrestling after school on the community centre's judo mats, sometimes even wrestling at the back of the classroom while the class was ongoing.

by then we had wisened up a little and more or less agreed that wrestling was fake... or was it really? the little bit of doubt made it more exciting to watch though, the crazy moves, the storylines (remember we didn't really know it was a story), the larger-than-life characters, it was truly a fun time.

of course we did our best to bring this excitement into the real world. sometimes things got overboard and there were many tears shed, bruises were normal, and maaaybe even a little blood lost (none of those were mine), especially amongst the unwilling participants.

i would wrestle at home too with my siblings. every friday night was wrestling night and we would go to our parents room, turn on the aircon and slam the hell out of each other (it was mostly me slamming them since i was the eldest and biggest but i encouraged them to slam me too). i even made championship belts out of cardboard that could be attached to a real belt and worn.

the downfall started when the community centre locked up the judo mats and we lost that relatively safe place to wrestle. sure wrestling in class was fun, but it wasn't a really conducive environment. one could only get slammed that many times on the hard concrete floor, and high-flying moves were basically out of the question.

interest also faltered when we gradually accepted that wrestling was indeed truly without a doubt fake and scripted, partially because we realised that we too could pull off the moves without getting hurt.

the final straw came when they removed wrestling altogether. with that gone, it was truly the end of an era.