OLD!

Oh my god, I'm getting old. I'm such a dramatic bastard, but it's true though, I mean technically speaking, I am growing older every second. I thought growing old was just in the face but actually it's a constant feeling of whiplash where you keep getting slapped with the realisation of how little you know and how all your prior thoughts were all not just WRONG but, like, EVERYONE knew you were wrong at the time and they just didn't say so.

August, man, fuck August. I've been having this month-long existential crisis about how old I'm getting.

It all started when I found myself surrounded by heavily made-up teenagers at an unlicensed bar just a few weeks ago. The whole place (which shall not be named) was filled with thrift-store jailbait with anime-coloured hair. Girls with DSLs who look too young to even have been around when that term was funny. While I was sitting at the bar counter with my head in my folded arms, contemplating my life, a girl with a Kurt Cobain-looking sweater full of holes asked us in this whiny American YouTuber/Netflix main protagonist voice, "Do any of you guys have a mask? I need a mask to get home." Because she had to book a Grab home, you see, and you need to wear a mask in the Grab; it's the rules. A he/they sat cross-legged behind her, pearl necklace and braces.

I had come for a rap show, uh, term used loosely.  The poster said the gig would run from “8pm till da AM,” and it was hosted by a bunch of Gen-Z Soundcloud rappers. When I arrived at 10.30pm, all the rappers were already packing up and leaving. Thunder boomed somewhere in the distance and everyone still hanging around pretty much scattered immediately. Who the fuck wraps up an event on a Saturday night at 10pm? I started commiserating with the bartender, cussing under my breath in my bitterness at how refined some of these girls looked. It was giving me PTSD, I felt like I was back in high school again and I was the uncool kid, again, the girl who's mom didn't teach her how to do make-up, the girl who wasn't invited on  shopping trips on the weekends. I felt uncomfortable despite being among the few who actually had the legal right to be at that bar. Who wraps up an event on a Saturday night at 10pm, but what desire and need for relevancy had propelled me to attend an event hosted by barely-legal kids fresh out of school? I mean how did I let myself fall for this shit? I felt so damn old and I was starting to see time through the perspective of a lot of scary angles.

A lot of weird things have been happening lately; I've been experiencing a lot of returns of my repressed teenage self. At a food festival sponsored by Tiger one weekend, I watched a bunch of young, crop-top wearing girls and trucker-hat wearing guys sing along and vibe out to three girls dancing on the stage karaokeing to throwback chart hits from the aughts and mid-10s, like Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me and, my God, Maroon 5's This Love. On another night at a separate party, the DJ started playing Taylor Swift's "Love Story" as an ironic transition effect in between bass-heavy electro tunes. What this perhaps tells you is that I go to a lot of parties where I'm unhappy. But what it also tells you is that culture is cyclical, that things of the past make a resurgence in the present, nostalgia is the greatest marketing tactic, and all of Kuala Lumpur’s hippest DJs are now trying to sell me on songs I spent my entire teenage years rebelling against. You're not getting me, fuckers. So I feel old because it's now my turn to see my youth packaged as "nostalgia". But I also feel old because I feel cranky – instead of excited – at the overwhelming volume of events that is taking place around the city and because it's just too much for me to keep up with anymore. I thought I knew what was hip, I thought all the normies went here and all the cool kids hung out there, and then I check my Instagram Stories and all the young people of Kuala Lumpur turn out to be elsewhere instead, at some other third thing that I didn't even know about. I haven't felt so out of the loop or desperate for an invite (or at least an explanation) for the longest time. Evidently, this is what the normal after a two-year nationwide lockdown is supposed to feel like.

I, too, have to start learning how to deal in the trade of likes and hype of social media marketing and event management. Last week the Zhongshan Building had PESZTA, where I found myself in the eye of the storm that was a hype- and marketing-generating event. Which is to say, the greatest work that I found myself being praised for and getting my dopamine fix from was making Instagram posts. Instagram captions: the most validation I’ve ever received for any piece of writing. It led to some uncomfortable feelings, the fact that so much of other people’s labour and effort and time could be condensed into something like an Instagram post, or the whole festival, for largely anonymous spectators.  And that you never really know whether to say that your event was a qualitative “success” or not, when the only thing you’re seeing is quantitative feedback. Its attendance by people you don’t know, likes and shares on your post by people with weird usernames, like I’m supposed to consider it a success when someone with a cartoon for a profile picture and a feed of blurry selfies re-shares an emoji-brazy Instagram post I made.

Oh, and since we’re on it, another post-lockdown thing that I’m still trying to wrap my head around? Is the seamless transition between social media (particularly TikTok and Instagram) with reality. What I mean by this is that people have no compunction now about referring to things that happen on Instagram and to other people by Instagram handles, thus betraying the amount of time that they spend on Instagram. There is NO shame now about that when, back in my day (when Maroon 5 and Taylor Swift were still on the charts), I kept it a protected secret from everyone at school that I spent most of my days posting online on my Tumblr blog with 300 followers. Everyone knows what everyone is up to, even if they don’t follow each other or watch each other’s Stories, because everyone has burner accounts (another thing that I realised was a thing) that they follow and watch everyone’s Stories on. And speaking of having no shame (I’m on a roll), at yet another event I went to just this past weekend, one of the DJs started his set by playing the Attack on Titan theme song and closed the night with A Cruel Angel’s Thesis. The nerds have taken over the downtown KL nightlife scene, and it’s surprisingly okay to look nerdy in real life now, as long as your Instagram feed stays flexed. Before, I would have dropped dead before I admitted to a pretty girl — let alone a room full of pretty girls — that I watched anime. But now it’s okay: anime music, emo throwbacks, the DJs becoming increasingly bespectacled and looking like Gendo Ikari meets the Matrix meets latest season Balenciaga, the use of stage names and the acceptability of referring to people by their Instagram handles instead of their actual names — this is the post-lockdown landscape of downtown Kuala Lumpur.

I’ve been tired this whole week since Peszta and I didn’t even do that much, just questioned everything a lot and made my own brain hurt. I’ve been tired throughout all of August because the month has been about slowly learning to take the whiplash punches of growing older.  Fairs, festivals, gigs, markets, exhibition openings, secret raves, house parties, karaoke sessions, etc. I work hard at writing my Instagram captions so that on the weekend I can go get drunk with my friends and maybe on Sunday evenings I can go to a random mall and buy something stupid for myself. I thought being a dilettante would be more luxurious than this. Look Ellen, the trick is not to question it too much and to just keep working because you still don’t have it as bad as most other people who question their job if, in your job and social life, you get to even briefly feel adored and at the centre of the universe sometimes and to be surrounded by people who also frequently get stints at centre-of-the-universe-dom. That’s what being young is all about.