A Better Title

I partly blame my lack of blog posts to Plurk.

What is Plurk?

Wikipedia says:

Plurk is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as plurks) through short messages or links, which can be up to 140 text characters in length.

Updates are then shown on the user’s home page using a timeline which lists all the updates received in chronological order, and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Users can respond to other users’ updates from their timeline through the Plurk.com website, by instant messaging, or by text messaging.

Plurk is a very convenient way to give short updates on your life or your thoughts. I mainly use Plurk after Twitter started to die off some time back. Just to give a snapshot of how Plurk looks like, have a look at the following:

Yep, you can reply to each Plurk by plurking on the plurk itself (notice plurk is both a verb and a noun). It might be a bit hard to use at first, but once you get used to it, you can get really addicted.

If you use Plurk, feel free to add me. My Plurk profile is private, so you’ll have to be my friend in order to see anything I posted.

See you there!

It’s funny that the simplest items can remind me of so many sweet memories.

I’m currently having a patch of dry skin on the “inside” of my elbow (elbowpit?), so this morning I applied some skin moisturizing cream.

The brand is Rosken.

And then I remembered that close to 3 years ago, someone else noticed that my elbow (the “outside” this time) had a patch of dry skin. One fine day when we were studying on the school benches, from her bag she took out a small bottle of skin moisturizing cream.

The brand was Rosken.

I can’t remember where she got the moisturizing cream from. All I knew was that it was a really small bottle, probably a sampler from… the Big Walk maybe? It wasn’t exactly the same type as the one I’m having now. The one she had was a blue “Dry Skin Cream”, whereas the one I use now is an orange “Rosken Dry, Itchy & Scaly Cream with Vitamin E” (that’s a mouthful, I know!).

I remembered that she helped me to apply the cream, making sure that the entire patch was covered thoroughly. When the dry skin persisted, she gave me the bottle of skin moisturizer and reminded me to apply it regularly.

What she did wasn’t much by any standard, but it was a catalyst for the 2-year relationship that ensued 3 months later. Right now the empty, blue Rosken bottle sits inside a white box in my Bukit Batok apartment. The bottle is just a small fragment of a chapter of my life that I’d still like to keep for the time being.

As I finished applying the cream and dressed up for work, I smiled.

It is easy to remember the bad times and get hurt all over again.

But it also isn’t hard to dig the sweet memories and remember that at one point in time, someone had loved me and I had loved her too.