As in, I don't like being in them. I don't really mind being the one snapping them though.
You see, when I was young, I didn't like being in photos, you know, those picture perfect poses, and smiles, etc. and last time, we needed to take nice shots cos it wasn't digital. So each pose needed to be done well. One shot, that's all we usually got.
My mum kept telling me. Just take the pictures. Please.
I never understood why.
She would say, in her youth, she never had the chance to take pictures and she didn't have very many memories of her youth. Cameras weren't very common so it's not like they even had the opportunity.
And as I young kid, I didn't really bother.
But as I get older... I understand what she used to say. I look back at my old pictures ever once in awhile and I reminiscence about my youth. I see pictures when I used to stay at my grandmother's place or when I was a kid taken with my parents on a trip, etc.
So now I try to take more pictures. But I don't like to take pictures which are picture perfect. I find those kind of pictures, without much character. I tend to take candid shots, make funny faces, etc. Personally, I just find picture perfect shots too... rehearsed. Yes, some group shots need to be picture perfect, I'm talking about all the other shots. Anyway, that's my preference. Cos when I look back at the pictures, I like to see what everyone was doing at that point in time, their real expressions, happiness, sadness, etc...
And now, with everything digital, it's so good right? Not really... I've found that as people take more pictures, the pictures now lose value. They become cheap. So cheap, that people don't look at them. They are just stored in a nice Cloud somewhere, or even just forgotten when people change their phones. I don't backup my pictures. I just take them and leave them on my phone. If I change phone, it's all gone. I do extract some of the pictures which I know I want to keep though.
But when was the last time you looked at your old pictures? I reckon, very seldom.
When do people usually look at their pictures?
If you think about it, it's usually when you're cleaning up the house, OR when you're moving house.
More often, it is when you are moving house. If people are going to start storing their pictures on Cloud, then, in the future, there's going to be NEVER a time to look at the pictures. Cos there won't be anything to look at when they move house or clean the place.
No one is gonna suddenly think, "Oh today is a nice time to look at pictures, lets turn on the computer."
Come on, let's be realistic. Pictures on Cloud are probably going to be just forgotten.
So I now make it a point. To print out our pictures, especially after our trips. Every trip we have, we have a task. We need enough pictures to make a photobook. And for every trip, I tell my wife, we need to have a photobook done. Even if the photobook is not well designed, just whack in the pictures and print them out. Cos if there's no physical item, the photos will just be lost. My wife does the photobook designing, cos she likes the books to look pretty. If she let me do it, then it would just be a simple plain book with printed pictures.
Nonetheless, to me, it is a very important task. Cos printing out the memories is crucial. It creates opportunities to flip through it when we accidentally stumble upon it.
So I do suggest. Just print them out in whatever form and put them in a simple album. It doesn't need to look pretty. It just needs to exist physically. Cos in the digital world, it's very easily forgotten. Even though it's available at anytime and stored almost forever, it is rarely called upon.
He was selling quite a lot of other cards, so I was thinking, why not add to my collection cos there were so many cards I did not have and did not have the money to buy when I was younger. It's just a few bucks. Some are a bit more expensive, but I could easily just buy some just to complete some sets which I never managed to complete.
Then, as I thought about it, I wondered. What was I buying? What did the Dragonball cards represent?
Now that I have spending power, I could just complete all the sets easily just by splashing out some cash. And yet, that was not what the cards represented. I am not a collector. I am not striving to complete my collection. The cards represents my youth and the days I spent enjoying collecting and trading the cards. Completing the sets now would serve little meaning and also add little memory value to the cards.
And that's what the cards are. Memories. The new cards would have little value cos they were easily purchased, as compared to the old cards which I obtained when I was in primary school, which were slowly accumulated by saving and trading for the cards.
So I decided that I'll be trading away my extra card and buying some of his cards for cheap and not attempt to further complete my collection. The cards are what they are. Memories. They aren't a collection and neither am I trying to complete the collection.
And since I opened the memories drawer, I also flipped through the folder which contained my Magic The Gathering (MTG) cards. Ah... another flood of memories. If any of you hung around Coronation Plaza or Serene Center around the prime years of MTG (1995-1999), you may have seen me around. I don't hang around Bishan.
I flipped though the folder and saw the first rare which I opened from the very first pack I bought.
A revised edition Fork.
Some crazy luck right :o)
This isn't the exact same card which I got when I started playing in Sec 1.
I intentionally bought a Fork for collection when I quit playing to keep the memory.
This got me thinking. What if someone offers to buy all my cards for a fair value.
Let's say all my Dragonball cards are worth $1000 and my MTG cards are worth $1000.
I don't know the actual valuation now, but let's just say...
And someone comes along and says he's willing to buy them all at $2000.
Would I sell them? It's a fair valuation.
If it's a crazy valuation, like $10,000, then I would definitely sell them. Cos I could use the money to buy back my collection and still have excess.
But what if it was a fair market valuation or even 10% more?
Would I sell my memories for $2000-$2200?
I probably won't sell my Dragonball cards. They really are very old and happy memories of my primary schol days.
As for the MTG cards, I probably would sell them all for a fair value, or even 10% discount for a bulk sale. Cos there are a lot of cards which I don't want anyway. I'd probably use the money and buy a few cards back for collection/memories and save the remaining cash.
So how much are your memories worth? Priceless right? And yet, what value are memories if we aren't able to recall or trigger them a times? I'm sure many of you have stashes from your past kept somewhere, about your youth, or your kids when they were just born. Very sweet memories which seem so recent yet so many years past.
And I think all these memories are so important to us and that we should cherish them dearly, cos who are we, if not an accumulation of all our past memories and experiences?
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