Episode 1276: I Won't Miss The ECP McDonald's

Have begun reading Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy in earnest, as I'm pretty sure my review is actually overdue at this point. Thankfully, it's one of those books that's easy to breeze through. I'm sure if I sat down and analysed it in comparison to books that I've found to be a trudge, it'll all boil down to something banal like sentence length and complexity, or something equally mundane. Then I could go away and find another book that completely disproves this theory. Or I could just not begin worrying about the whole thing in the first place? Heard a while ago that the McDonald's at East Coast Park is closing down, and now someone's made a video to commemorate the passing of another unofficial Singaporean icon. While it's a great video (with appropriately nostalgia-inducing soundtrack), I have to say that personally, I'm not all cut up about this. I don't feel like it's another part of my childhood that's being erased, mainly because I can probably count on both hands the number of times I've been to East Coast Park and to that particular McDonald's outlet. I wonder if that's part of the reason why I've never really felt homesick throughout these four years that I've been overseas, not having emotional attachments to places like a specific McDonald's outlet. I'm sure if I thought really hard about it, there must be places that I would miss if they were gone forever. There just aren't any that come to mind. I mean, I don't even really miss the flat that my family used to live in, and I grew up in it. I'm sure lots of people will think there's something emotionally defective about me now, but honestly, isn't this just as valid a way of processing your personal history? After all, the process of remembering is always already a process of forgetting, in that a selection has to be made. I just happen to work with a different filter from lots of people, I guess.