Old habits die easy... Happy 2020!

Recent change in lifestyle arrangements has afforded me more time on hand and prompted me to revisit this abandoned blog. Rereading past events as far back as a decade and a half ago made me cringe at times at some of the silly things I said and strange expressions I used, and laughed out loud at other forgotten snippets of life. The little things that actually matter. I came to realise the true value of journalling and now decide to continue doing it.

Another lesson learned from rereading these gold nuggets is that I wish I could have been more diligent in elaborating events where I had been vague at best and, now worse with the passing of time and loss of unrecorded memories, frustrating.

So here I am again, writing down apparently mundane daily events and thoughts which I now know will turn into sweet barrels of wine as they age in the cellar of time. I look forward to tasting these words in a decade's time, if God allows.

My way or the tollway?

I went to CityLink yesterday to pay a toll. The man who served me happened to wear a condescending attitude and would rather give a lecture on tollway jurisdiction than assist customers with relevant information and send them on their way.

The plot thickens when he was to be embarrassed later when his colleague next to him delivered exactly the thing he said earlier couldn't be done.

Now here's where the real twist happens and makes the story well worth telling. As I later thought I was being gracious to downplay his embarrassment by not making a scene or not asking for his name so that I could later address him in the letter of complain he would remember the rest of his sorry life, another thought hit me like a lightning bolt: I shouldn't have at least let the opportunity slip by to commend the lady who assisted me with what I needed to get done.

When we are inconvenienced we feel justified to complain, don't we? But how often do we let people know when they've actually done a good job? Not often enough.

Through the silver screen darkly

Though movies, or any narrative storytelling, seek to portray life, they differ from life thus: In movies, the bad guys are easily far more believable and intriguing in their badness than the good guys are in their goodness. Unlike the good guys who need to be in one way or another coerced into taking the side of good, bad guys are bad because they just are.*

Like the antagonists in our own experiences, we love to hate them and hate to love them. But in movies we're also glad that they are there standing between the good guy, supposedly an onscreen proxy of ourselves, and what he wants. This almost never happens in life. Good movies take care of that under two hours and open up a window to an instant insight we desire but rarely encounter in life. It is in this inversion of reality, by rationalizing the human experience through fiction, that stories are, and must be, told.

* You might take exception to the theory and refer to stories like Hannibal Rising, where a sort of origin story is told of the bad guy. But for all intents and purposed of the author(s) Hannibal Lecter is the "good guy" in that he is the sympathetic character through, more or less, whose point of view this particular story is told, therefore rendering the bad guy theory inapplicable to him in this instance.

A note from the future

My dear friend Adelaine wrote a post on her blog that nourished my parched imagination and set in motion a mental exercise in nostalgia.

Here's the big idea: If I could go back in time (and space) to slip myself a note from the future, what would I tell myself?

What does someone like me has to say to "himself minus 10 or 20 years", having lived a wonderful life many out there can't even remotely hope to have? What rues or regrets could I possibly have in my life that warrant a rewrite of my story at large?

If I ever get a chance to thwart time and space (I'm pretty sure I've just offended Einstein mid-sentence), I don't think I ever want to give the minutest detail of the future away to me in the past. Contrary to what I first thought it would do, doing so would not give me an upper hand in life—whatever I thought was important enough to justify a second attempt (which, as a good Sci-Fi flick would have it, was to happen at the exact anchor point in spacetime when and where "it" first presented itself).

Part of a well lived life consist of learning life's tough lessons the hard way. To slip myself a note from the future is like telling a school kid all the answers to the finals before he even learned any of it in class. To say the least it wouldn't have made any sense to him. And then there's the butterfly effect (no explanation of the term necessary thanks to Hollywood). What I would get after I make the round trip and pull the time machine over at the curb of Present Time will in fact be a lesser me. In both substance and quality. In the end I would have been better protected from the brutalities of life—and at the same time been made a dimwit in the truest sense of the word.

So there, one of the biggest Sci-Fi aspirations of mankind deciphered. Don't bother cracking the codes of the spacetime continuum, folks. I've figured it out and it's not worth the hassle.

Although I wouldn't mind meeting myself incognito ten or twenty years back just for the kicks. Or conduct history's first double-blinded, conscious, out-of-body experiment on oneself. Just to find out if I've really been the product of my own good opinion of myself.

On the courage to act

In the span of a normal week we find enough opportunities to be brave. But more often than not we do not step up to the plate and live out the courage that we believe is hidden in us. The things that we know to be right are the hardest to perform because we believe they are the exact same things that would bring about our downfall if we fail the test.

The moment we look out from our threshold of choice into the largely uncaring world, what we care about suddenly takes on a bright significance and trembles us to the bones. We know we are about to take a stand, to walk onstage, into the spotlight and say the line that would proclaim who we are to the onlookers of our life's drama, if unconcerned. Suddenly death doesn't seem like a bad alternative. But since the mention of death in this case is really just a melodramatic whinge with no real relevance, we withdraw to fight another day.

But then order is not yet restored by our failure to act. If this is something we genuinely care about, the pressure would only escalate until we head-on deal with it. Now here comes the question: How do you know if you are prepared for the bravest moments of your life?

You can't. So I was told. No one knows if they are brave until they have been brave. "Act first to deserve the good opinion of yourself." There is no secret in being brave, you just do it despite your fear, doubt, worry, reservations and all that. Act, and then you can tell yourself if you're brave.

My secret life as a normal person

One thing that anyone who has risen from the dead would notice is the surprising drudgery of a new beginning, along with the overwhelming freedom of what can be.

Another day goes by without any writing done. I still have time to make up for the pagefill before the day is over. The wicked thing is I don't want to. I don't feel like it.

It's not the first time I don't feel like writing. Normally I would be able to trudge on no problem.

I just wish she hadn't looked at me the way she did every time I see her. We barely have a chance to talk after that day. Any construal in the meantime, if I let it, could easily make a dash either way.

Maybe I should just scrap the alter ego and resume my true identity as a thick-glassed writer with no life beyond his imagination. Trying to have a life and write at the same time is too damn hard, if at all possible. Every bit of energy disbursed in life is detrimental to the work in progress, as is already evident.

The pill bottle of life's little quandaries reads: Apply on fictional characters only. Not suitable for writers at work.

The New Silent Generation (or "What I hate myself for")

Two things turned me inside out today while I was out taking a walk in the city. The first was my response to a comment I heard that fumed me, and the other was a display of apathy including my own; both belonged in their own ways to a disability to speak up caused by what I believe to be a derailed sense of morality that is weaving through the fibre of society.

When I boarded a tram a lady in the tram who was trying to get off after the other alighting passengers were gone said to her companion referring to the boarding passengers, "How rude these people are," and then raised her voice saying, "excuse us! We're trying to get off!" Then and there, my ears turned fuming hot and I so wanted to give the lady an earful about how it was her who dilly-dallyed when other passengers were alighting before her. How dare she blame others for her own indecision!

Another frustrating incident also happened to have taken place in a tram! - does public transport bring out the worst in people? A half-drunk youth was harassing two ladies seated next to him and for minutes after insufferable minutes, the women were left to their own limited resort to ward off the slurring nuisance and nobody went to their rescue!

The bottom line is, men from my generation (myself very much included) are incapacitated from acting as men when it counts. We are more than glad to stand by and watch others suffer than jump into the hot seat to relieve others. We haven't been taught how to stand up for the needy, but how could we? Men my age were raised by men and women born in the Silent Generation. As the Time magazine described our parents in 1951:

Youth today is waiting for the hand of fate to fall on its shoulders, meanwhile working fairly hard and saying almost nothing. The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence. With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today's younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters...

...so their children naturally follow in their footsteps.

I'm not asking my generation to issue manifestoes, carry posters or burn books. These things have been and should continually be debated for their validity. I don't even have the right to ask anything of others until I do something about it myself; as Chesterton was rumoured to have supplied the two-word answer to the question what's wrong with the world, "I am." All I can do is to refrain from inaction in the future when action is needed on the side of good. No more silence when speaking out could save. There would be no more fear of declaring the truth if the fear of God triumphs.

People suffer when we fall by the wayside. What are we going to do?

More thoughts on writing

Through the years I learn that it is not up to the writer to be interesting, but merely to be truthful. For writers are nothing more than conveyors of truth when they can latch on to it, even if it meant doing it in various disguises of lies or wildly disconnected images.

In that regard, whether or not the writing is good is not to be determined by the writer, who in any case is only a messenger waiting or coaxing on the edge of the tangibles. A master of his craft he might be, his craft serves solely as a facilitator of truth echoed from the beyond, therefore the only way he can progress in his trade is in improving the accuracy at which he relay what he received. That's all any artist can do; learn the basic rules of the means - in this case, language - and learn to pay intense attention.

Then again there is this relatively new school of thought that propounds the idea of making art for art's sake; such as a door is no longer a door but a cat. In all that a writer does, his primary task is to be truthful, and then to make sense. I believe these two are one, or came from one single source. To be truthful is to be boldly honest. By making sense I mean keeping the truth in check, for we can be overly bold unto self-indulgent and forget to be truly honest.

The truth conveyed could make sense without anybody yet recognizing it, but it must make sense. The internal coherence has to be there and conform to the shared principles of reason or the whole message breaks down. To make a door a cat might sound avant-garde but is in fact dangerous. Art could be an overlooked message projected into space that never falls onto a right-distanced wall, but it isn't nothing. Art for its own sake isn't a form of art. Art for art's sake, like any meaning turned on its head, is nothing. And it is always dangerous to make something out of nothing - a task even God does not attempt.

The power of certain songs

There are certain songs in my playlist that I only listen to when I need to jog a particular segment of my memory.

Or should I say: when I'm brave enough to relive certain memories.

There are a handful of songs I know that attach only too closely to certain emotions. Some songs only you know them. Others you shared with someone wishing they would become theirs too. And yet others someone told you about and had since become yours forever.

Whichever special song you're listening to, it is as if a whole disappearing world came back to life as it slowly spread out with the unfolding of the meshes of tunes and words... and that's when you know they've never been gone.

Just locked away behind those special songs.

Some thoughts on writing

I never gave much thought to the act of writing until I took up a different practice and made comparisons.

Photography (a recently acquired interest of mine) is, I think, not that much different in nature from writing - the word literally means writing with light. Except writing is more entrenched to the human experience than taking photographs, in that the artist's equipment to form his art is built-in. Photography is more like working with a very smart partner compared to writing, which is a sole proprietorship for better or worse.

But we tend to believe that anyone could just pick up a camera and take a decent photo (just as we believe anyone could write a book), it still doesn't discount the fact that a captivating image, like a coherent sentence, involves some thoughts that went on behind its creation.

Because the art is born through the artist himself (vs. a lens-mounted camera), it is easy to mistake writing as more elemental than photography. A photographer plays around with light, shadow, composition, etc. to define his artistic choices. To assist his expression he needs the knowledge of, say, the relationships between aperture, shutter speed and ISO value. But the amazing thing about the mind is that its workings - what we generally call instincts - are so ingrained in our experience that we give no conscious thought to subjects, predicates or any such sentence constructs. You would have thought it doesn't take any more to form a thought than it does clicking the shutter release to snap a photo. You don't normally see the things going on in the black box, as Chase Jarvis calls the photographic process.

If an association has to be made somewhere, then the writer has more in equivalence with the camera than with the photographer. For a person writing is essentially a camera taking off its lens cap and deciding which combination of aperture/shutter speed/ISO to engage before pressing the shutter release - all by itself. Maybe put in another way, a photographer without his camera is like a writer losing his mind!

My silly season

I did a pretty silly thing. I've finally forgiven someone but that's not what's silly.

The person who said sorry to me two months ago had left my life without waiting to hear what I have to say. Even if she did wait long enough I don't think I would have been able to utter the appropriate words right then—well... appropriate as for now, not then. I still can't ascertain what could have been an appropriate response then given the circumstances.

So I wrote her a letter that was never read—and perhaps never will be. And that's a bit silly. The original draft was, believe it or not, penned the very night she plummeted me to my death. To be fair: it was a very long night. And what came out was probably not the most forgiving thing anyone could manage on paper. Luckily that wasn't the version that got signed and sealed.

Appropriate as this gesture is a thing to do, appropriateness isn't the reason behind it. I could have held my peace about it for the rest of my life without ever willing to forgive. But then what rights have I to deny someone her pardon, even if she wasn't looking for it, when I was undeniably grateful for what immense beauty I was left with, just in as equal an extent as I was nicked by the sting?

There's this little hope that she would somehow know that she's been forgiven and could go on living the life she chose without the slightest trail of guilt. That would in turn help me to forgive myself.

Words, words, words

We take chances hoping the universe would somehow realign itself to advance our good fortune. And nine times out of ten that doesn't happen. But is words all that lovers have for each other? You could string together the sweetest-sounding words and still lose everything the next moment.

But to the right person it does matter. To the person the right words are meant for, those words aren't just words.

They are an acknowledgment of our lifelong search. I don't like to boil something down to its essence when the flowers are to be found in its elaboration. But to a woman the soul of the right words pronounces in effect a man's converging attention; to a man it extends a woman's exclusive invitation.

But words you can never take back. Then again you wouldn't have known. There are words that felt so right the first time you might never say them again because they had already been said... only to the wrong person. Of course it always seems a waste thereafter. But would you have withheld yourself and left those words unsaid?

If there are things to be said, say it loud and say it well. Leave heartache for the morning. It always comes whether or not you plan for it.

Story of my life (and death)

There are things you learn only in retrospect. But at my 29th year I knew some things right away. For one I know I'm the luckiest man I've ever met, and that all the things that made me who I am, good and bad, were just shadows of what are to come.

People who don't know me, when they read something like this, they'd think that I've probably had it easy, and that this is how I define lucky. I would admit that I have been very good at concealing my inner life even from those very close to me, so that only very few who know me can construct my life story from all the pieces of the puzzle.

They say when a life is lived to the fullest, it overflows and changes others. But my experience of life so far is just the opposite. I seem to have been made a chalice rather than a vase. What's poured into me tends to get distilled so much there just isn't enough to spill over. If you were never intent on tipping me upside down you would never have tasted the last drop of life that's hidden at the bottom of the cup—that's how unnoticeable I designed my life to be... since I first discovered the want for romantic love.

Something tremendous happened the month leading up to my 29th year that converged all efforts and struggles of mine for love in a most unavailing confrontation that led to a climax most unbearable there wasn't an existing category to name it under. It was, to borrow from old idioms, a baptism of fire that could only be described as a sort of death... and rebirth.

For the first time in love I was betrayed. The betrayal brought about death that seemingly must be and most strangely with it, a resurrection from hope. Though it killed me, it gave me at the same time a new name to bear for the rest of my life. And that name I couldn't utter in any language even if I want to. It was made up of certain sounds, but mostly psalms and lamentations, a lifetime of keen questions and deep answers, honors and humiliations, faces, words, visions, terrors, light, and secrets.

So what after all do I mean by being lucky? There is only one reason behind my celebration of this life after death. And that is a pain-filled life is the only life worth living. I do not say this lightly. Every day countless out there suffer more severely than I did. But no one ever suffered needlessly. That is to say, people have without doubt suffered unjustly but no suffering was or ever will be undergone without its rewards. The human soul seems to be just the kind of thing that thrives on hope the more it goes without, and that's all I'm saying.

I'm lucky because I died.

Story of my life (crescendo)

This has got to be the strangest thing that has happened to me in years. Recently I noticed I've recovered some of the things I stopped doing or experiencing.

I was done with it a long time ago but lately I began to search the vast blue sky and exhale lento. What was that! The last time I did that I still had a whole heart to rend on the altar of life...

And I began to be afraid again. Really afraid. Suddenly there's something in life that I'm afraid I might lose...

But strangest of all, I've totally detached myself from all the past grievances that I ever visited... I stepped out the door one day only to hear birdsongs and feel the sun's warmth on my face.

I found the source of my newfound joy in the most unusual place. I want to let the world know the reason I'm happy but for now I'm content that my reason already knows.

Story of my life

Do you have any regrets in life? That's what I found myself answering today when I was caught in the Simba-and-Rafiki moment as I was pulling up some fond cases from the memory file.

"Yes...?" said Simba.

"Try again!" replied the nosy Baboon in me.

"Well... no?"

"And why not?" asked the monkey as he invited me to stoop low and watch him form ripples on the water's surface with his ugly index finger.

In an enlightening moment an answer came...

"No..." this time the monkey gave me time to finish my thought, "no I don't have any regrets in life..." and he waited still... "Only pity."

That's when the pesky monkey disappeared.

So what's with that? It took me a while but I finally figured out what the simian was trying to say. He wanted me to know for sure that I haven't been living with regrets. But on the other hand there is pity, which may look just like the same thing as regrets but is not.

I haven't a regret in my life, because I eliminated them along the way as best I could.

But I'll always have pity, because hard as I tried, I could never make someone love me.

So there you have it, the story of my life; a life with pity but no regrets.

Hapless in dreams

I hate dreaming lately.

To put things in perspective, what I really hate is waking up to find what I thought was real when it happened was actually a dream.

Dreams are a cruel machine the better they get. There wasn't any signs or banners in the dream that warns against emotional investments. And you always find out the truth a second too late. And like lovers who steal your heart along with your money, the best cons always manage to vanish and keep you swooning over their acts despite the fact that you're left with nothing but your socks and the memory of a cheap thrill.

Nonetheless, though I hate to admit it, heartbreaking dreams have a place in the cognitive process.

They remind you that though it might seem like you own the world, it could all be gone in an instant, and that you're fundamentally powerless in the greater scheme of things.

Don't like the sound of it? Nobody I know does, myself included. That's why I guess it's all the more important that we're reminded that every single day, lest we take for granted the simplest of things that usually mean the most to us.

Are you a philosopher?

I met a Frenchman today and expressed to him my fascination with Paris. He encouraged me to visit his country with the following reason.

According to him, in France an average man gets to have seven women, and often five of them are knockouts and the other two are plain ugly.

He then wittily offered to confer two of his ugly ones to me out of goodwill. I told him if that was the case I believe I might just find the ugly ones beautiful by my standards (like there is such a thing as ugly Frenchwomen). The man expressed his touché by raising his hands and eyebrows as only the French could do, and said, "Are you a philosopher?"

Oui monsieur, comme vous, je pense à de belles femmes toujours.

Love gets dated

Who needs this day right?

Tell me the meaning of Valentine's Day. You gotta set a day in the year aside for birthdays. Celebrating it any other day won't do. Same goes for memorial days like Australia Day and Anzac Day, lest we forget. But a Valentine's Day? Do we really need a set day in the year to celebrate our love—in whichever sense you take it? Love is the only thing you can't have an anniversary of. If it's ever there, love is too large and too close a presence to need reminding, and too pragmatic to get exclusive attention only one day in a year.

I'll tell you what Valentine's Day is for. It's for those who can't decide on when to celebrate their love—if they haven't already realized there isn't a single day when you shouldn't celebrate. It's also for those who want, for at least a day, to forget love. Love in it's truest, day-in-and-day-out sense. Without February 14th, most people would probably lose the only chance they have of being treated the way they aren't treated the rest of the year... like getting expensive boxes of chocolates wrapped up in glossy ribbons, receiving scented cards written with notes on feelings and good opinions, or walking on rose-petaled hallways.

In a word, pampered.

Love on the rest of the days is hard work and stripped of pretense. You see the other person in their realest form and most of the time it leaves much to be desired. The sad part of it all is that you know you're stuck with an imperfect person when you're secretly gauging them against ever-increasing standards. I for one am a perfectionist, and therefore do not condemn the desire for perfection. I believe we're made for perfection. That's what I believe Valentine's Day is for. To create a fleeting illusion of perfection in the other person through royal treatments.

Why don't we do what we do on Valentine's Day everyday? A culture that makes a day for love will soon need to make appointments to love.

Love gets old

Good thing about eating in public is you can listen in on some of the most interesting conversations.

This afternoon I was sitting next to two chatty young girls munching my Filet-o-fish burger and leaving the earphones of my iPod on in pause mode to obscure the fact that I was blatantly eavesdropping (though the volume at which they conversed did save me the trouble of straining my ears). And boy! the things they talked about could shame a grown man into shrink-wrapping his high school yearbook.

When I was making acidic comments in my mind on each silly thing I heard, I knew my transformation into an old fart has come full circle. I no longer root for Andrew the ex, who thinks Matt is no good for the girl. I don't trust Matt either, who shared dessert on a first date that wasn't an official date anyway. And when Matt still attends his ex's family reunion, I wondered why people don't turn into old farts any sooner.

Looks like the dating scene still hasn't changed since my time. The young are the easiest to fall in love. Just as easily as they fall out of it. What remains is the reminiscent old fart who wonders about possibilities. I think it would be wrong to say that he wishes to relive the past differently. The old fart is someone who's pretty comfortable soaking in the bittersweetness of life, being well aware that whatever choices he could have made, he's bound to live with regrets either way. Rather than sulking over what befalls, he's the happiest when he realize he's actually enjoying the torture of not knowing it both ways. C'est le mystère de la vie.

Musings on a blue Chinese New Year

As family and friends are celebrating the arrival of Year of the Rat (you gotta love the Chinese for including a rodent among the signs in their calendar), I'm quietly tugged away in a far corner from home where festivity is underway.

The blues have long been anticipated since I found out a month ago that my housemates will be flying home for Chinese New Year, leaving me Melbournebound for 3 weeks.

Just when I was beginning to enjoy having the house all to myself, I was visited by old memories in the form of an early autumn night's dream in the middle of Week 1. To protect the privacy of innocent parties involved, let's just say I dreamed of a love interest from the past and was living out an alternate version of reality until sunrise.

The dream was so vivid it left me as loathsome in the morning as a pregnant hyena. To think of all the efforts I've put into rearranging related memories according to Jungian archetypes throughout the years, they finally retaliated and showed me a demo reel of the director's cut. Naturally, it gave rise to questions that begin with "what if..."

What if I made a different decision at some crucial point in history, would things have turned out differently now?... Oh brother... this is a time when I wish I were a hyena—at least hyenas don't ask hypothetical questions! But then again I guess hyenas don't experience reveries on an autumn night either.

That's not to say that I'm accustomed to living off relationship carcasses from the past. OK maybe I am. But if you know my personal history you'll wonder. I wish I have a penny every time I'm asked a variation of "Have you found someone yet?" Brothers and sisters everywhere, to satisfy your spirit of inquiry and end all curiosity toward my love life or even my sexual orientation, let me answer your question once and for all with the title of U2's song, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For".

To end the concern of some and maybe disappoint others, no I'm not gay. But I'm not in love either. That might be hard to believe for a man my age (I'm going on 30 in the Year of the Rat according to the Chinese lunisolar calendar) and erm... virility (contrary to misconceptions propagated by my boy scout image, I do experience hormonal drives). It is common that polite society cannot fathom such a sub-species as healthy single heterosexual males, at least not as a constant life form in no need of further enhancements through pairing with their female counterparts.

Don't get me wrong if you think I'm not looking. Just ask my housemates how I have pushed the envelope of being desperate in the past... though I operate on a highly selective mode and rarely show my hands, to borrow betting terms.

Maybe that's my problem. Probability dictates that success rate increases with the increase of the number of throws (or so the casino would have you believe). I detest the idea of leaving up my love life to random phenomena, therefore I fold, untie my bow tie, and help myself with a glass of whisky at the bar.

I am the missing link in the human cultural evolution—a single man who thrives amidst survival of the couples.