Complaining

Today is a bad day. I don't mean a fucking bad day, but a bad day nonetheless.

It started off with me getting insomnia over the first tutorial class today that I had to give at 9am. Couple that with how I had to wake up at 6.30am for the class, makes my day a really bad start. Add to that my back problem, which is tugging on my left leg all the time, my mood wasn't really pretty by the time I left the house.

Then on the bus 96 to school (did I mention I hate public transport?), there was a freaking gay who pressed himself against me on the seat. I was leaning as far away as possible from him, but still his leg was jammed right against mine, and I have no way of removing my leg short of standing up. Luckily he got off at the Archi stop, else if I have to brush pass him when I get down, I might just punch him in the face.

Then it was the class at 9am I was in school for. 85% of the class was terribly late; they only start filing in around 9.15am. We had really a lot to cover in each tutorial, and them forcing me to start the tutorial late meant that we have less time to go through all the materials.

Then I had to go for this talk, which was so boring, that I actually had to pinch myself to not fall asleep. The worse thing is there are 3 parts to the talk (why can't they stick at just 2 parts?), and after 2 sessions of torture, there was absolutely no way I was going to sit through the third one, and I went to the Grad room to sleep.

Then I went for Karate. My half-week hiatus plus my back problem conspired to prevent me from stretching much; I can't even kick properly, nor punch properly. I don't want to stop Karate! I hate it when stuff like that happens.

Only consolation for the day, on the way home on the MRT, there was a girl stealing glances at me even though her boyfriend was just beside her.

Questions

We are haunted by different questions at various stages of our lives. When we are young, some of the more vivid questions that stood out seems to be "When do I become an adult?" "When can I decide things for myself?" etc.

When we were older, at adolescence, we muse about particular problems, things like "how to get back at the idiot?" or "how to woo that pretty girl?" These seem rather important at that point of time, and the questions we had at childhood faded into inconsequentiality by comparison.

As we grow even older, we move into abstraction, wondering about what love is, wondering about why we have to do exams, and why people are such jerks. And at the background of it all, there is the question of what life is really about, playing on like a soft trumpet just at the edge of hearing.

The questions never seem to get answered, but nevertheless we gradually lost them, and moved on to other questions. Questions like "what is the role of money" in my life, and "how the hell do I get more of them?" seem really important now. Especially the latter question, which is rather independent of how you answer the former.

Predictably, some of the questions will haunt us for the rest of our lives, and as we grow even older, a question that pops up every now and then will stand out even more ostensively: what is Death to us? That question could really mean a lot of things, like what does it feels to be dead, or just before death; it could mean how the prospect of being dead sits with us; it could mean what is our reaction to seeing the people around us dying before us (or for the pessimists, our reaction to the possibility that we might be the first to go instead).

Do we really have an answer to any of the questions? Maybe. We do seem to have ready answers to the childhood questions, which are respectively "Legally, 21", and "Probably never." The answers to the other questions appear less obvious. Instead of answering them, we just decide at one point of time that certain questions just don't deserve answering anymore, either due to a change of perspective, or a change of priorities.

With that in mind, and the fact that we are moving inexorably into the future, perhaps there is one thing we should safely conclude: that all questions eventually doesn't matter anymore, and so we should stop fucking around with them, and get down to making life miserable for the idiot in adolescent period.

priorities

For ambitions and interests, I am giving up money, time, and love. =s

For gaming, I am apparently giving up all the above. =p

The meaning of life

After doing four years of Philosophy, I've finally discovered the meaning of life.

Life noun (pl. lives) the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.

Meat

Did you notice that vegetarians tend to smell nicer than meat eaters?

Of course, that could be the reason why we eat beef, but not tiger meat.

Clearance

At some of the bookstores in Singapore, like Times, or MPH, especially Popular, one can see the store being divided into various sections, touting titles under attractive headings like "Best Sellers", "New Titles", "This Month's Pick", etc. Some of the titles under "New Titles" sport names like "50 ways to get out of your couch", "10 tips for the successful businessman", most of them doomed to join the little noticed section "Clearance" next week.

It may be slightly inaccurate, however, to call the Clearance section "little noticed". Despite Herculean efforts by the shop assistants to make the section as messy and dirty as possible, it is possibly one of the greatest rivals to the Best Sellers section, as people haunt the clearance basket in search of the book they always wanted, but wanted to wait till the author hanged himself from bankruptcy, so the book would go into clearance. Usually, their search turned out fruitless, but that doesn't stop them from trying again the next time.

More likely than not, you will find books written by some celebrity who had some overnight fame, and rightly cashing on their new found fame, or notoriety, produced some books in the same night, hoping to make some money out of it. "The life of Paris H*****--an autobiography", "How I cut my arm off to save my life", etc, are such works.

When I browsed through the very titles which I had just made fun of, I feel a sense of sadness, a sense of futility emanating from the spines of the books. It is as though they are looking back at me, crying of vast disappointment, of despondency. A lifetime of effort, of hopes and high spirits, may have gone into the writing of these books. Yet still, nought counts if you are unable to get people to appreciate what holds within you.

As a writer, I had hoped to write a book, or many of them, someday. It might be too much perhaps, to hope that I would be able to produce some philosophical blockbusters. I don't even have an exact genre in mind. But I do know that I want to write a book.

And I know which section of the bookstores I want my books to go under. It has to be the Clearance section. Whenever I had hoped to achieve something, life always throws me something else instead. Let's just see what life would grant me this time round.

Noise

If you have extremely good hearing, you will know why I always keep my handphone ringtone down very low, and all the volume settings on my laptop and radio are always near minimum settings. Because I can hear very well, I thought that there is no need to tune up the volume, and no need to cause unnecessary disturbance to other people.

However, every once in a while, I would crank up the volume, especially when listening to some particularly nice songs. The difference is significant, and it is not merely in terms of volume. Previously unnoticed melodies would sound up in the background, blending in so well that you could almost miss them, especially if you had them in low volume. The insignificant sounding drum beat suddenly became something more, thudding my heart along to the rhythm; the violin suddenly tugging at my heart. And now you know why the singer sometimes pause, for no other reason than to bring into relief a particularly intricate turn of melody.

Then of course, at this time, I would be causing disturbance to other people, though now a necessary one.