A list of important questions which I am preoccupied with these days:
1. What thesis topic?
2. If two events A and B each individually determine a third event, why do we need event B, given that event A exists?
3. Should I do a PhD? Or should I get a job in Singapore?
4. Who do I like?
5. Who loves me?
6. Am I smart? Or was I merely lucky thus far?
I have never subscribed to the view that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” To me, that seems plainly wrong. To describe a picture in words never serves to capture the essence of it--not the barest outline. What you have before you, a painting, when described, is merely an elaborate name which you have just given to it, a baptism of sorts, but never accurate. Taken in isolation, the description just given would never have evoked in another person the picture which you saw.
That, some would say, is exactly what the phrase meant, that the picture is much more than words can do. But that in itself is a mistake, for to compare pictures with words is to assume they have at least some grounds of comparison, when they are in fact, as different as possibly can be.
Yet that is not to say words are inferior to pictures. In certain ways, words are markedly superior in producing images in the mind of which the greatest painters could not hope to emulate. For the painters, for all their creative geniuses, could only show their audience a single image; different interpretations to be sure, but nonetheless a single image. Words could do better; a certain description of a single scene could produce in its readers completely different images, not to mention having its own myriad of interpretations at the same time. In the world of words, sight and sound come together to form a tapestry of life, a moving 3 dimensional, real time successions of colorful events with you at the center of all, a silent observer of events as they play out in full color and vibrancy all around you.
A simple description like “It was a dreary day, full of smog and gloom, as I sat crowded in a morning bus, watching the pavement crept by” is both simple and rich at the same time, hinting at images beyond what it described, of the other vehicles crowding the road producing the dreaded smog; of the rush of the morning as students and commuters crowding each other in the morning bus, each hoping for more speed than the laden vehicle could give. One could imagine the oppressive feeling of being in that bus, and the underlying mood of the author, which is at once interspersed amongst the imageries conjured up in one’s mind. All these, needless to say, cannot be captured in the entirety by a 2-dimensional canvas, not even in a moving theatre of holographic images.
Latest update: I realised that "Kaisen Maki" could actually be a typo for "Kaizen Maki" which is a sushi described as made with "eel, flying fish roe, cucumber and melon with wasabi." Not a surprising typo since I took the photo on the 24th of Aug, whereas the packaging shows it "was" packed on the 25th.
I happened to catch a snatch of chinese news today on the tv, and it was reporting on some singer who held a concert somewhere, who apparently performed exceedingly well. What caught my attention however was how the reporter described the performance as hauntingly beautiful which made all the audience, this is the interesting part, "听出耳油."
Which meant, literally, that some yellow fluid is dripping out of your ears.
Now that's one really disturbing image. Imagine you are seated in a posh concert hall, with few hundred people all dressed to the nines, all holding their breath to a hauntingly beautiful melody. And suddenly, as the melody reaches its crescendo, you feel something wet creeping down your auditory canal. And you slowly realized, that out of the ears of the mesmerized audience, something yellow is dripping out slowly, staining velvet coats and bare shoulders in a persistent stream...
Bleagh.
Well it is only a metaphor I guess, but one couldn't help feeling that it is a rather crass one. Certainly not one to inspire the feeling of beauty when applied to any piece of music. Not unless it's a music designed to magically clean out your ear canal.
Sometimes it seems that life is about being happy. And if being happy involves doing nothing much other than slacking around, doing things that we like, or not thinking about unhappy thoughts, then we ought to be doing exactly that.
The trick however, is being able to slack around, doing things that we like, and not think about unhappy thoughts. One got to make a living after all, even if living is about being happy, you need food at the very least to carry on doing that. And if you try to earn your bread, in all possibilities the three important things outlined above are going to be quickly crowded out of your life. What then?
The balance seems to be somewhere between getting a job with no life and getting a life with no bread; we want a job that gives money, but minimal or no work is required. Is there such a job? Yes, being an academic. Or more specifically, being a philosophy academic. Other areas of academia like the social sciences does an admirable job of not doing any real work under the pretense of "research", but philosophy carries it to the extremes, where the only "research" involves racking your brains for a viable thesis topic. You don't even need to survey pesky undergraduates, or run babies through a lab maze. You don't even need to get out of bed.
In many ways, my thinking is affected by this ancient chinese philosopher Chuangzi. If you read his works, you will understand what I mean--he advocates not doing anything that might put you under undue stress or unhappiness, or indeed doing anything at all. In an early chapter of his book Chuangzi, he speaks of the Weiqi master who died young due to brilliance, and the zitherist who vomitted blood over his art. Later on, he speaks approvingly of the tree which has a crooked trunk and soft wood which is totally incapable of fashioning into anything, whereas the nice and straight hardwood due to its excellent quality, gets chopped down very early in its career precisely for those qualities.
My calligraphy teacher once advised me that Chuangzi is not a good read for young people. The young should be full of drive and ambitions; they should want things they couldn't achieve and do things that are severely stupid. Chuangzi teaches the exact opposite. I kinda agree with him now. Such a lifestyle tend to drag into monotony, and it seems way too early to be concentrating on putting one foot after another to live your life out.
That said, I have ambitions enough for ten people (judging from the ambitions some people around me has), so I haven't really been following what Chuangzi says to the word. I do however slack a lot. That's following the spirt of the word isn't it? Though that probably isn't a good idea, much better had it been the other way round right?
Or not, probably better if I had been able to throw Chuangzi entirely. On the other hand, if I had, I wouldn't be able to enjoy life, doing the things that I like, slack a bit, and not think about unhappy things. Maybe I'm good the way I am. haha
Last night was wonderful, but for the movie. And even the movie was great, just that the seating wasn't: we were in the front row of the theatre and right smack in the center. We had to crane our necks almost 90deg to watch the show, and I could feel a headache coming on even while they were showing the trailers.
That said, The Dark Knight is nonetheless a great show. It's just that I couldn't remember much of it since my brain was continually drained of its juices while watching it. Watch it for The Joker though.
I was at the gym today, doing my lats pull-down, while behind me was a kid, around 18-19 years old, stretching in preparation, I think, for the barbell press machine. This was when suddenly, a stocky man of around 40+ rushed into the gyming area with his bag and everything, threw his towel on the barbell press machine, and rushed off back to the locker area to deposit his bag. He certainly took his time after the act of “chopping” the machine, for he even went to the toilet and sauntered about the gym.
When he returned to the machine, the kid approached him and asked if he can share the machine by taking turns. The stocky bastard refused by saying, ” I am only just starting my sets.” And the stupid kid just stood there and took it. In the end, the kid waited for nearly 30mins, doing nothing much, while the stocky bastard strutted around the gym with his chest out doing one set of exercise here and another there, taking his time chatting with his gym friends, returning only occasionally to use the barbell press, all the while leaving his towel on it to prevent the kid from using.
What’s the use of going to gym if you cannot even stand up for yourself; you are just inviting people to step all over you. The kid should have stopped the man immediately when he was trying to put his towel on the machine saying “Sorry, I am using this machine. And no, you couldn’t share it even if you asked, which you didn’t, because you are such a bastard.” At the very least, the kid could have insisted on sharing, explaining that he was there first.
That’s the problem with Singaporeans nowadays. They have no manners, and they dare not stand up for themselves. If your toes got stepped on in the MRT, you would keep quiet and pretend that you didn’t mind that at all. No one would bother to apologise. And you would pretend that you didn’t mind that either. If some retard blew his stinking cigarette smoke in your face, you would just pretend to enjoy it until he left and you glare menacingly at his back.
In this world, justice only exists if you enforce it. Waiting for divine retribution? Do you think God is going to kick his ass in heaven just because he has no manners? Or perhaps you think retribution comes in more intangible form, like a guilty conscience. Some assholes simply don't have that; they can lead their whole lives out happily cutting queues, happily barfing on your bag, and going around happily beating people up. You can console yourself thinking that these bad actions surely will have repercussions for them in the long run, but it is just going to be pathetic wishful thinking on your part.
There is a dead dragonfly in my room.
Which is weird, considering how dragonflies haven't been seen in my area for the past 5 years. Nor the past 6 years. Or the past 8 years. Actually it has never been seen in my area, and now there's one dead in my room.
What is really weird, is that not too long ago, yifeng gave me a handicraft dragonfly from vietnam, and it is currently sitting on top of my bookshelf. Which is where the real dragonfly lay dead at the foot of, as if it died in the last-ditch attempt to reach my wooden dragonfly. Poor fool. I wonder if it really thought my wooden dragonfly is alive.
Now it lay dead under my bed. I have no idea if I should sweep it away with a broom, or just let it be. It looked so elegant, and fragile--sweeping it away seems a sacrilege, much less dumping it into a dustbin.
Talking about bugs reminds me of the dream I had last night. I have really strange dreams these days. Dreams which involves you randomly teleporting from one place to another aren't the strange ones; what is strange are the ones which almost seem to make sense, but not quite, and you have absolutely no idea what brought them on. Like finding yourself in a study group of five, and a maths professor assigning to you a thick book of maths questions to be finished by group effort.
Which is when I find myself staring at a container (a pencil box?) with a HUGE caterpillar crawling slowly at the bottom of it. My fellow (maths) group mates were freaking out slightly from it, so I reached in, freaking out a little myself, to haul it out. But before I touched it, or rather the paper it was crawling on, suddenly I was beset on by a cloud of little bright red ladybugs, flung on me from all sides, possibly by my group mates. I couldn't tell, all I can see were the little red ladybugs which were landing on me everywhere, humming slightly. Strangely, I wasn't as freaked out by the ladybugs as I was by the giant caterpillar, though I did run about trying to fend them off.
I have no idea what that dream meant, nor how I come to dream of it. Guess it's a absolutely meaningless dream. Just like this post.
It's raining now. It hasn't been raining for a really long time lately, especially this particular kind of rain. It's a kind of mindless kind of splattering rain, not at all like the downpours that fall with a vengeance, nor like the spluttering rain like an engine about to die on you. This is a rain that says "I don't care" as it falls lazily, with sleepy thunder rumbling in the distance, so dense that it could form a curtain obscuring your vision of the distant hills.
This rain reminds me of the time when I was in NS, when we were still in Signals. When I was in NS, we would occasionally get deployed for exercise in our signal vehicles, subjected to the whims of the division commander. There was once I got deployed to Amakeng, which is a restricted army exercise area just beside the Amakeng old folks home. The rain that was falling then is exactly the same kind that is falling now: lazy with a statement.
An interesting side note, my officer told me the restriction on the army area isn't exactly that rigorously being enforced apparently. When we were driving into the area, I could see some villagers looking people waiting before the gate in the rain, waiting for us to open the gate and drive in. When we did open the gate, they walked passed our whole convoy of army vehicles, passed us who were all carrying rifles across our backs and with bayonets on our waists, and walked nonchalently into the restricted army area, disappearing before long into the bushes and trees. My officer told me that these are farmers who grew vegetables inside the restricted area, and they are apparently going to openly harvest them now that we opened the gate. How's that for guts huh? We obviously can't just shoot them, so we studiously ignored them.
Amakeng is really like some rural area, perhaps the last surviving countryside left here. There are even lots of fruit trees scattered around, growing wild. After we set up our vehicles and comms, sometimes we would roam the area looking for durians. We did find some, and they were good, not like the lousy small durians found in Pulau ubin. One of us even plucked a papaya, which unfortunately caused him to sign a lot of extras when he picked it and left in his vehicle, forgotten till it rotted and stank the whole place up.
However, when it is raining like it is now, we weren't able to go booty hunting. For normal army units, raining means a chance of lightning, and if Cat. 1 is sounded, all exercise would be off for fear of lightning strikes. For us signal units, it means hurry up set up your vehicle, put up the 10 stories high antenna and establish communications before you get fucked or struck by lightning, whichever is first.
And establishing communications in the rain is especially hard, if not impossible. For my vehicle, it's worse. My radio sets date back to WW2, and at the best of times, only bloody single-mindedness allowed me to establish comms after hours of tuning and adjusting the antenna. When it is raining like it is now, getting the radio sets to work is like praying for a miracle, which involve alternatingly tuning the radio and going out into the rain to shake the antenna like an idiot trying to get struck by lightning.
Finally after several hours when the comms are established, the rain would disappear, leaving us to steam slightly in our wet clothes under the hot sun. It is entirely more likely that, however, we managed to establish the comms only because the rain is gone.
We all do unconscious mirroring, sometimes, to some degree. Some self-help books on imaging, office politics, or interviews recommend doing that in order to build better relationships with your friends, your colleagues and sucking up to your bosses. The general lines to go about doing it is to copy your target's little gestures, leaning back in your seat as he does, crossing your arms if he crosses, breathe to the same rhythm, and pretending to accidentally step in another pile of poo if he did so too.
The danger is that your target might notice your mirroring, and instead of forming a subconscious liking for you, he might be put off, or worse, think that you are mocking him. Hence it is vital, according to the experts, that you keep your mirroring gestures small, natural and entirely unnoticeable. At least to the conscious eye.
However, for the uninitiated, we don't really need to try all that hard. Friends mirror each other whenever they sit and talk, or walk alongside each other. We relax when the others slag visibly in their chairs, lean forward if he does so while talking, and generally walk to the same pace with the same swagger. (This brings us to an interesting observation: if a friend leans back away from you when you lean forward, you have a very clear signal that he/she isn't being very comfortable around you.)
All this is very fine and good, since we want our friends to be comfortable around us, and like us to say the least. However, things can get a little annoying when strangers start to mirror you, also subconsciously. Behold the pedestrian on the sidewalk who obviously was torn between two directions, and just as you were passing him, he would miraculously, and usually to his own surprise too, choose the direction which you are walking in, and walk shoulders to shoulders to you, in tandem, two people crowding a sideway which is empty for miles.
Or the obnoxious smelling man on the train, who seems to lean onto you with every lurch of the train, giving off a smell which only in the best of moods you would call "homely"; each time you lean forward ever so surreptitiously in your seat to escape the smell, he would lean forward after a minute's lag time, totally unconscious that he is doing so simply because his subconscious saw you doing it at the edge of his vision. And if you get up early the moment the train doors closed on the stop before yours, to escape the stench, he would get up early too, ambling along the train corridor after you with that vacant eyed look. All the while his subconscious is spinning up stories why he needed to lean forward due to a creak in the back, or why he needed to get up early due to the crowd in the train. He didn't follow me anymore after we got off the train; I hired someone to take him out.
To the people who know, subconscious mirroring by strangers are irritating, especially since you cannot stop them from mirroring you short of stripping yourself naked and start dancing in the train. Now you know too, being my readers, and I shall gladden my heart with knowing that henceforth I will not be the only one being irritated by subconscious mirroring by strangers.
