I am feeling deliriously happy because the third term is finally over, and after this short one week break, we have our final exams to look forward to. Life is good, no great, when you have two exams in as many terms.
Anyway, the past few days has been a jumble of mixed feelings. I nearly lost my wallet twice yesterday, found them back, stained my shirt, expected to get a shelling, barely excaped, stained the bloody same shirt again this morning ( soaked it with soup.. no laughing matter there boys ), and got away with my skin again. I really have no idea if i am terribly lucky, or horribly unlucky.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Happy (or not so) 50th post.
At this point in time, i feel that i do have to return from my break from posting(or blogging for that matter).
In life, we all face problems. Sometimes we succeed in solving them, at other times we just make them worse. As i passed through a person's blog, i feel compelled to highlight a particular post which caught my attention.
"
Illusions & Appointments
When we speak of disappointments, we sometimes forget about what that really means. The implicit appointments of which we speak are not the appointments to rank or office, or the meetings we arrange with others, or the legal designations of power and status. Rather, we speak of furnishings and embellishments, for these are what appointments are in the context of disappointments. A disappointment is the stripping away of something which we had used to furnish our emotional house, the rooms of our dreams and aspirations. We rarely use that phrase 'luxuriously appointed', but in such a context, 'disappointment' would refer to the removal of such luxury, and the reduction of our rich imaginings to drab reality.
In like vein, we occasionally forget that disillusionment is often positive, regardless of our religious or philosophical leanings. When Niels Bohr was asked what the complementary inverse of Reality (Warheit, 'truth') was, he replied, "Clarity (Klarheit)." He meant that the more we seek reality, the less clear things become (1, 2). To be disillusioned is to be reft of one's illusions, to somehow enter a state of clarity without forsaking reality. This is a difficult trick; it is as difficult to be disappointed of one's appointments without being disappointed in the wrong way.
And so we return to the iron city of Dis. Somehow, we must be disillusioned of the glamours and fakes which surround us, but not be stripped of imagination and the power of creation. Somehow we must be disappointed without losing heart, without taking the loss of prettiness as a loss of self. Somehow, we must be able to absorb 'dis' without succumbing to Dis.
I take heart from the encouragement I have received from those whom God has given to me for friendship and support. I am heartened, which is the same thing, but made simpler. I am enjoyed, made more joyful; I am enabled, made more able. And through all these great gifts of God, I gain and am renewed.
"
To anybody out there reading this post, no matter what problems you may face, what difficulties you have, commit it all to God. If you are a non-believer, take heart that there are always friends around you to pick you up when you are down. Never give up if you can, but if you have to, move on.
We'll always be here.
At this point in time, i feel that i do have to return from my break from posting(or blogging for that matter).
In life, we all face problems. Sometimes we succeed in solving them, at other times we just make them worse. As i passed through a person's blog, i feel compelled to highlight a particular post which caught my attention.
"
Illusions & Appointments
When we speak of disappointments, we sometimes forget about what that really means. The implicit appointments of which we speak are not the appointments to rank or office, or the meetings we arrange with others, or the legal designations of power and status. Rather, we speak of furnishings and embellishments, for these are what appointments are in the context of disappointments. A disappointment is the stripping away of something which we had used to furnish our emotional house, the rooms of our dreams and aspirations. We rarely use that phrase 'luxuriously appointed', but in such a context, 'disappointment' would refer to the removal of such luxury, and the reduction of our rich imaginings to drab reality.
In like vein, we occasionally forget that disillusionment is often positive, regardless of our religious or philosophical leanings. When Niels Bohr was asked what the complementary inverse of Reality (Warheit, 'truth') was, he replied, "Clarity (Klarheit)." He meant that the more we seek reality, the less clear things become (1, 2). To be disillusioned is to be reft of one's illusions, to somehow enter a state of clarity without forsaking reality. This is a difficult trick; it is as difficult to be disappointed of one's appointments without being disappointed in the wrong way.
And so we return to the iron city of Dis. Somehow, we must be disillusioned of the glamours and fakes which surround us, but not be stripped of imagination and the power of creation. Somehow we must be disappointed without losing heart, without taking the loss of prettiness as a loss of self. Somehow, we must be able to absorb 'dis' without succumbing to Dis.
I take heart from the encouragement I have received from those whom God has given to me for friendship and support. I am heartened, which is the same thing, but made simpler. I am enjoyed, made more joyful; I am enabled, made more able. And through all these great gifts of God, I gain and am renewed.
"
To anybody out there reading this post, no matter what problems you may face, what difficulties you have, commit it all to God. If you are a non-believer, take heart that there are always friends around you to pick you up when you are down. Never give up if you can, but if you have to, move on.
We'll always be here.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Math portfolio sucks.
I am nowhere near fit for blogging, but then i guess i have done a lot of stuff that i should not have done in the past few days, so one more item on an already long list won't make much difference, and i might as well be hanged for a goat as for a chicken.
If it takes us so long to churn out a piece of work on something we already know, I swear mathematicians must be robots, or else machines in which you pour in coffee and which grind out mathematical equations. Or maybe we are just dumb, but that is sometimes too painful to contemplate.
I have also heard that they are a weird bunch, one apparently left the following message on his pager, ' I am sorry the number you have dialled does not exist , please rotate by ninety degrees and try again'
If you can manage even a slight dry chuckle after spending all those hours on maths portfolio, congratulations, you are now officially an IB nerd.
I am nowhere near fit for blogging, but then i guess i have done a lot of stuff that i should not have done in the past few days, so one more item on an already long list won't make much difference, and i might as well be hanged for a goat as for a chicken.
If it takes us so long to churn out a piece of work on something we already know, I swear mathematicians must be robots, or else machines in which you pour in coffee and which grind out mathematical equations. Or maybe we are just dumb, but that is sometimes too painful to contemplate.
I have also heard that they are a weird bunch, one apparently left the following message on his pager, ' I am sorry the number you have dialled does not exist , please rotate by ninety degrees and try again'
If you can manage even a slight dry chuckle after spending all those hours on maths portfolio, congratulations, you are now officially an IB nerd.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
All right, its been some time since i really sat down and seriously thought of something to blog about. A blog, is after all, just a more popular form of the diary - I do not intend to commit it to posterity, and i do not imagine that there would be too many people interested, even if I do. If nothing on this blog interests you, or if you find it a little too whimsical, or nonsensical, umm, well no one is forcing you to read it. I imagine Rushdie would say that it is very easy not to get offended by a particularly horrible blog - all you have to do is move on to the next horrible one.
But i am missing my point. The point i was trying to get across, before i got all defensive, is that our modern culture is intolerably stifling. Okay, i know i am starting to sound like an angsty teenager now, but like i said, freedom of choice.
We all believe that we possess a degree of individualism our boring fathers could never have dreamt off ( after all, we have personalized computers, personalized keychains, and personalized god-knows-what-else). Well, truth is, and I know this sucks, we are not. The ironic part, of course, correct me if i am wrong, is that there is an amazing number of brands telling you to be yourself and other such nonsense, although how that should entail buying goods mass-manufactured in some Third World factory, I am not too sure.
All that would not be so bad, i guess if it weren't for the fact that we are unabashedly revelling in our shallowness. I think we are somehow aware that our lives have degenerated into a weird race for acquisition of material goods, for the sole purpose of acquiring more material goods. We amuse ourselves with toys, like the latest handphone model, aching to be relieved from our mundane worries, if only for a fleeting moment.
We believe that exercise is good for us, because the newspapers tell us, but mainly because other people are doing it, so we go to the gym, which happens to be the modern substitute for a walk, for those less enlightened among you, but shorn of a walk's true pleasure. We also believe that fast food is bad, but of course that doesn't stop us from going to the nearest Burger King's to pick up whatever strikes our fleeting fancy. What is so depressing about fast food is not that it kills you, (everything does, come to think of it), not that it is oppressively oily, hell, not even because it comes serves in plastic forks and spoons but because it is so massively, irrevocably, for lack of a better word, monotonous. Look around you, and you will see people eating, that's right, burgers, fries, and more burgers. You know you are in a very sad state when you cannot afford a one hour lunch break, having instead to resort to the same fast food everyday. I mean, sorry if i come across like a retard, but isn't this getting a little ridiculous?
We also believe that we are bored all the time, mostly because we are indeed bored, outside our jobs that is, because our lives are defined by the jobs we have, or, on a more pleasant note, the cars we own. In our moments of boredom, we sometimes question if it is all worth it, but then we look back at what we still have to do, and we push it aside, because we'll figure that when we have time. And guess what, big surprise, we never have the time.
All in all, I think we did a pretty good job at ensuring our time on earth will be as miserable as possible.
But i am missing my point. The point i was trying to get across, before i got all defensive, is that our modern culture is intolerably stifling. Okay, i know i am starting to sound like an angsty teenager now, but like i said, freedom of choice.
We all believe that we possess a degree of individualism our boring fathers could never have dreamt off ( after all, we have personalized computers, personalized keychains, and personalized god-knows-what-else). Well, truth is, and I know this sucks, we are not. The ironic part, of course, correct me if i am wrong, is that there is an amazing number of brands telling you to be yourself and other such nonsense, although how that should entail buying goods mass-manufactured in some Third World factory, I am not too sure.
All that would not be so bad, i guess if it weren't for the fact that we are unabashedly revelling in our shallowness. I think we are somehow aware that our lives have degenerated into a weird race for acquisition of material goods, for the sole purpose of acquiring more material goods. We amuse ourselves with toys, like the latest handphone model, aching to be relieved from our mundane worries, if only for a fleeting moment.
We believe that exercise is good for us, because the newspapers tell us, but mainly because other people are doing it, so we go to the gym, which happens to be the modern substitute for a walk, for those less enlightened among you, but shorn of a walk's true pleasure. We also believe that fast food is bad, but of course that doesn't stop us from going to the nearest Burger King's to pick up whatever strikes our fleeting fancy. What is so depressing about fast food is not that it kills you, (everything does, come to think of it), not that it is oppressively oily, hell, not even because it comes serves in plastic forks and spoons but because it is so massively, irrevocably, for lack of a better word, monotonous. Look around you, and you will see people eating, that's right, burgers, fries, and more burgers. You know you are in a very sad state when you cannot afford a one hour lunch break, having instead to resort to the same fast food everyday. I mean, sorry if i come across like a retard, but isn't this getting a little ridiculous?
We also believe that we are bored all the time, mostly because we are indeed bored, outside our jobs that is, because our lives are defined by the jobs we have, or, on a more pleasant note, the cars we own. In our moments of boredom, we sometimes question if it is all worth it, but then we look back at what we still have to do, and we push it aside, because we'll figure that when we have time. And guess what, big surprise, we never have the time.
All in all, I think we did a pretty good job at ensuring our time on earth will be as miserable as possible.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Unhappiness is a very personal thing, but if any generalization can be drawn at all, it is that most people are usually convinced that they are the most unhappy / miserable/ unfortunate / troubled / sorrowful / despondent ( delete where appriopriate ) person on earth. I don't think anyone will have any problems understanding that, we have all been, at one point or other, been convinced of its truth, generally because one's own problems are immediately identifiable, whereas trying to walk in someone else's shoes may be a tad too troublesome. Plus, everyone fancies being chronically misunderstood.
Point is, of course that we always convince ourselves that if we just do a little bit better, or if we get that damn promotion which is just without our reach, our happiness will be complete and we will finally be able to sit down and enjoy the feast of life. That does not happen very often, just as a student who fails his exams will aim to pass, while someone who passes it comfortably will aim to excel, and those who excel will hanker for the top spot, because we will forever covet what we do not have.
And even if we do get what we want, we usually lose our appetite for the feast in the process.
Point is, of course that we always convince ourselves that if we just do a little bit better, or if we get that damn promotion which is just without our reach, our happiness will be complete and we will finally be able to sit down and enjoy the feast of life. That does not happen very often, just as a student who fails his exams will aim to pass, while someone who passes it comfortably will aim to excel, and those who excel will hanker for the top spot, because we will forever covet what we do not have.
And even if we do get what we want, we usually lose our appetite for the feast in the process.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
This blog's readership appeared to have stagnated once again ( err, like wow, big surprise and all ) and i think it might be convenient to put it down to the drecreased frequency of posts. Yeah, i know, mea culpa, (which to the classically challenged amongst you, which is pretty much all of us nowadays, means 'I am guilty', a phrase which i imagined was propelled right up to the forefront of human consciousness by the advent of Christianity ) but if its any consolation, at least you don't have to put up with horrible posts which i assure you, i am quite capable of, in times of haste ( that was false humility by the way, in case you have not noticed, or what you might call fausse humilite ).
On another note, the performance yesterday was not too bad at all, for a school production that is. I did wish i could hear what they were singing a little more clearly, and i suppose i would appreciate better jokes ( accents are getting horribly boring, don't you think so...?), but all in all, it was pretty decent. My friend found the singing of the school anthem particularly amusing for reasons i cannot pretend to fathom, and he was belting it out with cheerful abandon, so you can be forgiven for being a little puzzled by his behaviour. Not that i would have paid twenty bucks for it, oops, i mean, of course i would, whatever were you thinking?
On another note, the performance yesterday was not too bad at all, for a school production that is. I did wish i could hear what they were singing a little more clearly, and i suppose i would appreciate better jokes ( accents are getting horribly boring, don't you think so...?), but all in all, it was pretty decent. My friend found the singing of the school anthem particularly amusing for reasons i cannot pretend to fathom, and he was belting it out with cheerful abandon, so you can be forgiven for being a little puzzled by his behaviour. Not that i would have paid twenty bucks for it, oops, i mean, of course i would, whatever were you thinking?
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