metaphoric

2003-10-24T01:03:00.000-07:00

This Love (Not for Sale)

Gawd...
This song is just so you, and just so me.
This song is everything that we could be.
And everything we are, and everything we dream.
And everything that things could seem.

I used to think for a moment there that it referred to the USA, but now I know better. This song is dedicated to a certain place called S...

Yes, it's everything but the girl again.

Do you want to get on in this cowering country now?
Do you want to get on (get on get on)
Or would you be happy just to get by?
The small thoughts of a small town girl
Grew up and wanted to change the world
Will heaven echo back my plea
Or cast it as a curse on me?

Do you want to get on in this beautiful country, girl?
Listen hard to what the big folks say
And you'll believe anything
If you believe what they say of this world
From the orchard to the foundry
From farms to the city night
Everyone cracks if the price is right
Ideals soon begin to fail
God must know by now
This love is not for sale

I'm beginning to port over to blogdrive pretty soon. Find it a much better client. Although less cool.

2003-10-20T03:18:00.000-07:00

A Love Story (in 350 words or less)

She passed by blankly, searching for little, if not nothing at all. He was a shepherd, looking for a really good time. She smiled vaguely in his presence, and in the little grassy knoll that was to become their idea of the garden of Eden, it began.

He had sworn to be her knight in shining armour, knowing all too little about knights and/or shining armour, just merely that it twinkled and looked nice on a horse in the middle of a grassy knoll. She laughed, her cynicism unabated by the universal declarations of love. Nice, nonetheless, empty. But nice.

Thereafter he remembered little but the sunshine of her smile, the silvery twinkle of her laughter, how she could light up the already brightened day with her presence. There was little joy he could recall before her arrival, and little sadness after they met.

As if no other existence was relevant (although it existed, merely), their lives began again. They made love like flames in the night, and fluttered like butterflies in the day. Oblivious and curiously so, while the world watched and waited by.

And as the Gods would have it, it was not to last. One day she said goodbye, and like any love story, without really knowing why. “It had to be,” said She, casting a forlorn gaze in the other direction. “But why?” cried He, looking lost and loving at the stranger’s face he came to know so well.

“Because.” She said. And left.

And so day turned to night into day and night once more.

After vague years had passed she looked back at whence she came and reflected, “I was like a distant star, and without you I would always be thus. Warming and waiting to cool at your touch. The endless nights would not glow any brighter for me, no matter how much I tried. It was always I, the whittling and waiting star, that was to brighten your day.”

2003-10-18T00:54:00.000-07:00

All in a Day's Work

one thing i DO like about america, and you got this one first. my friend accidentally pointed to a copy of coraline on the shelf in a bookstore... and!!!!!!! i happened to flip it open and ... THERE YOU WOULD HAVE IT, UNMARKED BUT CLEAR AS DAY ... it was SIGNED!!! and neil even drew a mouse on it which was sooooo cute!!!! and it was exactly the same price, 15.99 retail.

So i bought it.

2003-10-17T13:10:00.000-07:00

Brief Lives and Scribbled Paper
5 Portraits of Desire

#1:
This is me. This is me after being inches away from Neil Gaiman's face, and casually tousled curls less than an arm's reach away. If he looked into my eyes, they would be golden amber I swear.

#2:
This is Neil Gaiman's wry humour weaseling its way into my ears. I laughed. Of course I laughed. This is his naturally slightly British air of self-deprecation, followed by a good long hard laugh at the scene of him explaining Harry Potter slash fiction to his Bloomsbury editor.

#3:
This is my fascination with his crazy hair. Too bad he's married.

#4:
This is me, photos in tow, American Gods and Endless Nights. San Jose, 2 hours away battling American public transport and following a dream. To hear his voice in my ears, to see his hair with my eyes, to watch him smile gently and say, "You're most welcome!" knowing that I've come so far. I just wanted a picture. Neil was so down-to-earth.

#5:
And here is me. My feet's not quite touched the ground since yesterday. I missed the last BART and ran for today's. It was a long way to travel, and it is a long way I've come.

2003-10-15T02:03:00.000-07:00

The Two Wolves

There is a Native American story about a grandfather, talking to his young grandson. He tells the boy that he has two wolves inside him that are struggling with each other. The one is the wolf of peace, love and kindness. The other is the wolf of fear, greed and hatred.

"Which wolf will win, grandfather?" asks the young boy.

"Whichever one I feed," is the reply.

"What if we choose to feed both wolves?" Was a question. And the reply, "We can't. We feed the wolves with our bodies, our minds and our souls. And like everything else in the world, there is only so much to give."

I think we both know now what each of us are looking for. It falls upon us to learn that we have to give ourselves over to true gods now. The gods of our conscience, the tiny gods of ethics and morality. Not the frail and fragile gods of old men in fancy pyjamas molesting little boys.

2003-10-15T01:23:00.000-07:00

I pitched my tent with N's and ended up doing research in which she benefited. I don't know why I'm doing all the work but she's also enjoying the fruits of my labour. I guess the freerider problem is something with economics but I don't know why it's causing me disutility. I'm working really hard to hold on to my job, she's not doing anything and she gets the job too. Life is unfair.

2003-10-13T02:22:00.000-07:00

Sympathy can run out. Shape up or ship out.

I finally did it I guess. And it's a career move. I hate to see it as anything else, but really, it is a life move, and a smart one.

I really don't think that I won't be going back. Somehow I have the confidence in myself to choose what really is for me, and I know that my final decision will be the right one. It's not an impulse buy this time for me, I know what I am looking for.

2003-10-12T03:32:00.000-07:00

James Zabiela is from Southampton, UK!

Why why why must the best, cutest, most talented DJ that rocks this century of my life be also from Britain? Have I not moved my tastes and preferences outside that continent or what?

Not just, I think he's a Cancerian too! Aaargh... I should have just reached out and grabbed his hand last night. *shameless rant*

Name: James Zabiela
Real Name: James John Zabiela
Born: 08-07-1979
From: Southampton, UK

2003-10-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

Bleah...

Something must have been in the vodka-redbull I had last night. I had only one, but this morning woke up with a major hangover and felt seriously smashed last night. That's impossible.

But! James Z was fantastic and absolutely worth the hangover and the $20 bucks to see him. I have never seen a DJ smile so much, look so gorgeous and still spin so well. Aarrggh.

Missed Six Flags this morning because I really didn't want to go there feeling sick and puking all over the place. Guess it's worth it, I get chill time and the opportunity to cram some studying in for the midterm next week. College life in US is one intense experience completely different from UK or Oz. Fun though.

2003-10-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

So Tonight that I Might See

Yayy... bought myself a $66 dollar pocket sized digital camera so I'll be bringing visions of esctacy everywhere I go!

2003-10-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

How Embarassing...

Got the date wrong for Gaiman. It's next week. Jon pointed that out to me, much to my mortified embarrassment.

Am going for Terry Pratchett tonight. Wooo... no book.

2003-10-09T16:33:00.000-07:00

I can't believe these choices that Fate has tossed out at me...

Neil Gaiman (yes... NEIL GAIMAN!!!!!!!!!) is out in San Jose tonight at 7:30pm for a reading and I was scheduled to go. I'm also scheduled to meet for 2 projects: 1 case competition due tomorrow noon, another due end of the month conference call: Friday 6pm.

And the guy who I was supposed to go with emails me back with arrangements once I hit home, asking to meet somewhere in school at 3:30pm but it was currently 3:45pm. So close and so far.

Neil is going to be doing book signings! I didn't buy tickets for the event. I could have gone and taken a BART on my own and gotten fantastically lost! I arranged to go for group meetings for something I'm planning on quitting anyway. I could have had nothing on and the best night of my life googly eyed and face to face with Neil!!!!! Aarrgh... I emailed the other Jonathan who is in San Jose and he's apparently either dead, lost in Star Wars Galaxies or never made it to San Jose. Either that or his mac account is down. Oh the trials of high technology...

I have a feeling this will be my first and last chance at getting to see Neil for a book signing. How cool is something like that to bring back as a US exchange abroad experience!??! Not to mention that if there was ONE author that I ever did read avidly and wanted to meet in person it would have been Neil. (That and Jeanette Winterson but I might kiss her in public.)

Well, I have work to do and that won't wait, so I guess my love would have to. *sigh*

2003-10-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

Why Not Peace?

In class today, representatives from the Palestinian/Israeli Bereaved Families Association came to give a speech and show videos of their activities in Israel and Palestine. We are studying the Palestinian/Israeli conflict in Peace and Conflict Studies class. Obviously, as it is the singularly most ridiculous and devastating conflict this side of the century.

The Bereaved Families Association collects parents and children who have lost loved ones in the conflict in a move for peace rather than retaliation and revenge. This is a new thought and a radical move in both Israel and Palestine, misinterpreted by many as betrayal, collaboration with the enemy and a lack of revenge. Very telling is what a Palestinian said about their move which was interpreted by many as "forgiveness": "There can be no forgiveness. I will never forgive the killer who took away my two sons. But my brother here (pointing to an Israeli who had also lost his daughter) is not a terrorist. My brother here did not kill my sons. He too had lost a daughter." There is much coalition in suffering, much banding together in common misery. What is telling is a complicit blindness in seeing the misery of others, the suffering of the other side.

This association formed summer camps for Israeli and Palestinian children who had lost relatives in the conflict. Together, these children play with each other and have no quarrels among themselves. They learn to understand the situation of the other side of the fence, and hopefully will grow up as leaders who will bring the two sides to peace. Strangely enough, the video juxtaposed this with other people who have become terrorists after losing relatives to the war. They interviewed a 22 year old who had lost his mother and brother in the conflict who became a Palestinian terrorist, one of the most wanted men in Jenin. He had a baby who was barely 4-5 days old and said that he was fighting the war for the baby, so that he could grow up to have a good life and a good future, so he did not have to be a fighter like he was. The interviewer asked many telling questions but had neglected to ask a key question, which should have been not only implied but directly challenged and I would have gone to the end of the earth to see his answer: "What if you die? Would you want this baby to fight for you as a terrorist?"

I am fortunate to have come here to Berkeley instead of Michigan. I am glad to face the side of the USA that is marginally resisting the Bush Doctrine, or at least not taking it in wholesale. I am glad to know that there are thinking people, intelligent people, who have the heart and soul to crave peace not just for themselves, but for the world. I am relieved to find myself at home at least, among people who can see that the US foreign policy is, rather than encouraging the security for the US as is often touted by the un-free media, putting the USA in graver danger. I am heartened to see that in my classes, in the words my lecturers are speaking up, that they disagree and are exercising their right to disagree. These people are former Vietnam veterans, previous military, 100% pure American.

Many people, even in Berkeley, do not see or care about the world around them, do not know much outside of America. Many of them have not even travelled outside of California. Still others are wearing stickers and badges saying, "I voted." and "I am ashamed to be a Californian" today, just after the news broke yesterday that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been elected as the new governor of California.

My only regret is that I am not experiencing what America truly is. This is not 80% of America and American sentiment. This is not even 10% of America and American sentiment. This is not the place that sends 17 year old boys as soldiers to die for a country they know nothing of, for a cause they have misunderstood. I wonder how I am going to react when I return to Singapore and to Australia. I wonder how it would be like to breathe the air of a free country, especially in Berkeley, return thinking that this is what America is about (or not, I know better than that) and confine myself once more into a cage with zipped lips and truncated tongue. It is dangerous, in some ways, to be here. But I reckon, heck it. It's equally dangerous to live.

2003-10-07T22:32:00.000-07:00

Yes the End is nigh...

Arnold S. is today officially elected the Governor of California. God save the Queen.

2003-10-06T03:19:00.000-07:00

Are they looking for me?

I kept apologising to him after that, even though I didn't really lose my temper.

From the McKinsey website:
Problem solving ability
Analytical and conceptual reasoning abilities, curiosity, creativity, business judgment, tolerance for ambiguity, and quantitative facility.

Achieving
Ability to set high aspirations for self, achieve outstanding results, handle obstacles well, show signs of entrepreneurship, and take personal risks.

Impacting others
Ability to positively influence others, possess self-confidence without arrogance, listen, understand, and respond well to others.

Building relationships
Ability and willingness to take on leadership roles, seize opportunities and take action, help build highly effective teams with a shared vision, be sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of other team members.

I keep thinking I have most, if not all of these qualities, but at the same time, my mind dwells on the last one, and I stopped short. I practically lost my temper at my teammate today. First he kind of pissed me off when he was rushing homework for another subject for much of the time we were working on Friday, which resulted in a really unproductive time and wasted the whole of my usually free Friday. Then today, his communication skills which missed the point that everyone else was talking about and completely made no sense whatsoever drove me up the wall. So I cut in halfway, interrupted him loudly and practically shouted, "What does this have to do with what we're doing? What are you trying to say?" even though he was trying very hard to express what he was thinking - which ran counter to usual economic logic. I debated the point, but it wasn't too tactful.

I think he was trying to figure out a point that another team mate and I had come to the same conclusion about, but he kept insisting on the inverse relationship between price and volume sales, even though volume sales were increasing because of another business factor. The analysis was too one-sided and unsophisticated to be up to scratch and instead of remembering that he is pretty fantastic for someone who has absolutely no business background, I lost it.

I remember him also saying that I must really hate them (my other team) because none of them were business majors at the time, much less finance but we came up with a very innovative and illegal business model in another case presentation.

* * *

I'm looking at a void and finding absolutely no value there. I don't want a job with efficient and intelligent people who are driving themselves ever forward in the pursuit of wealth, a fast car and a good life. I don't want the materialism and the cynicism that comes with having too much money and nowhere else to spend it. I don't want to be sad Steve sitting the middle of a wine bar at 2am in the morning with friends who are business partners. I don't want to be divorced or unmarried, childless, rich and sorry about the way I spend my time and my life. That absolutely scares me. Because I know that there is no way I would be happy with 100 Prada accessories that my money can buy, the corporate rushing around heedlessly through the void of a grey and black world.

Which is why I am freaked out when he says, "I don't have your aspirations anymore. All I want right now is to get on with my life."

To me that getting on with life means going after these meaningless materialistic things. To devote one's life to the pursuit of wealth for the sole purpose of finding yourself in the trap where you are married (and think you're therefore happily ever after) and settling down into a comfortable routine of finding a cushy job, a nice house in a good district, a stable fuel-efficient, family car with two and a half kids. That's what "getting on with life" means to me, and I can't think of anything in the world that would make me more unhappy. Well, perhaps besides being a go-getter with $5000 USD in salary a month, a fast fuel-inefficient car, a penthouse, no kids, no husband, too much money and too many whores.

The saddest thing to me in the world would be to turn into a jaded, materialistic, insensitive, greedy, heartless, arrogant prick so already out the door that the only thing that would keep me here is the fact that the door was revolving. Because that is not what success really is. Defined by me or almost anyone else.

The next saddest thing for me would be to turn into an unfulfilled, married-early, disappointed, disillusioned, dreamless wife with two kids, a pot-belly and a heart so taxed upon it has turned to boiled cabbage.

What would fulfil me?

I want a Medical Degree by age 35.
And to work in non-profit by sprucing them up and making them sustainable.
And doing the reverse and putting some heart into a big corporation - or a small one.
To meet CSR in the middle by putting the finance into non-profit and the heart into corporations.

I want to save lives by practicing good medicine.
I want to understand the logistics of good organizations and apply that to emergency rooms.
I never want to leave a hospital or the sick.
I want to be able to look life and death in the eye every day and know that I am not merely keeping Death at bay, I am working to make Life better.

I want to introduce compassion into where it should really belong.
I want to know that I am living every day for a cause.
I want to feel that every day I am living is demanded for by someone.
I don't ever want to give up on my goals and I don't ever want to be so distracted by them that I wander off in another direction, pursue something else unrelated and wake up one day regretting what I did with my life.

I want to come to accept that it's okay that there are people that I can't save.
I want to be able to feel that it was because of something else beyond my control.
I want to be able to do something about the things that I can control.
I want to come to know people again, and not think it's all about mindfucking.

I want to be able to put a stake in the ground and really stand for something.
I want to know that at the end of my life, I have experienced the full spectrum of it all.
I want to stand by the deathbed of every single person I got to know.
I want to know that I am moving towards my niche in the world and that it is a very unique niche.

I am going to save up for my own MD.
I am going to get it from a good school and know that I did it all in my own time and at my own merit. It'll be the greatest challenge in my life.
I want to know that I've truly worked for something that I've wanted for a long time.

2003-10-04T23:10:00.000-07:00

Realisations

Before you were born you were only a chance.
Then you were born, and growing up, you were an opportunity.
Throughout your life, living things through, you were a miracle.

2003-10-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

Oh, how peculiar!

There is a hollowness like a vacuum and like a black hole and it's sucked me in. These days I'm into Robbie Williams and Britpop. And I just got pulled into Friendster.

If you're thinking of asking, it's metaphoric@myrealbox.com

Cheers, y'all.

2003-09-26T01:04:00.000-07:00

Story to Myself

I am not tired of you, I am tired with you. Perpetually, incessantly tired. Your body talks to me even in the quiet moments, your eyes screaming loud red messages at my already fatigued vision. I have to wear sunglasses to avoid the silent sun of your gaze.

They say a gentleman's relationships are quiet, subtle and last forever. At the heat of your presence, I shrivel and plummet, my liquid affections dry in the parched thirst for your affection. And you have no soothing balm to quench my sated appetites.

"Faith, you're driving me away. You do it everyday. You don't mean it but it hurts like hell."

Mary showed us that what was pure was not what came out of us, but what was inside us.

2003-09-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

This song is written for mass marketing and mass consumption aka America

Gawd don't you just love the UK, with it's obsession with culture and ingenuity?

Her green plastic watering can
For her fake Chinese rubber plant
In the fake plastic earth
That she bought from a rubber man
In a town full of rubber plans
To get rid of itself

It wears her out, it wears her out
It wears her out, it wears her out

She lives with a broken man
A cracked polystyrene man
Who just crumbles and burns
He used to do surgery
For girls in the eighties
But gravity always wins

It wears her out, it wears her out
It wears her out, it wears her out

She looks like the real thing
She tastes like the real thing
My fake plastic love
But I can't help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run

It wears her out, it wears her out
It wears her out, it wears her out

If I could be who you wanted
If I could be who you wanted all the time

BTW, Radiohead *is* really poseur.

2003-09-21T19:28:00.000-07:00

For the Record

I am such a loser. hahaa...

Just found out that my name in Japanese is Itsu (Yi) Rin or Rei (Ling) in the Japanese Kanji characters. Now if only I can find out what Yuwen's and Rong's is, that would be so cool! *grins*

2003-09-21T01:31:00.000-07:00

Radiohead + Supergrass

Am going to Radiohead in San Francisco this coming Tuesday. Yippeeaiay!

2003-09-21T01:30:00.000-07:00

A Change of Plans

Was supposed to hike up to Yosemite National Park this weekend, but we couldn't get a car in Berkeley last minute on Friday, so decided to rent a car the very next morning on Saturday and went to Sausalito and Napa Valley instead. And it was just as well:

*Watched Underworld
*Sprained my left foot
*Wanted to go to Napa Valley
*Went to visit Robert Mondavi's vineyard

And the one comment that I have to say about the over-hyped Underworld: if you are in the least bit a sensible person and/or have roleplayed White Wolf before: DON'T WATCH IT!

2003-09-18T01:31:00.000-07:00

Christopher O' Riley plays Radiohead
September 17, 8pm, Zellerbach Hall

Textures, friezes, lace pure black lace.

The lyrical intensity of Radiohead, half of what I love of Radiohead was lost, but as he beat out the melody and rhythm on his Steinway & Sons, the lyrics floated in anyway. I was half dreaming, half in a trance, half asleep, half lost in Radiohead.

My favourite of the evening: No Surprises

A heart that's full up like a landfill,
a job that slowly kills you,
bruises that won't heal
You were so tired, happy,
bring down the government,
they don't, they don't speak for her
I'll take the quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide

No alarms and no surprises, no alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
Silent, silent
This is my final fit, my final bellyache with
No alarms and no surprises, no alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises, please

Such a pretty house, such a pretty garden
No alarms and no surprises, no alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises, please

It sounds freaky on the piano but what was even scarier was the floaty, ethereal voice of a man half in love that I missed so much about the UK floated in along with it.

Bulletproof:
limb by limb and tooth by tooth
tearing up inside of me
everyday everyhour wish that i
was bullet proof.

wax me
mould me heat the pins
and stab them in you have turned me into this
just wish that it
was bullet proof.

so pay me money and take a shot
lead-fill
the hole in me
i could burst a million bubbles
all
surrogate
&
bullet proof.

And my favourite commentary: ... captures the main characteristic of Radiohead, which is that you are facing the epic and the colossal, like you are staring at the universe, the interior of an airport, falling in love... and yet at the same time feel somewhat unwell.

2003-09-15T23:44:00.000-07:00

From Fe's Page:

I remember this Family Law class two years ago. She was always very well prepared, coming to class with her tutorial written neatly in flowing, feminine, penstrokes on NUS pad, sitting in class, just another one of us.

Then there was that day, where she came, no statutes, no text, no prepared tutorial, very not her. Prof Leong sat at front of the class, looking serenely severe. Prof Leong noting that she seemed unprepared, directed the first question of the tutorial at her which she answers with ease. Only one ground of divorce in Singapore "irretrievable breakdown of marriage". The Prof's questions come fast and hard at the perceived recalcitrant. "Reasons for irretrievable breakdown?" "Unreasonable behaviour". "Another?" "Adultery."

To cut a long story short, we found out about her parents this way. When she with no notes stood up during that divorce tutorial and answered everything with no emotion on a usually expressive face.

Is Divorce still a stigma in the annals of failed marriages and strained relationships coursing through the trials of Singapore? Why not Divorce? When two people can't get together, it's not always an "irretrievable breakdown of marriage" but it may still be a relief to end it prematurely, one way or another. Two people can be happy together, yet apart. That is the American view of divorce, and it happens so rapidly, so frequently, so suddenly that it is not talked about, mentioned neither by disaffected children or by staid middle aged men who proclaim proudly, with not so little humour, that "marriage, if done right, is a repeating strategic game" in the middle of class (my lecturer in Strategic Planning).

Here it is a matter of fact, a matter of time, a matter of getting used to it. It is not talked about not because it is taboo, but because if your parents are married after 45 years of marriage, something is rather strange about their extremely romantic relationship. Speculations of hidden agendas and secret liasons, of money and external doubts begin to creep in. It becomes strange to have been married, rather than to have been divorced. But it is only because of the definition, the "irretrievable breakdown of marriage" that we don't sight divorcees more often in Singapore.

Why "irretrievable"? Do we assume that marriage, like any object of women and men can be lost, misplaced and picked up again after a time of absence? Do we leave our values at the door when we kiss our spouses goodbye in the morning and leave for work, hoping to pick them up again when we return home with the bacon and the car keys? I'd like to know when the day arrives that I can leave my marriage at the door with the potted plant after coffee at 8am, and hopefully return to find that it was not, after all, "irretrievable". If it was, I'd then validly file for divorce.

"Excuse me," she said to the judge, "I returned home early one day, having left my marriage, family and kids at the main door as usual at 8am in the morning as you know, and found my marriage irretrievable."

"The reason?" asked the judge, stoic face, heard this a thousand times, "When I returned home that day, only the car keys were to be found under the potted plant. My marriage, I found out a minute later, was on the kitchen floor, shattered to pieces, when I heard the sound of my husband fucking in the bedroom with another woman."

"Another?" asked the family law practioner. "Adultery." The reply.

2003-09-15T00:15:00.000-07:00

Spotted on the Bumper Plate of a Car...

You can only see this in Berkeley, Democrat stronghold of the United States, hotbed of dissent and discussion.

"Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam"

I pointed it out to a friend I was walking down along the road with, someone I didn't really know. I said it was really cool, quite a profound statement, quite a stand. I admire people who have the tenacity and the guts to think things through and make a stand, however extreme or brave, on something.

And he went, "Really? I don't think it's cool. I think maybe it just sounds cool, but then when you consider what it's saying..." And he hesitated.

I wanted to say, "It is precisely what it is saying that makes it cool." But I stopped short of my sentence, and realised where he came from.

Later on, we had a discussion about politics and I said, "I don't think war can ever be justified. There is violence, and there is needless senseless killing going on." And he said, "I just don't like opinions that are too extreme, y'know, I tend to go for the middle ground." Why? I wanted to ask. Perhaps no reason at all. Perhaps the idea that if one believes in something too strongly, goes for something too passionately, one stands to lose all reason, and go blind. Perhaps go mad. Perhaps simply loses everything.

I asked him which war he thought was justified and he said, "Well, perhaps World War 2, y'know, Hitler." And I said, "Perhaps. Someone had to get him out of power." And he concurred. But then I thought, "Couldn't we just kill him? That one person? In an assassination or something, like JF Kennedy?" And I fell silent. If wars could happen that way, in specific, accurate, targeted measures, we would have much more peace than we would now. Perhaps if we had assassinated Saddam Hussein instead of bombing the hell out of everyone else and not even being able to confirm if Saddam Hussein, the real guy we're after was dead or alive. How cool would the carving of political justice be if we bred and raised only hitokiris like Kenshin, born and raised in the shadows, only to pick off key personnel like hunters in the night? I am sure these people exist. I wonder why we do not use them more often in our political games.

I didn't want to say anything further. It made me think, if war could ever be justified to the masses, like capital punishment which don't happen in many countries, especially in Europe. It made me miss Europe.

Later on he said, "You know, you really impress me, you're the first person I know who listens to Jeff Buckley." And I had nothing to say.

2003-09-14T13:01:00.000-07:00

The Spoils of War

Men unleashed from the horrors of repression are the worst type of men there are. Around me I saw men behaving the way they normally would not, simply because they could. "C'mon it's California!" And the curiosity that overtakes the most sensible of us makes jackass out of donkeys. "Because we can..." was the answer, no punishment awaiting, nobody to know, no one to care.

In the repressed, what is usually sacred and normal in the lust of humanity become warped and torched like a burning candle. The morality of romance become lost in the mundane of plain sex, becomes raw and carnal in its desire, and rape results. In the military, three years spent in human captivity fed only on the company of other hyper-masculine men, turn ordinary human nature into war crime.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We cannot expect the repression to go unheeded. It is in the most repressed of people that I find, eventually upon release, the most extremes of behaviour. Wound up inside, something is unleashed upon the subtle untwisting of an elastic mind. We can bend, even if just to avoid being broken, but the energy inside of us: emotion, thought, power, desire... stays the same. In the same capacity as we are able to feel, we are able to hurt, to maim... to kill.

2003-09-09T16:42:00.000-07:00

How School Looks Like

It was in peace and conflict studies (PACS) today that this girl, the girl who came up to me (her name is Kate) and said "you're so brilliant" during the lecture walked out with me and along the way home and we talked and she said, "you're just so eloquent. i mean, it's like, people want to stop and hear you talk. i want to hear you up on NBC, I want to hear what you have to say on politics, on religion, on some many different issues..."

I was kinda flattered but today I was seized by a strong note that I think really impressed my tutor. I asked, "Why do people perceive peace as neutral, as zero? Why do we think that there is more energy in tearing something apart than in putting something together?" And she looked at me in amazement and just nodded. I think everyone was kinda impressed by that last note that was my "parting speech" heheh... well, good to know I'm enjoying myself in at least ONE class that I'm taking. It's a lower division course so maybe that's why, but it's really easy and it's the first time I've ever done such a topic and I'm almost tempted to take political science.

PACS is a political science department course specialising in violence and war. We learn direct violence (war, terrorism, killing, genocide etc.) and then move on to structural violence (racism, attitudes that are violent, prejudice etc. that sort of thing that kills people's hopes of leading a normal life in society and may lead to direct violence in the future). There are lectures for 2 hours twice a week and then one discussion session for 1.5 hours. And a whole stack of reading that cost me $89!!!! grrr... but well, kinda worth it, there are good articles in there. And we learn by watching movies, reacting, defending our viewpoints, speaking out, confronting issues etc.

I think the learning here in America is alot more emotional and intuitive than the education I have had abroad. In a sense this is true even for business (learning by doing) it's not theoretical, and one succeeds not merely in grades but in gaining vital skills for future development. Say what you like about the American education system and how it is going into the dumps, Berkeley is a good school because like York, it doesn't focus just on churning out production lines of As, it focuses on the individual and gives plenty opportunities for gaining skills, for doing things and for learning by doing. I think that's what distinguishes a good school from a mediocre school. Oh yeah, and also the total lack of organisation in terms of syllabus and course structure!

2003-09-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

Just in Case

Yuwen was asking why I felt so much anguish at having to say that I'm from Singapore, or why I say that I'm from Australia even though I don't really like the place. To be fair, I don't really like Singapore either, but I hold a Singaporean passport, and practically grew up there, so what the hey, in some respects I am from there.

I don't know how to insert 'lahs' and 'lehs' into my speech, but then again, that does not define being Singaporean. I don't like the government or what they are doing with "my country" but then again, that does not define being Singaporean. I don't eat "char kway teow" but then again, that does not define being Singaporean.

What does?

In its heart perhaps it is the sentiment that one's roots came from there. My parents are from Singapore, as were my grandparents who cast away their chinese soil and planted money, time and sentiment into a place they came to call home. I don't want to waste their efforts. But at the same time, I increasingly feel that Singapore with its artificial constructs of nationhood, is no longer the authentic home my grandparents knew. If they were still alive I might have asked them how they thought. But I recall with guilt once when I was very young when I hated the dirty underdeveloped place Singapore was when I was young, and wished that it might be cleaner, with theme parks and playgrounds, with sophisticated technology and a western speaking people. I hate now that my dream came true in some sense. We have taken away the ancestral home and painted it purple.

Even that is not where my sentiments lie. I told Yuwen that it was partly official (although I think its an excuse) that I was on exchange from Australia anyway, lived there anyway, and had to say that I was from there anyway. My school records marks me as "Au" and in I-House, I put "Sg" as my country of origin.

I'm rambling. The concept of identity and national identity deeply fascinate me as someone who has increasingly become diaspora. To begin with, I was born diaspora. There is an archaic concept that certain countries must be associated with people from a certain race but increasingly that is becoming false. Where is Asia? And What is Australia? I resent the idea that people ask "Where were you from originally?" when only one of the Australians that I know who are here is actually "Australian Australian". Why the perception that Australia is a predominantly white country when it lies at the bottom of the Asian Pacific?

That is like saying that a Malay or an Indian can't possibly be from Singapore or be Singaporean because he/she isn't chinese. "So where were you from originally? Which part of India?" Or "Did your parents move down from Malaysia? You don't look like a first generation Singaporean."

What are the effects of globalization? On one sense it is the pervasiveness of diaspora. We are increasingly an uprooted society, because the soil beneath our feet move faster than we do, yet maintain their idea of colour and race.

I apologise. This was not what Yuwen had asked me, but it was what her question sparked off in me. I know it was not related, but on one sense I had answered her question personally already, and am not inclined to repeat it here.

2003-09-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

What is Democracy?

At its first, it is the vital, robust, uninhibited debate that stands for every person's freedom of speech and the right to express their views. Increasingly, that is what I find Americans hold up as their capstone of Democracy. I call this White democracy, because it stands for a white person's right to express white views over any other person of colour's right to express their coloured opinions. Very often it is a Ford democracy: you can express any view you like as long as its white.

But you who hold up democracy as your salvation and cling to it as though you needed it to breathe have no idea what freedom of speech really is. You shout out loud your cause and your justice and refuse to see the viewpoints of anyone else. You hold up disagreement as a right to disagree but bat down the idea that it is respect of the other's viewpoint that really holds up democracy, not merely the idea that you can say what you want and I can say what I want in a symphony of discordant voices.

At its first, it is to listen.

Perhaps I believe that Love is respect. And civility is built upon fellowship and love. That is the other thing I've learnt, the other thing that is often held up and then forgotten by the very people who preach it. Not chivalry but civility. The concept of acceptance is futile in most countries too caught up in their own heriditary nationalism.

What is peace?

Perhaps there is nothing more than a symphony of discordant voices that we may one day make harmonious. A time and a place for everyone, instead of shouting out loud at the same time may very well be my dream for an orchestra. If you violinate your voice together with the harsh keys of my piano, we would hear only a scream and the sound of a battering silence. Music comes to us all to show us that the freedom of rhythm is an answer we seldom consider. Not everyone has to go first, as long as we are all heard, in our turn, in our voice, with our representations.

2003-09-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

And in the darkness, made me think

Yuwen (I'm not sure if I should mention names but what the hey, I think I've done it before, bless them all) responded saying she didn't know why I felt so much that I have to say that I was from Singapore just because it's on my passport. She doesn't feel a need to grudgingly admit that she's from Indonesia, or attempt to align herself too much with a place she identifies with only partly.

I identify with Singapore only partly. I get fidgety when I meet Singaporeans, I wonder sometimes paranoidly if they are the "weird sort" of people who aren't open, friendly, warm and caring. The people I've met so far from there are pretty okay. But then again there's just two of them, and some of them are indeed the "weird sort". I fall in love with Singaporean guys. I tear passionately when someone talks about a place he belongs to and sounds like he really means it. I feel a basic desire to feel like I have to somehow try to belong to a place that I hold citizenship to, even if just because I need a country that I can call my own.

And Singapore just doesn't cut it. It is a place that has supposedly given me rights but doesn't want me. I receive far more welcoming treatment overseas than I do in Singapore, and oftentimes I wonder at the openness of it all and how far it goes. Where would you fit in when there is a world that doesn't want you? Where there are countries who close their doors, and other countries who open them only to push others out? How do you define your national identity when you have lived in three vastly different countries and then some, relate to people from across the world far better than you do your own, and crave a localised identity in a globalised world simply because you're forced to?

The Singaporeans I've met cling on to Singlish and the logic of the language for dear life. It is what defines them, and makes them unique and Singaporean. I have to agree. It is the one thing that has uniquely originated from Singapore that we can proudly say we did not import: unlike the water, the food, the clothes we wear and the ideas we speak. At least it is one thing that defines a Singaporean. It is a pity that I do not really know how to speak it though, even though the vocabulary is on my tongue. It is the "kong" (for container) that Siang Cheng told me, the Teochew dish of olive vegetables that Siang Cheng taught me to love, even though she was Hainanese, it is the sense of having lost something you never really had in the first place.

2003-09-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

So where are the "picture says a thousand words" stuff?

My new photolog is at http://metaphoric.fotopages.com for those of you who might like to peruse and laugh at your leisure.

Alf is currently doing up a much faster server-linked one on verbosity, but that would take a little while for me to activate and get used to and the feel-good, culturally-impatient side of me is using the cheap-thrill-free-gift fotopages first.

Cheers y'all.

2003-09-05T20:41:00.000-07:00

Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps

Am wondering how much I should say about my country. It's easy enough to say that I'm from Australia and leave it at that, but home is where the heart is, and because of where my love is from, after a while of prying, I gloss over on Singapore. And I don't know what to say.

To the response, "Oh yes, I've been there on holiday." I'm tempted to reply, "And what did you see? What is there to see?" And to the thought of, "What do you think about your country?" I bite my tongue from replying, "Oh it's pretty fucked up much like the rest of the world but there are nice people there whom I wish I could get out of there. Anyway where else is there to go?"

But the topic always drifts to two things about Singapore: the economy and it's amazingly rapid tiger-growth, and politics. To which I have nothing positive to say.

Sometimes I wonder if I should make my opinions so honest and so clear. It is a nice place, no doubt, but there are things that need to be changed, with the problem that the idiots on top don't know how to do it right, and don't know how to take instructions or research on how to make it so. That frustrates me. Anyone would be able to say that if we had a more accountable, transparent, honest and open government that partakes in a lot more than whitewash, that things would be better. I am afraid of being ripped to shreds, of having everything my grandparents and parents have spent whole lives of blood, sweat and toil building up torn down within a day, a week, a month. Like Iraq.

But anyone that speaks out is systematically shot down. Isn't that the general idea? I hate having to tell anyone that I'm not there because I've left. And I'm not there because I am leaving. And I am not leaving because I have to. But because I haven't a place to stay.

2003-09-05T01:08:00.000-07:00

DUH...

I spent some time fretting about how embarassing it would be if I brought all my copied bootlegged stuff to the US and realised they had very strict copyright laws and everyone purchased cheap original CDs, just like in the UK.

I've not seen any original CDs since, except my own.

Then today, it just struck me like a thunderbolt: My goodness, who am I kidding? This is Kazaa country. This is Napster country!

Am sincerely regretting my lack of 280 titles now...

2003-09-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

In case anyone needs to get me:

I reckon that the only people who browse into this site are people who know me anyway. So for creeps, here's my cellphone number. No guarantees that I'll call back.

(510) 220-8304

If you're calling and can't get me, please leave a message because I *will* get it.

2003-09-02T21:49:00.000-07:00

L.A. L.A. L.L.A.

Out when the sun comes up
Over Santa Monica Boulevard bar...

I guess I both like and dislike L.A. The city isn't the friendliest, but it isn't the most gritty either (I haven't seen New York). It's not that dirty, although the hotel I was in begged a different flavour. I'm tired of talking about America, talking about the things I'm doing, the faces I've seen, the experiences I've had and the fancy things that have happened. I'm tired of raving as though America is the latest new thing, when the truth is I didn't really like it to begin with in the first place. Especially not after the war in Iraq.

Two myths to dispel:

Myth #1: Americans are friendly, warm and blonde. They will stand up for any injustice or anything which goes against their American ideal of liberty, free speech and human rights. That is as much a myth as Londoners wearing stiff black tuxedos and upper-lips and saying, "Good morning, sir" to each other like proper butlers and having afternoon tea like the Queen (with chinaware). To say all Americans are bureaucratic, unfriendly, cold-hearted and New Yorkers is going to a bit of the extreme but suffice to say that most Americans know they suffer under an extremely stupid system and go with the flow, rather than try to change anything. Sounds like anywhere else in the world to me.

Myth #2: The city you see in the day is the city you see at night. That's as much like saying that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are the same person. (Well, they ARE but then again...) Strangely enough it happens in any city. Not the extreme paranoia of some Americans regarding their own safety and the obsession with safety regulations and good practices, but even the nicest city in the daytime turns into something else completely come nightfall. The streets are littered with the homeless, the disenchanted, the vampiric wannabes who would hassle you for a bit of spare dosh if they could. Somehow somewhere, even the nicest district appears dodgy at night. I've never seen or felt that in London. I'm disturbed I see and feel it in Berkeley, where it is supposed to be safe.

They say Berkeley would change your mind about things. I'd like to retort that when I came here, my mind was changed. When I left, my mind changed back. Still believe. Savour life.

2003-08-29T15:13:00.000-07:00

City of Angels

Los Angeles. I'm going there this weekend. Apparently it's not really good to develop a reputation for being happening and active, because then everyone feels inferior and nobody really feels much sympathy for you, or ask you out for anything. To be popular, blonde and Miss All America is probably to be the loneliest person in the world.

On an off note, Tanya (my roommate) says I talk in my sleep, sometime around an hour after I fall asleep, I'll say a word every night. I'm immensely curious as to what that word is, because many people (most of them unexpected) have turned up in my sleep, and I wonder what I'm saying to them subconsciously. Obviously my brain doesn't sleep, something it has never done: from sleepwalking when I was younger, to sleeptalking when I'm older. Maybe I'm under stress, or just so chatty that even when I fall asleep, I can't stop.

I wonder about the friendliness level here. People in some countries tend to be less reserved than others, and Asian countries do tend to have a reputation of being more reserved, although I find that quite a few enthusiastic people have come up to me and starting chatting with me, and it's nice to engage someone in conversation. I find that I have less to say to people from some countries completely because I don't know where they are from and what they are about, even though perhaps I feel the pressure to feel that I should.

2003-08-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

Mars is nigh

Two moons in the sun of Verona
Two moons in the day of night
Two suns in the heat of winter
Two days in the swell of fight.

I wish it was something of superstitious to say that the planet of war is so close to us, closer than it has ever been. And if we want to get superstitious, it's also warmer now everywhere than it used to be, as the world loses its cool and starts to heat up in anticipation of a great disaster. Maybe this is what thankfully wiped out sophisticated dinosaurs from their reign on earth. I wish.

San Francisco's heat is killing me. It's 32 degrees celsius or higher with no humidity, no wind, nothing but a dry heat that burns and cracks and swathes like fever.

I hope things finds you well. Someone said to me before I left that Berkeley would change my world view and open my perspectives, make me see things in a different way. Coming here, I'm not sure if that would be a reinforcing experience, or a detrimental one. People here are so full of hope, dreams and themselves.

2003-08-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

Life is Beautiful

Well not always. Berkeley folk isn't always nice, especially when most of them come from overseas where I live (International House) and come pre-paid with their quirks and habits, their routines, attitudes and diversity. I wanted that, but I miss York and the people there who hang out in true blue good faith, where we chatted into the late of night in the dingy Langwith corridor, even when we didn't know each other very much. When I fell asleep on Becky's bed with Callie trying to paint my nails. I wasn't in Langwith C for very long, but I miss Stacey, Ije and Matt. Wonder how they're doing.

Wonder why there aren't that many people like that and whether I should consider going back to the UK as my personal choice of home. It's impossible to get to I'm sure, but enough money and perseverance and a government that probably won't kick you out is a good thing. Pity it's Australia for me.

I realised there are many things quintessentially American that I hate. Football games, the obsession with sports, the lack of intellectualism, a political sensitivity that honestly cannot rival Melbourne's, fraternaties and sororities, an obsession with being accepted, in, and pop culture, the lack of respect for individuality, solitude and personal space, a certain penchant for whining on and on about their lives and how stupid everything they had created was, a lack of Art. What am I doing here?

Berkeley has a lot to offer in the way of liberal politics, activities and enthusiasm but the world has gone cold. All over the world are people who are an apathetic majority. If you would not fight for right ... says the man, and I much agree. There must be something I can do about it.

Status: Am missing meaningful relationships and conversations. I hate the current superficiality of socialising contact. I want the opportunity to be able to sit down and really talk in free flowing conversation with someone, since I bond by talking. A pity that obviously so many people have such differing conversational skills or interests.

2003-08-21T23:58:00.000-07:00

San Francisco Trip Une

Sight #1: A whole group of streetfolk playing chess in flocks of tables by the side of the road. Black old men scratching scraggly white bearded chins, half shaved in the afternoon sunlight. Facing off, white young men in hip-hop gear, hooded heads and nodding limbs. Chess. Watching it along the street played in quiet intensity, one almost believes it is an intellectual game. Until you realise that it is.

Sight #2: Break dancing in Powell Street. A hip-hop battle going on. Cheers on both sides, battling for money to a fascinated audience crowding round in various semi-circles external of Gap. The dance is smooth, vivid, and goes on forever. When I left shopping, their hands were still on the floor.

Sight #3: An archaic cash machine at a flower store. An old man working the flowers. Stand aside Anne Geddes, this is the real sentimentalism of vintage.

2003-08-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

Official Report: Internet is now working

2003-08-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

The Move

Am finally about to commence move to Berkeley. The few days of absence have been marked by intensive packing and last minute rushes. I miss the substantiality of my desktop. Four months. Wish me luck and before you know it, I'll be back.

2003-08-08T00:59:00.000-07:00

Ode for the Lonely-Hearted

This is a song that goes out to a particular girl I know. She's much glitter on the outside: pretty, sweet, unfailingly polite; grasping and pained on the inside because she can't have all that she wants. Every time I think of her, this song comes to mind. If I could give her another name besides the one she already has, her name would be Greed. First there was envy, then the realisation that there was nothing to envy. I used to hate her for what she stood for. Now there is only sympathy.

Two people played this song to me some time ago. One of them was her. And the other, I think, still feels this notion and I wish he would get out of it.

When you were here before
Couldn't look you in the eye
You're just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry
You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
I wish I was special
You're so fuckin' special
But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here.

I don't care if it hurts
I want to have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul
I want you to notice
When I'm not around
You're so fuckin' special
I wish I was special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here.

She's running out again,
She's running out
She's run run run running out...

Whatever makes you happy
Whatever you want
You're so fuckin' special
I wish I was special...

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo,
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here.
I don't belong here.

Radiohead - Creep

2003-08-08T00:36:00.000-07:00

Frailty, thy name is woman.

Fragile
Like a baby in your arms
Be gentle with me
I'd never willingly
Do you harm

Apologies
Are all you seem to get from me
But just like a child
You make me smile
When you care for me
And you know

It's a question of lust
It's a question of trust
It's a question of not letting
What we've built up
Crumble to dust
It is all of these things and more
That keep us together

Independence
Is still important for us though (we realise)
It's easy to make
The stupid mistake
Of letting go (do you know what I mean?)

My weaknesses
You know each and every one (it frightens me)
But I need to drink
More than you seem to think
Before I'm anyone's
And you know

It's a question of lust
It's a question of trust
It's a question of not letting
What we've built up
Crumble to dust
It is all of these things and more
That keep us together

Kiss me goodbye
When I'm on my own
But you know that I'd
Rather be home

It's a question of lust.

-- Depeche Mode, Question of Lust

Whose song is that?

Interestingly, this was my favourite song at the age of 8. Yes, 8, I remember I was in Primary 2 and we'd just moved into a new home near my school. What did I know of lust and trust? I just found this song deep, reflective of a desire for independence, a freedom from control, manipulation, power play and sexual politics; and reflective of a brother 9 years older than me. But perhaps I did not know anything better. Then and now.

Now, more than 9 years later, I read the letters and well wishes that I had received when I was in York and realised, perhaps for the first time, how much I was truly loved. How many blessings were in those scraps of paper that we keep, like the many unlikely unions we make in friendship? It just occurred to me that York held something special to me. I was living, I was loved. But I did not love any in return. Perhaps like everything loved and lost, that made all the difference, only apparent in that damning 20/20 hindsight.

Why did I leave? A despair at the sheer naivety of many blessings surrounding me? A cynicism at the folly of the many who loved me? An ignored sentimentality at so many unlikely letters that had reached my mailbox? I left Singapore for York in somewhat unhappy circumstances, yet the people who had written to me, from Paris, Australia, Singapore, Shanghai, Toronto, York itself... were unique only in their unlikely love. I can't remember my correspondences, but I recall that they were special. I was blessed once to have been surrounded by unique people, living and loving in their own way, each a node in the entire network of life that I was isolated from.

In the future I would do well to remember that, and what I had consciously or unconsciously left behind.

We cannot leave Life. Life follows us on the back of airplanes, the trials of failure, and the kisses of friends.

2003-08-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

Rainbow

He once described me as red and blue
Now he says I am the colour of flesh
Not the raw red of skin under skin
Nor the royal blue of veins and blood
But the pale, translucent glow of life.
In that I think he sees my vulnerability;
Fragility, the revelation of blood beneath
Delicate ego stained royal blue black.
So are we all. We kid ourselves to think
That we are made of any other colour
Than what we are born with.

2003-08-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

Lucidity and the Lack of It

Am thankfully not going to reproduce the very lucid conversation I had with Yuwen early this morning (or was that yesterday by the time frame that I've been going with) but it was insightful. Will probably mention it some time later when I'm more lucid and coherent.

Govin told R that he could not remember what he said on Saturday night, but Michelle told him it was very harsh and he apologised if it offended anyone. Told R to tell me about it. Am partially upset that he did not tell me directly but told R to convey the message, when it was me he was being harsh to. The reason I suspect is pride, stubborn damned pride. To think he behaves in exactly the same way he warned me about, the caveat "don't go the same way I did" doesn't act as quite that good a disclaimer as I thought. But the truth is no apology was necessary. He was off on some things I felt, but overall, I felt it showed a good indication of how some people might perceive me, and the hideous inadequacies of my portrayal of my inner soul. I am not being myself, and I am going against my belief that I truly want to be as authentic a person as I can. Obviously, even though he may or may not have meant it that way, he sparked off something in me that, while it hurt, didn't turn out quite as bad as it should be. I went back with more confidence than I had before, because I had thought through what he said, and could come up with a reasonable answer or defence against it. R was puzzled as to why I was so upset at him apologising to "the wrong person", however. What I did not understand was why he didn't have the guts to come up to me and tell me that apology to my face. Several explanations, all of them not savoury and I shall not go through them here. Govin's going to tell R some things, and if one of them is that he should take a break from me and wholeheartedly reconsider his relationship with me, then I fully endorse it with all my heart. I think it's long overdue.

I think we both need a break. This strain is like a rubber band stretched to its limit, drawing thin and threatening to break. We've patched back my previous decision but what has that changed? Both of us need time, and time isn't something that comes with dealing with the strains of a relationship, of life, of the demands of work or school or both.

Part of my "authenticity" plan is to deal with Reality realistically. To see what is, because I am such the chronic dreamer that I am, instead of what I want it to be, or what it could be. I feel that I am ready to leave "what it could be" to Fate; and what I want it to be isn't going to happen without some turning point. Perhaps that's my problem, the fact that I don't believe things can happen without a turning point. Truth is, most of Nature exists without turning points. It exists in gradual evolution, a process that dissolves like water into soil, ice into mist. The fact is that Nature isn't about the turning points and sharp breaks that human beings want to see. Neither are relationships, emotion and growth.

I believe in Life and Death, not in Good and Evil. The irony of my life, as someone aptly told me, is that I am nothing yet everything. That I am only great in so much as I can do things for others, and make the life of others better. And that I am nothing the moment I have failed to do so. The irony of St Francis: My life is a channel, only a channel for His peace, His joy, His love and His message. The sum of my life is that I am a channel. The sum of my existence is that of a vessel. So whatever goes through me to others is what makes me who I am. Like a multifaceted prism, people will see what they want to see, get what they want to get, receive only what they had asked for. No wonder I feel empty. No wonder people think I'm a hypocrite. No wonder some may say that I am a people-slut, I show people want they want to see. The truth is I am glass. People see right through me to the other side, but a mirror -- they see only what they want to see. That is the sum of my reality: that I know I cannot and should not change the behaviour of others, and that I do not want to influence or manipulate behaviour, opinions, attitudes, feelings. But in truth, I am doing nothing. To be neutral, perhaps, is to be the worst thing of all.

The scary thing of course, is that I do this instinctively. And that I can remember doing this since the day I was very young. In that liquid nature, while I was trying to avoid being manipulated, other people put their hands into quicksand, get caught, sink, drown and say that they have been manipulated and controlled. It returns sevenfold like the curse of Cain. I know that happened with the whole coterie of Mark, Jo, Lance, Talia, Heng, Jeana and the others. Interesting that the term that occurred to me was the curse of Cain, which is exactly what they would have called it, knowing them. So a mark was placed upon the guilty, and he was told, "If anyone tries to harm you, it would be returned sevenfold." I still can't figure it out: why did God keep Cain alive and protected? What sort of twisted love was that, to protect the guilty in perpetuity, and establish a curse upon the rest of mankind who might try to exact Justice? Apparently, Justice isn't for Man to exact, it is God's sole right. Judge not and ye shall not be judged. Is that how it goes? And so as it turns out in the case for Cain and since then, Fate tends to take a heavier hand than most of us would expect.

I am not trying to say that I am part of a great divine plan of retribution. Nobody is that (un)lucky. I'm trying to say that I am merely who I am, and the painful self-awareness that my ultimately large navel-gazing ego is guilty of would not let me forget that. Ergo, that for as long as I cannot change that instinct/habit of giving out what I am taking in, of play-acting what is around me, of absorbing my surroundings and spitting it out like a painful sponge, I cannot change the emptiness that I feel. My mother tells me that I am easily influenced, but it goes deeper than that. Like a chameleon, I literally change into the colours that I sense around me. This has been a problem for me before. I'd love/hate to think that this was some instinctual human behaviour born of some evolutionary force, but (un)fortunately, I am not that (un)lucky either. No, this is just me. Problem: deal with it.

I guess it happens. Some people just rub me the wrong way. And that happens to everyone. I used to think that it was not impossible that the whole world can click, given the right time and place, but now upon growing older, I'm revising that view. As liquid personalities get set in stone with age, we eventually come to settle into comfortable values that we no longer challenge, and grow personalities that change in colour less and less with time. I don't know if that is a good thing or not, but I suppose age eventually forces it to happen. The alternative is slutty, and while I know people like that, and fully empathise with their intents sadly many stemming from absolutely good intentions, the end result is obvious: at the end of the day when all colours gets set to grey, the confused chameleon doesn't know where to go or what to be.

That is the warning that I got. Decide what you want to do with your life, find out what your focus is, know yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, your aims your goals your purpose and get on with it. If I were to pick a colour in the many shaded palette of the world, what colour would I best be?

2003-08-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

The Safehouse: Corinthians Chapter 13

It was read to me, some days ago:

I realise that my understanding of Love is very limited. I understand that Love is exclusive: you must love me and only me; possessive: if you love me, you must treat me more special than anyone else and pay me and no one else all your attention; manipulative: if you love me you will do things for me that I want you to do.

But Love is not any of the above.

Love is patient and kind; it is not jealous or conceited or proud; love is not ill-mannered or selfish or irritable; love does not keep a record of wrongs; love is not happy with evil, but is happy with the truth. Love never gives up; and its faith, hope and patience never fail. Love is eternal.

And this is the promise of what Love is, a definition, a truth. I believe that we cannot understand human relationships and claim we love until we understand that point. That this, to me, is what Love truly is. This is what it is said to be, and it is the truest definition I have ever found.

2003-08-02T21:36:00.000-07:00

The Sugar Plums are Waiting

Roses are roses, and violets are blue
Violets are violets, and roses are red
The sugar plums are waiting
And so is your head.

Beats me why I just wrote that but I woke up with it.

Had a few strong words and drinks since Jul 30. Many thanks to you who asked me how I was after reading this. It was a pleasant surprise, and it showed that you care. The day after, I wandered around and we had a talk that night after he left work. I can't leave. It is still an impossible, because try as I might, it can't happen. I can offer understanding, cold cuts and sympathy with chicken soup, but I cannot leave. He was sick, and we went to the doctor together and there's nothing like an ill person to keep sympathy juices flowing. Ok, I know I sound really cold about it, but looking at him there like that, all I wanted to do was care about him and be there for him. It became instinctual. I did it and I knew that I couldn't leave. And so I didn't.

The day after we went to Govin's and had a couple of drinks and dinner. Govin invited us over and I was wondering why. But I think his instincts on Govin aren't usually wrong, he offered an explanation, and I took it. Didn't want to think too much upon it. There is a strange awkwardness I have about going to Govin's these days, a little like the awkwardness of visiting an aunt that you used to like a lot of when you were young, but now that you've grown up, are subject to her aged scrutiny, have nothing to say and feel uncomfortable being there. In the Beginning, Adam and Eve partook of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and realised that they were naked and hid from God. When I was a child, I spoke of childish things and did childish things. But now I am an adult, I have no more use for childish things. If I have no love, I am nothing.

Govin spoke to me of many things before I left. Warnings, fears that I already had within me, worries of what is to come ahead. And I realised many things. He had seen me through these two years or so, and unlike God, he did not just sit there and weep. I thank him for the things he said to me. For they are things even my own parents who watch me every day cannot tell me. Yet they are things that I need to hear. I know now how and why he cares for me, and removing that uncertainty, I know where I stand. It was as I thought. Perhaps that ego which he referred to, though strong and overly huge, isn't always wrong with instinct. There is a different between instinct and ego. Instinct tells you something, and you choose whether or not to listen to it. Ego refuses to accept anything which contradicts its self importance. It was said long ago that R doesn't have an ego. I've looked at him a thousand times, tried to study how this was so, but still I cannot understand it.

Cogito ergo sum. Egoism: excessive love or thought of self; the habit of regarding one's self as the centre of every interest; selfishness; - opposed to altruism. Hurt is no excuse because hurt happens.

Right now, things feel different in a tinge of colour that I cannot detect. I think the change must come from within. Perhaps I have to be different, and not expect anything around me to be different. Instinct acts in a very different way. Intuition says something else completely, and perhaps, as I strongly suspect, I am leading myself up to disappointment. But that fear of disappointment is what keeps me in.

At the end of the day, somewhere and somehow, I think I have to find the courage to live that soul's life. The cost of true disappointment in the future is far worse than the risk of secular disappointment now which I can do something about. At least I've lived, at least I've loved, at least I've learnt.

2003-07-31T20:27:00.000-07:00

Warning: strong psychobabble ahead.

The Matrix Essay

I went to The Matrix Essays today. Really good site. You should go too.

Regarding your question about the heavy symbolism used in the Matrix, I notice that in Reloaded, they've moved from heavily using Biblical references (Nebuchanazzar, Zion, the One, Prophesy etc.) to Greek references (Persephone, Merovingian etc.) Leading me to think of Old Gods. The Greek references are specifically limited to those who have come before, their names are the names of gods that are now dead and gone. Persephone fits her role as the wife of the god of hell, and there are definitely links to that story in the positioning of the table where they meet Neo, the pomegranates on the table etc.

Am wondering if part of the resolution implies that Neo, Trinity etc. are the post-modern version of new gods, but gods that are doomed to die anyway. There are humans, and there are HUMANS, people who live their lives existing in a much bigger ego framework than others, people who seem to partake of the eternal struggle, the soul-searching and the seeking answers, but people whom ultimately do not get the whole picture anyway.

Can't we say that our world is no more like a Matrix than the real Matrix? What is the real world? Ultimately, we are still living in Plato's cave, and the caves exists in layers. It may not be false only because it's obvious. When everything is stripped away, whatever remains, however plausible or implausible, must be the truth.

2003-07-31T20:09:00.000-07:00

Dream Sequence Trois

Have taken to recording my dreams. Why? Because I think it's interesting, and because I suppose it records some part of my life which I'm living but not conscious of living it. (I try to record them immediately, day I wake up, or day after.)

Dreamt I was playing Super Mario and completed the entire game. This is particularly amusing, since it's not the Super Mario where you have to go through many obstacles in Princess Land, but the kind that occurs in very simplistic handheld games. I was playing it on a very old version of a Sega, I think the Sega 16 bit. It had colour. It was my cousin's. He loaned it to me, and I finished the game in 3 hours or so. He wasn't so happy about that. Funny thing was I dreamt up whole 105 levels of the game. Time must have elapsed sometime between then, but I swear I've never ever before managed to complete any Super Mario game, so this was kinda special to me.

The final stage was one where you had to swim. There are jellyfish like things shooting coins at you. You're supposed to collect the coins, but if you hit the jellyfish itself, you die. There's also another aggressive monster that shoots bullets/lasers at you, you're supposed to dodge that too. And the monster. The tricky part of the final stage is that you swim around really slowly, and have to collect all the coins which is not an easy task since the jellyfish keeps shooting out more. But eventually, jellyfish gets tired, you collect everything and a door opens at the bottom of the tank you were dropped in. That goes down a passageway and you walk through a door. I know it's supposed to be a pipe in the real Super Mario but hey, this is my dream.

The door completes the game, you pick up a very important piece of the puzzle and put in your name in the high score. For some reason I keyed in 6.5 then my name. I think I reckoned I got 6.5 million points by the time I was through. But my cousin suggested 3h since I took 3 hours to complete it, and the points are inconsequential. Maybe it's a number sign. I keep dreaming of numbers, think numbers are important to me.

The stage before the last one involved some flying. You jump (or climb, as my cousin later did it) to collect coins way up to the ceiling, and float down from the top and collect some more. All the time avoiding the turtle ducks that roam the floor.

In some previous stages, you just collect all the coins, eliminate some turtle ducks (some stages had them practically on every tile, and you had to knock them all off) and step through the next door.

I've got a feeling this is a real game. *shrugs* Maybe I will play it on the in-flight entertainment system when I fly to San Francisco. Maybe that's why I dreamt it, might be prescient. *laughs* Although I wish I could be psychic about something less trivial than this.

2003-07-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

The Impossible

Ironically, this is a safe place to be, since nobody comes round here to read my thoughts anyway. *wry smile* Well, I finally did the impossible, and why I did it I have no clue, except that I thought I was following a natural progression, a timeline that ended like the last station of a railway track. It was there, ahead and nowhere. That, and waning hope and certain disappointment, I am regretful: because everything was going so well, and my timing really sucked. He told me that directly, and I could not contradict it. Except to say that I am sorry, and that emotion just happens (my conclusion) even though we try to put rationality to it, sometimes there is no rationality for emotion: emptiness, despair, a sense of void.

I suppose he would make a really good husband, father, boyfriend etc. He does, to be honest, with the exception that at its core, there is a burgeoning ego that overrides everything else. He has his beliefs, his interests, his morals, his job, his everything else, and nothing stands in the way of that. To that, I am an outsider, and forever will be. Those beliefs aren't bad, they're completely good, sound and rational and I think that if everyone has those beliefs the world would be a much better place, but those beliefs don't care. They simply exists to do things the right way, and the right way gets done, and ultimately living there is like living in an Equilibrium world, where there is rationality, and anything irrational becomes a sense crime. Despite that, he demands a right to feel, to be irrational, even though that basic right is denied to anyone else who "acts up". In the end, I felt nothing. It was a calm wrought out of neutrality, which gave birth to emptiness. To have an opinion these days, I said, costs. We feel its sting.

Dream Sequence une: Y came up to me in a clouded haze where he knew and I knew that things were different. But reality lay in the background and something strange happened: he said, "You know that ultimately, I was the one you chose. And I was the one you walked away from. Now you have a choice, do you choose anything differently?" I almost had a sense that Time itself was warped. I didn't say anything, but the rational memory that he was now attached to someone else and the whole real world scenario was different came back to me. Thank goodness. If I had the choice to choose, I would not have chosen him anyway.

Dream Sequence deux: I was making love to him in my godmother's house with an open door. My godfather kept walking past that door, and for some reason didn't see us. [ A note: making love in dreams are somewhat interesting things: you don't have to have done it before, nothing ever really happens (like in the movies, where the mind self-censors but one somehow knows what is supposed to be going on through extrapolation) and it is most likely a metaphor for something (usually emotion) ((except in Hollywood)). ] Somehow I went out to take a bath and mixed vodka with water and used that instead. Amazingly it began lathering really well and I used it as soap. I was still doing that out in the open kitchen (where the tap was) and incredibly, no one noticed. My godmother came up to me and asked if that really worked and I gave her soap-making tips that said it does. [ Note again: in real life, vodka and water won't really work either, unless there's sodium hydroxide in the water as well - glycerin soap. I make soap, I should know. ]

I think there were at least two themes in that dream: unreality and openness. Perhaps it's trying to tell me that my sense of freedom is only illusory. True control and true desire lies somewhere in between rationality and emotion. I had wanted everything to be the same. Everything except the status of being a girlfriend. It is time for me to realise that my choices meant that things will be different, for better or worse. And although many things still feel the same, some things will definitely change, whether I want it or not. It is the choice that reality brings, we do not decide our own conditions.

2003-07-23T21:57:00.000-07:00

dream sequence [deux]:

Certain themes occur in my dreams very often, and it's scary, because they've appeared since childhood, and are continuing to recur in intermittent intervals. I am not sure what they mean, or if they mean anything at all except spell certain things about my psyche. If anyone wants to tell me this means I'm a schizophrenic neurotic psychotic, please feel free (as if I didn't already know).

Watched Resident Evil last night and that was probably the source of my numerous nightmares, which occurred in what seemed like a few second clips:
+ large plastic arcs swinging like blades in front of human flesh, dark corridors
+ Ordinary human employees in suits suddenly turning into bureaucratic men in black (note they weren't zombies)
+ violent flashes of fast moving objects and clamp-down buildings used to herd people around (death otherwise)
+ camera eyes tracking movements: big brothers

I don't mean to be naturally anti-establishment but it strikes me that there is something very Luddite and bureaucracy-fearing in my dreams. For years I have been pursued by ordinary people - bus drivers, neighbours, random strangers on the streets - turning into various versions of the men in black: grey suited faceless individuals who pursue and hunt down aberrants (which almost invariably happen to be me).

In another frightening dream that I still cannot resolve, I was put into the gymnasium of a very old school building as a student. There were many other students and kids my age, playing in the gym in various water balloon structures and air towers. The aim of the game was survivor, and students were encouraged to kill each other or be killed themselves. It was only after a while of looking around that I realised that people were taking this for real. I got frightened and tried to run away, pursued by faceless administrators and teachers who hunted me down school corridors. Finally I managed to find an exit into real space, and ran out of the main entrance, only to face a graveyard and a wall of tall mountains behind it. Laughter sounding in my ears, I heard someone say, "You see, I told you, there is no escape."

2003-07-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

dream sequence [une]:

haven't posted in a while. wanted at first to create a blog for a dream diary (thought it would be a cool idea) but then again realised that i so infrequently get interesting dreams, it won't be updated for long spells at a time.

Interestingly, dreams and what they tell you:

On the night of 22 July, I dreamt:
+ of endless diarrhoea in an unfamiliar toilet - reality: had food poisoning and nearly endless diarrhoea and vomiting the very next waking day
+ quarrelling with an ex-boyfriend on the back of a bus (which turned into a car then a taxi intermittently) driven by a taxi driver, then another friend of mine (changes intermittently) and was looking for pacific mansions in river valley (there's actually such a place and I have *no* clue why I was supposed to go there). In the end, I dropped off at a bus interchange and told the guy to get lost and get the hell out of my life. - reality: nothing yet. Maybe because I broke up with him at a place of public transport, the scene changed to a bus interchange. But it was immensely satisfying and ego gratifying to have told him to get lost.
+ dreamt an old man in a public conference of sorts asked me if i still had a [something: can't remember] on my hand. I replied to the affirmative. And he said, "So, the prophesy does exist..." I couldn't ask what prophesy, because something woke me up and I drifted out of slumber. Staring at my window, I thought I heard another female voice going, "How do you know this is the real world and not just another dream world?" In my mind I replied, "I don't. The window looks hazy." And I drifted back to sleep. And the whole sequence of the council began again and this time, I had more knowledge. They spoke of living in endless cycles of un-reality, fading from dream to dream, such that there exists a small group of people who are haunted by living in two worlds at the same time, both of dreaming. It is similar to the Matrix, except that there is no such thing as a real world. You simply phase from one Matrix state to another. (Imagine the nightmare of existence). They have no means of knowing what reality is, and no means of escaping it. However, a small group of breakaways have decided that there is only one way to escape this loop, through a process called a "forced reset" which is nothing more than suicide. Some among them (the council) believe that there is another way: that there will be born (will exist) a one that can phase between worlds easily, and discover the truth about what the real world is, and go where none of the rest was able to go before. I was a bringer of one of these prophesies, apparently, with something (that I couldn't remember) that I had on my hand. It was an object like a ring, if I vaguely recall, not something like a tattoo or birthmark. - reality: nothing fascinating happened yet.

2003-07-20T09:33:00.000-07:00

finally decided to do the sensible thing and not cut 95 episodes of kenshin onto 25+ cds. i could just save myself the heartache, sleepless nights and endless waiting for my really slow cd-writer (still a 4x2x4x external thing before the days of burn-proofing) to finish up and just re-download the whole thing. (and not worry if i don't have cable in future next time because it'll still be cheaper at the rate at which i watch it...

2003-07-10T20:07:00.000-07:00

Silent lucidity part deux

My results came out today. After a night of fevered dreams and constant waking, cynically telling myself that this was the first time I've ever acted so nervously and pathetically, I tried tossing back to sleep again. Holding back my fear and calming myself was no more successful than trying to stop a storm from billowing... and so I gave up, and woke up.

In the first place, there was no exhilaration. And even that slow sense of relief faded away into the embers of the single thought: "I survived". In the end, I suppose that's all that mattered.

2003-07-10T01:01:00.001-07:00

unfinished

Homecoming, on the death of a distant relative

It began with a ring, the telephone
That twisting, ticking timepiece of longing
And the voice on the other line, fevered
Almost dragged away (I imagine) a Persephone
With dismal news. A distant relative.

Passed away. Granduncle.
Funny how the word grand seemed to suggest
He was larger than most, even in the distance
I saw

Silent wreaths of incomprehension
Fluttered around the parapet of my mind

The footsteps in the hall no heavier than the first
I made in my departure ten years ago.

2003-07-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

Silent lucidity. I feel the stirrings of something great coming up. Watch for it.

2003-07-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

July.

What is the Greek significance of July? These days it seems the only thing I can do / And the only thing I can say / Is wait. // Waiting for dread, for death, / For hope, for despair, for release and absolution / For the incarnation of another supreme being / Other than myself and my ego. // And Hope, blessed Hope waits in the wing as Fear's only twin.

Is this the sum of my financial advice as I attempt to navigate the political economy of the inner mind? To watch, to wait. The only thing I can do is to bear the bull of my life, and hope that this bull is not too mulish to bear. And perhaps write this snide poem:

To have an opinion, these days
Costs. We feel its sting
The sharpness of words biting into
Blood money and death threats.

And it appears the only irony
Is what sets us free.
The poor cannot afford an opinion
(The bite of whips and chains
Shackle them to bowing heads and numbness)
And of opinion, the rich have none
And pay others to provide them.

I would pay my tax breaks
In cliche and dull wit, if I could.
But I cannot sell you my mind
(worth two cents anyway).
Only my soul is on offer
At five dollars a piece
So why not buy one to assuage
Your conscience?

Or would it not be one of the five C's
You know the cliche: Courage, Conscience
Clarity, Candour and Calm.
The plastic that made me dare
To buy more than I earned;
The country club membership that salved it.
Newspapers to tell me what to learn
And the honesty to hide it.

Of course, this anxiety.
Nothing to worry about, only the usual
Crash and burn, not the sky
Falling.

If I were a chicken,
I might know better
When the axe would fall.

2003-07-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

One day there was a search for the word metaphoric.

I suspect this had a lot to do with my ego and nothing to do with it being late in the middle of the night.

Metaphoric Revolution: In quest of a manifesto for governance through metaphor Written in September 1988.

Metaphoric Idea Database from Half-Bakery Of course as you would know Half-Bakery is a great site.

Metaphoric Entrapment in Time: avoiding the trap of Project Logic And once more the same site. I'm getting really interested in what laetusinpraesens means. Thus the main page which is the site of Howard Bloom runs here.

Somewhat related, the idea of memes, Meme Central which transmits the idea of memetics, the concept that human beings can be programmed and "written" by psychological viruses and codes known as memes, the building blocks of the mind and culture and the psyche, much like cells are the biological building blocks of the body.

More interesting: The Generosity Game: spread random acts of kindness did you watch Pay it Forward?

2003-07-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

Tsuiokuhen

Somewhere and somehow, Memory is a very powerful word. I remember. I had wanted to sit back, relax and enjoy watching endless reruns of Kenshin episodes (how droll) on my cable modem when I first got back. Now, the exam results are coming out in 3 days time, and I am beginning to feel nervous. I had only just managed to successfully distract myself to immense fatigue by clearing the house, painting my room and redoing my furniture as though it was a well planned break, but the delusion won't last much longer now that my things have been unpacked and my room completely painted. My parents chipped in enthusiastically to help, which made the time pass faster I suppose, but it strikes me that it is true that things don't last long for me. Before too much time has elapsed, the old worry creeps back insidiously like the onset of influenza, and I am struck with the same damning sense of helplessless I felt two days after the exams were over. There is nothing I can do now. I am beginning to have dreams about what my grades will be, and this time, unlike previous times, I am worried, because I somehow knew that I had failed myself. In my dreams, my grades weren't fantastic, and I am hoping that the sinking feeling I have been getting at the pits of my stomach won't materialise into something more real than an insubstantiated fret.

Memory. I had wanted to talk about Memory. I capitalise the word because for the first time in many years perhaps, I am beginning to realise that sentimentality and memory are powerful things which move me enough to live, perhaps in ways that enrich the experience that is my life. Emotion, so swiftly blocked out with the excuse of reason, begins to surface without danger and it is a funny feeling to watch an old enemy swim up like an old friend. It is a struggle to make sense of it without the fear that history might repeat itself as it inadvertently does (even reason tells me that). But to welcome the trial like an opportunity to grow in strength, that makes me tick.

And so, Memory. Or, the vicarious living of oneself in the past and in other's pasts. I have taken to watching my parents and listening as they relate tales from their times as though it is a chance to live a life, learn lessons, role-play and experience things I otherwise may not know. I can live through two world wars, the injustice of parents (without the realisation that some things don't change), the thrills of love and empathize with what is otherwise a real life movie. People enjoy movies more when they are "real-life" with a sort of visceral vicariousness, don't they? Daphne said there was something rather vicarious about me, and I didn't realise it at the time, but it was always an obsession with me I suppose to want to look at other people's photographs, imagine their lives and dream about what they might have felt. Somehow it is part of being human, part of living to empathise, yet at the same time I cannot help but feel that perhaps I am demeaning their experiences by taking this view on the matter.

I dredged out old photos of mine when I was clearing my room and I think I am going to scan them.

[ memory ]

and visceral fantasy / dwelling in the reality of previous / our former selves staring at us / some dead, some forgotten, some writing love letters / "to your ego at twenty-four" / who says we can only give advice to our children / we can write letters to our future selves / if we would heed them when the time comes anyway / advice is cheap (and forgotten) no matter by whom / knowing my foibles, i don't think i'd take myself any more seriously at seven than twenty-seven / i'd look back and laugh at my naive insanity all the same.

funny though, how we haven't words for future besides future / but we have adjectives, nouns, verbs for what has come before / previous, former, past, ago; future, future, future, future / frevious, perhaps, fast is taken, the verb 'will be' / funny how 'will' suggests determinism sometimes / not everyone would agree we have a choice

i am obsessed with time and the notion of clocks / tiny time pieces ticking destiny in regular motion / i didn't think time slipped by in seconds but we need some way of counting i suppose / like a metronome keeping rhythm when the fact is i am out of tune. / did you think we'd need a watch other than to meet the time to meet each other by? / these days i take to meeting you whenever / a location and an uncertain hour (you are always late anyway) / and if you are meant to be there then perhaps you will be / (and i will break up with whoever i unfortunately never managed to meet). / these days, late means time has passed and i learn to expect you two minutes after / and late to me becomes the endless waiting for someone who will never then arrive / a truly late. and perhaps then "the late mr darcy" takes on more significance than someone who is simply held up by traffic.

2003-06-30T02:20:00.000-07:00

And then it was all over.

It seems a little anti-climatic to say this now, but then again, what end isn't (by its very definition) anticlimatic? Got a couple of sympathies here and then about the nature of stress, and that seems gratification enough for me. Honest as this thought is, the very relief of having completed something, whether I've realised it or not, is relief enough.

cynicsyndication.com is ending, and I probably did the most juice-squeezing I have ever done out of the time I've got there. Strangely pushed to sign up for a silly thing I didn't need which I eventually farmed out, it seems pretty strange to now attempt (three hours before shut down) to attempt to glean some meaning out of the whole thing. What did I get out of the emails, the many addresses, the failed attempts at communication etc. that passed through the portals of cynicsyndication.com?

Got a new idea now. SoundMind. Sanity of Sound. Seriously think it's more impressive sounding than "Ministry of Music" *guffaw*

2003-06-16T08:58:00.000-07:00

I don't think I have ever pushed myself as hard or as insanely as this. I've stopped thinking about my motivations or of anything in the future ahead of the next two weeks. My only drive is to press on, stay focused (what on!?) and live to see the end of what will probably be the worse examination period of my life. It's my fault, I took it upon myself and perhaps it feels like I bit off more than I can chew. Despite that, I keep thinking that I have the ability to complete it and survive (even succeed!) but even that is perhaps because I have no sense of my accomplishments, for better or worse. It becomes a challenge to me, a test of endless optimism.

I have:
* 5 exams: 1 more than the usual courseload, all at 3rd year level
* 1 driving test: taken ahead of the legal requirement of time and in East Burwood, a 45 minute drive away from my usual testing ground and place of residence. Did I fail to mention it's a DRIVING TEST I'm taking? That's right ladies and gentlemen, I get more driving experience than most simply because of the fact that I have to drive 30 extra more minutes on the freeway just to get to my testing spot.
* 1 major house packing in lieu of the fact that I will not be returning to Melbourne in the near foreseeable future
* Administrative details accompanying semi-permanent change of country of residence : you get the idea (see above)

Most people think I'm insane. In fact, I'd think so too. This is insanely optimistic. But I know that if I manage to pull it off and wing it, it will be one of the greatest personal accomplishments of my life.

2003-06-14T01:04:00.000-07:00

Bebo Norman Lyrics: Myself When I am Real

Am very annoyed that I can't find proper Bebo Norman lyrics for this album on Google, so I decided to transcribe my own. No guarantees for it being accurate but I'll brush it up when I get the time.

Our Mystery

Feels like a brand new day
And I know I’m not the same
‘Cos I see you, and I need you
And I know I couldn’t leave you if I tried to walk away
Your love won’t bring me down

Living a long, long life
And I will not let you go
It’s taking a long, long time to get here
It could be a long, long life
But I will not let you go
‘Cos love will be our mystery

So let’s leave this world behind
And see what we can find
‘Cos I don’t need it, or believe it
And I know I couldn’t keep it if I tried
‘Cos you changed my mind
Your love won’t bring me down

Living a long, long life
And I will not let you go
It’s taking a long, long time to get here
It could be a long, long life
But I will not let you go
‘Cos love will be our mystery

Our mystery… our mystery.
We won’t be alone.

Living a long, long life
And I will not let you go
It’s taking a long, long time to get here
It could be a long, long life
But I will not let you go
‘Cos love will be our mystery

Our mystery.

Beautiful You

I can’t stand the sound of losing control
But whenever you’re around
I can’t find the breath to speak at all
I need you to be careful with me

Please don’t go away
Please don’t leave me here
I know if you don’t stay
My heart will disappear
I need beautiful you

Your love brings the air that swallows me whole
Underneath your skin is the only peace I know
All that I need is you here with me

Please don’t go away
Please don’t leave me here
I know if you don’t stay
My heart will disappear
I need beautiful you

Please don’t go away
Please don’t leave me here
I know if you don’t stay
My heart will disappear
My world will disappear
I need beautiful you

Falling Down

Angels on the subway
Just buried in a magazine
Stuck inside a replay
In someone else’s dream

Coffins made of paper
Don’t tell her anything
‘Cos she wants something just to save her
So she lifts her head,
She lifts her head and screams

I don’t know you
But I love you anyway
I can’t see you
But I hope you’re here to stay
I don’t know you
But I need you here with me
‘Cos I’m falling down, falling down

Now angels on a runway
Looking for a big jet plane
Take her to a new day
She won’t be back again
She won’t be back again
‘Cos she says

I don’t know you
But I love you anyway
I can’t see you
But I hope you’re here to stay
I don’t know you
But I need you here with me
When I’m falling down, falling down

You’re on my side
You’re touched in time
I’m on my way
Don’t know who you are
But I want you back again…

I don’t know you
But I love you anyway
I can’t see you
But I hope you’re here to stay
I don’t know you
But I need you here with me
‘Cos I’m falling down, falling down

Great Light of the World

Sometimes at night I am afraid
I cover my eyes I cover my shame
To here in my dark, broken apart
Come with your light, fill up my heart

Holy light of the world, fill up my soul
I have a man here to come make me whole
Holy light of the world, come to impart
The light of your grace, to fill up my heart

The end of this world can push us around
Falling us hard and backing us down
Here in my dark, I’m not alone
So come with your strength, to carry me home

Holy light of the world, fill up my soul
I have a man here keeping me whole
Holy light of the world, come to impart
The light of your grace…

Holy light of the world, fill up my soul
I have a man here to come make me whole
Holy light of the world, come to impart
The light of your grace, to fill up my heart
The light of grace, to fill up my heart

When the Trees Stand Still

Everyone it seems
Is looking for the grass that’s greener
Through my window pane
A scenery flies back and disappears

So tell to me a secret
That won’t let the memories fade away
Until I am home again
Where the trees stand still

Yesterday it seems
I traveled in a younger man’s clothes
Living up his dreams
And wandering through fields of touch and go
Moving on forever
Watching the destinies fade away
But now I just watch and wait
Where the trees stand still

All this time
On this line
Here and now and gone…

Tonight I want a life
Where the faces are the same ‘most everyday
Tonight I want a wife
To sit with me and watch our children play
All the world between us
Watching the years fade away
And when the laughing’s done
We’ll watch the trees stand still
Everyday where the trees stand still
We will make it home
Where the trees stand still
The trees stand still.

Everything

When day is over
I’ll be the colour in the sky
If darkness lingers,
I’ll be the flames that gives you life

I just want you to know this
I just want you to feel the same
I just want you to know this
I just want to be your everything

On my shoulder
There is a place for you to cry
I’ll be your shelter
When there is nowhere else to hide

I just want you to know this
I just want you to feel the same
I just want you to know this
I just want to be your everything

Sometimes I see you cry
When you watch the sun go down
Magical, so beautiful
And I …

I just want you to know this
I just want you to feel the same
I just want you to know this
I just want to be your everything

When day is over,
I’ll be the colour in the sky…

Just to Look at You

I would give my soul
Just to look at you
And everything I know
Just to see it through

Let all the others fade away
Turn all my darkness into day
My love
I would give my soul
Just to look at you

Would you believe in me?
Or would you walk away and leave?
Would you believe in me?
Or would you turn away and leave?
Either way my love,
I would give my soul
Just to look at you.

If you found my heart
Would you let it dry?
Break it all apart
Just to run and hide?

Make all the colours fade away
Into another shade of grey
My love
I’d still give my soul
Just to look at you

Would you believe in me?
Or would you walk away and leave?
Would you believe in me?
Or would you turn away and leave?
Either way my love,
I would give my soul
Just to look at you.

‘Cos I don’t know where
And I don’t know
But I just want you now
So would you believe in me?
Or would you turn away and leave?
Either way my love,
I would give my soul
Just to look at you.

Long Way Home

It's a long way home, and we first head home
In the silence, there's nowhere else to run
It's the battle of our pending run
In the shadow is another smoking gun

When we dream these dreams
For the first time it seems
We could live this love for a lifetime
You and me
So I will...

I will not give up this fight
I will not lay down and die
I will not carry this heart of stone
I need not be your place to run
I need not be your kingdom come
I may stumble through this great unknown
I will be your endless truth
I will not give up on you
I was made to be with you alone
'Cos you and me, we're gonna see
The long way home

It's a long way home and the crying's done
But the sorrow’s still wet upon your face
I collide in heart, sometimes break apart
Now the pieces are gathered up in dreams

And we dream these dreams for the last time it seems
We lived this love through a lifetime, just you and me
So I will...

I will not give up this fight
I will not lay down and die
I will not carry this heart of stone
I need not be your place to run
I need not be your kingdom come
I may stumble through this great unknown
I will be your endless truth
I will not give up on you
I was made to be with you alone
'Cos you and me, we get to see
The long way home

I will not give up this fight
I will not lay down and die
I will not carry this heart of stone
'Cos I'm not your place to run
I am not be your kingdom come
I may stumble through this great unknown
I will be your endless truth
I will not give up on you
I was made to be with you alone
'Cos you and me, we get to see
The long way home

2003-06-09T07:47:00.000-07:00

THE FOLKLORE OF OUR TIMES
by HARUKI MURAKAMI

I was born in 1949. I started high school in 1963 and went to college in 1967. And so it was amid the crazy, confused uproar of 1968 that I saw in my otherwise auspicious twentieth year. Which, I guess, makes me a typical child of the sixties. It was the most vulnerable, most formative, and therefore most important period in my life, and there I was, breathing in deep lungfuls of abandon and quite naturally getting high on it all. I kicked in a few deserving doors—and what a thrill it was whenever a door that deserved kicking in presented itself before me, as Jim Morrison, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan played in the background. The whole shebang.

Even now, looking back on it all, I think that those years were special. I’m sure that if you were to examine the attributes of the time one by one, you wouldn’t discover anything all that noteworthy. Just the heat generated by the engine of history, that limited gleam that certain things give off in certain places at certain times—that and a kind of inexplicable antsiness, as if we were viewing everything through the wrong end of a telescope. Heroics and villainy, rapture and disillusionment, martyrdom and revisionism, silence and eloquence, et cetera, et cetera . . . the stuff of any age. Only, in our day—if you’ll forgive the overblown expression—it was all so colorful somehow, so very reach-out-and-grab-it palpable. There were no gimmicks, no discount coupons, no hidden advertising, no keep-’em-coming point-card schemes, no insidious, loopholing paper trails. Cause and effect shook hands; theory and reality embraced with aplomb. A prehistory to high capitalism: that’s what I personally call those years.

But as to whether the era brought us—my generation, that is—any special radiance, well, I’m not so sure. In the final analysis, perhaps we simply passed through it as if we were watching an exciting movie: we experienced it as real—our hearts pounded, our palms sweated—but when the lights came on we just walked out of the cinema and picked up where we’d left off. For whatever reason, we neglected to learn any truly valuable lesson from it all. Don’t ask me why. I am much too deeply bound up in those years to answer the question. There’s just one thing I’d like you to understand: I’m not the least bit proud that I came of age then; I’m simply reporting the facts.

Now let me tell you about the girls. About the mixed-up sexual relations between us boys, with our brand-new genitals, and the girls, who at the time were, well, still girls.

But, first, about virginity. In the sixties, virginity held a greater significance than it does today. As I see it—not that I’ve ever conducted a survey—about fifty per cent of the girls of my generation were no longer virgins by the age of twenty. Or, at least, that seemed to be the ratio in my general vicinity. Which means that, consciously or not, about half the girls around still revered this thing called virginity.

Looking back now, I’d say that a large portion of the girls of my generation, whether virgins or not, had their share of inner conflicts about sex. It all depended on the circumstances, on the partner. Sandwiching this relatively silent majority were the liberals, who thought of sex as a kind of sport, and the conservatives, who were adamant that girls should stay virgins until they were married.

Among the boys, there were also those who thought that the girl they married should be a virgin.

People differ, values differ. That much is constant, no matter what the period. But the thing about the sixties that was totally unlike any other time is that we believed that those differences could be resolved.

This is the story of someone I knew. He was in my class during my senior year of high school in Kobe, and, frankly, he was the kind of guy who could do it all. His grades were good, he was athletic, he was considerate, he had leadership qualities. He wasn’t outstandingly handsome, but he was good-looking in a clean-cut sort of way. He could even sing. A forceful speaker, he was always the one to mobilize opinion in our classroom discussions. This didn’t mean that he was much of an original thinker—but who expects originality in a classroom discussion? All we ever wanted was for it to be over as quickly as possible, and if he opened his mouth we were sure to be done on time. In that sense, you could say that he was a real friend.

There was no faulting him. But then again I could never begin to imagine what went on in his mind. Sometimes I felt like unscrewing his head and shaking it, just to see what kind of sound it would make. Still, he was very popular with the girls. Whenever he stood up to say something in class, all the girls would gaze at him admiringly. Any math problem they didn’t understand they’d take to him. He must have been twenty-seven times more popular than I was. He was just that kind of guy.

We all learn our share of lessons from the textbook of life, and one piece of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way is that you just have to accept that in any collective body there will be such types. Needless to say, though, I personally wasn’t too keen on his type. I guess I preferred, I don’t know, someone more flawed, someone with a more unusual presence. So in the course of an entire year in the same class I never once hung out with the guy. I doubt that I even spoke to him. The first time I ever had a proper conversation with him was during the summer vacation after my freshman year of college. We happened to be attending the same driving school, and we’d chat now and then, or have coffee together during the breaks. That driving school was such a bore that I’d have been happy to kill time with any acquaintance I ran into. I don’t remember much about our conversations; whatever we talked about, it left no impression, good or bad.

The other thing I remember about him is that he had a girlfriend. She was in a different class, and she was hands down the prettiest girl in the school. She got good grades, but she was also an athlete, and she was a leader—like him, she had the last word in every class discussion. The two of them were simply made for each other: Mr. and Miss Clean, like something out of a toothpaste commercial.

I’d see them around. Every lunch hour, they sat in a corner of the schoolyard, talking. After school, they rode the train home together, getting off at different stations. He was on the soccer team, and she was in the English-conversation club. When their extracurricular activities weren’t over at the same time, the one who finished first would go and study in the library. Any free time they had they spent together.

None of us—in my crowd—had anything against them. We didn’t make fun of them, we never gave them a hard time; in fact, we hardly paid any attention to them at all. They really didn’t give us much to speculate about. They were like the weather—just there, a physical fact. Inevitably, we spent our time talking about the things that interested us more: sex and rock and roll and Jean-Luc Godard films, political movements and Kenzaburo Oe novels, things like that. But especially sex.

O.K., we were ignorant and full of ourselves. We didn’t have a clue about life. But, for us, Mr. and Miss Clean existed only in their Clean world. Which probably means that the illusions we entertained back then and the illusions they embraced were, to some extent, interchangeable.

This is their story. It’s not a particularly happy story, nor, by this point in time, is it one with much of a moral. But no matter: it’s our story as much as theirs. Which, I guess, makes it a form of cultural history. Suitable material for me to collect and relate here—me, the insensitive folklorist.

He and I ran into each other in the Italian town of Lucca, in the Tuscan foothills. My wife and I were renting an apartment in Rome at the time, but she was back in Japan for a few weeks, and I was travelling around by train. From Venice to Verona to Mantua to Modena, then a short stopover in Lucca, a peaceful little town, with a restaurant on the outskirts that served wonderful mushroom dishes. By coincidence, he was staying at the same hotel I was.

Small world.

That evening, we dined together at the restaurant. Both of us were travelling alone; both of us were bored. The older you get, the less fun it is to travel by yourself. The scenery starts to seem less scenic; other people’s endless conversations are grating to your ears. You don’t bother to try out new restaurants, and the waits for trains seem endless. You look at your watch again and again, and you don’t even attempt to speak the language of the country you are travelling in. You close your eyes, and all that comes to mind are the mistakes of the past.

Perhaps that’s why he and I felt somehow relieved to see each other, just as we had at driving school. We took a table by the fireplace, ordered a quality rosso, and proceeded to eat our way through an antipasto of funghi trifolati, followed by fettuccine ai porcini and arrosto di tartufo bianco.

He had come to Lucca to buy furniture, he told me. He ran a trading firm that specialized in European furniture, and, of course, he was successful. He didn’t brag or anything, but I could tell at a glance that this man had the world in his hands. It was in the clothes he wore, in the way he talked, the way he carried himself. Success looked good on him, and, in a way, it was pleasing to see.

Initially, we talked about Italy. The unreliable train schedules, the inordinate amount of time devoted to meals. Then, I don’t remember what led up to it, but by the time the waiter brought a second bottle of wine he was already telling me his story, and I was commenting on it at appropriate intervals. I guess he’d been wanting to tell someone for a long time, but hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it. If it hadn’t been for the cozy restaurant and the bouquet of the ’83 Coltibuono, he might never have broached the subject. But talk he did.

"I always thought I was a boring person,” he said. “Even when I was little, I was boxed in. I saw fences all around me, and I was careful never to go beyond them. There were guidelines, like on a highway: take the right lane only for this exit, merge ahead, no passing. You just had to follow the signs and you’d get there. So that was how I did everything—I did it the right way—and, as a result, all the adults fussed over me and praised me. When I was young, I thought that everyone saw things the same way. But, sooner or later, I learned that that wasn’t the case.”

I held my wineglass toward the fire and gazed at it for a while.

“My whole life—or, at least, the first part of it—things went smoothly for me. I had no problems to speak of, but, on the other hand, did I have any notion of what it meant to be alive? I had no idea what I was doing, what I was after. I mean, I was good at math, I was good at English, I was good at sports. Straight flush. My folks patted me on the back, my teachers told me I had nothing to worry about. But what was it that I was really cut out for? What did I want to do with myself? Should I study law? Engineering? Should I go to medical school? Any of the above would have been fine. So I did what my parents and teachers told me to do and I majored in law at Tokyo University.”

He took another sip of wine. “Do you remember my girlfriend in high school?”

“Fujisawa something, wasn’t it?” I dredged my memory for her name. I wasn’t at all sure, but it came up correct.

He nodded. “That’s right, Yoshiko Fujisawa. Well, the same went for her. I could tell her everything I was feeling, and she understood. We could have gone on talking forever. It was . . . I mean, until I met her, I’d never had a friend I could really talk to.”

He and Yoshiko Fujisawa were such spiritual twins it was creepy. They were leaders. School superstars. They came from good homes, where their parents nevertheless didn’t really get along. The fathers had other women and didn’t always come home at night. The only thing that kept the parents from divorcing was what other people would think. The mothers ruled the households, and the children were pushed to be the best at whatever they did. Neither child could get close to anyone. They were both popular, but essentially friendless, and they didn’t understand why. Perhaps normal imperfect human beings simply preferred the company of other normal imperfect human beings.

They were always lonely, always on edge. But then, out of the blue, they met each other. They accepted each other. They fell in love. They felt completely at ease with each other, especially when they were alone together. They had so many secrets to share; they never tired of talking about their isolation, their insecurities, their dreams.

When it came to physical contact, they had their rules: never to take off their clothes, to touch each other only with their hands. Once a week, they’d spend the afternoon in one or the other’s bedroom. Both houses were quiet—absent father, mother out on errands. They allowed themselves ten or fifteen minutes of hectic groping before returning to their studies, chairs side by side at the desk. “O.K., enough of this, huh? Back to the books,” she’d say, straightening her skirt.

They both got good grades. Studying, for them, was no hardship at all, just second nature. They’d even race each other to solve math problems. “That was fun,” he’d say. Yes, it sounds stupid, but to them it was fun. Such fun as we flawed humans will likely never understand.

Yet somehow these relations didn’t entirely satisfy him. He felt as though something was missing. He wanted to sleep with her. He wanted to have sex. “Physical union” were the words he used. “I thought it would give us a more intimate understanding of each other,” he told me. “It just seemed like the most natural next step.”

She, however, didn’t agree. She pinched her lips together and gave a little shake of her head. “I like you and all, but I want to stay a virgin until I’m married,” she said. No matter how hard he tried to persuade her, she wouldn’t change her mind. “You know I like you,” she’d say. “Really and truly, I do. But that’s that, and this is different. I’m sorry, but just bear with me. Please. If you truly love me, can’t you let it go?”

“If that was how she wanted it,” he told me, “I had to respect her wishes. It wasn’t like she was asking for the impossible. I personally didn’t think virginity was such a big deal. I doubt I’d have cared whether the girl I married was a virgin or not. I’m no radical thinker, but that doesn’t make me a fundamentalist. I’m simply a realist. The important thing is for a man and a woman to know where they’re coming from, mutually. That’s what I thought. But she had an image of the life she wanted to live. And I put up with it. We went on petting, hands under our clothes—you know the kind of thing.”

“I believe so,” I said.

He blushed, then smiled. “It wasn’t so bad, as far as it went, but I couldn’t stop thinking about sex. To me, we were only halfway there. I wanted to be one with her. I wanted nothing covered up, nothing hidden. It was a matter of staking a claim. I needed some kind of sign. Sure, my sex drive was part of it, but it wasn’t just that. Never once in my life had I felt completely united with anything or anyone. I was always alone. Always cramped up inside that box. I wanted to free myself. I wanted to discover the real me. By sleeping with her, I thought I might be able to break out.”

He approached her with a plan. As soon as they finished college, he said, they could get married. If she wanted to get engaged, they could do that even sooner. It was no problem at all. She looked straight at him for a second. Then a smile floated across her face. A really lovely smile. She was clearly happy to hear those words from him. But, at the same time, it was a smile hedged with forbearance, with a faint hint of sadness. Not condescending, exactly, but not encouraging, either—at least, that’s what he sensed.

“It’s impossible,” she said. “You and I will never get married. I’m going to marry someone a little older than me, and you’re going to marry someone a little younger. That’s just how it goes. Women mature earlier than men, and they age faster, too. Even if we did get married right after college, it wouldn’t last. Anyway, we can’t keep going like this. You know I like you, more than I’ve ever liked anyone else. But that’s that, and this is this”—a pet phrase of hers, apparently. “We’re still in high school. We lead protected lives. The real world is a lot bigger and a lot more difficult. We have to prepare ourselves.”

He knew what she was trying to say. He was much more of a realist in his thinking, after all, than most boys of his generation. If he’d been told the same thing as a general proposition, he might well have agreed. But this was no general proposition; this concerned him very specifically.

“I don’t buy that,” he told her. “I love you and I want to be with you. I’m very clear on this. It’s very important to me. I don’t care if some things don’t hold up in the real world—honestly, this will. I love you that much. I’m crazy about you.”

She shook her head, as if to say, “It can’t be helped.” Then, stroking his hair, she asked, “Do you really think we know the first thing about love? Our love has never been tested. We’re still children, you and I.”

He was too disheartened to respond. Once again, he hadn’t been able to break down the walls that surrounded him, and he was only too aware of how powerless he was. I can’t do a damn thing, he thought. If things keep going like this, I’ll probably live out my whole life inside this box, year after pointless year.

The two of them stayed together until they graduated from high school. Rendezvousing in the library, studying together, petting under their clothes. She didn’t seem to think that there was anything wrong with this arrangement; in fact, she seemed almost to relish the incompleteness of it. While everyone else imagined that they—Mr. and Miss Clean—were enjoying an ideal youth, he alone was unconsoled.

Finally, in the springof 1967, he left for Tokyo University. She stayed in Kobe, where she enrolled at a very proper women’s college. It was a top-rated school among such institutions, but hardly a challenge for her. She could easily have got into Tokyo University, but she didn’t even sit for the entrance exams. To her mind, that kind of education was unnecessary. “I’m not looking for a career in the Ministry of Finance. I’m a girl—it’s different for me. You, you’re going to go far, but I’m just going to take it easy for these four years. An interlude, you know, a kind of rest stop. Because once I get married I won’t be having a career, now, will I?”

Her attitude disappointed him. He’d been hoping that the two of them would go to Tokyo together and reshape their relationship into something new. He urged her to rethink it, but she just shook her head.

The summer after his first year in college (the same summer that he and I met up at the driving school), he went home to Kobe, and they saw each other almost every day. She took him on long drives, and they petted, just like old times. But he couldn’t help noticing that something had begun to change between them. The change wasn’t drastic. In a way, things were a little too much the same. The way she talked, the way she dressed, her opinions—almost everything about her was as it had been before. But he no longer wanted to blend back into his old life. It was the law of dynamics: little by little, repetition after repetition, the two of them had fallen out of synch. And it wouldn’t have been so bad, if only he knew what direction he was veering in.

He had been lonely in Tokyo, still unable to make friends. The city was crowded and dirty, the food tasteless. He thought about her all the time. At night, he’d hole up in his room and write to her. She wrote back (albeit much less frequently), letters detailing her daily activities, which he read over and over; if it hadn’t been for those letters, he was sure he’d have gone mad. He took up smoking; he started drinking. Sometimes he even cut class.

How he had longed for the summer break, so that he could go home to Kobe! But now that he was there he was even more depressed. The funny thing was that he had been away for only three months. Why did everything suddenly seem so dusty, so lacklustre? The city he’d missed so much now looked run-down to him, just another self-absorbed provincial town. Making conversation with his mother was an ordeal. Going to the barbershop where he’d had his hair cut since he was a boy was a gloomy prospect. The waterfront where he walked the dog every day was a derelict tract of rubbish.

Even seeing her failed to boost his spirits. What the hell was wrong with him? Of course he still loved her, but that wasn’t enough. Passion can’t sustain itself forever. He had to play his hand, somehow, or the relationship would be suffocated into extinction.

He decided that he had to take the sex question out of the freezer and serve it up again. It was his last chance.

“These three months alone in Tokyo, I’ve thought of nothing but you. I really must be in love with you. No matter how far apart we are, my feelings are still the same. But while we’re apart I get so insecure. I have dark moods. You may not understand this, but I’ve never felt so alone in my life. I need to have a real bond with you, an assurance that no matter how far we are from each other we will always be solidly connected.”

She took a deep breath and kissed him. Ever so gently. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just can’t give you my virginity. This is this, and that is that. I would do anything for you, anything but that. If you truly love me, please don’t bring it up again.”

Once more, he tried the subject of marriage.

“There are two girls in my class who are engaged,” she told him, “but their fiancés already have real jobs. Marriage means responsibility.”

“I can take responsibility,” he said firmly. “I got into a good school, and I promise you I’ll get good grades. Any company, any government office would take me on. I’ll get a job anyplace you name. I can do anything if I put my mind to it. What on earth is the problem?”

She closed her eyes and rested her head against her seat and fell silent. “I’m scared,” she said after a while, then buried her face in her hands, sobbing. “Really scared. So scared I can’t help myself. I’m scared of living, of having to make a life. In a few years, I’ll have to go out into the real world, and it frightens me sick. Why can’t you understand that? Why must you torture me like this?”

He put his arms around her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “I’m here. Look at me, I’m scared, too, as scared as you are. But if you and I are together I know that we can make it. If we pool our strengths, there’s nothing to be scared of, nothing at all.”

She shook her head. “You just don’t understand. I’m a woman. I’m not like you. You don’t know a thing about it. Not a thing.”

Nothing he could say did any good. She just kept on crying. And then she said the strangest thing. “Listen, even if I break up with you, I’ll still remember you forever. Honestly. I’ll never forget. You know how much I like you. You’re the first person I’ve ever cared for, and it’s made me so happy just to be with you. Please understand. If it’s some kind of promise you want, I promise. I’ll sleep with you. But not now. After I’m married I’ll sleep with you. I promise.”

"What the hell was she saying? It boggled my mind,” he said, gazing at the glowing hearth. The waiter brought our primi piatti and added another log to the fire, sending out crackling sparks. The middle-aged couple at the next table were deliberating over the dessert menu. “I just couldn’t figure it out. I went home and her words kept playing over and over in my mind, but I simply could not follow her reasoning. Does it make any sense to you?”

“I guess she meant that she was going to stay a virgin until her wedding night, but once she was married and her virginity wasn’t an issue she’d be able to have an affair with you. Something like that.”

“Yeah, something along those lines. That’s the only way I could read it.”

“Unique, I’ll give her that. And logical, in a way.”

A mild smile played over his lips. “True enough. There was some logic to it.”

“A virgin bride, an adulterous wife. It’s like a classic French novel. But with no ballrooms or foot servants.”

“And yet to her that was the only realistic solution,” he said.

“Sad,” I said.

He shot me a penetrating look, then nodded slowly. “Yeah, sad. Pathetic, really. You hit the nail on the head,” he said. “By now I think so, too. I’ve done my share of growing older. But at the time, no, I couldn’t see it that way. I was still a kid, and totally in the dark about the little tremors that unsettle people’s minds. The whole thing came as such a surprise—it threw me for a loop.”

“I imagine it would,” I concurred.

Then, by tacit agreement, we both ate our tartufi.

"I guess you can see what’s coming,” he said after a while. “She and I broke up. Neither one of us came out and said anything. It just came to a natural end. Very peacefully. We just got tired of trying to keep the relationship going. As I saw it, her notions about life weren’t . . . How can I put it? Well, she didn’t come off as very sincere. No, that’s not right. What I mean is I knew she could do better. I was disappointed in her. Virginity, marriage—instead of agonizing over such conventional issues, she should have been trying for more out of life.”

“But that was beyond her,” I said.

He nodded. “I suppose,” he said, forking a meaty slice of mushroom to his mouth. “It happens. You lose resilience. There comes a point where you’re stretched to the limit, and you can’t go any further. The same thing could’ve happened to me. From childhood on, both of us had been herded along. Pushed and prodded—go forward, get ahead. It gets to where you’re so well trained, so conditioned, you can do only what you’re told to do. Until, one day, you just snap.”

“But you, how is it that you didn’t end up that way?” I asked.

“I got over it somehow,” he said after a moment’s thought. Then he set down his knife and fork, and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “After she and I broke up, I got a girlfriend in Tokyo. A nice girl. We lived together for a while. And, to tell the truth, there were none of the rumblings and jitters I’d had with Yoshiko Fujisawa. It was an honest relationship, and I really liked her. She taught me a lot about real human beings, and I also began to make friends. I took an interest in politics. I learned that realism can come in all shapes and sizes. The world is big enough for different values to coexist. There’s no universal need to be an honors student. And that’s how I found my footing in society.”

“And became successful.”

“Successful enough,” he said, with a slightly disgruntled sigh. Then, looking at me as he might at a co-conspirator, he said, “Compared with other people our age, I admit, my income level is higher, objectively speaking.” That’s all he would say.

But I knew that that wasn’t the end of the story, so I didn’t say anything. I just waited for him to go on.

“I didn’t see Yoshiko Fujisawa for a long time,” he resumed. “A really long time. I graduated from university and got a job at a trading firm. And I worked there for five years, part of it at an overseas posting. Every day was filled with work. I was incredibly busy. Two years after college, I heard, through her mother, that she’d got married, but I didn’t ask to whom. My first thought when I heard was, I wonder if she actually stayed a virgin until her wedding night. But then I felt a little sad. And a little sadder the next day. It was as if an era had come to an end, a door was closing behind me forever. Well, naturally. This was a girl I’d really and truly loved. We’d been sweethearts for four years, and I’d even thought about marriage. She was someone who figured that largely in my youth, so of course it made me sad. But, O.K., I really just hoped that she’d be happy. I wished her the best. I was—well, a little worried about her. She had her fragile side.”

The waiter cleared our plates, and we ordered coffee.

“I married relatively late, when I was thirty-two. So I was still single when I got a phone call from Yoshiko. I was twenty-eight. Which makes it just over ten years ago now. In the meantime, I’d quit the company I was working for and had gone independent. My father lent me the capital, and I formed my own little company. I saw astronomical market-growth potential for imported furniture, and I stepped right in. But, as with any startup, nothing went smoothly at first. Delivery delays, depleted stock, warehouse charges piling up, the bank breathing down my neck—to be honest, I ran myself down and I nearly lost hope. It was probably the most difficult time in my life. And right in the middle of it she calls. I have no idea how she got my number. It was eight at night when the phone rang. I recognized her voice immediately. That’s something you never forget. I felt a tinge of nostalgia—you bet I did. It just felt so good to hear an old girlfriend’s voice at a time like that.”

He looked long and hard at the fireplace, as if remembering. The restaurant had filled to capacity. People were talking and laughing at every table, utensils clattering, glasses tinkling.

“I don’t know who her informants were, but she was up to date on everything about me. I mean everything. She knew that I was still single and had been based overseas, that I’d quit my company and struck out on my own. She knew it all. ‘You’ll come through it, you’re the can-do guy. Just have confidence,’ she told me. I can’t tell you how happy it made me to hear such kind words. So then I asked about her. What sort of guy she’d married, whether they had kids, where they were living. Well, she didn’t have any children. Her husband was four years older than she, and worked in television. A director, she tells me. I say, ‘Sounds like he keeps busy.’‘He’s busy, all right, too busy to have kids,’ she says, then laughs. They lived in Tokyo, in a condo near Shinagawa. I was living in Shiroganedai. Not exactly neighbors, but close enough. ‘Strange how things work out, isn’t it?’ I say—you know, whatever. Well, we talked about all the usual things that former high-school sweethearts talk about under the circumstances. It felt a little strained and awkward, but nice over all. Like two old friends catching up on everything. We talked for what seemed like hours. Then, when there was nothing more for either of us to say, this silence comes over the line. A real . . . How to put it? A really dense silence. The kind that invites all sorts of thoughts.” He was focussing on his hands, folded on the tablecloth; then he looked up to meet my eyes. “I should have hung up then and there. ‘Thanks for calling, it’s been nice talking to you’—click, end of story. You see what I’m saying?”

“That would have been the most realistic thing to do,” I agreed.

“But she stays on the line. She invites me to her place. Like, ‘Why don’t you drop by? My husband’s away on business, and I’m bored all by myself.’ Well, I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything. So she doesn’t say anything. More silence. And then, do you know what she says? She says, ‘You know, I still remember the promise I made to you.’”

"You know, I still remember the promise I made to you.” At first, he claimed, he hadn’t known what she was talking about—he’d never once considered it a real promise. But when it did come back to him he had to think that it was just a slip of the tongue, that she must have been confused.

No, she wasn’t confused. To her, a promise was a promise.

For a moment, he lost sight of where all this was heading. What was the right thing to do? He looked around in desperation, but there were no walls around him, nothing to guide him anymore. Of course he wanted to sleep with her, that went without saying. Since their breakup, he’d imagined sleeping with her plenty of times. Even when he was seeing other women, his thoughts had found their way to her in the dark. Though he’d never seen her naked, he knew her body from the feel of it under her clothes.

He knew how risky it would be to sleep with her at this stage. He didn’t want to go stirring up what he’d so calmly left behind in the shadows of his past. Intuition told him that this was not something he should do. But of course he couldn’t refuse. Why should he refuse? It was a perfect fairy tale, a wish granted only once in a lifetime. She lived nearby, and she wanted to fulfill a promise made in the forests of the distant past.

He closed his eyes and couldn’t say anything. He’d lost the power of speech.

“Hello?” she said. “You there?”

“I’ll come right over,” he said. “Can you tell me your address?”

"What would you have done?” he asked me.

I shook my head. I never know how to answer such questions.

He laughed, and looked down at the coffee cup on the table. “I went to her place. I knocked on her door. In a way, I was hoping that she wouldn’t be at home. But she was there, all right, and as beautiful as ever. She poured us drinks, and we talked about the old days. We even listened to old records. Then what do you think happened?”

I had no idea. I told him I had no idea.

“When I was a kid, I read a children’s story.” He seemed to be addressing the far wall of the restaurant. “I forget the plot, but I still remember the last line. It went, ‘And, when it was all over, the King and his courtiers roared with laughter.’ Kind of a strange way to end a story, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would,” I said.

“I wish I could remember what the story was about. God knows I’ve tried. All I remember is that crazy last line: ‘And, when it was all over, the King and his courtiers roared with laughter.’ What the hell kind of story ends like that?”

By then we’d finished our coffee.

“We embraced,” he said, “but I didn’t sleep with her. She didn’t undress. We used our hands, just like old times. I thought it would be for the best. And she seemed to think so, too. We petted for a long, long time, without saying anything. What was there for us to say? That was the only way that we could really recognize each other after all those years. Back when we were in school, of course, it would have been different. Plain, ordinary, natural sex might have brought us to some kind of mutual understanding. And, just maybe, we could have been happy together. But we were long past that now. Those days were locked away, and no one could break the seal.”

He twirled his empty cup around on its saucer. He kept at it so long that the waiter came over to check on us. But that merely prompted him to return the cup to its original position and order another espresso.

“I stayed there maybe an hour, all told. Any more than that and I’d probably have gone out of my mind,” he said with a sly smile. “I said goodbye to her and left. She said goodbye, too, and this time it really was goodbye, once and for all. I knew it, and she knew it. The last I saw of her, she was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. She looked as if she were about to say something, but she didn’t. I knew what she would have said, in any case. I was exhausted . . . hollowed out, empty. I walked around aimlessly, feeling as if I’d wasted my whole life. I wished I could go back to her place and just screw her, long and hard. But I couldn’t bring myself to, nor would it have made anything any better.”

He shook his head. He drank his second espresso.

“It embarrasses me to say this, but I went straight out and got myself a hooker. First time in my life. And very likely the last.”

I looked at my own coffee cup and thought about what a standoffish jerk I must have been in the old days. I wanted to let him in on what I was thinking, but I doubted that I’d be able to find the right words.

“Telling the story like this, I feel like I’m talking about someone else,” he said with a chuckle, then fell silent.

“‘And, when it was all over, the King and his courtiers roared with laughter,’” he said, finally. “I always think of that sentence whenever I remember that time. Conditioned reflex, I guess. I don’t know what it is, but sadness always seems to contain some strange little joke.”

As I said at the beginning, there isn’t much here that you could call a moral. Nonetheless, it’s the story of his life, and it’s the story of all our lives. Which is why I couldn’t laugh when I heard it and why I still can’t.

(Translated, from the Japanese, by Alfred Birnbaum.)

2003-06-09T01:11:00.000-07:00

Another incidentally: I am annoyed that some people think this Persephone design is related to the Matrix Reloaded. It's not! Persephone in the Matrix is played by Monica Bellucci, a talented, intelligent woman who has been unfortunately typecast into a very narrow definition of English language acting. The real Persephone exists in Greek mythology as the wife of Hades, the King of the Underworld. She got stuck in the underworld because she accidentally ate a pomegranate. Interestingly, as a reference to the mythology, a plate of pomegranates is on the table in front of Persephone. If you look carefully you'll see it there, open and half eaten. The Wachowski brothers are definitely well-read!

As a design piece, I came up with this semi-dark, incredibly spiky design from an Italian modelling magazine, which explains the model who just so happens to look like Trinity after some computer manipulation (it was an accident, I thought she looked more like Enya at first) and decided to call it Persephone because she looked like one... well, in an atmospheric sort of way. (For the record though, I do not like Persephone in the movie.)

My new room is going to be white and black, with a Zen influence (the better to buy furniture with, my dear) and a New York sophisticated twist. Considerations which drove me to this very practical decision were mostly monetary: black glossy paint is cheap, white paint is even cheaper, everything black and everything white is incredibly friendly to my wallet. Not to mention that it would be so easy to modify the theme in future with a twist or colour or matching furniture. I've already got a black oak table which will become the centrepiece of my room, so everything (recycled) follows the oak table's leadership. I'm sure it'll look nice. And I'm sure in less than a month, I'm going to get sick of it and hang a green blanket on my wall as a drape.

2003-06-09T01:01:00.000-07:00

The following (very long posts) are excerpts from [no feminista statement] a defunct blog I am now deleting because it has no place else to go.

[3/22/2003 10:28:22 PM | Elaine Pang]

the time is now, something says. the time is now.

halfway across the world a child is slowly stirring from his slumber. his mother hurries to his room, pulls the blankets up closer around his neck, and strokes his cheek. she smiles down tenderly at the tousled hair of the young boy, and ponders for a moment about the world he is to inherit.

somewhere in the next continent, it is evening and warm light from a single desk lamp illuminates the upturned face of a girl no older than eighteen. she begins to ponder, suddenly, if the world will exist tomorrow, or be the same as she had always remembered, father, mother and sister gathering at the same table for dinners at eight.

the time is now, something says. the time is now.

if you believe it, things will become true, he says. and somewhere on the other side of the world, not even in the same hemisphere, i am believing that the young boy is sleeping, on the last day of peace, and she (her name is Francine and his David) will be writing an essay on political reform and democracy, not knowing a hideous irony.

the time now is two fifty five in a morning in autumn.
four fifty four in the evening for Francine in spring.
a clock reads seven fifty five in the morning in David's bedroom.

sometimes the things we know to be true cannot be verified until the moment has passed. but in this one instance, how connected are you to the truth?

my mind is flying. i don't know things to be real, but i wrote this and checked the clock. suddenly i realise that the time fits, perfectly, like the clicking of a second hand onto the first at the turn of an hour. i didn't expect this, my mind flying three places at once, not knowing a reality had just transpassed. i know it now, and the moment is over. the time was now, and will be now, is Now.

Here. and Now. the artist's inspiration.
we have yet to move beyond the simple deconstructed realisation of the complex simple notion of Time in the universal consciousness of our being.
why do we wear watches and keep clocks if they only tell us about things that are happening outside of us?

[3/22/2003 10:33:25 PM | Elaine Pang]

today is a remarkable day. i have to use the word remarkable, because there is hardly anything else like it.

0530:: i slept very little last night. probably had less than 3 hours of proper sleep, but this is becoming common place to me as i attempt to burn my life's candle out as fast as possible with little sleep and little food - the typical habits of a madrushworkaholicwithtoolittletimeandtoomuchtodo. i have completely filled the diary pages of two diaries with appointments and still have too many. am relying on memory and contemplating getting a third diary to put on my table. i seriously need to continue organising and reorganising my life.
0545:: have been tossing and turning since 5am last night. the storms are dreadful. or at least they sound like storms. enormous gusts of wind are sweeping through the city. my windows rattled, a shelf behind a closed cupboard door was knocked askew and continued to rattle at a predictable, regular rhythm, similar to the creaking of old floorboards of a haunted house. outside the storm rips through space with a fury i had not witnessed before, my walls, bed and floor begin to shake and i have a curious suspicion that one day, my 7th storey apartment might actually be blown down. "little pig little pig, sleeping little pig, come out come out or i'll blow your house down..." thinks my thoughts.
0700:: more tossing, and i can stand it no longer. i can almost feel the wind and its anger hurled against me, the howling as it tears with no chill air through the windows on the outside and inside of my room. i get up to close the windows and what assails my eyes is a red dawn. a very red dawn, almost tragic in its colouring, like the raw fresh stains of ... blood. "the sun rises with a red dawn," says legolas, "blood has been spilt this night." he tells me. i wonder briefly if a red dawn rises every day in the morning, and everyone has learnt to take it for granted, to think it natural. the sun rises red, they might think, that's just the way it is. i wonder then if elven lore is in fact true, that somewhere in the world, blood has been spilt almost every night, and stained the dawn, only that we are too oblivious, too cynical and too jaded to notice anymore. "the blood stains the sunrise, and the world is not at peace. but that's just the way it is, only natural. perhaps. i can almost feel the unrest, a dirty fog is in the air and a strange disconcerting feeling begins to sweep over me as i watch myself crawl back into bed, wishing for oblivion.

1100 ~ 0200:: the day passes uneventfully, marked only by natural phenomena. a roaring wind, a yellow fog, and a pervasive sense of guilt and dirt hanging in the air. i have no idea why. today i discussed robert cook's speech with jing, who asks for the transcript to be sent her. interesting. i didn't think anyone else was that interested in the war but it seems that the topic hangs unspoken on everybody's tongues, spoken only in relief and partial apprehension if someone happens to bring it up, unlocking the silence. a ridiculous tragic comedy is turning into a comic tragedy, and i can no longer tell which it was to begin with. the only words that come to mind, "a mistake".
0550:: sunset. it is yellow now, like a livid bruise. somehow, looking out of my eyes, it reeks of the sepia of sentimentality. it takes a conscious effort for me to remember that this is not the faded shade of memory, things are happening right here, right now. i am fighting the notion to remember this time as a faint resemblance of peace on the edge, the very verge of the destruction of everything i knew, took for granted, held dear, thought would last forever. even the window shows only the ghostly images of buildings, tainted by fog. why is it foggy and dusty today? nothing is burning. or perhaps, everything is. it happened this way with the bush fires as well, that sense of anguish, pity, the fog. but what is burning now?
0604:: everything is still drenched in yellow. denied me today is the clear sky of sunset. i suppose i am still harping along the same topic but this sense is surreal. seagulls are drifting not so far away from my window, and jonathan livingston is little more than a childhood memory. i feel blinded somewhat. it took me so long to come to this, working through the sleepy lethargy that my mind is engulfed in, to realise this. the sense i am having now is that of blindness. i imagine that somewhere else in the world, things are happening very clearly now, sharp and vividly right now in real time, and caught in this infantile sentimental wash of sepia, i am blind.

[3/22/2003 10:47:37 PM | Elaine Pang]

more war sentiments:

i am pleased to announce that i am not the only one who thinks the world is going to end. in my conversations, i have furthered my beliefs to maybe the possibility that the world is already past it's time, just that it's too stupid to know it -- much like an aging woman never knows how to call it quits with the wrinkle cream. given the current situations, talking fish, irresponsible, ridiculous war, bad weather and natural disasters, the wrinkling world theory seems to be gaining momentum as a newfound theory of our subsequent, impending disaster.

that said, i had considered briefly, and slightly more seriously this afternoon that i was going to impose a personal economic sanction on the united states by boycotting all american products and services. two things therefore stood in my way as major obstacles: firstly, the fact that if you extend the theory, i would also have to boycott UK and australian products, which would make living in australia a really difficult thing to do. secondly, as my roommate adroitly pointed out this morning, i had already eaten a small McChicken meal at McDonalds, taking my supremely sophisticated, highly effective, constructive moral standpoint and action back to the dark ages...

[3/26/2003 4:36:12 AM | Elaine Pang]

Read on the back of a toilet door (library/university/melbourne/australia) : "Invading for peace is as useful as fucking for virginity."

2003-06-09T00:51:00.000-07:00

Incidentally, Berkeley is not here yet but I accidentally mailed two very strange sounding emails to Robin Davidson (Haas Undergraduate EAP Coordinator) telling her that I will be arriving on august the 19th and living in I-house. Thing is, I emailed her using metaphoric@myrealbox.com instead of my old email address, and signed off (in habit) as Elaine. Now she doesn't know my new email address, or that I am called Elaine instead of Yiling Pang. *yuck* So I sent off another very apologetic email correcting my assumption of a MS Robin Davidson (took me 5 seconds after I posted it to realise the stupid name could go either way) and to identify myself. Yes, author of the weird email, me. I hope she doesn't think I'm a freak and a hopeless-as-hell person even before I get there (which she inevitably does right now, thanks to my mess-up)

On another note, I'm looking for one of those form-forum things that is so commonly observed on blogs. You know the thing: it allows people to post comments in a small tiny form at the corner of your page so people get to run a mini-forum on your blog while you're at it. If you know how to do it, please tell me. I hate being the only one writing and nobody else in the world is bitching about my life, Berkeley or my page. It helps to get a little conversation and life going.

2003-06-06T05:28:00.000-07:00

persephone looks on in despair. somewhere somehow, she loathes and loves the pretence.

so this is going to be the splash page for a while. i'm looking for a no pop-ups, no banners, reliable 10MB free webhost. if you find out, do let me know. in the meantime, this site is empty and as always, permanently under construction. i'm too much in love with webdesigning and graphic design to come up with any credible content, apparently.

my splash/main page is up at http://www.cynicsyndication.com as temporary webhosting for now before i can find someone else to leech on

2003-06-04T05:35:00.000-07:00

don't you realise how many people out there can write?

I've realised what it is that I envy and want from life. "life challenges us, we don't question life." says andre in his last lecture, and he is quite right. I shall remember that. And thus, a formal definition of what I am looking for: a quiet intensity that will last me to the end of my days in moments of serenity and in moments of chaos.

In a nutshell, that is what I seek and envy in others. And strangely enough, so far I've only found that serene intensity in one place on earth: Japan. Not merely in the frenetic bliss of urban decay, nor in the gentle elegance of traditional restraint. These pictures which paint the typical scene of a Japanese street do not come close to describing the energy that pulses like soft light in the people, the love, warmth and intensity that glows from these beings.

Is it in the culture, the voice or the thoughts of the Japanese that this pulse emanates? I wonder. Maybe I should pick up Japanese.

2003-06-03T22:21:00.000-07:00

I hate the way you make everything sound so simple

It's not. I resist the notion that things are that simple. That they boil down to the visceral vortex of lust, appetite and drive. They're not.

Simple things form complex meanings. Complex words and thoughts do not simply whittle down into the ordinary and the everyday. It is us who make the daily sacred, it is us who derive some complex aesthetic out of the falling of a leaf. I cannot take pictures anymore without seeing this divine. And yet when my pictures are developed, they contain nothing of the essence that I saw. They must have gone somewhere. But I know the "where" does not exist in my photograph. This gives me hope.

I hate the way you talk about relationships as a formulaic shift of choices and decisions formed on the basis of whether a variable is present or not. There is a reason why they call black-white, yes-no, one-zero binary variables "dummy variables", and I believe that. My life is a construct of mathematical algorithm on one hand, which frees me to make sure that it is not on the other.

I know what my life is about now. And I am certain that I am coming to a point where I will decide. If you do not fit into the picture of my life the way I know I want it to be, then you won't.

2003-06-03T22:16:00.000-07:00

let comradeship and fervent hope with one voice make us pray

in this depth of truth, i find the meaning of my salvation. For some strange reason, I wondered whether I would be underestimating you to think that you were only concerned right now in the pursuit of the very same superficial trappings I have been trying to see past. I used to think that it was because you had gotten everything else all settled: your spirituality, your questions, your idealism, your meaning of life. Then I realised that it was only arrogance that would think that way. There are two alternatives: either you have figured it out (what arrogance!) or you simply have no need for it because you live a life far simpler than that.

And so the have's meet the have not's somewhere in the junction.

Is our depth, meaning and spirituality only a luxury the rich can afford? Or is it the substance and meaning of every day life, that we imbue into the essences of breath, of food, of living?

Somewhere along the way I think you have forgotten what it was like to live and love. Somewhere along the way, I know I had forgotten, but now, seeing you, I think I remember.

2003-06-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be close to you soon.

And strangely enough she says I talk about you more passionately than I do someone else I'm supposed to talk about. How strange, only I know the truth of how I feel, and I know you are only imagination and reminscence. Which is probably why I can speak of you as I do, removing hatred, apathy, disgust, dislike and disdain. In our memories we strip away all that was ugly and old and all which we know we threw away, give it a new coat of paint, as they say, and turn it up as a beautiful relic of our past. This is sentimentalism. Because not one of us would care to admit that we have skeletons in our closets instead of pretty dresses. And so the past is given a good name and hung, like dirty linen whitewashed, out to dry.

2003-06-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

Chopin: Waltz in C#

So when you know and if you have an answer
Could you leave me a message at my door?
If not I hope it is not snowing tonight in Chicago
I doubt it, it being the beginning of summer.

And if you are vicariously living through reading
This and the many other things I have written,
Could you make it a point not to inflate your ego
By thinking I was writing about you?

It seems we spin around in circles
Like the snowflakes that fell when I fell
Face down into the snow angel of my youth
You picked me up by the hand, gloved no less.

If you were going to pick me up, why
Didn't you make sure you didn't let me down?
If you were going to read this, when
Would you make sure you wouldn't know?

2003-06-03T09:37:00.000-07:00

My lover and I trade pleasantries in the snow.
There is no better pursuit than to live life as a gentle game of go. I know we are pursuing the same things, you and your elegantly restrained ideals, me and my fiery passions and extremes that had not yet learnt to cool. You taught me the deep in you, and I reached in only to bubble forth in my typical exuberance. It seems I cannot learn to live with the elegance you are so comfortable with. This is me, my crudeness, my sheer lust for life, living with a vicariously visceral vengeance. This joy, this naivety is not youth. It is I speaking for a generation that has come to lose its voice.

My lover and I trade pleasantries in the snow. It is the only place our sorrows had not yet come to pass.

2003-06-03T05:17:00.000-07:00

Incidentally, yes. You can track my whereabouts, thought patterns, psychic energy flows through the timestamp on my blog. Yes I changed it to America-Los Angeles. Yes I hope Berkeley is close enough to LA to count as being in the same timezone (heaven forbid!) Yes I do sometimes stay awake at night and unless I end up talking about the guy I don't know next to me, one is to assume that I am alone, awake in my room and healthy. What with unholy early morning classes, I really doubt that would happen very often. And no, the guy next to me is not in a sordid position in my room (I am most probably in a lab).

First things to do in Berkeley:
Find my classrooms and wander around
Make use of cable connections
Dismiss all claims that Berkeley has a Sex Society (where did you pull that one out from?)
Make friends and go on camping trips
Utilize my newfound digital camera

2003-06-03T05:13:00.000-07:00

Suddenly it seems I'm not too fussy about web-design. Not that I ever was, but cheap, functional and low-maintanance seems to be the way to go with me. After all, it seems the most well-designed pages are mostly empty anyway, and so much for that. I'm not out to win an award, it's just a stupid page to update long-distance family and friends anyway. I hope the spacing meets everyone's eyesight requirements and btw, there is no way the font size can be increased. It's just not too fashionable. Gomenasai. You'll just have to wait until the trend to squeeze everything into one page despite a scroll button wears off.

Incidentally, I was at a website of a kenshin fan the other day. The webauthor was a 15 year old girl from Korea, and her web-design is award-winning, succinct, neat and downright fantastic. Makes you wonder about the days when you were like that and you couldn't even sell enough to keep your addictive hobby going. People like her should be hired, pulled out of conventional education and given jobs at web-design firms who definitely need these HTML-slaves to keep the industry going. She shouldn't be trying to sell paltry web-templates to keep a more than US$200 extra a year bandwidth problem from exploding. I could have given the excuse that when I started web-designing, there wasn't such a thing called Netscape, and Internet Explorer sounded like a dream when it was version 2.0. But now? Cripes, where are those handcuffs and whips for hostage situations like that?

2003-06-03T04:55:00.000-07:00

This is where the news from my exchange program is going to go. I'm not sure how long my paid-for website is going to last, so to be safe I'm trusting my thoughts to blogspot. Least all they do is put up a little innocuous, well-designed icon, not half a dozen popups and ads that insinuate themselves into your HTML coding.

:: news update ::

current status at berkeley: not arrived

estimated arrival date: august 19th 2003
estimated departure date: august 18th 2003
estimated city of departure: singapore
estimated city of arrival: san francisco
estimated address upon arrival: I-House, UCB
estimated arrival time: unknown
estimated emotion on arrival: excited, nervous, scared as hell and adrenaline is rushing