it tolls for thee (but evidently not for me)

This isn’t how holidays are meant to feel, but I guess there are caveats to every good thing, just as there are silver linings to every dark cloud. I haven’t had any time to myself all week, or time to trawl the Internet for handphone reviews (all the handphones are one of two things these days. There’re the iPhones and there’re the Non iPhones, hurtling neck to neck in the race for market share).

Dorian Gray was my best read all holiday. There’re certain extended passages whereby Wilde does nothing more than show off his classic brand of wit through unceasing repartee, which never ceases to be funny in the standard sense but which gets kinda tedious after a while – but the little segment about hypocrisy even in repentance spoke to me, worryingly enough. Can we ever trust ourselves to do something out of unadulterated goodwill or is there always something in the equation, even the warm fuzzy feeling one gets in doing something perceived as right?

But anyway – sorry guys I’ve neglected in the course of Orientating and Councilling. This too shall pass (like motion); in the meantime don’t judge. Those closest to me alone know how much I hate doing these things for the sake of filling out a line in my college record to-be. But the truth is we don’t always know our purpose from the onset, and we definitely won’t find it lolling around at home waiting for sitcoms to update themselves.

17 again

Yesterday is one of those days which will for quite some time be regarded with incredulity and xtreme disdain. But in my defence a New Year all-nighter at Clarke Quay is actually pretty short, in the right company and with the right conversation. probably the last stupid thing I’ll be doing in 2010 (hopefully) but thx anyway it was lovely <3

1) I managed to avoid getting beaten up. This is for the 4K guys who postulated last year that I’d be one of the first people to get beaten up in a rowdy crowd. My mouth doesn’t dribble insults anymore, or in any case I’ve learnt to disguise my racist comments as extremely bad sneezes

2) I didn’t touch any drink except Milo and coffee. I’m saving that for New Year 2011 because I’m a good boy

AVATAR 3D after that – am I just saying this because I slept through half the movie in intermittent extended blinks (and also started needing to pee pretty badly halfway in), or is this the most overrated movie ever? I mean come on, 162 minutes is way too long for what appears to be a video recording of the game Spore in action. Moreover, my bladder was extremely unrelenting. A commercial break was totally necessary.

Aliens making out also looks uncannily similar to humans making out. Is French kissing a universal concept, or have the little blue kids been watching too much Hollywood?

Action scenes also make me squirm with laboured inevitability: we all know the bad guy’s gonna die in the last 15 minutes, thereby reversing what had seemed to be an extremely logical victory, so there’s no point spending about 40 minutes on a furious fight scene. (The bad guy with white hair looks like Lt. Surge in Pokemon though, so I give them points for effort.)

I went home after that and had a sixteen hour snooze, nicely and exactly adequate for two nights of sleep – so here I am now, 9 hours into the 2nd day of 2010, none the wiser and still as irresponsible and culpable in every way. I’ve already broken the resolution about doing QT every day of the year, but who’s to say 2010 couldn’t start today? Yesterday felt more like an end than a beginning, and today feels like the true responsibility-inducing start.

2009 was a very mixed year, with regrets enough to counterbalance any high points. 2010 shan’t be perfect but with God’s grace it shan’t be another ambiguous year. I want to live it all and ride it through. It’s a scary year. By New Year 2011 I shall have done Orientation, taken my A levels (maybe even SAT Subject Tests), taken a course at SMU, graduated from the year-long Council experience, even applied to universities? I won’t correct all my wrongs overnight, even overyear – but I’ll give it a heck of a try.

Many things about tomorrow,
I don’t seem to understand;
But I know Who holds tomorrow,
And I know Who holds my hand.

I think I’ll start by buying a planner, I can’t remember what’s going on next week

wilbur tossing in his grave

Leaving for council retreat tomorrow! I hope it’s fun and not as reflective as other council meetings (we make mirrors look dull). I’ll be spending the last three days of the year in a Johor enclave, and after that there’ll be another three-day church thingamajig to catch and then orientation dry run – yes, I think it’s safe to conclude that the meat of the holidays are well behind me now. I haven’t done any decent work in weeks. I haven’t done any work in weeks. I might be speaking prematurely but this holiday has hence been rather productive.

There’s nothing better than feeling refreshingly stupid after an extended break from study. It allows you the luxury of summing up key study concepts in a few words or so. Feel free to use any of my definitions in essays without citation. (Preferably without.)

Kashmir – something extremely dangerous about India

differentiation - something you do between apples and oranges

GDP per capita - penis length of country

Hamlet - bite-sized pork chop

…and that’s how i met your mother

It’s actually Boxing Day (actually I only discovered a few years back that Boxing referred to Christmas boxes not, y’know, Muhammad Ali et al) but I thought I’d share something in the spirit of Christmas. It’s a blog frequently updated with micro-sermons, mostly pertaining to the promises of Christ (ie. pandering to Christians who like to hear only the good stuff) while remaining appealingly logical. (especially like this post about promises straight from the Word)

I’ve done a fair bit of (secular) introspective logicking in the past few posts so I should technically be quite familiar with the precepts of how to live life to the fullest and without inefficient wastage of time and emotion, but unfortunately life never quite works out that way. Any obstacles between me and a perfectly satisfying life is wrought of a material only God can rend into manageable pieces, and nothing else can do anything significant with them. This doesn’t mean that I cannot and should not put in any effort in overcoming these obstacles, but it does mean that anything I do with anything other than the correct motives and correct source of strength will necessarily be futile.

I have unfortunately learnt this the harder way – empirically. Let’s just assume that I am a complete train wreck of a person, and any outward manifestation of this barely begins to scrape the surface. Complete train wrecks cannot unwreck themselves since they are by definition train wrecks – unable to do anything except probably catch sporadic whiffs of the problem. Anything they do to try ameliorate the situation would hence tap on their trainwrecked skill sets and moral/social consciousness, and chances are that their efforts end up counterproductive. Since our inherent personality cannot be divorced from our reactions to problems and circumstances, our lives seem destined to be caught in positive feedback loops – virtuous or vicious cycles, depending. It’s like a poverty trap – someone poor in spirit will, under this logic, never make as much good of a given situation than someone rich in spirit, despite the fact that he needs more good than the rich-spirited dude does.

If that is the case, it would appear that everyone’s starting position matters infinitely. To many people it certainly does matter considerably. Yet I think God alone supplies the grace we need to break out of the positive feedback loop. To respond to any circumstance with a spirit greater than our own – this is both a commission and a promise from God. This is the underlying theme binding the Bible together – you can’t sincerely believe in the superiority of 300 warriors over tens of thousands of enemy troops, without an supernaturally enlarged spirit [Gideon]; neither can you naturally win souls for the same Jesus you persecuted and tried to put to death, without receiving a breakthrough [Paul]. All the same, it is all the more real in the New Testament. I hate to break into a three-point sermon here (though today’s Christmas sermon was good stuff so I’m borrowing liberally from it), but Jesus drew a crucial link between God and Man, being both at the same time. Through His death – through His very existence – we can ask freely and with confidence from God. Because Jesus so proclaimed, God v3 (ie. Holy Ghost) can reside in us, giving us that spiritual boost simultaneously from us and not from us.

To cut the spiel short, here’s my Christmas muse: there’s only ever one way to be more than equal to yourself.

weathered tarmac

I AM BACK – and I don’t know where to begin

(photos will surface eventually, in a Live Feed Flood to end all Live Feed Floods. start building an ark or tinker with your feed settings~)

You know, I’ve been thinking about it and I realised that the sole great leveller in life is Expectation. No one can argue with it; it’s naturally determined and adjusted (like a sort of equilibrium), and it niftily explains why the best people in life can easily fail to be as happy as the people at the bottom, despite their being inferior in all the ways that should matter. So it doesn’t matter where exactly you are on the ladder, only where you are relative to before. And that’s not a good or a bad thing – it’s just a thing. Expectation sets a bar that reality is necessarily centered upon, but the truth is that the bar is only cleared roughly half the time. They say men are equal in death, but surely men are more equal in life than we suppose! additionally burdened by the results of the people immediately inferior and superior to us, subject to consequences consistently proportional to our personal stature.

gay fish

Something possessed me (ooh, paranormal~) to open the drawer in my desk and rifle through the letters and cards I’ve deemed worthy of keeping over the years. These were mostly restricted to the very recent past, but already I found it hard to relate. Just last year I was babied by my same-sex class that was 4K; just last year I was touched by a very special effort to make my sweet sixteenth sweet. This year I’m hurled into the deep end like the rest of us and already I’m finding it hard to float. The same friends I’d sworn as brudders4lyfe (in not quite the same terms but essentially identical in meaning and effusion) I know acknowledge politely with little waves or nods of the head.

There is value in the printed missive that someone too used to SMSes and MSN can never begin to comprehend. Even emails recede into the bowels of your 7gb inbox with the natural ebb and flow of inboxes; SMSes are even more temporary, their existence bound and limited by arbitrary inbox capacities. The tactile and material nature of a letter, or a card, is therefore much welcomed in a world of byte-sized messages girdled by word- and character-limits (tweet tweet?). It also means that the feeling embedded in the message is immortalised, regardless of any present circumstance to the contrary. Because there was effort and discernment in writing a particular card or note, these will be made evident for the entirety of the card/note’s existence.

In my life I’ve been blessed with many friends who’ve given me much more than I could ever hope to repay. I’ve had a party thrown for me, a giant handsewn doll, many unguarded and generous prayers and prophecies, or maybe the mere gifts of time and company which I value more than most other presents. Sometimes I deem myself lonely, but then when I consider the effort (or lack thereof) I put into relationships of any sort, I realise that I could never have been less alone, and the Lord’s providence is such that I have never truly been “in want”.

As aforementioned, I see that some of my benefactors are irrevocably estranged from myself and that I can never hope to repay the debts I owe without first facing up to several extremely awkward and painful barriers (which I’m too pussy to be capable of doing so in every single circumstance), so the one thing I can do is to pay it forward – I shall tell the friends I still have how much they mean to me, and hopefully I’ll be able to do something nice for them this season. I used to be afraid of giving unreciprocated gifts or notes but reciprocity should be of secondary concern  if our intentions are pure. There’s no shame in giving someone something and not receiving something in return. Friendship is occasionally a wondrous simultaneous convergence of souls, but it needn’t be and it rarely is. Sometimes you’ve got to chip away at it, slowly and artlessly.

I hope you liked this post. It’s slightly faggier than average but I mean every word. So, time to stop pretending that the friendships that have mildewed and mouldied don’t matter anymore! There is the amplified risk of rejection that comes with effort, but there is also something very admirable about people taking this risk. It’s almost like watching an obese guy stuffing himself with Big Macs, knowing that he’ll meet an inevitable greasy end but still respecting his foolhardiness – except it’s far more respectable.

mood: apathetic

Damn sick of SATs. It’s without a doubt the least appetising test I have ever encountered, and I happen to be a two-time sitter of O Level Higher Mother Tongue. The format is forbiddingly unwavering across practices, so on Saturday morning I’ll have the dreadful feeling that I’ve seen it all before. Except I probably won’t get to snack on Kinder Bueno during bouts of Critical Reading, or check my email in between tedious sections.

Very consoling, then, that at least studying for a test means that I’m temporarily pardoned from grappling with personality flaws, or shit like that. For two more days I’ll be in the land of shaded ovals, so gtfo conscience

ur tummy is shingz

Moving away from the weighty intellectual stuff of the last post, an 8-minute video to end the day (some vulgarity). No pseudo-witty commentary from me needed, she seems to cope damn fine on her own.

please use this in your essays

Some of you may remember my mini-series of posts intended to help students weak in Economics, given my immense humility and sheer willingness to help others in the world who are not as clever or handsome as I am. Today we shall be looking at a deviant form of consumption and learning how to hit L3 (analysis of theory) in essays.

Inconspicuous Consumption refers to the surreptitious purchase or consumption of a particularly embarrassing good or service. Quantity demanded is hence not responsive to upward or downward movement in prices, but is dependent on The Number of People in the Store. Examples include condoms, Viagra and Instant Syphillis Remover – Just Add Water.

Analysis
One can easily see how troublesome inconspicuous consumption goods are to the government in shaping economic policy. You can affect the price of a good by imposing taxes or subsidies, but you can’t change the number of people in a store. Policy options are thus very limited on the supply-side, so what the government should be looking at should be to affect demand using a string of advertising campaigns. These will seek to let the consumer know that purchase of these goods should not affect their self-perception or social standing in any way, eg. email campaigns such as “Gonorrhea is but a state of mind” or “More Viagra doesn’t mean less man!”

57% goes a long way

“This fresh cake with original goodness and flavor that something delicious for everything and sweets make a very special.” Exactly. Now why can’t I phrase my thoughts better than a cake box with broken English and no discernible logic at all?

One of the lonelier birthdays in recent history – no class staking out in my bedroom; no non-familial Facebook wallposts, which proves my hypothesis that anyone who doesn’t have his birthday up on his profile for all to see has a great chance of finding out that not too many people remember after all; and where are the noisy bustling sisters when you finally want them around? – but also one of the loveliest. I wouldn’t have spent my day any other way or in any other company.

i hope you don’t mind
i hope you don’t mind
that i put down in words
how wonderful life is while you’re in the world

Life chugs on relentlessly but the pumpkin wasn’t only ever just a pumpkin. If only I had been more effusive. But ah well, sometimes the silences fill in the pauses in our breaths. Sometimes the bells chime in sync with our unsung tunes, that we may be represented in our inactivity, and even for it.