Recent Acquisitions

The boots which I ordered arrived almost a month ago. And I only had time to collect them a fortnight. The boots were made of full grained leather, the soles were slip resistant and resistant to corrosion, and they come with non-metallic tech toes. As I left the shop, the salesperson was there to remind me again, aside from the fact that the boots will not set off metal detectors, that I am probably the first and only person in the country to own that pair of boots.

That feels good.

A week ago, my friend brought back a CD which I requested. It is titled "Three Cat Cookies" by Ho Chen Chen, a Taiwanese, a very talented one at that. I could not find it at Tower Records and many of the music stores which I went to.

Most of the salespeople could not help grinning when I told them that I was looking for "Thre Cat Cookies". I could be the only person in the country to own that CD again.

That feels good.

 
Time to Lose

In a Gamespot interview, Tomonobu Itagaki (the head ninja of Team Ninja) had some insightful words for the rest of the world.

TI: Well, let me tell you the misunderstanding of most other makers of fighting games. The most important thing for a fighting game is that it has to be fun, even when you lose. In other words, you know, if you win or lose, it needs to be fun.

So many have forgotten that losing can be fun too.

People have built their identities around their victories and their trophies. They speak as if a victory is something they can own. Perhaps in a zero sum game, trophies will matter. But life and meaning structures have never been a zero sum game.

Not many can understand that, in the face of worthy opponents, winning and losing is secondary. It is especially difficult for those not involved in competitive sports to understand that the joy actually lies in the struggle and the journey. Often, the meaning is in meeting worthy opponents and in overcoming or succumbing to them.

When two teams fighting for the last decisive point, tired to the bone, each unwilling to concede and the game dragged on for what seemed like an eternity.... at this point, no one can discount each other's pain, grit or skills, and no one can deny the kind of respect they hold within, no matter how much they would hate to lose.

So many of my worthy opponents are now my friends, and as opponents they remain. But allies, they are, to my greatest opponent: myself.

 
Cats and Equanimity

I still remember a scene from the movie Krull (now everyone knows how ancient I am) where the cyclops despite knowing his ultimate fate pursued it to the very end, which is to be crushed between two rock walls...

I wonder how that feels like... besides being painful.

A few cat lover friends told me that cats, even domestic ones, do not die in the house. Somewhat slightly more sensitive to their own mortality than human beings, as if in possession of the knowledge of their impending doom, they will usually disappear from the house and never return.

I guess cats, like old soldiers, do not die, they fade away...

I believe Buddha said that since death is certain and our time of death is unknown, there is no need to fear it, or to worry unnecessarily about it, or to make elaborate preparations for it.

But for a moment, let us assume that cats are slightly different. Being blessed or being cursed to be aware of the train they have to catch out of the material plane, or to be aware of an oncoming one that will take them from the material plane, they left the house in search of their demise, to meet their end and to fulfill their destiny.

I wonder how it feels like to leave a house, which is never theirs, or to abandon four walls that seek to suffocate the freigeist; or to desert a castle that is a poor substitute for safety of any sorts; or to escape a containment that provides security for one that does not need it; or to leave a spatial point of transit that one does not call home; even if in the leaving, one heads towards the end of the journey.... the end of the known.

Perhaps in leaving the house, they are once returning to their playgrounds since young, returning to the hunting grounds of their ancestors, it will mean having one's barefeet once again on the solid ground... it will perhaps be somewhat similar to the smell of the wet earth after rain... familiar yet, refreshing.

Perhaps to them, that would be home.

Perhaps for predators, anywhere with a sky above the head is home.

Perhaps for prey, anywhere with four walls is home.

I cannot answer for the world, but if I am to die, it will be at place where infinity lies above and below me...

... to remind me how little it all means, whatever it is.

 
Chamomile Tea

It is 100% caffeine free, the closest thing I can get to tea. And it is possibly equally good. I just bought a pack, thinking that the supposed calming effects would be good for me. I have been rather hostile lately.

I figure that before I unleash my sarcasm on the wrong person, I should do something about it.

Ingredients: Chamomile
Copyright and made exclusively by Celestial Seasonings
The Hain Celestial Group, Inc.
4600 Sleepytime Drive
Boulder, CO 80301-3292
USA

Sleepytime Drive?

It certainly sounds like a place I want to live in.

 
3 Sets to Exhaustion

I was complaining to M the other day that I am somewhat used to my back exercises and I no longer feel the soreness that accompanies my training sessions. He told me it was time I switch my exercises as I am no longer a beginner per se.

He had repeatedly told me that chin-ups are very important. And that people who reached a certain level of training, usually do chin-ups and dips before they start their regular gym sessions. He advocates 3 sets of chin-ups and dips, to exhaustion...

...as warm up.

He in fact told me that it would be "very good" if I have the discipline to do 3 sets of dips and chin-ups to exhaustion every morning. In fact, he told me that I should do chin-ups and as many push-ups, be it hundreds or thousands every morning.

Once in a while, I feel faint just talking to these people.

In any case, I was feeling really good on Saturday and so I did 3 sets of dips and chin-ups as warm-up. And the conclusion was as expected....

I was exhausted before I started my training.

I proceeded to do my usual back exercises, which included lateral pull, cable row and other machines which I have no name for. The result was was expected... pain.

For the next few days, I could be spotted leaving the men's room with a look of relief, holding a tube of muscle cream (which incidentally looks a little like hand cream)...

 
Humbled

I was reading on the Chaos Theory and realized that chaos does not arise from simply the infinite forces at work, it does not arise because we are unable to take into consideration all factors in play, it does not exist in the absence of our knowledge it does not arise at all, because it is inherent in the natural world.

Yes, it is inherent in our daily lives.

According to what I am reading, chaos will manifest itself even if there are only three objects orbiting one another in isolation. In other words, we are unable to predict the location of these objects in the future even if there are no other forces at work aside from the gravitational forces of these objects alone.

We are not even taking into consideration quantum uncertainty or the van der waals forces or the relativistic effect of gravity or even the expansion of the universe yet. This is because chaos does not simply arise in real life, it is also a mathematical entity.

It is indeed a humbling experience. Professing to be a child of the Enlightenment, I never expect nature to draw a line to where our understanding can go. If we cannot even predict with precision the future movements of three objects, I suddenly have doubts as to where we can go.

I am humbled, but hopefully not defeated....

 
A Reminder

A couple of weeks ago, an old friend reappeared on my contact list.

I am not going to pretend that I am not the least excited about this, because I am, for it seemed like years (and I think it has really been years) since we last chatted.

Even in this age of technology and interconnectedness, she is very much like a rare random encounter.

She has been studying in Melbourne since forever and only drops by Singapore with her family once in a long while. She is another one of those friends whom I have never met and it is quite possible that I never will; the kind of friends whom I already have quite a few.

And after years of silence, when I thought I would never get to chat with her again, she reappeared, on ICQ, the tool which we started out on, the only tool I have known her to be on, the tool which many forsaken for the spanking new MSN.

We did a little catching up throughout the next couple of days which she was online, after which she disappeared again. According to current trends, it will probably be months, if not years, till I will get to talk to her again. These are people whom you cannot forget, but yet cannot really contact. There is always this chance, and every meeting is by chance, which you cannot discount, that they will once again reappear in your life and that you will reappear in theirs. It is always this idea of "perhaps", that you will one day get to interact in cyberspace, a non-dimensional space that holds mutual memories.

It is because of this "perhaps" that they occupy a place in your future.

Hard as I tried but her first nicknames on MIRC eluded me and there is no chance that any remnants of her details would have remained on my computer, given that it has at least crashed 10 times in the past years.

So I checked up my Yahoo! addressbook, and there it was.

Nickname: AngelRain
Last Edited: 03 November 1998

 

In the absence of other reasonable alternatives, I caught Saving Face last week. It starred Joan Chen, among others, and therefore by Singapore standards, it is under the restricted, artistic category.

The plot is not something you have not heard of. There have been too many movies made about culture shocks and cultural differences. This one is no different, depicting the trials of a lesbian couple in traditional chinese families in America.

It has the ingredients of most of Mediacorp family drama; the authoritative, conservative, paternalistic figure, the young, lovestruck highflyers who are socially deviant, the maternal figure torn between the love of the child and her own standards of acceptability.

It is, once against, love against all sods; against all the dinosaurs that survived the meteor and not knowing that the world now belongs to the mammals, the warm blooded and the young. One of the protagonists is a young, female, geeky, doctor who came from a strict, conservative chinese family; not the usual computer nerd kind of geeky, but the kind of pleasant, nubile, bright-eyed, innocent kind of geeky that you see in Dirty Dancing, the kind that is begging for someone to deflower her by the fifth minute into the show.

I think Wilde once said that "Innocence is the best aphrodisac."

The other is an uber attractive ballet dancer who later got a place in a prestigious school of ballet in France, whose father happens to be the director of surgery and the direct reporting head of the first protagonist.

Talk about cliches....

Talk about stereotypes....

They have more cliches and stereotypes than Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. In the most expected manner, the liberal artist (once again, a dancer) brought out the courage out of her and the lesbian tendencies out of the closet. They proceeded to have a really sweet and romantic relationship peppered with thoughtful gestures that only teenagers freshly in love will do.

I wish they had more sex scenes.

Of course, there is a scene where one stood the other up due to an important event, work related, important event.

I wish they had more sex scenes.

If there is still anyone reading this post, I thank you for your patience. In short, it is just a horribly boring movie that is simply beyond redemption; a movie that should not have been made.

And I paid for it.

I wish they had more sex scenes.

While watching the movie, lesbian acts seemed almost natural. It is only in retrospect that I realized the problem with it. Face it, which male would have a problem watching two lithe, young bodies having lesbian sex?

But imagine two bodies sporting stretch marks, excess pounds, cellulite and freckles doing the same and 50% you might lose your appetite. Now imagine (my mind came short of other examples) Lydia Sum and the old Oprah Winfrey (the version 1.1, the original, upsized one) going at it like the cast of Hamtaro in heat.

90% of you would have lost your appetite.

Now, imagine them with facial hair and hermaphro...

Nevermind, you get my point.

The point is that the media has messed up our ideas of what is beautiful and what is not. It is as if everything should be poster perfect and aesthetically pleasing people gives more meaning to a meaningful act.

I believe Wilde did say that "life imitates art".

And reality becomes somewhat of a disappointment.

I know, because I am still coming to terms that not all girls look like those in Baywatch. It is hard living life looking at 99.9% of the population only to see their flaws and not their strengths. But it is the picture that media paints, the scene of normality that excludes all the common people, one that has every strand of hair in place, one that the sun is always in her hair, one that he does not have garlic breath when he mutters, "I love you." in your ear, one that he never has erectile dysfunction or performance anxiety when you first have sex....

But shit happens.

We cannot live in Hegelian hegemony that does not allow for flawed beings. Perhaps it is time we go back to our existentialist roots and to better understand ourselves, accept our flaws and learn to love ourselves more.

What really bothers me is that chinese film makers continue propagate the stereotypes of chineses, packaging them with attractive images, using the old formula for the sake of profits. It is all about chinese film makers using chineses to make a film for the non-chinese market, just as in The House of Flying Daggers.

I actually prefer the Warriors of Zu and the other crappy Hong Kong swordfighting movie, both of which I caught with ^dante... both of which he actually made extensive complaints about. But at least they had a more genuine feel than with The House of Flying Daggers.

Somehow The House of the Flying Daggers was a big budget production that failed terribly to capture the essence of the chinese swordfighting genre. It wanted to add a dash of aesthetics, a touch of sophistication and yet retain the ambience. Sadly, it turned out to be extravagant and artificial. There are many aspects of art, there are many kinds of art, but it is a fine line between fusing and bastardizing them. The movie experience was one that was inauthentic, leaving the asian audience as empty as when they walked into the theatre, and one cannot help but feel betrayed.

And I paid to watch that one too.

 
Where One Plus One Does Not Equal Two

I love the rain.

I love Sunday mornings.

rain + Sunday morning = me as an absolute monster.

Basketball usually starts at about nine. Being the main point of contact, I usually wake before half past eight to check on the weather. If there is a rain that lasts past a quarter to nine, I will usually have to tell the guys (about 6 - 8 of them) that the game is cancelled.

It all sounds pretty simple and straightforward, right?

It is not.

To decide whether to cancel a game, I need to understand where each is coming from, understand their usual arrival times and then plan who to call or consult first. Some lived far to the east or north and they might have set off earlier. Others, given their usual lack of punctuality, might not be awake yet.

Imagine me sending out the first SMS to cancel the game at a quarter to nine, to find out that most have already left their house, and to have the rain stopping five minutes after.

Now, imagine me flipping the bird at the heavens.

What should I do? Do I cancel the game or not?

Or imagine, I message one of my players at half past eight, to ask him about the rain. And he replied telling that the cloud cover in the north is darker than that in the south and the winds are blowing in the north easternly direction, and that the rain should be over soon. All these time I cannot see shit because I live on the second floor of a building surrounded by other buildings.

I have limited time to make the call; the faster I decide, the lesser the chance that the players have left their house.

Or imagine one in Thomson telling you that the rain has stopped, another in Sin Ming telling me that there is still a slight drizzle, and one living nearest to the court is still asleep. Or imagine me trying to determine what cloud it is that is bringing the rain and the kind of rain, and through all that, predict the likely duration of it.

Imagine doing all the above within 20 minutes of you waking and your mobile phone going kookie on you.

I usually have gym on Friday and Saturday nights and the last thing I want to do is to drag myself out of the bed on a Sunday morning to talk about the weather. No one deserves to wake up early on a Sunday morning aching all over, to be forced to make intelligent and informed decisions and be ethically responsible for so many others.

Even if the game is to go on, I have to coordinate disaster relief efforts. We need to get people to bring newspapers to dry the courts, and ensure that there is enough newspapers at that. There was a time, we actually bought a mop for the purpose and broke it on the same day.

After drying the court, I will be praying that the rain does not return.

I fell asleep at a friend's after gym last night and was rushing back home this morning in order to change and go for ball when it started raining. To make things worse, my mobile phone was flat and I was isolated from the rest of the world. The only other sentient creature was the cab driver.

He was hardly encouraging, predicting that the rain will last till late afternoon.

The game was later cancelled but the rain stopped and it got so hot you could fry an egg on the road at ten.

What was worse was that being totally insensitive to the frustration and the anger seething from his backseat, he gave me my change of two dollars ten cents in a two dollar note and two five cents. At that point of time, I felt like bashing his face in, in the manner of Irreversible with my umbrella.

I should really take things easy. All these frustration accumulated during the lunar seventh month and the monsoon season will kill me, or kill someone one day. It is time I look for another hobby which will be less of a test on my patience.

Maybe I will go organize line dances.

 
On Posting

I almost forgot how fun blogging can be.

If anyone noticed, I often have a few postings being published at the same time. I sometimes start an entry whenever a thought hits me and often, my muse desserts me before the end. It may take sometime before I will truly have time to conclude a piece.

So seldom is a product here a piece written on impulse, or a product of a moment.

They are products of passion, faded by time, tempered by events and fanned back to life by my every breath. While all efforts have been taken to give an accurate description of that moment of my life, I am certain that mistakes abound.

I am definitely more sentimental than what my writings show me to be.

 
Spectator Sport

I could not really sleep till 2am last night. Tons were going through my mind without a single theme, it was a simple collage, a series of random association.

Images of the earlier basketball game came to mind. Almost ten years back, someone remarked that I was pretty expressionless during basketball games, revealing neither excitement nor joy when I make my shots.

The shots, I forget; the passes, the steals and the blocks stay.

So, what really excites me about basketball?

I guess I like watching the game.

It is about watching and reading the slightest movements, the subtle signals, the strategies and the body language. Be it a block or steal, it is about thinking on and off your feet. And having your body keeping up with the brains.

And there are the memorable passes; the ones which were so very delicate and exquisite; the very ones which your heart stopped for. It is sheer precision, in step with your every breath, keeping in pace with the recipient's trajectory, getting the ball to be a hair's breath away from grasping fingers and into the hands of the one.

It is watching reality unfolding as you willed it to, in a moment so fragile that a single breath will shatter it. It is all about getting the ball to be slightly beyond everybody else's reach but one.

And there is that pair of eyes.

It is those eyes that tells you that there is a connection, an unspoken understanding that will start it all.

It is that look.

It is that glint which shines so brightly that the rest of the world becomes a mere shadow.

It is that silence.

An understanding in a complete vacuum; a connection made in a split second and two bodies dance to a tune which no one else can hear, complementing each other perfectly, one picking up where the other left off, to complete the final stanza to the poem, all of which started with a look.

It is not about whether points were scored, but about the split second when two minds were transparent, communicating at a level transcending thought.

Maybe all these sound incredulous and I sound mad, but do not take my word for it.

Try it.

I am a guy who sport myopia of at least four hundred degrees in each eye, compounded with astigmatism of over a hundred degrees in one... and I play without my glasses. I can hardly distinguish the facial features of my team mates standing within two feet, what can I possibly know about the look?

Play with me and find out then.

 
A Place Called Home

Quick steps, lightly treaded, gentle as a feather's touch, falling softly in the darkness. The mild breeze flitted through the night, weaving between the many shadows.

The day had been long. The night was still young.

I stood in the middle of the world, feeling my nerves calmed by the invading cold, feeling my senses extending into the distance, filling up the spaces betwen the stars.

The unknown sometimes offers a better consolation than the known.

The court slowly materialized as the mid autumn moon emerged from behind the cloud covers. There was a subtle sense of relief as familiarity greeted me. It is a new court, complete with fibreglass boards and retractable rims. I could feel every cell in my body stirring as I breathed it in, as I felt it beneath my feet, as I tasted it on my tongue...

Tired as I was, I knew that given a ball, I would be shooting hoops for the next hour, alone, and in the dark.

It has not been very different for the past 14 years...

But I did something today which I have seldom done. I cancelled my ball game this morning. And it still bugged me.

Absentee rate was unnaturally high today. Two of us were down with influenza, one felt obliged to help out at a wedding, another just left for the United Kingdoms, and one other had to take care of his wife...

Fourteen years and poor weather aside, I figured I have cancelled less than twenty games. Even if no one was playing, I would be shooting hoops alone or jogging or doing weights training in preparation for the next ball game.

We played through junior college, through army, through universities. I have dragged myself down to the courts having only 3 hours of sleep... there is no offseason, no rest period, no excuse.

Even after my kidney removal, I returned to the courts three months sporting an thirteen inch scar, that is, after weights training convinced me that the wound will not split easily.

I am not a natural athlete. And I still suck at the game.

But I like the person I am when I am on the courts. It is a feeling of defiance, defying reason, defying logic, defying gravity, defying age, defying pain, defying fatigue, defying resistance...

Voices get blocked out, every moment is a tug of war between instinct, reason, reaction and intellect. Decisions are made in a split second. The brain gives the direction. The body moves in harmony. The mind reads the changes. The muscles reacts accordingly.

Suddenly you are air borne.

You have two looks, one chance and half a second before it is all over.

The rest is history.

The rest will remain in the memory.

Standing on the court in the dim mid autumn moonlight, memories overwhelmed me; memories not of images and pictures, but memories built into the body, into the muscles, the nerves... preset configurations of physcial actions created by repeating the same motion hundreds of times in the past 14 years, memories stored in the very fabric of my physical being...

I could not help grinning as a strange thought surfaced.

Home is where the memories are, is it not?

 
Delivery

A healthy baby girl was delivered today. Both mother and child are safe. That is all that really mattered. I received a picture through my phone today and it was a mugshots of the girl fresh from the womb.

From what I can see, it bore certain resemblance to the parents.

And I suppose that is another thing to be thankful about.

I would love to be there to welcome the girl, but for her own sake, it is better that I wait. It might be Tuesday or Wednesday when I do get to see the girl.

These few posts about me getting all excited about a baby girl might sound a little out of character for me.

For anyone who remotely knows me, I am never big on family life. Being part of a family is probably more than enough for me. My mother nags too much, my father hardly utters a word, my brother frustrates me more than enough.... I cannot, for the life of me, imagine having membership to another family, let alone being in-charge of it, when this one (which actually is quite mild) is already too much to handle.

On a personal note, starting a family will be somewhat akin to a leisure activity or hobby, for I have mastered the ability to somewhat distant myself from the roles which I am supposed to play. Family life will be another facade of, a subsidiary to my overall social life, similar to roleplaying a character in the Sims.

In short, I can only do it when I have time, when I feel like it.

Family life requires a caring, nurturing, encouraging persona most of the time... or even just some of the time, a relatively low standard which I profess to still fall short of. I can be helpful, I can be generous, I can be relatively patient, but encouraging?

I pride myself on being on honest.

However, I figured that being an ideal family man, is not about being nurturing, caring or encouraging. It has everything to do with being consistent, and being predictable. If you are a good husband and father, that makes you a good and reliable father and husband. If you are a bad father and a wife beater, that makes you a reliable bad father and wife beater.

Being consistent makes you reliable, it makes you predictable, it gives them security. And a sense of security seems to mitigate most flaws.

But I cannot give that.

I cannot be consistently kind. That is impossible. It involves me going against my primary nature.

And I cannot be consistently wicked.

Surprised?

It is true.

I am incapable of being a caustic, nasty and wicked person all the time. There were times when I was too exhausted and too drained to be even sarcastic, or feeling too temperamental and more tempted to rave and rant than to take a verbal jab at someone's nuts...

These are times that I would just love to hide away.

I am one of those people you call toxic. Starting a family would be the equivalent of enrolling my next generation in lifetime therapy.

Strangers vex me, colleagues depress me, and I am to add family members?

You trying to get me killed?

 
Viral Flu

I am down with flu again. Body aches, chills, running nose... all these feel so familiar to me. This is the second time in two months that I am getting this. And I feel very sick.

This probably means that I might not be able to visit the baby girl anytime soon.

I feel very sick and very, very, very angry.

 
A New Hope

In a few days, my friend's wife is expected to deliver a baby girl. I cannot begin to say how excited I am. While I am not losing sleep over it, I am definitely affected. I have known this friend of mine for about 15 years... and this means the world to him. Whatever means the world to him, means the world to me.

 
In Celebration of the Spirit

In a recent mandarin singing competition, a visually handicapped contestant, due to overwhelming support by the public emerged the winner even though his competitors were arguably better and more suited to stardom.

It is interesting how much hype this competition has garnered, especially when whoever wins is not likely to end up rich and famous. There is simply no market here. And in the international mandarin music scene, seldom do you even see anyone last 3 years.

My mother was definitely rooting for him, I was just very much amused to see how the chain of events have unfolded. Whether he wins, is of no consequence to me. But I am really curious as to how far he can go.

Some think that it is a given that he will win, based on sympathy votes, I do think that he has a certain mass appeal. One cannot deny that while he does not have the charm or stage presence, his sincerity and his simplicity are endearing qualities. It is a like a breath of fresh air, and perhaps this is something that we need, something closer, something more akin to the unsophisticated us.

Perhaps he is to many others, a sign that if one puts one's mind and heart to it, one can succeed no matter how great the difficulties are. And can one be blind to what this means?

We are a society in need of a hero figure.

I laughed at the idea that our local idol cannot see; an idol so very representative of our general population. But our people are not so much looking for a symbol success as a symbol of hope, a symbol of hard work surmounting difficulties.

He might serve as an inspiration to those ladies and gentlemen who religiously pay homages to the Singapore Turf Clubs, or an inspiration to the local artists, or an inspiration to those fighting hard for the betterment of their lives...

And that probably includes all of us.

We are society that has forgotten to praise people for struggling....

 
Forgiveness

It is not something you cannot live without, but it is something good to have. About two months ago, about ten of us dropped by a japanese restaurant for a meal. Due to a series of miscommunication by a waitress, the food that arrived was not what we were expecting and several of my colleagues raised hell. The manager was called in, only after the poor waitress had been berated for over ten minutes. It must have seemed like an eternity to her.

After the dinner, I had a little chat with my colleagues about this. There is nothing complicated about the incident, and I felt that we had blown it out of proportions. If it is an honest mistake (and in this case, there is no way to prove otherwise) we either accept it, or we reject it outright. What point is there in making things already more difficult than it is?

Human beings make mistakes.

That is almost the defining feature; that is possibly the essence of being human. Some of us probably would not be here if not for parents screwing up and learning to live with their mistakes. There is probably a good lesson to learn from that.

Therefore, there was absolutely no need to make life difficult for the waitress.

Mistakes were made, wrongs were committed, from wherever the anger of being victimized arose, scolding would not have helped matters. I can conceive of scenarios where even though in full knowledge of the impotence of our actions, we can still be justified in going down fighting.

But this is not one of them.

There is no moral imperative to do so. There is no rational reason to do so. There is no guiding principle to do so.

“Customer is always right”

Being in customer service for years, experience tells me that the customers who say that are the ones who make things quite ugly for themselves.

By a twist of fate, I ended up in the same restaurant last night. And I took the opportunity to apologize the waitress. I had to recount the incident in its full, gory details before she can remember what happened. I think she has forgotten whatever happened.

Maybe she has forgotten all about the incident, maybe it was not even of significance to her, maybe she has walked on, maybe it did not matter to her whether I apologized, but I just felt that I had to do it.

I still do not know why I bothered to apologize, after all, I do not really care how the world perceives me. But I was seeking a closure, a way to walk away and I figured I want to end the chapter leaving it a better place.

I have done what I needed to do. But her job is far from finished.

She got our orders wrong three times last night.

 
Sonhood

It was past midnight when I opened my door, headed for the kitchen and found my father sitting alone in the living room popping medication. A newly acquired cough had woken him from his slumber.

There is a rather potent flu bug in the air. My brother, among many, many others, caught it sometime back and was unfit to work for days. It evolved into a racking cough that kept him up at night for weeks to come.

Somehow the sight of father coughing struck a cord.

What came as a common occurence should not have caused any response. But somehow, this is different. For a split second, I was at a lost. And it was followed by a sense of confusion as I tried decipher my feelings.

It plagued me for hours...

A distant object of perfection suddenly seemed so intimate and suddenly fragile. The facade of a seemingly indestructible, invincible figure for the past twenty eight years is suddenly shattered in an instant, leaving a vacuum impossible to fill. Somehow the father figure is no longer what it used to be. And if the father is no longer what it is, then what is the son?

If the father is no longer the father, the son cannot be the son.

I suddenly felt as if the ground that I stand had fell away.

All my achievements came relatively easy for me, or cost me relatively little. While I had worked hard for them, I never thought I deserve the things that I have now. I was feel grateful, blessed and lucky; grateful, but not enough.

Somehow I forgot that I should feel lucky and blessed to have my family.

In this culture of meritocracy, it is often so easy to forget the people or the things that had made all these possible. I forgot that whatever I have thought to be my personal achievements would never have been possible if had no roof over my head or food for my voracious appetite.

If ideal children are to be seen and not heard, I am not half as bad. I am seldom seen and seldom heard, since I am seldom home. And I have always hidden myself behind the role of a son taught to me since childhood.

Things are simpler that way. But nothing is the same anymore. And it is time to learn the duties of a son at adulthood.

I do not reckon it will be long before I step into his shoes to carry what he has shouldered for the past 40 years. And I am not confident if I can do the same. I am not sure I can perform as well, for in more ways than one, I am still finding my way around. I am not sure if I am ready.

But it is time to learn, and fast.

Things have changed, and things will.

But I am his son, and that will not.

Walking past him, trying my best to be nonchalant, I patted the cane chair that he was sitting on, and told him to rest and take care of himself.

Next time, I will pat him on his back.

 
On Organizing Dinner

Good food on quiet evenings at reasonable prices is quickly becoming a rarity, for restaurants which do not charge for their silence and serenity usually do not stay in operation for very long.

It is hard to plan dinner when all the joints you frequent have closed down.

Desperate times demand desperate measures. But should I cook, food poisoning will probably add a whole new dimension to farewell dinners.

 
Slowly and Surely....

The past will catch up with you. My ex girlfriend messaged me on ICQ last night. We began speaking a few months back, on the net and the phone. She has been back in Singapore for slightly for more a year and I am glad that things are turning out the way she desires them to be.

She is making plans to return to Australia, planning to get married in a couple of years, and (despite professing to understand the uncertainties in the way things can turn out) proceeds to, in her self-assured ways, work out the other details of her future.

She can see so much into tomorrow, while I am somewhat struggling to reside in the now of Zen, always falling a little short of the absolute calm as advertised on the books.

It is a little hard staying calm when you cannot forget about the past or ignore the future when yesterday is creeping up on you as you stare into the hell hole called tomorrow.

The conversations we had in the past two months left me with mixed feelings. Talking to an old friend is always wonderful, but I am struck by the familiar undertone to the conversations. She is always looking outwards, pursuing her definition of perfection. So am I. In my pursuit of excellence, I spare no efforts.

I guess the difference is that she is always looking out, high and far, while I look in, down and deep.

I would not say that I have found the answer, but I have discovered a semblance of stability when I look upon the ground I have planted my feet on. She still seemed unsure and unhappy. The joy of talking to her again has been mediated by the disappointment of discovering that perhaps things have not changed much in the past 5 years.

I wish I can tell her that no plan in the world can be a substitute for a good solid foundation. I wish I can tell her if looking outwards does not help, looking inwards might be a good idea.

But I think I know better than to try to change a person.

The seventh month of the lunar calendar is a time many are visited by apparitions, by phantoms, by fond memories of the dead and by nightmares of those still alive. There is no escape and there is no stopping them. I will just have to be at peace with the dead, some of whom I still miss dearly and I will have to learn to face up to those still alive.

So, even if there is a whole hoard of them, dead or alive, standing outside my door (as in many Resident Evil games) waiting to pounce on me once I open it, I guess it is good, very good.

It means I do not have to look for you one by one.

I am seeking closure to many things.

So welcome back, whoever you are...

 
Internet Limbo

Imagine....
a universe of chaos,
a dump for pent up emotions,
a collection of random inspirations,
a repository for snippets of memories,
an ocean of drifting thoughts,
a haven for lost souls,
an endless labyrinth of experiences,
a play of fate,
a consequence of choice,
and threads that link one to another, linking all together, the past, the present and the future....

Imagine.

The creators called it an experiment, ever so curious to see how it will turn out to be... a sentiment God might have when he created the world...

 
This is my first post after more than a year of silence, so the first few sentences have better be good. A "I am back." sounds pretty appropriate.

That somehow does not sound right.

But how can I be back when I was never away.

I was just out there, in real life, thinking, dreaming, reminiscing, experiencing, training, doing... although in absolute honesty, thinking has not been the main focus for the past few months. But as with this page, its readers were never far from my mind.

I cannot forget the people that I want to forget, how can I forget the people whom I do not want to forget?

Slowly, in the postings to come, I will share what has transpired in the past year. It is perhaps new to most that I have to admit to not being sure how I have changed in the past year, since I am always cool, collected and in control. There just has not been enough time for the long reflections that I need, and recently weariness has gotten the better of me and frustration and disappointment, which have been constant companions are expressing themselves through my short temper and my refusal to indulge in tomfoolery or poor humour of any sorts.

I am still in control, but my social skills are being sorely tested.

Perhaps another reason for not posting for the past one year is that I have been posting somewhere else. It is a place which can only be described as a sort of internet limbo, a plane of existence that does not really allow real, personal existence.

I do not know how to describe my feelings this moment as I am typing on this familiar page. One year has not been a long time, but at a point when I feel myself slipping into juvenile angst, adequate words come difficult... what the heck, forget the excessive ruminations and revel in the moment, let me just say...

I am back.