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.