"Do Us Proud"

That was what my boss said to me weeks back, when he told me that I will be moving to another department. He said that my previous two bosses and my director has pushed hard for me to get this position, so I must not let them or the department down.

During a dinner on Monday, my director told me that my bosses (three of them including one who was here for less than half a year) had positive feedback about me and have been planning my career for the longest time. Throughout, I was unaware.

Planning for the longest time... I guess that is because I was too good to let go, but too caustic and abrasive to fit into a normal group.

Their plan somehow left out a significant pay increment.

My future boss (effective first next year) told me that the team is excited to have me on the team and are extremely curious as to who I am.

When I met my immediate superior (effective first next year) for the very first time, she told me that I am coming in with extremely high recommendations. She said that my boss is expecting me to contribute in many areas, areas she believed to be my competency, areas which I myself, am unaware that I am competent in.

People have been telling me that I should take things easy and give myself time to learn, but they are not aware of anything that I have just mentioned. They are not aware that this new job is not a new beginning. It is another stage where I am expected to deliver the results that I have been delivering for the past two years, results which I sacrificed so much, perhaps too much for.

Is it time to create the future again? Is it time to grow into their expectations again?

I do not know. I grew up with a thousand expectations of me and I grew with every one of them.

And I am tired....

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.


But I have promises to keep,



And miles to go before I sleep,





And miles to go before I sleep.

 
Fear and Trembling

After a seven-month hiatus, I am back.

Seven months is a long time. Some have fallen in love and got married in the past seven months. Some have fallen out of love. In the same span of time, some have quitted their jobs, some have found new ones. So many changes have taken place, yet strangely... so much remains the same.

During this time, I have experienced, possibly with the exception of hatred, the full range of emotions during these months as well: fear; love; anger; insecurity; frustration; joy; angst; sadness; and so much more. I think we call that volatile cocktail: confusion.

I had to dig deep into that reserve of my being to find, in the arrogance that I am alive, the calm that I need.

I do not have the luxury of being dead, so I have to be grateful that I am alive then. Being dead, being the dust in the winds, being the air that others breathe, you have the excuse to be nonchalant.... being alive, it is your Existence overshadowing mere existence, you take refuge that your future is yours to create and that reality is yours to work. You own your future.

And I suppose that, is both beautiful and scary.

There is so much uncertainty in the air, that you wonder whether you can even claim with confidence that you can own any one future, or for that matter, any one past. Aside from the fact that we are all slipping inexorably towards dementia, or unconsciously employing ever more selective perception, some of us were never masters of our own fate or reality.

There are many changes happening in my life... but until they materialize, I guess I will not blog about them.

It must have been ten years ago when I told my primary school classmate, then already my secondary classmate, I want to be in control of my own fate. And he said that we will always be.

I did not know why I said what I said then… he is presently one happy guy, but I wonder if he still believes in what he said then... aside from God, that is.

 
Belt

I was lifting a pair of 50 lbs dumb bells the sometime back for my seated dumb bell shoulder press when I felt myself losing balance and my lower back shifting to restore equilibrium. That was a lapse of a focus there. For a moment, I really thought that I might sprain something, or rather I thought I might injure my lower back. Thankfully, I am unable to lift heavier weights...

Within a fortnight, I got a weight lifting belt.

I guess once in a while, we forgot we are flesh and blood.

 
Raffles Place

Having worked at Raffles Place for a couple of years before, I find it rather lacking in terms of a soul. It often seemed more like a point of transit than a place that you can say that you intimately belong to. The monolithic structures, the shiny glass windows, the immaculate lobbies, the pristine walkways all marked the lack of life in the heart of finance and commerce. There is simply not enough mess, flaws or mistakes to mark the sign of human engineering.

It was only when night falls that there will be signs of life. On my way home from my work outs, I used to see groups of cyclists practising their stunts and tricks on the long walkways and along the low stone ledges. Once in a while, there will be a couple of others juggling wine bottles, or at least trying to do so. These are people possessed, perspiring and bleeding in the name of passion. These are the people who on weekends, sacrifices their sleep to perfect their craft. Passion and sacrifice is to duty and obligation as night is to day, just as these cyclists are to the paper pushers who shuffle through during the day.

But recently, they had workers cut ridges into the ledges and between the stone slabs, inserted small pieces of metal plates which protrudes out just a little. The purpose of this, no doubt is to keep the cyclists and skateboarders away as they can no long slide along or skate on the ledges.

Sometimes I wonder if these foreign labourers are cursing their luck for being paid the insignificant to do the unnecessary for the incompetent.

I should have expected the town council to do something like this, although I was expecting them to mobilize the riot police. If these people performed at Chingay or national day, they would be called performers or even artists. If they practice anywhere else, they are public nuisance. And as with all public nuisances, they do not belong in Raffles Place, unless they are employed by the government.

Furthermore, the stone slabs have been coated with a thin layer of vinyl finish, giving them a wet, glossy look, a move that I might have applauded if the coating had been done in a dust free environment and if the the finish does not feel sticky to the touch. When it was first started, everyone hesitated to sit down, thinking that slabs might be wet.

It reminds me of the days in the camp, when during inspection, tyres have to be coated with shoe polish to ensure they looked relatively new, when jerry cans have to be coated with green paint to give an illusion that they are well maintained...

And now, stone seats have to be coated with vinyl, for what ends? To prevent corrosion?

I think they should stop promoting ex-army personnels to positions in statutory boards.

It is probably a not a good idea...

 
Wondering

I wonder if you remember how the grass feels beneath your bare feet, between your every toe, feeling so natural. I wonder if you remember how the smell of wet soil lightens your heavy burdens. I wonder if you remember tasting the wind on the tip of your tongue, as it brushes the fields with its gentle hands. I wonder if you remember hearing the soft whistling of the field accompanying the beating of your solitary heart. I wonder if you remember the sight of grasshoppers jumping away with your every step, like green sparks among the blades.

I wonder if you miss the times when all your senses come alive.

I wonder if you wonder where all that went.

I wonder if you noticed that everything is still there. (except maybe the grasshoppers, I think they have planted some genetically modified grass that deters some insects)

So, just what has changed?

 
Life Used to be Better

This is inspired by Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. I know this is an old game, I know it has been available since 2002, I know you played it and I know I should have played it years back, but I did not. So enough of the smirking already...

This is inspired by the unappreciated peasants, peons, wisps and acolytes in the game. I remember a time when peasants stand idle after they have finished their deforestation, construction, mining, repairs or other duties which peasants do. I remember a time when a peasant can be left standing nearby, doing nothing, or sit around and watch as the critters crawl by, or maybe screw a passing sheep or two when the player is not watching...

But happy days are now over...

With the new improved system, no idle peasant or peon will escaped unnoticed. Whenever a peasant or peon is left idle, the bottom left corner will show a small icon with a number to tell the player how many units are actually just standing around getting a free suntan, taking up the RAM in your computer. Click on it and it will bring the player to the location of the peasants' and peons' inactivity.

Before long, these cogs that are not turning will find unwarranted attention being showered upon them, with instructions from higher powers demanding that new tasks be completed. A finger of light will point the way. Apparently, there is no free lunch in the world, not even for pixelated existences. There will be no one left without work, no one standing around doing nothing, no one not working to justify their continued wellbeing.

In the game, this feature has been used for resource maximization.

From the frequency of the shining fingers I have been seeing, my boss probably has the same thing similar installed on her computer, the only exception is that she is using all ten of her fingers (including thumbs) instead of just one.

Life used to be better...

 
Unlearning

This word usually occurs only in movies or maybe religious texts... and no one really knows what it means. I think we have to differentiate it from amnesia or forgetting what we have learnt. Perhaps it is to be understood as a characteristic of our minds or of the nature of truth. Truth is supposed to describe reality, and as we grow, often we have to refine our description or understanding to better fit the picture we see. And until the day we arrive at the ultimate truth, if the day ever comes, we will always be learning, unlearning and refining our realities.

An example would be newtonian physics that is replaced theories of relativity, which is later to be complimented with quantum mechanics. In science and in life, our own rules neither apply to the very large or the very small...

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. "
Henry David Thoreau

Growth boils down to learning that truths are often temporary and sometimes necessary so. It is to impose order on our universes, to stablize the grounds beneath our feet before leaping into the next unknown. I have described it as akin to moths flitting between lamp posts, pausing at the light long enough to recover one's breath before heading out through the large expanse of darkness for the next light.

It is like living your entire life believing that the total of the internal angles of a triangle will always add up to a hundred and eighty degrees... and having your world turned upside down when you learnt about non-Euclidean geometry.

It is always a tiring journey.

And some will never leave their comfort zones... but many will. Growing up sometimes is not a choice, although we wonder if it should ever be. Of late, due to certain unsolicited comments, I have been asking if I have grown too arrogant, so much so that I am not able to see with the clarity that people appreciated me for, whether I have failed to move on to the next plane of understanding....

And the answer is that I do not know.

What am I supposed to say to whether my mind is open, or whether I can see things which in my arrogance, I may not be able to see? What can anyone say?

People see me as a person full of paradoxes, someone with unyielding principles; yet someone flexible enough to accomodate deviant ideas, someone with uncompromising standards; yet someone who does not care enough, someone who lashes out with vicious ferocity; yet someone who is quite often forgiving.

Yes, I am an existentialist. I am supposed to be full of paradoxes.

And yes, they do not know me enough.

So is my vision still clear? Is my sight still untainted? Is my mind still unclouded?

Of these, I cannot be sure and I am not sure if many know me well enough to comment with any conviction. I cannot be sure, and I am not sure if I can ever be, but I shall live, breathe, die by the following words.

"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself."
Henry Ward Beecher

 
Yet He Remembered

I took quite a while to come up with the title of this post, because I am not sure of how I feel or how I should feel...

After months of planning and having plans destroyed by the interruptions of work and sheer laziness, I finally dropped by campus on Saturday, and quite a bit has changed, some portions are almost beyond recognition.

It is really the same with the rest of this country. No one can really drive for 15 minutes without seeing some construction, renovation or replacement taking place. It is always in some process of renewal; trapped and trapping ourselves in a flux, washing us along, struggling to keep itself abreast of the times...

Here, there is nothing to really remind us that this place is home or that it is really alive except for the constant change around us; faceless people are always playing musical chairs in different lives, leaving little for the mind to cling onto, somewhat resembling background static, incoherent and droning monotonously on...

I guess this is a place that we can regularly get lost and feel lost... and there is really little that we can hold on to except for this strange sense of loss and a subtle longing for some things that we cannot really remember.

It is a profound experience actually, feeling a sense of loss for something you constantly wonder if you ever really had experienced... akin to gradual amnesia, perhaps reminisent of Parkinson's. I returned as I had in the past five years, hoping to find a friend there, but he had left. And with his leaving, most memories of me that resides in the campus should be swept away as well.

At least that is what I thought, until the drinks seller remarked that it has been a long time since I visited.

He went on to ask if I am still involved in logistics. I remembered him, but it was a shock that he remembered me, despite serving hundreds of new faces everyday and thousands of new faces every year. My visits to the campus were always to look for another, and when I did speak to this store holder, it was never more than the usual polite chat... yet he remembered.

What can I say?

I spoke little to him because he is often critical and cynical about the campus management, but are we all not equally frustrated? And what we spoke about, does not differ much from year after year. And I should be nothing more than the person that appears once in a long while for a quick chat about nothing much... nothing more.

Yet, he remembered.

Often as we drift through our lives, we may desire anonymity, sometimes a silent passing, or perhaps, solitude... but I guess we can never be sure in whose hearts we leave our footsteps. So while progress beckons, it may not a bad idea to retrace one's steps once in a while to find out if there are memories waiting to be revisited.

 
Manufactured Identity

You do not make a fashion statement by wearing one.