Well yes, I know, kinda cheesy post title (Charles De Yan, or Chuan Dickens..) but waddya know - the only reason I'm even trying to blog today is that I feel like I haven't actually used my brain for a while now. Once you're BFG (Back For Good) there's just too many ways to procrastinate, to tell yourself that okay next week I'll find some time to sit and write, to tinker about with my diary, to actually use any portion of my brain at all. But noooo, there's too much admin to be done, a myriad errands and tasks or plain lazing around thanks to the full blown fatigue of full time work. Quite apart from work (which is going decently all things considered), I have quite possibly done nothing of value at all over the 3 weeks since I've been back.
So, not that this is going to be of much worth either, but at least I have to give myself a chance to flex a wee bit of my cognitive functions.
Chronologically, I guess, was grad trip, followed by graduation. Too much really to cover, and previous posts on previous trips have borne out the fact that I am a horrible accountant i.e. my accounts of my travels have never failed to fail to inspire. Triple negatives, how's that for some random brainwork? I did cross entire continents, from the Nordic city of Oslo through Moscow, Lake Baikal, Beijing, and more, to Shanghai, a grand total of 8 time-zones crossings and a resultant seriously messed up body clock. The adherence to rail time instead of real time along the Transsiberian, the thousands of miles on the road, and much more too. Absolutely incredible stuff.
Graduation was, of course, surreal. It was odd to realize how many of the people at the ceremonies I'd have been seeing for the last time, possibly, forever. Bittersweet in the extreme. One, I guess, of the tradeoffs of studying in a foreign land. Exeter, too, unfortunately is not a place I am likely to revisit anytime soon, not least because a large majority of the people I have gotten to know there are likewise leaving it for good now. It did turn out eventually to be a massive photoshoot kind of, and I am immensely grateful to bel for gracing the occasion and graciously agreeing (tacitly) to be photographer of the day too! Wish I could attend yours come January!
Flew back via a circuitous route through Manila, a complete waste of time but not of money (the savings! why my return flight is not paid for I will never know). and went to work the very next day. Extremely rusty and almost starting from ground zero (again), it's been quite the learning process. And a good one too.
My grandma passed away last week, after almost 2 weeks of drifting in and out of consciousness having been admitted to the hospital for a fever. I guess everyone saw it coming, and my uncles/cousins even flew in from overseas to see her. It's a minor miracle she survived long enough to see all but 2 of her family/descendants.
It's a strange one. I was never close to her. Truth be told, I didn't like her all that much. All my life (or at least those that I retain sufficient memory of) she's been telling me to study hard, get a good job, and earn a ton of money. Emphasis on that final point. Which has been kind of grating at times. It's only been the last 3 years when I started visiting her at the hospital or nursing home that I interacted properly with her at all, although even till the very end I think she believed I was gonna end up as some high-flying ass-busting lawyer or something. I don't think that's gonna happen!
But no matter what she may or may not have meant to me, I realize how much losing her means to my dad. I cannot imagine what it must have felt like for him, not least because I felt nowhere near as keenly the loss. What grief I felt I felt for my dad, a man who's lost both parents, a brother and a sister, all in the last 5 years.
With this as backdrop, the first time I visited my grandma upon returning to Singapore last month I thought these thoughts, whether appropriately or not:
Hospital bed:
Hey how are you hope
You are well
Or do I?
How easy it is to pretend we love
We fake our concern our care
For the possibly loved
The potentially not
Honest deceit.
Death bed:
Eulogy
Desperately
Sieving memory
For the good stuff
But the muck comes up too
Keep a straight face look serious
Say something profound
Lie.
NB: This is an abstraction, much of which I have just thought up just now, and has nothing to do with my grandma's hospitalization and funeral, except inasmuch as it provided the setting for me to think these thoughts. Not very good ones, mind you, completely unpolished, no cadence or anything whatsoever, just an outlet. A beginning, perhaps, to a return to form sometime soon hopefully!
Some other stuff going on too, that I am keen on thinking about, but it is 1:22am and another day of waking up at 5.20 beckons and I am pretty much already screwed sigh, but I shall at least try to mitigate some of my deadness by going to bed right now.
Saturday 20 September 2014
Sunday 7 September 2014
Let This Be Finished! Dead! ...Khattam-Shud.
Longest weekend I've had since flying back more than a month ago! But not one that I wanted. A disappointing turn, really. Supposed to close up for duty on Friday but didn't quite manage to pass my assessment, quite the blow both for myself and my poor friend on duty that day. It's a bit upsetting - I know I could and should have passed. "But no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, spread out our arms farther."
Think it's the secret, hidden (or not-so-hidden) ultra-lame-hipster part of me that makes me prefer that line over the actual closing line of The Great Gatsby. I think I've seen that one too often before even having read that book, and it probably featured in some "Best first/last lines in history of ever by super authors" or something. Don't get me wrong, it's a very fine line (pun not actually intended teehee)."So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." I was probably just grasping for something less well-known to latch myself on to. Ah, this post-modern life. How can what one likes/dislikes be governed by what others/strangers/masses like or dislike?
Apart from that diatribe on the quite bitter disappointment of Friday (and o how I underperformed) I've also faced some professional or indeed, absolutely unprofessional challenges. A bit of a rant, but I can't stomach having to do menial, brain dead taskings just because someone else refuses to put in that extra bit of work. I am willing to help for sure, I don't mind going out of my way to do so, but not in order for you to further your own social life/whatever other commitments. I'm not ending work late just so that you can secure on time - and it's not the work ending late that's the issue. I guess everyone at any workplace in the world experiences such things or such people, but that doesn't lessen the frustration anyways. Some people are just so oblivious/indifferent it hurts to interact with them.
Speaking of which... Maybe it is time to let things die a natural death i.e. let me no longer seek artificially to prolong. Khattam-Shud. It is strange how much... hope one pins on certain things so completely out of one's control. (Actually, if you're particularly optimistic, you might begin to think that you do have a measure of influence after all, but let us not consider that in this case.) It is odd how much one invests in so little. A wing and a prayer. But no more games. "Be careful what you wish for", I think I just read Haroun advise Luka in Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life - and how often do we as adults fail to heed just such advice, expounded in countless fairy-tales and fables? We never learn, or we never want to - because some wishes are worth wishing for, worth waiting for, worth wilting for, come what may, who can say.
But not this wish. Not at the fervent urgings of a stray note from Sgt. Pepper's esteemed band - the Beatles be damned. Sometimes the why of a wish matters more than the what of a wish. And if the former is suspect then the latter is inconsequential, a matter that does not matter. Why I'm going on at length here is because... because I know this to be true. But I have trouble believing it. Ah, when you know something but cannot bring yourself to believe it! That's when you know that wings have taken root, taken flight, somewhere in that gnarled twisted multi-valved organ. Oh yes, that inseparable burden, this life-giving soul-consuming organ we cannot help but need this side of forever. But that organ beats on, a boat against the current, and yet the past, the past.
And on to the inconsequential. I've had the good pleasure of reading The Great Gatsby, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Timequake. Fitzgerald, Rushdie, Vonnegut. Almost feel like a participant in some box-ticking exercise (perhaps I should stop railing against those sometime soon.) Excellent reads though, all of them, most intriguing of all Timequake, that intoxicating blend of autobiography and fiction, so smooth you can never tell where one ends and where one begins, or indeed, if any of it is at all real in the first place. Also came across the new Murakami book (be still my heart! and indeed it was still because) I did not buy, only because I had already in my arms $290 worth of books at that most charming of bookshops - Litteredwithbooks! Never seem able to leave that place without at least 5 books or so sigh yay sigh.
Also watched Sin City, kind of just a rinse and repeat almost of the first one, but stylish nonetheless. Not likely to make any new fans though, I don't think. Whatever worked for the first one worked for the first one, so I'm not sure what people were expecting A Dame to Kill For to be. And An Education again, for the first time since.. 09? 10? Carey Mulligan everything I remembered her to be, and more. Gush fanboy gush. Missed Begin Again and have this creeping sensation I'm missing Boyhood soon too, but hopefully I'll have a lenient enough week that I am able to catch that ridiculous timing of 9pm or so at Cineleisure. Taxis galore apparently, once you find yourself in the working world. Oh glamour where art thou. Seems as if I'm rushing everywhere only in order to be able to rush somewhere else. Where are my soirees and lounges and posh-ass adult things?
And that is the end of that, Eggheads. Khattam-Shud.
Think it's the secret, hidden (or not-so-hidden) ultra-lame-hipster part of me that makes me prefer that line over the actual closing line of The Great Gatsby. I think I've seen that one too often before even having read that book, and it probably featured in some "Best first/last lines in history of ever by super authors" or something. Don't get me wrong, it's a very fine line (pun not actually intended teehee)."So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." I was probably just grasping for something less well-known to latch myself on to. Ah, this post-modern life. How can what one likes/dislikes be governed by what others/strangers/masses like or dislike?
Apart from that diatribe on the quite bitter disappointment of Friday (and o how I underperformed) I've also faced some professional or indeed, absolutely unprofessional challenges. A bit of a rant, but I can't stomach having to do menial, brain dead taskings just because someone else refuses to put in that extra bit of work. I am willing to help for sure, I don't mind going out of my way to do so, but not in order for you to further your own social life/whatever other commitments. I'm not ending work late just so that you can secure on time - and it's not the work ending late that's the issue. I guess everyone at any workplace in the world experiences such things or such people, but that doesn't lessen the frustration anyways. Some people are just so oblivious/indifferent it hurts to interact with them.
Speaking of which... Maybe it is time to let things die a natural death i.e. let me no longer seek artificially to prolong. Khattam-Shud. It is strange how much... hope one pins on certain things so completely out of one's control. (Actually, if you're particularly optimistic, you might begin to think that you do have a measure of influence after all, but let us not consider that in this case.) It is odd how much one invests in so little. A wing and a prayer. But no more games. "Be careful what you wish for", I think I just read Haroun advise Luka in Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life - and how often do we as adults fail to heed just such advice, expounded in countless fairy-tales and fables? We never learn, or we never want to - because some wishes are worth wishing for, worth waiting for, worth wilting for, come what may, who can say.
But not this wish. Not at the fervent urgings of a stray note from Sgt. Pepper's esteemed band - the Beatles be damned. Sometimes the why of a wish matters more than the what of a wish. And if the former is suspect then the latter is inconsequential, a matter that does not matter. Why I'm going on at length here is because... because I know this to be true. But I have trouble believing it. Ah, when you know something but cannot bring yourself to believe it! That's when you know that wings have taken root, taken flight, somewhere in that gnarled twisted multi-valved organ. Oh yes, that inseparable burden, this life-giving soul-consuming organ we cannot help but need this side of forever. But that organ beats on, a boat against the current, and yet the past, the past.
And on to the inconsequential. I've had the good pleasure of reading The Great Gatsby, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Timequake. Fitzgerald, Rushdie, Vonnegut. Almost feel like a participant in some box-ticking exercise (perhaps I should stop railing against those sometime soon.) Excellent reads though, all of them, most intriguing of all Timequake, that intoxicating blend of autobiography and fiction, so smooth you can never tell where one ends and where one begins, or indeed, if any of it is at all real in the first place. Also came across the new Murakami book (be still my heart! and indeed it was still because) I did not buy, only because I had already in my arms $290 worth of books at that most charming of bookshops - Litteredwithbooks! Never seem able to leave that place without at least 5 books or so sigh yay sigh.
Also watched Sin City, kind of just a rinse and repeat almost of the first one, but stylish nonetheless. Not likely to make any new fans though, I don't think. Whatever worked for the first one worked for the first one, so I'm not sure what people were expecting A Dame to Kill For to be. And An Education again, for the first time since.. 09? 10? Carey Mulligan everything I remembered her to be, and more. Gush fanboy gush. Missed Begin Again and have this creeping sensation I'm missing Boyhood soon too, but hopefully I'll have a lenient enough week that I am able to catch that ridiculous timing of 9pm or so at Cineleisure. Taxis galore apparently, once you find yourself in the working world. Oh glamour where art thou. Seems as if I'm rushing everywhere only in order to be able to rush somewhere else. Where are my soirees and lounges and posh-ass adult things?
And that is the end of that, Eggheads. Khattam-Shud.
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