Kleptomaniac's Dream.

That's what I'm calling my mega shopping bag. Probably none of you has ever seen me carrying it but I can tell you one thing, it is a grocery shopper's dream come true. Ever since I discovered Wilkinson offers a student discount (OF 15% NO LESS!!)#!) I've been going there much too often to be healthy.. for my manhood that is. I think I've become domesticated. I have just proudly returned from a shopping expedition where I bought a baking tray, a roasting tray, a wok, and some tea towels.. Well now.

But one other day as I was leaving one of the supermarkets I was stopped by one of the cashiers who sheepishly asked to take a look inside my bag. He probably thought he was being quite rude or something but on the inside I was thinking: What a fine young man! Doing his job with mettle and panache! Cause I could see that clearly, I looked pretty suspicious. It's so easy to slip things into this megabag, hence what I've christened it.

Been reading the (thus far) excellent City of Small Blessings by Simon Tay, and will hopefully proceed to complete it today cause I've decided not to let such a glorious day go to waste! Gonna hit the park later for some sun-on-boy action before I get all pasty again.

I also bought a lampshade the other day. A mother bleeding lampshade. What devious spirit hath possessed me so?? It is a gorgeous piece of work, handmade (because I am a total sucker for all such things, as I might have mentioned once or twice before) and the result of a little chat with the delightful maker of the Kitsch Attic one-off pieces, and learning about the new (I presume, if only because of an appalling assumption that it has to be cause I've never heard of it) and cool and environmentally conscious practice/trend of upcycling.

I'd like to think that most of the things I purchase has some sort of meaning or story behind them. (Not all of them, cause that would be atrociously pretentious.) Because, as I tried to explain one of my pricier purchases to my sister once, what are you willing to pay for if not for a certain human experience? Is that not the point (or at least one of the points) of art anyway? A connection; with somethings or someones, often in a surprising or unexpected way? So when I stumble upon a quaint little shop or something somewhere, and find myself in conversation with someone so completely apart (or foreign) to me, it is an unexpected connection, so I am willing to spend (sometimes exorbitant amounts of) money in order that I may have a keepsake of such connections.

Of course, there are the completely random things, like my 10 euro clock, or my cheap wall hanging, random postcards etc which happen to catch my fancy and I just like, and there's nothing deeper about that. But still, it soothes my aching soul (and ravaged wallet) to think that there is some meaning behind some of the things I buy. That they are not just random pieces of worthless junk I have a fetish for (okay I admit maybe to a little of that.)

I read this article about this 24 year old guy who's been to every single country in the world. Every single one of them. What in the world?! (and I guess he's the youngest and one of the only persons to be qualified to actually use that term.) It's pretty inspiring. And the way he got about it, from part-time jobs, hooking up with locals etc, it's truly admirable. But I was just thinking that some people collect countries the way they do badges. Oh, this list says I have to go to Paris before I die? Check. Cinque Terre one of the you-wouldn't-believe-it-exists-must-see-to-believe places to go? Check. Without any genuine interest, if you know what I mean, instead just leaning on other people's hype?


And because love battles
not only in its burning agricultures
but also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
to those who between my chest and your fragrance
want to interpose their obscure plant.

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.

I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.


Truly what would we be without the internet, I wonder. I stumbled upon this most sublime poem by Pablo Neruda through complete accidence (coincidence? more like incidence than coincidence I guess) which really makes you wonder how different life would be had we not have had so much information at our literal fingertips almost all our lives. I wikipedia-ed Pablo Neruda and found out he lived in Valparaiso, which sounded familiar so I googled and confirmed that yes, it was from the story of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. And the way sometimes we find answers to the questions we didn't even know we were asking. Well, I guess it's not just the internet that offers that, but anyhow.

I had this random thought about us millenials the other day. I'm not certain what exactly the proper definition for that term is but I'm gonna appropriate it and use it to mean us folks who grew up (or were forced to) at or around the turn of the new millenium. Probably including most of you reading this I assume. Weaned on a diet of TV and games as we were growing up, most likely (at the risk of over-simplifying and generalizing a whole host of people, which you'll notice in most commentaries on Gen Y or the Strawberry Generation, it is hard not to I guess). The world was pretty much our oysters, the world was our classroom, etc etc. I was just thinking about this the other day and I came up with this thought: That we are interested, but not interesting.

Do you think yourself an interesting person? What is it about you that is interesting? I tried to cough up something and came up rather empty-handed. I could go on at length about what interests me, but interesting? It is, of course, rather an exercise in futility cause I don't expect most people go about thinking what makes them interesting, or have (sensibly) too much humility not to. But is it our fascination in things that makes us fascinating as people? Possibly it is. But I was thinking of how likely it is that we have grown up to be a generation of vaguely interested, ultimately vapid people. Chock full of one-liners taken verbatim off of 9GAG, ever-ready with references to books and movies and TV series, in all their banality. A generation of reproducers (not in that sense. you know, the biological one) instead of producing anything of real value ourselves. Random Access Memory (also that awesome album by Daft Punk) as apt a term as any to describe us (and all our random references).

It is, of course, easy to condemn one's own generation, because it is a well-known fact that people oftentimes do take to self-indulgent self-bashing in order that they may feel better about themselves (that they are so self-aware perhaps) or whatever other reason they do. And it is easy for an older generation, perhaps even natural, to condemn a new generation of young punks, much in the way you'd deride your cui-looking/acting/pimply juniors in school. Usurpers, the lot of them. So perhaps alot of the flak that Gen Y receives is unwarranted, merely an echo of the bitterness and resentment of a fading generation, a generation long past its glorious heydays. But how much of it actually rings true?

Our lofty expectations. The way we cling on to that incredible belief that despite everything, everything's somehow gonna end up all right, because that's what we were brought up to believe (laying the blame on TV series and movies of course, in exactly the same way violence can be traced definitively to video games)(I'm not actually serious here.) That we are special and that we deserve better. That love will magically happen in random coffee shops around town. That it happens just like that, you just know, and requires no effort whatsoever. A generation of hopeless dreamers, if you will, except in this sense it is not "romantic", it is just sad.

Not that I'm knocking hopeless dreamers (oh that tired cliché), surely at some point most or all of us has identified with exactly that state, or still do even. The world needs its share of dreamers. But it needs its realists too. What I'm afraid of is that we have far too many of the former, and inexplicably, far too many of the latter too. 

Too many dreamers who will never see their beautiful dreams realized, who will wind up bitter and resentful and unable to fully grasp the providence of their realities. So keen on chasing down only the most beautiful of dreams they are unable to appreciate the smaller littler things life has to offer, the serendipity of minor occurrences.

Too many realists who see the world based solely on their own pragmatic views of it. Chasing the tangibles, going after only the definites and the unshakeables, like their 1st class degrees, the 5-digit salaries, all the while not realizing why exactly, or what exactly it is they are working for. Instead just vague ideas of stability and "progress", social mobility, and whatnot. Never asking the question: and then what? Or they do, and it's answered unfortunately by that black hole of an answer: More.

Okay so I kinda got caught up with yet another verbose (and pretentious, as the usage of the word verbose clearly demonstrates) post and the sun is going down and I am slowly getting chilled in my room so I really don't think I'm heading to the park now... Meh. Baking an apple cake tonight though, and was gonna do a baked rice too but I forgot to buy cheese while on my expedition just now sigh. Well, what do you know, even DomesticDe isn't perfect..

Lady Lamb the Beekeeper is my newest soundworm, and she seems so young too! Definitely not what I was associating with that voice. Okay then, see ya later guys.

Unique.

Tiny flickering lights in a million windows
The hopes and dreams of a million different people
But they do not hope and dream
The way I hope and dream
Surely?

What Comes With Opposable Thumbs.

Got like a million and four thousand stuff shoved away in random little drafts and notebooks all over the place, so I'll take this opportunity to clear them all out of the way. Will be pretty random, I expect, so hang on to your hats.


An old friend
Made new again
What machinations or monstrous mind
Can explain what one now finds?

From easy familiarity
To anonymity
Only we can unfriend
Unlove
Did this come with opposable thumbs?

The capacity to love
Hate
Two sides of a coin
Third series
Do we get to choose
Which side it lands
Which face it shows
Is it so easily flipped?

Just the twitch of ones fingers
In the blink of ones eyes
Do we fall in hate
So recklessly too?

我们的过去, 并不属于我们

I just had this random thought a long time ago that our pasts don't belong just to each of us alone, that we can't be so selfish as to think that all the time. That other people have a stake and play a part in our pasts too, and sometimes maybe we owe it to them to not covet our pasts like that. Not sure where this stemmed from but I think it was some reflection about my reticence and how I find it almost impossible to share anything about myself and my past at all.

An expert on being stubborn and full of pride. Was writing a letter to a friend when I stumbled upon this as quite the apt description of myself, if only because I wanted to warn her against being any of those.


Took for a twirl
Another girl
Told her that
She was his world
Another day
Another play
So says the art
of modern manliness.

You're eating alone
You look at your phone
It won't ring
No
It will not.

Scattered failings where doubt lurked. That when push comes to shove, you'd fold.

A mediocrity imposed on each of us. And yet within our personal, mediocre worlds, did not there spring forth decidedly unfutile acts, emotions?

A happiness contingent on others. Emotions not belonging just to me, nor my life, cause my emotions affect others too. Just the way other people affect me.

War is not war until a man on a hill says so. Fighting not-a-war.

If you could see me now.

Solitude with no purpose?
With no audience.
And end in itself.

Lost in a crowd
Looking for the meaning in art that no one knows.

Guns the great equalizer.

Foreign is to be apart.


Yep that's kinda all of my backlog. Ranging from reflections on re-acquainting myself with an old, old friend to snippets of self-doubt and ruminations on being alone (and your phone offers you no respite.) How soldiers can fight all they want but if the politicians decide that no, this does not qualify as war, then we'd be fighting nothing at all. That no one actually knows what they're looking for when they peruse the Arts, that we're all going at it blind. How so much of what we feel are our best faces, the most important people in our lives will never get to see. This straight from le Carre's Our Kind of Traitor, where one of the spies rues how his children will never appreciate fully what he does. How to be foreign is merely to be apart, and how easy it is for each of us to be foreigners in our own countries.

Ehm I shall end here actually, not quite in much of a mood to continue much further even if I could and want to elaborate on quite a lot of those few topics above. So many existential issues.. Pains of being human I guess, the price to pay for opposable thumbs. Well good night fellas!

Sweater Weather.

The Neighbourhood's Sweater Weather has been one of my favourite songs recently, which I discovered just before arriving on these dreary shores, since I have had nary the chance nor ability to do any discovering since, what with no WiFi and all UNTIL TODAY YAY!

I thought it was an apt song to bring into autumn (my favourite season as some of you may know) but it is scarcely true. As sad as it makes me to say this, I have to declare that this is parka weather instead. It's been raining every single day (or it sure feels like it has) since I've got back. Masigh.

Today I wore a shirt to class. This sounds like just about the most mundane and meaningless statement in the world. Or so I would have thought. Instead, what I got were comments like these. "Why are you wearing a shirt today?" "Did you run out of clothes?" "I thought you had some kind of wardrobe malfunction or something." DO YOU GUYS EVEN KNOW WHAT THE WORD FRIEND MEANS GUYS? I mean, how depressing is that?! Admittedly my wardrobe has needed a little sprucing up for a while now (incidentally I bought myself a fancy new plant flower shrub thing because spruce refers to some coniferous tree apparently) but frank astonishment I did not expect, not from people I had heretofore (what a lawyer I am) called "friends".

So. Been pretty busy these few weeks, largely with church related activities, and I am pleased to note that my first week at children's church went well and without injury nor tears nor mucus et al! (Wow totally didn't realize it at first but that's a phonetic pun right there. i.e. at all. Must be the Law and Literature module I'm doing, also a fantastic one!) Sure there were only 2 kids there but still it was a roaring success in my books! The adorablerestness kids of the whole world I assure you.

Been attending lectures with almost near perfect faithfulness (yes I just skipped my first lecture yesterday sigh. I am disappoint.) like the aforementioned Law and Lit as well as Forensic Speech, which are fascinating just on the strength of them being the minor modules which arise purely out of their own interest and are the professor's brainchildren I guess, the kinda things they themselves are passionate about, so it's been mighty good. Just attended a reading of Where The Wild Things Are which was fab, so I am only expecting greater and better things from here on out. Apparently saying things like greater and better is a linguistic tool called a doublet, and there's your random piece of education you never were expecting. The wonders of the internet hey.

And meeting friends and other people, not actually had much free time of late and what time I do I have spent on FFX. Didn't quite like the game initially but man am I hooked now. It really is quite bad.. Yuna looks terrible when not in CGI form though, i.e. normal gameplay, but ohwell I really shouldn't be trying to notice fictional characters should I?

Been reading City Of Small Blessings, the book kinonn kidnapped for weeks back in Singapore, which has been pretty good so far. Also finished this epic book called Sleepwalkers, a non-fiction account of the shenanigans that lead up to the First World War and changed forever the world, leading as it did to the Second World War etc etc. Really quite a fantastically researched and articulated narrative, and it's definitely going to add some colour and knowledge when I go and my Eastern European adventures this winter (I hope!) And Emeritus Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew's One Man's View of the World, which was good as well. The breadth of knowledge and insights that this one man has, it's not even funny man. For some reason it's cool to like LKY and it's cool to hate on the PAP too. Weird singaporeans. I guess it is hard to deny his influence, the same way I've probably never heard anyone complain about the late Dr Goh Keng Swee.

Cool in Singapore is really weird nowzadayz cause I just found the new Navy advert on youtube and it is pretty awesome, especially that tagline: We may be out of sight but you will always be on our minds. Or something like that. And just about 90% of the comments are from SGAG-gers (okay I might be wrong for taking that as the standard for "cool" cause most of those people make me want to gag.) who were lured there by the promise of a pretty female officer, and they're split between professing their unending ardour and desire for her, and deploring her upsetting unattractiveness. As my friend jess would surely say, kill me lah.

I do have a friend though, who seems rather ashamed of being Singaporean, or possibly just Singlish, and has this overwhelming sense that he wants to be British with the best of them. It's pretty disturbing really. Not that he doesn't like singapore or anything, it's just this sort of sense of inferiority. Which is kinda easy to fall into sometimes I guess. My uncle told me the first time I voyaged to Hong Kong at the tender young age of 14 that one of the key things he wanted to tell me was that: Never to feel inferior to anyone, especially Westerners. And I guess that extends to everything exterior as well. So I find it odd when I meet someone who does, a little.

I just had my wisdom tooth extraction a week before I was due to fly, which saddened me greatly cause I wanted to indulge in all da food before leaving. And I did! Because I suffered almost not at all from any pain or swelling at all, thank God! KTP Hospital is my new third home I think. The staff there are fantastic, and I am 159% pleased with my entire experience there. Visiting dentists has never been this painless.

Which leads me to this next question I shall pose the universe. Must all dentists possess fine eyes? I went to the medical centre in base (of all places) for my dental assessment (which I failed miserably apparently thanks to my wise but uglily grown tooth) and the first thing (indeed the only thing I could) I noticed was the dentists' eyes. If eyes could launch ships the way faces do (see: Helen of Troy) then surely she belongs rightly to a naval base. Okay I did notice the engagement ring too after, but those eyes! Haha that's been one of the things I've been meaning to say for a while now, because it was one of the bright spots of my stint back home (as lecherous as that sounds..)

Erm, have also done up my room so it looks a lot more presentable now than it did when I first arrived, which was quite an unmitigated disaster of a first encounter! Sparse, sad-looking, shelve-less, wires sticking out of walls. Managed to bum a (shaky) shelf off my street-mates (also the aforementioned jessica) so my room is at least serviceable now. As long as I don't rumble the floor too much and send all my books sprawling. For some reason I had like 30 books leftover from last year, which frankly is shocking given that I purposefully tried not to make any big purchases from amazon or bookdepository.. Well that number does include statute books and law revision texts, but they are so overwhelmingly in the minority I am ashamed even to mention them.

What else. My life does seem so sparse everytime I attempt to encapsulate it in words. But what do when life is average. As the Kaiser Chiefs say, #everythingisaveragenowadays. How they tried to charge 30 or 40 or even 50 plus for a performance at my uni is still baffling to me. I paid 50 for MUSE IN LONDON BUDDIES. Oh in other cool news heading up to Manc in november for Imagine Dragons, imagine that! Thinking if I should go for TNAF again cause it's just 2 days away.... Don't see why not really, unless I truly overspend which I am quite in danger of doing unfortunately. Too much going out and pizzas over the last few weeks, and not enough cooking sadly.. Have only cooked once since getting back although I do make the excuse that I have no idea how to use this gas oven..

Well that as they say, is that. Not quite got that much to say, so bye. (Probably my most parentheses filled post in months as well, although I'm not sure if they mean anything, or if this signifies anything in the greater scheme of things at all, or maybe it's just one of those meaningless observations which serve no purpose but to fill space and frustrate minds.)

In Defence Of;

I've actually got heaps I want to unload so I'll start off with the trivial before diving into the depths of my soul and consciousness and the human psyche and the meaning of life. Why not throw in the cure for cancer and the solution to world poverty while I'm at it? Jkz, just gonna ramble on about some of the more mundane things that have occupied me, and some of the other things which required a little more thought. Also my faith. So hold on to your socks, or just switch back to facebook or sth if you think I ramble like La Rambla! (Longest touristy road in Barcelona, cause I name-drop like it's hot.)

Well anyways, this past few weeks I have been rather busy, and yet not, in that weird way that is only possible to the crazy minds of human beings. By that I mean I am working, staying-in for duties, sailing, in general tiring myself out greatly in service to our nation (the nobility!) and yet I feel like I am unoccupied, that I have so much time that I am not spending in adequate fashion. I am ending work daily and wondering, huh, is dota all I have to look forward to? It is a terrible, terrible predicament to find oneself in on an everyday basis. Probably because some part of me actually relishes the idea of going home to dota asap.. Not even kidding.

I did participate in the Singapore Public Policy Challenge early August, which was an excellent experience. By complete chance I bumped into my friend whom I met in Lisboa earlier this year and spent a pleasant day with, although it was slightly awkward after cause I wasn't sure how to talk to her haha. Lawyers unite, apparently. Also met a cute girl I spoke to on the first day but was completely at a loss as to how to talk to her on subsequent encounters.. Totally squandering my 3d2n experience. Except for the challenge itself of course, 24 hours of policy crafting at the wonderful Intercontinental (those buffets..) and getting to see how the public service works. I must say I came away extremely impressed by the public service officers I met, they clearly have a handle on the Singaporean consciousness, our laymen concerns and worries, much in contrast to the public image of them. They are very self-aware (self being the government) and very capable, so I came away in the confidence that we have got ourselves excellent people dedicated to serving our nation.

Okay going to launch into a tangent about Singapore and patriotism, entirely unplanned believe you me you. Just finished reading a book titled Heartlands, by Daren V. L. Shiau which has to be one of the best Singaporean books out there. Unpretentious yet authentic, probably a pretty rare combination for local writers. Why? I think writers in general come from a certain upbringing, a certain socio-economic background (who'd let their kid write without some form of economic stability? certainly not prudent singaporeans.) and yet, conscious of the fact that they're Singaporean, they might try to inject singlish, drop food names etc, in an effort to sound "authentic". I'm not sure how the book would come across to a non-Singaporean, however, and it is impossible for me to divorce myself from my own Singaporeanness and try to consider it from an outsider's point of view. So I'm not sure how good a book it can be considered critically. All the knowing winks and nods to Singapore culture, the brevity only understood by us.

Also, how relatable the protaganist is, his frustrations and miscommunication with both the "upper" and "lower" classes, deeply middle-class as he is. A heartlander. I think so many of the little things that we only appreciate, entirely untranslatable to our (relatively) silver-spooned friends, that we cannot see how they do not understand. Oh yes, the proletariat predicament.

Is it uncool to be patriotic? I'm not sure, but there certainly seems to be a proliferation of government-bashing and the like in recent years. I've always toyed with the idea of one day migrating, but all of a sudden I have come to the conclusion that no, I never will. Kinda early in life to be declaring something like that, but it's the only thing that can make sense to me (at least at this point in time.) Of all things, it was a completely random line in Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland that made me come to such a resolution. One of the fringe characters said this: I have spent so much of my life defending this place it wouldn't make sense for me to leave. Or something along those lines.

Which made me consider hard. Why am I doing what I do? I am serving my country, defending its people. I cannot give a concise answer, but in short, I believe in my country. I believe in its ideals, I believe in the way of life here, and I feel it is worth protecting. If I've come to this conclusion (at the age of 19, it has to be said, and we all know about the impermanence of youth and its ideals) then I have to ask myself: If I were to leave, what would it be for? And the only reason I can come up with is this - for myself. If I have come to the conclusion that this country is one worth fighting for, my leaving it means that despite that, I will choose to forsake it, and that can only be entirely selfish. That's the meaning of selfish - to work for one's self - and that is the one thing that I have resolved not to be. Doesn't matter the pay that I'm getting (or not getting), the opportunities I might have (for the advancement of self) if I get to choose (and yes, at this point thankfully I do) I will choose not to be selfish.

Leaving would mean I invalidate a large portion of my life. I have chosen to defend this country, so if I choose to leave, it would make a large part of my life's work worthless. I'd have been a mercenary, if you will. That's not to say I'm definitely staying in the force, cause even if I do I can still choose to stand by my belief in our country, and contribute in whatever little way I can. But leaving the country cannot make any sense to me, not a country I have decided to dedicate some of the best years of my life to. That's why it's not just a job, much as I like to whine about it, it is at the very least a commitment. One that I've made consciously, knowing all it would entail.

That's why I'm puzzled sometimes meeting colleagues who have decided from the get-go that they're leaving the force. Does that not immediately rob whatever you're doing of any possible meaning? Knowing that it has no real impact on you, that it doesn't really matter in your picture? I guess for anyone out there as well, holding whatever jobs. Suddenly everything is just a stepping stone to wherever you think you're destined for, the contract length only a signpost for you to leave. Sigh why do I have so many quibbles with modern life.

Yesterday I got quite riled at a friend who was boastfully explaining how little he did during re-service, in the process cheapening an entire institute, the experiences of thousands of other (possibly) motivated men, and me. Of course I took it personally. Just the subject matter is fine, plenty of people chao keng in NS and after, and that's perfectly normal. But you want to make it a point of personal pride that your platoon is that much worse than everyone else's? You want to cheapen the efforts of your sergeants and officers? In order to feel that much perversely better of yourself? Tell me how that is not perverse. Being proud of your uselessness as a soldier, of the utter futility in training you and your platoon. Good job, you made a complete shit waste of 2 years of your life, + another 10 ICTs, I sure hope you are proud of that. I hate it when people don't have the awareness to at least appear slightly apologetic about the complete fuck-all they have done. Instead they treat it as some sort of badge of honour. Yes I am treating it as a personal affront, because I have made a certain commitment and I hope my friends can respect that. Instead you get so proud of yourself for doing nothing, you work in some private company for yourself, you feel so good about yourself by putting down others. It's all about yourself. At least have the guts to feel ashamed about that, instead of hiding behind some ridiculous fucking bravado which has no substance to it whatsoever. Empty vessels and volumes and all that I hope you learn to think before speaking. Pardon the vulgarities I'm trying to make a point, and I am incredibly pissed off too. Call yourself a friend, really. Who goes around dissing someone else's profession like that? I understand people have different experiences and resentment and bitterness but you wanna pull down an institution I have chosen to serve, really? Thank you for your friendship, but no thanks. Yes, this is an exercise in protecting my own self-esteem because of my profession, but it is also the complete anger that someone would try to put down the efforts of so many others in order to fulfill the stupid immature teenager's maxim that slacking = cool. Please, get a grip, grow up. You want to profess to the whole world that you're some big-shot grown up drawing a salary now, I say wake up your idea. You've got a whole lot more growing up to do.

Well, I'm not trying to say I don't slack, cause Lord knows I do that and in insane amounts. But I'm not proud of it, please don't anyone ever think that. I was proud of it at some point, but I was young and dumb. I can't take any pride in putting in no effort at all, in fact it's a huge issue with me now. I know, painfully, what the trade-offs are, so when I don't study I know I'm not going to do as well as I should. I know that that doesn't matter so much to me anymore, that I consciously choose to travel, to do other things, although that leaves me sort of in a bind now. I know that my not putting in any effort has caused me to squander much of my vaunted "potential", I know I might have been doing a whole lot better than I'm currently doing had I not wasted so much of said potential. Because waste I did, and waste it is. Let no one try to boast that despite slacking they have done well, that's just silly. It just means you could have done better, so what are you on about? I used to think that way, that hey, I know I could have done better so whatever. But what's the end result? The end result is no results, and that is immutable fact.

What other consequence? This: that I do not know how to try even if I wanted to. I have no prior experience of working hard for anything. So now, even if I wanted to try exceedingly hard to get my first class, I would not know how to go about doing so. It is possibly the dumbest thing you have ever heard of, but there it is. All these years of feeling self-satisfied and content with mediocrity has brought me this. I cannot paw my way out of my mediocrity because I do not know how to. Forgive the self-indulgent bashing, but believe me this is not self-pity in any form, it is a truth that I have been unwilling to confront ever since primary school, secondary, helped along by a string of decent results in major examinations here and there. It's done me no favours, as I am painfully aware of now. I know how this might present, the self-indulgent rant of someone who's had a damn good life and is now whining about precisely that good life. But what I'm trying to convey is this sense that I could have been that much more, not just for myself but for others too. Which is what one of my divisional officers in MIDS said to me once: that I could have done so much more for the batch than what I ultimately ended up doing. I could be making real contributions but all I'm doing is nothing. Purposefully nothing, at that.

So now I am afraid to put in any effort into anything, because I've never done so, and if I do and it doesn't bear fruit, I'll have nothing to fall back on. I have not thus far been prepared to expose myself like that, no.

I think I shall end here actually, gotta go out to collect my passport soon. This post is decidedly darker that I'd intended it to be so /endofunplannedrant I guess. Sorry once again for the vulgarities but if I intend this blog to be a collection of honest reflections (which I do) then I shouldn't mince my words, even if I know I will regret them 5mins later, which I kinda do now but oh well. Actually wanted to talk about so many other things, but this is what tangents are 4 (oh yeah I am cool with number puns like that.) By the way today will be a perfect day cause 16th of september consists of two perfect squares, 16/9 = 4²/3² how I am not a math major I will never know.. Good day fellas.

(A + B) / 2

This is pretty unfair. Just woke up after spending the night half in zouk and half in the rain, much to my sorrow! The unfairness being that I kind of find myself feeling slightly down, despite not getting high in the slightest last night! Meh. I did have fun though, first time going out with the gang since... probably that sucky night at supper club haha! Well happy bday (or graduation??) bel!

I guess it's also cause yesterday I was just contemplating my startling averageness. Contemplating only because while in the past I might have moped about or worried about it (it's not a topic new to me), the onset of age and I hope maturity means that I treat my normalcy with a certain amount of acceptance now.

95% of the world is average. Well, 90 maybe, or 80, if you consider that there are people who are below average. But most everyone you know, and meet, is average. It takes something truly special to not be average, which I realize I probably lack. I used to agonize over this lack, thinking: why aren't I special? (while thinking, secretly of course, that I somehow was. as all teenagers do, surely?) Decently intelligent, decent at sports, okay at school, sometimes humorous, etc. Not too shabby, but none too shiny either. But now I know that's perfectly fine, it's something that 95% of the world faces, and no one else is silly enough to whine about it either so.. We average people just have to accept that we're average and get on with our average lives. What does it matter that we're average? We'll still get our average jobs, fall in average loves, and finally die our average deaths. I've still got a life to live.

Possibly this sadness stems also from my IPPT yesterday!!!! The saddest performance of my life, and I blame prawn noodles. Didn't think I was gonna do my ippt so I ate, and hey presto 10mins after consumption I find myself starting (I jest, I mean acing) my stations. Then came 2.4. Then came the pain. Oh, the agony. I'm surprised Lilo didn't appear. (Oh yeah I just made the most random Lilo and Stitch reference ever.) Run was no go. 10:17mins of misery later and I find myself the sorrowful recipient of an IPPT SIGHVER. The shame. Hopefully I get to re-take my ippt sometime in the next few weeks haha, although if I still don't get gold I'm hardly likely to have another bowl of prawn noodles for a scapegoat..

Also watched an amazing movie called Disconnect yesterday. (this despite my sister's lukewarm reception, which threw me for a loop.) But I'm sticking with my guns, and calling it here: One of the best movies this year for me for sure. Surprisingly.. male, however, now that I think about it. It is quite a masculine piece, actually. Funny how I've never thought about stuff like that until attending law school. Nonetheless, an excellent expose of the dark side of all this vaunted inter-connectivity, a cautionary tale for this day and age. And the theme of disconnect, between husband and wife, fathers and sons, nothing short of impressive.

Also spent about half a day watching the Capital Children's Choir and PS22 Choir, cause I am a youtube addict. And because they are insanely talented. And I have no life. Well..

I guess in other happenings, I tried to walk from Tiong Bahru to Clarke Quay cause I'm coolio, but I went mainstream and walked instead down the green line to outram park and thereafter to chinatown. Kind of directionally retarded, apparently. Did meet my sister for some Little India and Mustafa Center action, however, so all was not lost.

Also met yiying yesterday, which probably could have gone a lot worse considering we've not seen each other for.. 3 or 4 years now?! It's always nice meeting old friends. You get this little reassurance that, you know what, despite all these years, despite all the things you've done (or not done), the things you've been through, maybe a part of you remains the same after all. That maybe, you've managed to stay true to yourself in spite of what the world's inflicted on you all these years. We must have spent what, 5 hours at tiong bahru bakery? A fantastic little place, much more homely and relax-y than the raffles place one, and I've got a slight crush on that door.. Best door 2013.

How many more friends do you get to make in your life? Good friends, close friends, cherished friends. How many more friends will you lose to life? To careers, girl/boyfriends, marriage, family, migration, various other commitments (and thank god we do not yet worry about disease and death). Few and far between, real friends are. So anytime you get to reconnect with a friend, it is a happy thing! It doesn't even take much, just the willingness and some money for coffee really.

Which is also why I found myself in zouk for the second time in 2 weeks (shocking, I know.) last night, because friends matter.

Alright I'm ending here, I'm trying my bestestness to be more concise and short and sharp and to the point and not keep beating about the bush like a beater of bushes.

Just another one of your average posts.

"Thank You For Loving Us."

Happiness, too, is inevitable.

This, at least, is the opinion of one Albert Camus, incidentally the author of a book I read just recently called The Outsider, quite an interesting read, which I picked up in Jinja, Uganda, of all places. I got this quote off An Ordinary Man actually, Paul Rusesabagina the manager of Hotel Rwanda's own account of the events that happened and an exceptional read. His point being, it's easy for us to, when disaster/depravity strikes, fall into the depressing belief that you know what? This is the natural state of human beings after all. We are base animals etc.

But consider the word decency. When paired with the word 'human', it seemingly takes on new meaning. Human decency seems like such a scarce commodity nowsadays, or at least that's what some of us feel like we have no choice but to conclude. But what does the word decent on its own mean? It means okay. Average. Nothing exceptional. Decent means okay. Okay means normal. Human beings are normally decent. Why then is it so easy for us to discard this notion in the face of unnatural violence? "Reverting to our primal states." etc etc.

No. War is unnatural. So too is violence, and depravity. That's what the hotel manager was trying to put across. He was nothing but decent, in a country which had forgotten what decency meant. Courage? It does not take courage to do the decent thing, normal things, don't we do them everyday? That's what decent means, that's what normalcy means. He's trying to say that you do not have to be exceptionally courageous to do the right thing, we just have to be able to remember what "right" means.

This actually coincided quite neatly with the current course I'm undergoing, Military Leadership at SAF-NTU Academy. I shit you not, this is the only module I've ever gone through the reading list and prepared myself for lessons. I guess it's finally hit me this year what I've chosen to do as a vocation, as a profession. It behooves me to, as much as is possible at my current stage in the service, find out for myself what leadership actually means.

I was wondering what courage meant. I think too often we mix up daring into the concept, and we get everything muddled up. Daring is thrill-seeking, the search for exhilaration, it is a self-serving quality. It is superficial. It is saying, hey look, I can do this! I just did a bungee-jump! I sky-dived! It is not valuable. Certainly it does something for your self-confidence, your self-belief, but it is shallow. Courage is not. Courage is, or should be, selfless, or at least not entirely selfish.

Actually I'm not entirely sure. I think it takes courage to face up to your fears, of heights, of public speaking, or whatever. And yet that is something that is not immediately valuable to others/society either.. Oh well okay nevermind I'll have to refine my own definitions. But the question in my mind was, how can we tell that we are courageous? What acts of courage has life demanded of any of us?

I'm not trying to say that it does not. I think it takes courage for each person to go through each day, some more than others. The courage to carry on, the courage to face adversity, or even just a sadistic boss or a sarcastic colleague or whatever. Small acts of courage throughout the day. But great courage? Acts of daring do not count, so taking the Battlestar Galactica etc will not qualify. I'm not sure.

Anyway, just some thoughts I thought I'd put down. I've just uploaded all my photos from Uganda, and it's surprising how I'm actually feeling this sense of loss. It's like letting the world in on a precious secret. Not that I want it to be a secret, of course, if any single one of my photos can inspire someone to go to Uganda or anywhere else in the world to do or attempt to do some good, I think the wretchedly long hours and minutes it took me to upload all these pictures would be worth it. The power of social media, so often portrayed as negative, would have asserted itself in a positive way, and I would be extremely gladdened. And of course I do want that validation as well, that people in whatever superficial way, thoughtless way (just hitting 'like') approve or admire what I have done. Or even, dare I say it, delight in the pictorial evidence of what I have done, or hopefully inspire in them such intense envy that they decide they must do it for themselves.

And yet this sense of loss. Maybe it's the (irrational) belief that by not uploading the pictures I was holding on to them somehow. That because I kept telling myself I had to upload them I'd think of them more. Because there is this undercurrent of fear. It is hard to explain, and I am not skilled enough of a writer to adequately express in words what I feel in my heart. This is my attempt, which I actually wrote on my flight from Uganda back to London. Bear with me.

It is a peculiar heartbreak. In the sense that it's all very removed from oneself, detached. A sadness that doesn't seem to affect you very much at all. A broken heart which does not break you. Even while you expect it should, at some level even hoped that it would. But no, this is not a sadness that overwhelms. It is a sorrow that will not linger. It resides in one of those lesser visited regions of your mind, catalogued as one of those memories which only affect you when you choose to let it do.

When you return from some place you know has (or should have) changed your life, but whose details fade much too quickly, and this worries you, because that is the last thing you want to happen. It is alarming how seamlessly you fall back into your old ways; the trip that should have left such a deep impression on you leaves you instead unmarked, traces of it appearing only when you stumble upon certain pictures, or the odd snatch of conversation.

It is funny how you are worlds away, you may even have rapidly adapted to certain customs and mindsets, but immediately upon your return the familiarity of your old routines, the normalcy of having friends and family around you, just minutes away, takes over. And you're left wondering, "Is this it?"

Each of us has to deal with this particular, peculiar, sorrow in our own way. It is, paradoxically, not a matter of moving on but its inverse, that we are moving on far too quickly. "What does this say about me! Surely I cannot be so unfeeling!" Some of us may cry, Others, merely silent dismay. Some of us just feel this niggling sense that something feels wrong, just slightly troubled, but are unable to place it.

This quiet, distant heartbreak. Which does not make sense, so our brains do not make sense of it. A jumble of unelucidated feelings, untranslatable emotions.

Maybe it's the feeling that, now it's out there, I don't have to care about it any longer. It doesn't quite make sense but there it is. I've got a huge chunk of my notebook that I might want to put up here as well, so brace yourselves please. That's for next time, however.

Despite this fear that I might have left Uganda not in any way different, I know that I am. It has left its indelible impression on me, and I have been ineffably changed by my experiences there.

This, now, is my exhortation to you to go and do something. It did not take me much to go to Uganda, proximity and finances aside. It sounds so incredible, impossible, when you put it up in the air, when you consider it, but once you actually start doing it, it's incredibly easy. It does not have to be volunteering. It does not have to do with your ultimate purpose in life, however much or little you may know about that. It does not have to be anything at all. Just something.

Go and discover something, or rediscover something. Confirm something about yourself. Challenge something about yourself. I always thought I liked kids, and that I might be decent at handling them, but I never actually knew for sure, not until I went to Uganda and into the deep end of 400 primary schoolchildren. I fell in love with the children there, the country, and I loved that. I loved that I was falling in love with a country, with a people.

Go and fall in love with something, or find something to fall in love with. Go and be affected, impacted. You can't ever plan for everything. You can't say okay today there's gonna be a beautiful sunset that's gonna be so affecting. No, you just go for it and open your mind, open your heart, let life have its way with you. Let go of your stranglehold on your life.

One thing made the greatest impact on me, the words of a mother whose children I played with most nights as they lived right next to the lodge. And it was this: "Thank you for loving us."

Such a simple statement, and delivered so simply, but what a profound effect it had and still has on me. I didn't set out to love these children, nor did I realize (or at least had not consciously thought about it) I did until she thanked me for it. Yes, I did love these beautiful kids, whom I was gonna leave behind in just a couple of days. With this discovery of love came immediately sorrow and loss. How I relished that sorrow.

Why? To be perfectly honest, I'd begun to doubt my ability to love. Not to sound dramatic or anything but I've been on my own for a long while now. I have sought solitude, have enjoyed it, and have gotten used to it. I am comfortable now with being alone almost anywhere, in any setting. Sure, I wasn't always alone, in fact I largely wasn't, and yet essentially, in some sense I was. I spend about 2-3 months a year traveling and that mostly I do on my own, in foreign lands, no 3G no connection no nothing. Possibly I even wanted to be cut off, if only to prove to myself that I could be with no real consequence (is that not actually quite sad?) As a result, without ever really thinking about - I mean who does really, who sits down and ruminates hmmm am I capable of love? - I developed this doubt.

This mother did not know any of this, of course, but her frank openness and sincerity caught me completely by surprise, for which I am immensely thankful. She followed that by saying: "God has blessed you. You love children." which broke my heart. Most children there do not get to see their fathers very often because of working hours/locations, which could be hours away from home. And there are so many of them, anywhere from 3 to 10 or more per family, that I think many of these children grow up without really knowing what it is like to be loved. Any attention you pay to them, physical touch, the simplest of games like letting them hang on your arm or lifting them up into the air, any of these could make their days. I was relieved to know that this mother did not resent me in the slightest for, without asking for any permission at all, playing with her kids on an almost daily basis, but instead seemed to like me as well.

So this is it - go out and do something. When I was having fun with those kids, that was exactly what I had in mind - having fun, but this was an act of love to them. By saying those simple, profound words to me, without probably meaning to this mother managed to deeply affect me in a way that few other statements ever have, or ever will. It does not take much to make a difference in someone else's life. Anything will do.

With that, I'm out.