"life is a highway and i'm gonna ride it"

Continuous days of studying have given me time to think, to stand in front of the mirror having conversations with my reflection, to walk around the house entering make-believe scenarios and entertaining all the thoughts a wandering mind would lead to. What I really want to do is to travel around in a caravan, wearing colour-striped socks and cartoon-print pajamas licking hot chocolate off my lips while listening to fellow travel mates tell stories, singing songs at the top of our voices with wind slapping on our faces, stopping the caravan along the road, sitting on wet grass to stargaze and waking up to fry hotcakes for one another.

I’ve been thinking about my future and I realized that much as words are important to me, I have never given any attention to doing the things I love, like writing. I’m frequently constructing sentences in my head but I leave them as broken half-complete strings in the air. I think about all the books I’ve yet to read but never get down to reading them. I unquestioningly devote a huge portion of my days to the education system and it’s such a shame that I do not question such ‘natural’ occurrences despite being equipped with years of sociological training. I ignore the doors of opportunities open to me through the mentorship programme. The illogic of my actions suddenly became very logical to me. If I led my life waking every morning to ask myself what I would do if today was the last day of my life, I guess I’d have been living all my last days wrongly. I can’t wait for the vacation to arrive (Life can afford to wait for another week I guess). I’m going on long bus journeys. I shall visit Borders to smell the air, watch the films that I always wanted to watch, explore art galleries, hop by museums, return to familiarly distant places to read and start writing all over again.

Being in "Ctrl"

I thought about what it means to choose the word of God over emotions. Our emotions flow from the core of our heart, they overwhelm us, intoxicate us, and are in us, with us--to make a choice to deny strong feelings beating in sync with our heartbeat, that's tough. It is one thing to keep your emotions to yourself instead of parading it for the world to see, and quite another to be living through them, and retrospectively making the decision to deny them. But choosing the word of God is the recognition that as real and as powerful your emotions are, you choose to stick close to the word of God instead of acting upon feelings that confront you.

I guess the issues of life always birth out of our relationships with people. And that’s where it is the trickiest because we never have direct control over relationships, there are too many factors involved and it is not something we can work hard at solving. Yet a large part of our emotions arise from our relationships with people, instead of the last ‘A’ we achieve or the newest handbag we bought. Herein lies the contradiction: on the one hand, we have little control over relationships, on the other, relationships impact our emotional life so deeply. To resolve this tension would be to centre our feelings and thoughts on an outer objective truth that would give us more directed choices, and less emotional dependence over relationships. Ah, why have I made it sound so formulaic? I always wonder if one can be such a mastery of emotion handling that one becomes
robotic.

I really like this song:



Closer To Love


She got the call today
One out of the gray
And when the smoke cleared
It took her breath away

She said she didn't believe
It could happen to me
I guess we're all one phone call from our knees

We're gonna get there soon

If every building falls
And all the stars fade
We'll still be singing this song
The one they can't take away

I'm gonna get there soon
She's gonna be there too
Cryin' in her room
Prayin' oh, Lord come through

We're gonna get there soon

Oh, it's your light
Oh, it's your way
Pull me out of the dark
Just to shoulder the weight
Cryin' out now
From so far away
You pull me closer to love
Closer to love

Meet me once again
Down off Lake Michigan
Where we could feel the storm blowin'
Down with the wind

And don't apologize
For all the tears you've cried
You've been way too strong now for all your life

I'm gonna get there soon
You're gonna be there too
Cryin' in your room
Prayin' Lord come through

We're gonna get there soon

Oh, it's your light
Oh, it's your way
Pull me out of the dark
Just to shoulder the weight
Cryin' out now
From so far away
You pull me closer to love
Closer to love

Cause you are all that I've waited for all of my life
(We're gonna get there)
You are all that I've waited all of my life

You pull me closer to love
Closer to love
Pull me closer to love (You are all that I've waited for)
You pull me closer to love
Closer to love
Closer to love (Cause you are all that I've waited for)
Closer to love

Pull me closer to love

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Excerpts from Commencement address at Stanford University by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios:

.....Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

...
....
......

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything-all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure-these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

...
.....
.......

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, and most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Hearing voices in my head

I want to sit by a countryhouse cafe facing the stormy sea, have strawberry tarts while I pour through my readings. It's terribly miserable to be ill especially when you have tons and tons of work. Throbbing headache be gone!!: ( GONE!

Growing Old

"idealism is the drug of adolescence.
together with romance and revolution.
as we get older we learn how to plan.
besides, no one i ever loved with all my heart ever deserved it"

Joshua the Sage had those wise words...but when was it about whether the person is deserving enough anyway?

Against all Hope

I think there are many things in life we don’t understand and every thing that we don’t—we try to rationalize. Most insecurities, fears, doubts, questions become rationalizations because it makes dealing with them easier when we think we know what’s going on.

I’m in between two worlds, if I could broadly simplify them- a world of disbelief and a world of belief. They could both be worlds of beliefs, just beliefs in different value systems. As I shuttle in and out of the academic space where being critical is the Prized characteristic, and where various notions are easily simplified into ‘social constructions’, it makes me all the more reflective. I don’t think I can win anyone over through reason or through argument and how could I possibly do so? It doesn’t take grand theories to be brandied around, a simple and logical argument leaves me mum.

I don’t have answers to many questions and I have many questions unanswered. I know some people roll their eyes when they hear words like “faith” being thrown around. To them, it is a ridiculous idea that weak people depend on for lack of belief in themselves, God's presence could just be collective effervescence. I just read a thesis about how religion is a tool of social control, as Karl Marx most famously said, “Religion is the opium of the masses”. Religion teaches you to be content with your lot and not to envy and that helps ex-convicts re-integrate. Believing that whatever challenge you go through is part of God’s plan in your life makes everything easier to handle. All that seems very smart and admittedly, there is a certain amount of truth in that.

With all that said, I find my faith being challenged all the time. It takes a bump, or several, to root myself deeper. Today I was broken and I started tearing during worship and I couldn’t stop but I was also comforted with the knowledge that God is with me. I know that when a conclusion is drawn this way, in such a personalized form, it doesn’t seem like any sort of closure because individual experiences put every banter to an end. How could one challenge another’s personal experience? If it is a flawed conclusion, let it then be a truthful one. Sometimes I am incredibly weary and I'm left feeling that I just don't know what to do. And it is always during these times when God sees me through and against all hope, I believe.

Love is our Air

It's good to remember what you love.


A: How's ________ ? [Insert: Work/School/Hobby/Passion]

B: Tough.

A: But you love it.

Sometimes we need reminders...

uphill climb

What a trying day... I can't decide if it's a good thing that it's a new day (already?)For some reason, Steve Job's "Stay Foolish, Stay Hungry" keeps ringing in my head.

Baking in progress

The bad thing about staying up late is you start getting all sorts of food cravings. Now I'm really longing for a good fat slice of carrot cake with a cup of hot chocolate. Also I want to watch Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, Coraline, My Sister's Keeper. Other cravings include Timbre's Peking Duck Pizza and wings, a Carls Jr Mushroom Burger, 10 000 Xiao Long Baos, Percy Pig Gummies, okay--this isn't helping!

The Sky isn't Falling Down

Winter has arrived. It has been pouring daily and they’ve started playing Christmas carols in the forum. There’s a chill in the air, fog on the bus windows and if I’m tired enough and closed my eyes long enough, I might forget that I’m in Singapore. I have decided that I must be a Barista before I start working ‘for real’ and I realized that I have internalized societal norms and expectations that making good coffee isn’t a proper job. It is a job nonetheless, but only something that I could pass time with before drifting to bigger, greater things. I wonder what bigger and greater things could possibly refer to. Not many things can bring me more joy than a good cup of Frappe and a slice of carrot cake.