I know that this entry is definitely too late compared to the usual time that I put this up, but bear with me. This time period has been quite difficult. The year that just past me was one that was fraught with many difficult decisions that needed to be made, and really, I am still in many ways trying to get to come to grips with all that I have to deal with.
But as always, I think that I have diverged greatly from the intention of this post. This was supposed to be a celebration, not a rant, and so here it is.
Just a couple of days ago was yet another birthday anniversary of mine. It was a decent day where I allowed myself to take a little break for once and just do things that I liked doing as a way of pampering myself. I mean, I'm not really that big a fan of drawing a huge bunch of attention towards myself on a day like that, but really, sometimes it was just a nice thing to treat oneself to some of the simpler pleasures in life. I played a little flute in the morning, messing about with some Chinese New Year-themed pieces all from memory before settling down with a nice Korean-styled spicy instant noodles. John grabbed me for some light geocaching in the early afternoon before we joined up with 3 of my other good friends over here in UIUC for a special dinner over at Mandarin Wok.
The funny thing about it all is that my birthday happened to co-occur with the Chinese New Year's eve celebration, and thus it was, in many ways, a dual celebration of sorts. Unlike the time when I was back in CMU, I'm not really that close to the local chapter of the Singapore Students' Association, which meant that if they had some kind of reunion dinner event, I wasn't really in the know for it. Taking matters into my own hands of course, I just organised a strange one for myself.
I think that overall, it was a nicely organised dinner, even though I wasn't really the kind of guy who hosted events like this on any extended manner. We splurged a little, ordering nice foods like braised sea cucumber and even fresh steamed sea bass, a rarity for this part of the world considering that we are really fairly landlocked here in Champaign-Urbana.
So, what are my thoughts about having reached yet another milestone in life? Not much, really. I'll be happy to just obtain my license to research and move on to doing great things with it, and at the same time, attempt to live and love life while it still lasts. Funny how I don't really have that much expectation now; I wonder if I'm just getting a little too old that my cynicism was starting to get in the way.
YT actually sent me an early birthday gift some time back, thinly hidden with the excuse of using my size estimate for a ``friend who was roughly the same size''. It was a T-shirt from Cafepress with an 8-bit compass and the cute epithet of ``old school GPS''. That was pretty awesome.
RX had gotten me Batman: Arkham's Asylum over Steam for my birthday. In the first incarnation of this post, I've almost forgotten to write about it here! Arkham's Asylum is a fun game, and I managed to put a couple of hours into it, but well, time is starting to go a little crazy here, so the next playthrough will be a while.
As for my traditional gift to myself, I got myself a nice nyan cat perler. Why a nyan cat perler of all things? Mostly because it is cute and lively looking. I put up the perler on the wall directly in front of me at home, and it serves as a nice colourful motivation to help me relax a little, acting in many ways like the role that the soy bean plushie that my other sister gave me on my previous birthday.
All in all, the celebrations were of a more tight and simple setting, just the way that I like it. Never was really a fan of elaborate procedures and stuff, so the get-together and the gifts of YT and myself were a good enough conclusion to the one day in this year that I can really and honestly take a day off just because I can.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Fading into the Darkness
I think... that time has never been on my side. I have known this for a while now, but I think I have been living in denial for a little too long. Running, hiding, trying to escape the inevitable.
The time to confront it is now.
The time for change... is now.
It's time to discard that fake-happy side of me and sink back to that morose persona that had served me pretty well for quite a long time, until that weird day that I decided that I was better off being happy.
If ignorance truly is bliss, then let me be as melancholic as possible so that I remain un-ignorant. It is when we realise that we don't know anything, have a looming deadline to get things done, and the realisation that life will never ever be the same again that we step out of that safe zone and get things done.
In view of what I just said, it means that my overall web presence is going to shrink significantly. No, I'm not suicidal, I'm not going crazy [yet]. I think that I have to forgo what is effectively a normal life to succeed at this---there is no other way.
Wish me luck and skill, and hopefully I will prevail.
To the few who still care about me, keep in touch with email. That ancient technology works wonders since it allows a batch processing and doesn't demand any instantaneous response, qualities that I think are most apt at this point. Hell, even leaving a comment or two on my blog entries will work too, since their existence is made known to me via email anyway.
Alright, enough of drivel. Time to hit the grindstone. Hard.
No pain, no gain.
The time to confront it is now.
The time for change... is now.
It's time to discard that fake-happy side of me and sink back to that morose persona that had served me pretty well for quite a long time, until that weird day that I decided that I was better off being happy.
If ignorance truly is bliss, then let me be as melancholic as possible so that I remain un-ignorant. It is when we realise that we don't know anything, have a looming deadline to get things done, and the realisation that life will never ever be the same again that we step out of that safe zone and get things done.
In view of what I just said, it means that my overall web presence is going to shrink significantly. No, I'm not suicidal, I'm not going crazy [yet]. I think that I have to forgo what is effectively a normal life to succeed at this---there is no other way.
Wish me luck and skill, and hopefully I will prevail.
To the few who still care about me, keep in touch with email. That ancient technology works wonders since it allows a batch processing and doesn't demand any instantaneous response, qualities that I think are most apt at this point. Hell, even leaving a comment or two on my blog entries will work too, since their existence is made known to me via email anyway.
Alright, enough of drivel. Time to hit the grindstone. Hard.
No pain, no gain.
Monday, January 02, 2012
Pre-sleep Rambles
Alright, now that I am feeling sufficiently light-headed from reaching that partially awake/asleep state, it is time for another round of automatic writing where I end up ranting whatever that comes to mind without actually trying to preprocess of censor it [much].
It has been a strange fortnight. Even though there are no classes, there's always research to be done, where I spent my time reading up papers, trying to think, writing down my thoughts on the papers, writing down thoughts on what I have seen, wondering about the problem we are solving, wondering about its relevance, wondering about how I can get some tangible results as opposed to a lot of theoretical idea slinging, wondering if I have been working too hard but not smart enough, wondering about my own abilities as a research apprentice. So many ponderings, it is no wonder that I end up in this semi-zombified state where I just sleep late, wake up early, and am generally having a helluva screwed up sleep schedule, among other things.
Geocaching has been fun, cathartic in fact, more so since there hasn't been any jujitsu training for a while due to the horrible hours of the gyms that we go to to train in, and partly because, well, this being the US, the time period from Dec 23 to Jan 02 are traditionally time periods where people would go for their extended holidays or something. Geocaching allows me to get some of the rather limited sunlight, and of course, makes me use all those muscles, from my core down to the calf muscles from all the hiking and climbing that inevitably comes with these.
It's kinda odd to realise that in another two weeks, the next semester would have begun, and the entire rat race cycle will begin all over again. I am uncertain if... well I zoned out there and lost the train of thought. This probably shoes how sleep-deprived I am feeling heheh.
Alright, enough of the autowriting---it's starting to make less sense now that my cognition of the events are clearly starting to be dissociate from the general sleepiness I am experiencing.
It has been a strange fortnight. Even though there are no classes, there's always research to be done, where I spent my time reading up papers, trying to think, writing down my thoughts on the papers, writing down thoughts on what I have seen, wondering about the problem we are solving, wondering about its relevance, wondering about how I can get some tangible results as opposed to a lot of theoretical idea slinging, wondering if I have been working too hard but not smart enough, wondering about my own abilities as a research apprentice. So many ponderings, it is no wonder that I end up in this semi-zombified state where I just sleep late, wake up early, and am generally having a helluva screwed up sleep schedule, among other things.
Geocaching has been fun, cathartic in fact, more so since there hasn't been any jujitsu training for a while due to the horrible hours of the gyms that we go to to train in, and partly because, well, this being the US, the time period from Dec 23 to Jan 02 are traditionally time periods where people would go for their extended holidays or something. Geocaching allows me to get some of the rather limited sunlight, and of course, makes me use all those muscles, from my core down to the calf muscles from all the hiking and climbing that inevitably comes with these.
It's kinda odd to realise that in another two weeks, the next semester would have begun, and the entire rat race cycle will begin all over again. I am uncertain if... well I zoned out there and lost the train of thought. This probably shoes how sleep-deprived I am feeling heheh.
Alright, enough of the autowriting---it's starting to make less sense now that my cognition of the events are clearly starting to be dissociate from the general sleepiness I am experiencing.
Quick Summary
So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2011:
That's an average of 0.43 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.59 last year. Again, we see a general downward trend in the amount of leisurely writing I do, partly because I have been writing so much daily for my work/studies. Every day I write anything from 400 to 1000 words about the research work that I am doing, and really, at the end of it all, I just don't feel the need nor energy to write even more things.
Compared to last year, I have almost no emotional roller coasters. Things that had happened in the past stay in the past without any further ramifications, and I have been so work-oriented that I have almost no time to mull about all those odd and interesting relationship issues.
I don't interact with a whole bunch of people any more; mostly interacting with the few who are actively involved in geocaching, aikido/jujitsu, and more recently, the NaNoWriMo crowd in Champaign-Urbana. 2011 is a bumper crop year for Geocaching for me, having gotten a grand total of 300 finds by the last day of 2011, which is quite cool, considering that I had never thought of going for more than a couple of caches every few months. I suppose one of the best things that I had done was to introduce YT to geocaching, and to get involved with a small local group of new-ish geocachers. So many adventures all over Singapore, and in the last few months, all over the cities of Champaign-Urbana, Normal-Bloomington and Peoria. I think geocaching is more therapeutic on my psyche than anything else that I had done, partly because it required me to go out there and take a walk/hike through interesting terrain.
2011 was also a rather tumultous time for me, when my general jadedness was starting to feature a little too strongly, almost completely masking what was essentially the me I fondly remembered before all the cynicism got to me back in 2009 and reduced me to a husk of ``dumb adult-hood''. I have been too disillusioned for a little too long that I have started to lose heart. Well, like all things in life, it will change, and in this case, the change is now. Hopefully this change from ``dumb adult-hood'' back to ``inventor fun!'' will be fast enough that nothing terrible will happen. I really don't want to lose this rather hard-earned fight that I have been doing for the last couple of years.
Something rather random though... over the last three days (including today), I had visited at least three different cemeteries in the day time. I've never really walked through a cemetery much, let alone three, but all in the name of geocaching I suppose. Anyway, those cemeteries invoked a strong sense of respect in me---there lay many of those who walked the earth ealier than I. I never knew how their lives were, but what I know is that the world today, for better or worse, was consequent of their actions, directly or not. It reminds me in some sense that whatever I do now will affect the world, for better or worse, directly or not. A very sombering thought. And of my own mortality---life is really short, can't really waste it over trivialities.
I think I've side tracked much from my original intent of this post. Maybe next time.
Anyway, onwards through 2012, a better year than the last.
- 70 poems posted here
- 79 essays/rants posted here
- 6 prose/stories posted here
- 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
That's an average of 0.43 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.59 last year. Again, we see a general downward trend in the amount of leisurely writing I do, partly because I have been writing so much daily for my work/studies. Every day I write anything from 400 to 1000 words about the research work that I am doing, and really, at the end of it all, I just don't feel the need nor energy to write even more things.
Compared to last year, I have almost no emotional roller coasters. Things that had happened in the past stay in the past without any further ramifications, and I have been so work-oriented that I have almost no time to mull about all those odd and interesting relationship issues.
I don't interact with a whole bunch of people any more; mostly interacting with the few who are actively involved in geocaching, aikido/jujitsu, and more recently, the NaNoWriMo crowd in Champaign-Urbana. 2011 is a bumper crop year for Geocaching for me, having gotten a grand total of 300 finds by the last day of 2011, which is quite cool, considering that I had never thought of going for more than a couple of caches every few months. I suppose one of the best things that I had done was to introduce YT to geocaching, and to get involved with a small local group of new-ish geocachers. So many adventures all over Singapore, and in the last few months, all over the cities of Champaign-Urbana, Normal-Bloomington and Peoria. I think geocaching is more therapeutic on my psyche than anything else that I had done, partly because it required me to go out there and take a walk/hike through interesting terrain.
2011 was also a rather tumultous time for me, when my general jadedness was starting to feature a little too strongly, almost completely masking what was essentially the me I fondly remembered before all the cynicism got to me back in 2009 and reduced me to a husk of ``dumb adult-hood''. I have been too disillusioned for a little too long that I have started to lose heart. Well, like all things in life, it will change, and in this case, the change is now. Hopefully this change from ``dumb adult-hood'' back to ``inventor fun!'' will be fast enough that nothing terrible will happen. I really don't want to lose this rather hard-earned fight that I have been doing for the last couple of years.
Something rather random though... over the last three days (including today), I had visited at least three different cemeteries in the day time. I've never really walked through a cemetery much, let alone three, but all in the name of geocaching I suppose. Anyway, those cemeteries invoked a strong sense of respect in me---there lay many of those who walked the earth ealier than I. I never knew how their lives were, but what I know is that the world today, for better or worse, was consequent of their actions, directly or not. It reminds me in some sense that whatever I do now will affect the world, for better or worse, directly or not. A very sombering thought. And of my own mortality---life is really short, can't really waste it over trivialities.
I think I've side tracked much from my original intent of this post. Maybe next time.
Anyway, onwards through 2012, a better year than the last.
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