Reading Day

I met up with an old colleague last evening for dinner, and we caught up on our lives ever since we both were done with working at I²R. He's doing alright, but was undergoing similar issues about matching what he was trained in with what was being expected of him at work, with the single big difference that he had started a family (with a child on the way), and was therefore more ``stuck'' about just holding it out instead of walking away from the nonsense.

Call it confirmation bias, but hearing that coming from him was not exactly a good thing in my mind. Already I have been feeling ``stuck'' in the environment that is Singapore with respect to work, and the session that I had with my old colleague was just feeding me with more information that is leading towards exasperation at the labour market in Singapore.

I am not just a ``cheap-ass warm body'' to be pushed about by people who believe they know more than me through the blind following of so-called ``best practices'' that they themselves have no understanding over. Charlatans... society is run by many charlatans, and it makes me fume.

Did I study so much and think so hard just to be lackeys of conmen?

This is something that I need to think really hard for myself.

Of course, there's the whole other aspect of ``am I really ready to commit to a full life of singlehood with Christ at the centre of it all?''. If I commit to a life of singlehood, then there are many more options that are available since I do not have to hedge any resources that I may possess for the eventual family that I am supposed to raise.

I don't know if I am ready to make such a commitment. In many ways, such a commitment is akin to declaring the equivalent of monk-hood, or the concept of a 出家人 in that one is simultaneously capable of loving all and no one at the same time. It is a very tough call to make. I pray that God will grant me the appropriate amount of wisdom to understand the consequences of the choices so that I can know what He intends me to do.

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The thing about Feudal Alloy is about how annoying the control scheme is---analogue stick for a 2D platformer. I played a little of it yesterday afternoon, but had to put it away when I was stuck on the same two screens for the past half an hour. That meant that today, instead of trying to play Feudal Alloy in the bid to complete it as talked about a while back, I procrastinated and ended up doing more reading.

The big book that I was reading was No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War by Hiroo Onoda, translated by Charles S. Terry. It is the semi-autobiography of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese army officer hold out that waged a one-man guerilla war against the Fillipinos even as World War II has ended. The main thing about the whole autobiography that struck me was his final doubt about just what he had did with those thirty years of his life living in the jungle, twisting every single piece of evidence that the outside world was trying to tell him that the war was already over and that he should stand down.

It hit a little close to home for me. Yes, I am in no war with no orders from superior officers and what-not, but the same level of doubt about what I had been doing with my life till this point was a sentiment that I could understand. It was not a situation where one was just sitting around and doing nothing---things were indeed done, but at the end of it all, when one finally has the opportunity to take a step back and reflect upon all that has happened, only one question remained:

Why did I do all that; was it really worth it?

I don't think that what I had done in the past has contributed towards the glory of God. I was/am a sinner, and prior to becoming a believer and being saved by Christ Jesus, I was at best an agnostic, which definitely won no favours of God for sure. The intentions of all that I did then had nothing to do with God in mind, and thus cannot be contributing towards anything towards the glorification of God.

To sum it up, I don't think I got happy from it all. I was much happier making music than working.

Anyway, the other book that I read was A Grave of Fireflies by Nosaka Akiyuki, translated by James R. Abrams. Everyone dies in A Grave of Fireflies, and they all die for the saddest of reasons that is from human suffering and human greed. At least in No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, the protagonist ended alive---his comrades died one after another over the thirty years, but he managed to live on.

I remembered a few years ago, back when I was still pretty close with Janet that I talked about wanting to watch the Studio Ghibli version of Grave of the Fireflies over a Chinese New Year holiday that I spent at the I²R office while working on something, without knowing what it was other than it was a good piece of animation. Thankfully, I had heeded her advice of not doing so as it was a great way to get all depressed from it all.

I wonder how she is doing now. I could reach out to her---she still exists in cyberspace---but it has been so many years since. Whatever commonality we had before is probably just reduced to being she and I are both humans who once studied in UIUC.

Ah well.

Now that the ``short books'' have been read to offset the craziness that is Deep Learning, it is time to start on another text book, namely OpenStax College: Organisational Behaviour. Hopefully this one will be less excruciating than Deep Learning---OpenStax's open text books tend to be quite readable, but to be fair, most of their text books that I have read tend to be on the soft science aspect and not hard-core mathematics-related.

That's all for today's entry. I'm going to watch some more ESA 2021 Winter VODs before calling it a night. Till the next update.