在美国的读书生涯中，我几乎从来没有特别想家的感觉。不过在这两个星期内，我不禁回想着家。或许是生活太复杂吧，还是最近的种种错则而导致我出现想家的念头。
家是个很奇怪的一个组织：当你和家人在一起时，有时会出现种种默察，而这会导致你觉得你的家人似乎在整你。不过，一旦你离开了家，不久后你就会产生想家的念头。可能是人生常情吧，每个人都需要有一种归属感，而家就是能产生个人归属感的一个东西。当你最需要人关怀的时候，你就会想起家。
或许在这深造的生活方式太紧张了吧，也可能是因为我最近又受了伤之类的，所以我会想起家。以前的我简直不把家的重要性放在眼里，如今我觉得除了家以外就再也没有设么重要的东西了。有个家的归属感的感觉最好。
好了，我累了，错别字好像有要重出江湖了。我看我因该去休息一下，这么一来我就有精力来挑战未来。
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Funereal #2
Ahem.
I lay there within my half-opened casket, serene as a man can ever be. Right there next to my glass-covered top, my aged but still lovely wife weeps to herself. Oh the sorrow, the pain! Yet she maintains her dignified poise, melancholy notwithstanding. Comforting her with an arm around her shoulders is my eldest daughter, lovely, tall and dressed in the deepest black that one could think of. She has always been my pride and joy, for being first-born meant she was the child I held the longest and watched over the most. Her husband stands quietly near her---it is not his place to be in deep mourning; his role is mostly supportive. My other daughter flanks my wife on the other side, silently sobbing to herself; she's not as tough as my eldest, but still she has her strong moments, but now was not the time. My son stands in front of my portrait, his head bowed, face unsmiling, tearless, serious---I have brought him up well, it seems, for stoicness was one thing I thought every male should have about him, to never look emotional in front of others other than those close by.
The monk finally finishes the prayer that he was chanting to free my soul of my earthly shackles. Already I feel a little lighter. My wife's weeping intensified, and if I weren't already dead I would have leapt up to her and hold her and tell her once more how much I love her and don't really want to go. With a solemn bow, the monk steps away from his position and the pallbearers stepped up. The lead pallbearer gave a final bow to me, before closing the lid of my coffin. With a silent one-two, the pallbearers lift my casket upon their shoulders and walked solemnly into the antechamber behind the curtains. The small cortege behind me filed out of the main area and shuffled up to the viewing room on the second floor.
There, they got to see the funeral home workers lift up my casket and slowly bring it to the conveyor belt that fed into the gaping door of the furnace of the crematorium. My wife, stoically strong thus far, finally wails audibly, dignity be damned, while my daughters try their best to comfort her while stifling their own tears with little effect. Confronted with the final inevitability, even my son's eyes were tearing.
The funereal home workers gently pushed my casket onto the conveyer belt and stepped back, their heads bowed in respect. My casket rolls gently down the conveyer into the furnace, where I get consumed by the flames for the last time. While I know that I am dead, I leave knowing that my son and daughters will carry on with life, and that they will take care of my lover till the day comes that she joins me for true eternal bliss.
Saturday, October 08, 2011
It's Saturday Already?
It's yet another Saturday morning, and again I'm sitting at my study desk next to the window, the only time that I can get decent illumination from this desk. That corneal abrasion episode took away a good chunk of my time as I shuttled to and fro doctors, instilled eyedrops like clockwork, worrying about how scary the final bill will be, worrying about how all these down time is affecting my already burgeoning workload.
It's not easy living life without support, especially a life where everything needs to be pre-planned and time-managed from start to end. In the bid to obtain a life where I have a slightly less mundane existence, I find myself in a life that requires inordinate amounts of self-discipline just to pull things off. Such is the irony of life. And just when I thought I could put all those years of self-discipline behind me too.
I think at this point, the one big thing I can say about the PhD programme is that it is one long struggle between doing things and finding enough time to deal with the whole life aspect of things. Life has a strange way of creeping up on you when you are not really noticing, and what happens after that is usually quite complicated, since in life, you have to deal with more than just yourself; there's always someone or something else in the equation that you need to look out for.
Okay, no real mood to wax lyrical. Need to get some stuff done so that I can... work on other stuff. Till next time.
It's not easy living life without support, especially a life where everything needs to be pre-planned and time-managed from start to end. In the bid to obtain a life where I have a slightly less mundane existence, I find myself in a life that requires inordinate amounts of self-discipline just to pull things off. Such is the irony of life. And just when I thought I could put all those years of self-discipline behind me too.
I think at this point, the one big thing I can say about the PhD programme is that it is one long struggle between doing things and finding enough time to deal with the whole life aspect of things. Life has a strange way of creeping up on you when you are not really noticing, and what happens after that is usually quite complicated, since in life, you have to deal with more than just yourself; there's always someone or something else in the equation that you need to look out for.
Okay, no real mood to wax lyrical. Need to get some stuff done so that I can... work on other stuff. Till next time.
Friday, October 07, 2011
Clean Bill of Health?
The nightmare of 2+ weeks is just reaching the end, and none too soon I might add.
A day-long travel out to Bloomington, Illinois is nothing to scoff at, considering that it is a 60-mile journey one-way from Champaign-Urbana. Factoring in the fear of the unknown meant that I added a generous buffer to the overall time that I was willing to spend out here in Bloomington before hopping on the long-haul bus back home.
That last 1%---finally there is some closure. The expert has spoken; there is no medical risk of the epithelial ingrowth colonising the entirety of my cornea, and that any procedure that would be done will be done so under my own comfort level. The gist of it is that the corneal flap has folded back slightly, and it is under the ophthamologist's opinion that it wouldn't post a problem unless I feel discomfort from it, i.e. things like having ridiculously dry eyes for extended periods of times, sudden change in astigmatism, or random feelings of foreign bodies within the eye itself. In short, that 1% isn't going to matter unless it is actually affecting me, then I can always go back to her to have her lift the flap and scrape of those epithelial cells, all under local anaesthesia of course.
Probably the best bit of news I have heard in a while.
Right now, I'm in no rush to get back into Jujitsu training---still need to alter my gi a little (damn thing is still too damn long in spite my ``best fit'' sizing). Also, while that 1% is declared medically insignificant, I want to give it just a little more time to recuperate, and until I can get hold of some of those protective goggles. Calling those things protective goggles is kind of strange, when in reality there are really spectacles with particularly sturdy frames. Might as well, considering that I have been thinking of updating my prescription for a while now for long-range work like driving. I asked the doctor if it were normal of me to not use my glasses when working on the computer, and her reply was that my eyes were lazy; since I was already myopic to begin with, the eye just refuses to use the eye muscles to accomodate for the nearer vision given the correction. This happens only because the level of myopia that I have now is sufficiently low that objects placed just at arm's length distance away just happens to be sitting within the comfort zone of my eyes' focal length. Well I suppose I'm going to keep doing this as I don't really see a need to fix anything---worst case I'll see if I can get a greatly reduced power for close range work, mostly to fight the astigmatism that can distort things.
I was feeling quite listless over the past fortnight, considering that I couldn't really do any of the physical activities stuff that I liked doing due to my corneal abrasion (Jujitsu and geocaching). But today, I think I had my share of venting out these frustrated energies through the long walk to and fro the ophthamologist's office from the long haul bus stop. The Google Maps' estimated distance for the route along the main roads was estimated to be around 2.4 miles, and I walked both directions, plus a mile here and there when I slipped off to pick up some geocaches along the way. All in all, I think I walked about 10 kilometres today, not counting the daily 7 kilometres of cycling I do to get to office and back. I bet I don't even get to clock such mileage back in Singapore heheheheh... yet I find myself willing to take walking as a valid mode of transport here. For fun, I used my GPSr to track how fast I was walking, and it turned out to be, on average, 3.7 miles per hour, which is roughly 5.9 kilometres per hour. Not super fast, but fast enough to make the time quoted for walking on Google Maps irrelevant.
And so, my Thursday is almost done, spent in a different town getting expert advice on my eyes because the town that I am based in had no such experts. Such is the strangeness of life. Now the only thing left to do for this episode is to wait for the medical bill and see just how much 20% of it really is, and then figure out how to pay for it without using up all of my allowances. I am hoping that the cost isn't too drastic, but I can't be sure only because no one seems to publish the consultation rate. According to Mangesh, my colleague/labmate, those rates are hardly published because they change according to the health insurance provider. Talk about stratified sampling for sales. I just hope that the part I need to pay is reasonable enough.
Alright, enough of ranting. I should probably start to walk towards the pick up point and wait for the bus. Hanging out in another university's student centre is a little weird and disconcerting, particularly when it's evening and there's no one about. I must be missing something here I suppose.
Till the next update.
A day-long travel out to Bloomington, Illinois is nothing to scoff at, considering that it is a 60-mile journey one-way from Champaign-Urbana. Factoring in the fear of the unknown meant that I added a generous buffer to the overall time that I was willing to spend out here in Bloomington before hopping on the long-haul bus back home.
That last 1%---finally there is some closure. The expert has spoken; there is no medical risk of the epithelial ingrowth colonising the entirety of my cornea, and that any procedure that would be done will be done so under my own comfort level. The gist of it is that the corneal flap has folded back slightly, and it is under the ophthamologist's opinion that it wouldn't post a problem unless I feel discomfort from it, i.e. things like having ridiculously dry eyes for extended periods of times, sudden change in astigmatism, or random feelings of foreign bodies within the eye itself. In short, that 1% isn't going to matter unless it is actually affecting me, then I can always go back to her to have her lift the flap and scrape of those epithelial cells, all under local anaesthesia of course.
Probably the best bit of news I have heard in a while.
Right now, I'm in no rush to get back into Jujitsu training---still need to alter my gi a little (damn thing is still too damn long in spite my ``best fit'' sizing). Also, while that 1% is declared medically insignificant, I want to give it just a little more time to recuperate, and until I can get hold of some of those protective goggles. Calling those things protective goggles is kind of strange, when in reality there are really spectacles with particularly sturdy frames. Might as well, considering that I have been thinking of updating my prescription for a while now for long-range work like driving. I asked the doctor if it were normal of me to not use my glasses when working on the computer, and her reply was that my eyes were lazy; since I was already myopic to begin with, the eye just refuses to use the eye muscles to accomodate for the nearer vision given the correction. This happens only because the level of myopia that I have now is sufficiently low that objects placed just at arm's length distance away just happens to be sitting within the comfort zone of my eyes' focal length. Well I suppose I'm going to keep doing this as I don't really see a need to fix anything---worst case I'll see if I can get a greatly reduced power for close range work, mostly to fight the astigmatism that can distort things.
I was feeling quite listless over the past fortnight, considering that I couldn't really do any of the physical activities stuff that I liked doing due to my corneal abrasion (Jujitsu and geocaching). But today, I think I had my share of venting out these frustrated energies through the long walk to and fro the ophthamologist's office from the long haul bus stop. The Google Maps' estimated distance for the route along the main roads was estimated to be around 2.4 miles, and I walked both directions, plus a mile here and there when I slipped off to pick up some geocaches along the way. All in all, I think I walked about 10 kilometres today, not counting the daily 7 kilometres of cycling I do to get to office and back. I bet I don't even get to clock such mileage back in Singapore heheheheh... yet I find myself willing to take walking as a valid mode of transport here. For fun, I used my GPSr to track how fast I was walking, and it turned out to be, on average, 3.7 miles per hour, which is roughly 5.9 kilometres per hour. Not super fast, but fast enough to make the time quoted for walking on Google Maps irrelevant.
And so, my Thursday is almost done, spent in a different town getting expert advice on my eyes because the town that I am based in had no such experts. Such is the strangeness of life. Now the only thing left to do for this episode is to wait for the medical bill and see just how much 20% of it really is, and then figure out how to pay for it without using up all of my allowances. I am hoping that the cost isn't too drastic, but I can't be sure only because no one seems to publish the consultation rate. According to Mangesh, my colleague/labmate, those rates are hardly published because they change according to the health insurance provider. Talk about stratified sampling for sales. I just hope that the part I need to pay is reasonable enough.
Alright, enough of ranting. I should probably start to walk towards the pick up point and wait for the bus. Hanging out in another university's student centre is a little weird and disconcerting, particularly when it's evening and there's no one about. I must be missing something here I suppose.
Till the next update.
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
But I'm Only a Student...
There are some days in my life that I wish I were dead or non-existent, and it seems that today is the day.
I went back to the optometrist today expecting good news. Well in some senses, I did, as the wound is healed at 99%. Except that 1%, that lousy last 1%. Something wrong with that 1%---it wasn't healing fast enough; that 1% was at the periphery of my corneal flap. Maybe some epithelial cells have made their way past the flap from the initial injury, causing it to possibly be the start of an ingrowth. Possibly. Prognosis is good though, but it means I have to go elsewhere to get this checked out by someone more qualified than what we are having at the local hospital/clinic.
Except this somewhere is a good hour's drive away. In the US, this means at least 60 miles, or around 97 kilometres. 97 kilometres. Bye bye busy day.
And of course, I have tons of things that are due this week. Thankfully, I've gotten enough of them done, so I'm left with one major item to clear, not counting this cross-country doctor's visit. And now I have to coordinate with a kind soul who will take half the day off to drive me all the way out there and back.
This is starting to be a really costly (opportunity cost) incident...
I went back to the optometrist today expecting good news. Well in some senses, I did, as the wound is healed at 99%. Except that 1%, that lousy last 1%. Something wrong with that 1%---it wasn't healing fast enough; that 1% was at the periphery of my corneal flap. Maybe some epithelial cells have made their way past the flap from the initial injury, causing it to possibly be the start of an ingrowth. Possibly. Prognosis is good though, but it means I have to go elsewhere to get this checked out by someone more qualified than what we are having at the local hospital/clinic.
Except this somewhere is a good hour's drive away. In the US, this means at least 60 miles, or around 97 kilometres. 97 kilometres. Bye bye busy day.
And of course, I have tons of things that are due this week. Thankfully, I've gotten enough of them done, so I'm left with one major item to clear, not counting this cross-country doctor's visit. And now I have to coordinate with a kind soul who will take half the day off to drive me all the way out there and back.
This is starting to be a really costly (opportunity cost) incident...
Monday, October 03, 2011
Corneal Conundrum
Break my arm and I can still work with the other one, albeit slowly.
Break my leg and I just limp about, working mostly unimpaired, though I probably need to watch my weight from lack of activity.
But bust my eye and my spirit is broken, having neither the will nor the ability to actually see what I'm doing and thus get things done in a smooth fashion.
That last statement is basically how I have been feeling for the last fortnight---the inability to see clearly is always annoying and makes it really difficult to concentrate. Indeed, calling humans visual creatures is a most apt description.
It is not that my right corneal abrasion isn't healing; it is doing better each day compared to the last. It is the fact that it is healing too slowly relative to the norm that is making my attending optometrist worried. Such is the complication that comes with a general predisposition towards inflammation, and the fact that my cornea itself has undergone some structural changes via LASIK.
Do I regret having LASIK done then? No, I don't. It just isn't safe to be traipsing all around the world with an effective eyesight that required -15.00 dioptres of correction. I think the expensive take-home lesson here is that I should be careful with what kinds of sports that I am doing. A year of Aikido didn't increase the risk of anything happening to my eye---most of the stuff we do involves mostly the hands and twisting the body into interesting positions so as to throw someone. But Jujitsu, it's different; the take downs are many and highly varied. I should be more careful with this sport than I did with Aikido, since the integrity of my cornea has been breached twice by now, and we all know that structural integrity takes a long time to recover, particularly for something that begins as fragile as the cornea.
Anyway, that's all the time I have for random ranting. Maybe another post will be up on Friday or something... I don't know. Currently having to juggle too many things at once means that I have little to no time to myself to do reflections and other ``personal development'' things like writing journal entries or even stories or poems.
Break my leg and I just limp about, working mostly unimpaired, though I probably need to watch my weight from lack of activity.
But bust my eye and my spirit is broken, having neither the will nor the ability to actually see what I'm doing and thus get things done in a smooth fashion.
That last statement is basically how I have been feeling for the last fortnight---the inability to see clearly is always annoying and makes it really difficult to concentrate. Indeed, calling humans visual creatures is a most apt description.
It is not that my right corneal abrasion isn't healing; it is doing better each day compared to the last. It is the fact that it is healing too slowly relative to the norm that is making my attending optometrist worried. Such is the complication that comes with a general predisposition towards inflammation, and the fact that my cornea itself has undergone some structural changes via LASIK.
Do I regret having LASIK done then? No, I don't. It just isn't safe to be traipsing all around the world with an effective eyesight that required -15.00 dioptres of correction. I think the expensive take-home lesson here is that I should be careful with what kinds of sports that I am doing. A year of Aikido didn't increase the risk of anything happening to my eye---most of the stuff we do involves mostly the hands and twisting the body into interesting positions so as to throw someone. But Jujitsu, it's different; the take downs are many and highly varied. I should be more careful with this sport than I did with Aikido, since the integrity of my cornea has been breached twice by now, and we all know that structural integrity takes a long time to recover, particularly for something that begins as fragile as the cornea.
Anyway, that's all the time I have for random ranting. Maybe another post will be up on Friday or something... I don't know. Currently having to juggle too many things at once means that I have little to no time to myself to do reflections and other ``personal development'' things like writing journal entries or even stories or poems.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Musings on a Saturday
In the office/lab on a Saturday morning---not my kind of weekend morning, but it suffices given the situation that I'm in. I'm kind of delayed by a few days of work this week because I had to deal with the pressing issue of a right corneal abrasion that I think I sustained from a rather vigorous training session on Monday evening.
It's funny how one doesn't really care about something before anything bad happens, and then when some strange occurrence happens, one is suddenly made aware of body parts, medical histories and physiologies that we never really paid much attention to.
Suffice to say, this condition is currently under medical supervision, and all that I can do is really to wait it out and let my body do its thing about healing the abrasion over. The medication provided is mostly prophylactic in nature, and in some senses to improve the conditions in which the wound has to encourage healing. This of course includes the properties of the reduction of the inflammatory response (via steroid eyedrops), and a general relaxation of the ``twitch'' muscles (via mydriasis and cycloplegia inducing eyedrops). Of course this leaves my right eye in a somewhat ``zombified'' state where I cannot really use it to focus on anything of importance, and this includes reading as well as other important near vision work like looking at the computer screen. Thankfully, my left eye is still doing a superb job in keeping my overall eyesight serviceable, and I am really grateful for the general adaptability of my body in general.
So, what's new in my world? Well, for some reason I find myself thinking about how life would be like to have a couple of sons or daughters about, living with them, growing up with them, and generally experiencing the joys and pains of fatherhood. It's a funny type of warm and fuzzy feeling---I have no idea how to explain this, maybe real-life fathers will know what I'm trying to convey here. Anyway, this bout of emotions and wishful thinking came about when I read this article by Regina Brett (same person who wrote the 45/50 life lessons column). It does seem like one is missing out on a lot of things in life when one does not settle down with a child or two (or more!). Some time back, my parents did mention how they never regretted having us children, even though it meant that my mum had to stop work and take care of us full-time---they never regretted it even though we were trying at times, me particularly due to my general abnormality of having skin that reacted to everything with inflammations. They never regretted it. They never regretted it.
It makes me cry when I think about what they said.
I suppose as I get older, my perspective shifts away from what I can do to improve my personal self towards something a little more... humanising, if there's a term for that. Like the random team-building events that I had gone through with various people from different stages of life, they placed family above everything else, while silly l'il me was still thinking big thoughts about meeting great people and being great in general.
When I was young, I knew about mortality, but didn't really care much about it, since when one was fourteen for instance, dying was among the last things that would come to mind. But as I grow older and reaching my one-third mark of my expected natural lifespan, the reality of mortality is starting to hit me very soon. It is hard to accept that my parents are growing old---in my eyes, they never seemed to have aged since twenty odd years ago when I was first sentient. Yet now as each day passes, I fear for their eventual infirmity, I fear for their eventual mortality. And then it makes me sad to realise that I'm probably not spending much time with them now that I'm ``all grown up'' and have a life to lead on my own. Yet when I am with them, it is hard to say anything else other than what we might usually say each day; too macho or too repressed as a culture, perhaps?
I suppose it's becoming easier and easier to understand what pains our parents went through the older we get, and it is only after some time of being away and pondering about the past and the future that makes one realise how important it is to love them now when they are still here with us.
It's funny how one doesn't really care about something before anything bad happens, and then when some strange occurrence happens, one is suddenly made aware of body parts, medical histories and physiologies that we never really paid much attention to.
Suffice to say, this condition is currently under medical supervision, and all that I can do is really to wait it out and let my body do its thing about healing the abrasion over. The medication provided is mostly prophylactic in nature, and in some senses to improve the conditions in which the wound has to encourage healing. This of course includes the properties of the reduction of the inflammatory response (via steroid eyedrops), and a general relaxation of the ``twitch'' muscles (via mydriasis and cycloplegia inducing eyedrops). Of course this leaves my right eye in a somewhat ``zombified'' state where I cannot really use it to focus on anything of importance, and this includes reading as well as other important near vision work like looking at the computer screen. Thankfully, my left eye is still doing a superb job in keeping my overall eyesight serviceable, and I am really grateful for the general adaptability of my body in general.
So, what's new in my world? Well, for some reason I find myself thinking about how life would be like to have a couple of sons or daughters about, living with them, growing up with them, and generally experiencing the joys and pains of fatherhood. It's a funny type of warm and fuzzy feeling---I have no idea how to explain this, maybe real-life fathers will know what I'm trying to convey here. Anyway, this bout of emotions and wishful thinking came about when I read this article by Regina Brett (same person who wrote the 45/50 life lessons column). It does seem like one is missing out on a lot of things in life when one does not settle down with a child or two (or more!). Some time back, my parents did mention how they never regretted having us children, even though it meant that my mum had to stop work and take care of us full-time---they never regretted it even though we were trying at times, me particularly due to my general abnormality of having skin that reacted to everything with inflammations. They never regretted it. They never regretted it.
It makes me cry when I think about what they said.
I suppose as I get older, my perspective shifts away from what I can do to improve my personal self towards something a little more... humanising, if there's a term for that. Like the random team-building events that I had gone through with various people from different stages of life, they placed family above everything else, while silly l'il me was still thinking big thoughts about meeting great people and being great in general.
When I was young, I knew about mortality, but didn't really care much about it, since when one was fourteen for instance, dying was among the last things that would come to mind. But as I grow older and reaching my one-third mark of my expected natural lifespan, the reality of mortality is starting to hit me very soon. It is hard to accept that my parents are growing old---in my eyes, they never seemed to have aged since twenty odd years ago when I was first sentient. Yet now as each day passes, I fear for their eventual infirmity, I fear for their eventual mortality. And then it makes me sad to realise that I'm probably not spending much time with them now that I'm ``all grown up'' and have a life to lead on my own. Yet when I am with them, it is hard to say anything else other than what we might usually say each day; too macho or too repressed as a culture, perhaps?
I suppose it's becoming easier and easier to understand what pains our parents went through the older we get, and it is only after some time of being away and pondering about the past and the future that makes one realise how important it is to love them now when they are still here with us.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
A Bicycle Built for... Me
While on the one hand I'm really glad to have gotten my driver's licence in Singapore, I'm still tardying a little with regards to getting the state licence in Illinois. Well, I technically still have around 60 days to get it, but that's not a major problem---it's not a problem at all. Driving is of course a most useful skill, but the maintenance and usage of the car is something that needs to be taken into consideration. Considering that Champaign-Urbana is very friendly to cycling in general, I have taken up cycling as my primary mode of transport.
So I got myself outfitted for a bicycle, a hybrid one specifically. A hybrid bicycle is a cross between the gripping power of the rugged mountain bicycle and the light-weighted speed of the road bicycle; a nice mix of the rough and the smooth, the kind of bicycle that is well suited for urban travel. The one thing that feels different riding in the US is that I need to signal with my left hand. That is a little unnerving and disorienting because I'm too used to steering with my left hand and signalling with my right---this switch of hands just takes a little getting used to. And I have now grown to love the fact that my bicycle has a mirror attached to it to look behind without having to turn all the way around, though I still look over my shoulder to check my blind spots should I have to filter left to turn left.
I'm going to build up my stamina and power to make my bicycle a most useful mode of transport, building up to the point that I can easily cover 50+km in a single day (roughly 25km out, and 25km back). I think that will help my overall goal of being stronger when I return.
Okay, enough of the cycling talk---sleeping time.
So I got myself outfitted for a bicycle, a hybrid one specifically. A hybrid bicycle is a cross between the gripping power of the rugged mountain bicycle and the light-weighted speed of the road bicycle; a nice mix of the rough and the smooth, the kind of bicycle that is well suited for urban travel. The one thing that feels different riding in the US is that I need to signal with my left hand. That is a little unnerving and disorienting because I'm too used to steering with my left hand and signalling with my right---this switch of hands just takes a little getting used to. And I have now grown to love the fact that my bicycle has a mirror attached to it to look behind without having to turn all the way around, though I still look over my shoulder to check my blind spots should I have to filter left to turn left.
I'm going to build up my stamina and power to make my bicycle a most useful mode of transport, building up to the point that I can easily cover 50+km in a single day (roughly 25km out, and 25km back). I think that will help my overall goal of being stronger when I return.
Okay, enough of the cycling talk---sleeping time.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Undoing Font Hiding in Windows
If you are on Windows 7, and after performing some update, suddenly realise that you cannot see any of your non-Latin characters in your applications when you once could, try this out. Use Win+F2 and type "C:\Windows\Fonts" and press enter. Under "Font settings", make sure that the option "Hide fonts based on language settings" is unchecked. Then, reboot. Things should work okay after that, if not well, erm, you're on your own.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Quick Evaluation
Phew, the first week of classes are finally done. I really wanted to write this entry a couple of days back, but somehow things always cropped up and I find myself having to abandon the various attempts on writing a decent entry here. Of course, I have Q10 handy for the ``just write'' type of writing that I seek, so this entry gets done that way.
The first thing that one notices when one is in graduate school is the notion that no one really gives a damn about what you do. No one gives a damn about what you do, be it your advisor, your fellow colleagues, or any one else. No one except yourself, of course. The curriculum is tailor-made for you, and you have to take charge (with the assistance of a committee of course) of what you want to/need to take in order to fulfill your academic course requirements. And then there is the whole issue of intellectual discovery---it is up to you and you alone to decide how you might want to run your research. Of course if you have a slightly more caring advisor, he/she will actually attempt to make sure that you do something along the way, but other than that, you are on your own. I sort of knew this was going to be the case prior to entering graduate school, but having witnessed it first hand makes the stories that I have heard more concrete and real.
Of course, this being the first week of the semester, things are progressing a little on the slow side, but things are not as slow as it seems. Okay, compared to CMU, things are sort of slow now (usually we would have the first round of homework assigned by the end of the week), but it is really hard to tell if this is going to be the pace that things will be running at; for all I know, this is merely the first week syndrome where things are deliberately released at a reduced pace just to ensure that any last-minute class enrolment won't lose out too much, though to be fair, it doesn't seem to be the culture here to have ``last-minute enrolments''---there doesn't seem to exist a wait list from which people can queue on while waiting to be enrolled into a class.
Living conditions-wise it has been pretty peaceful. My dorm space is really a one-room apartment on the southern outskirts of the main campus, so it tends to be much more tranquil here than say the residence halls where the undergraduates might be living in. There are of course pros and cons of this set up---it means that when I finally get myself completely at ease with this place, I will have an excellent distraction-free environment to get cracking, and not have to get into my office just to get work done. The main disadvantage is that because I live on the southern outskirts of the main campus, the daily commute to my office up in the computer science department building (Siebel Centre) can be pretty brutal. I have to take a bus up north every morning; the bus comes in 12-minute intervals between 0700hrs to 0800hrs, subsequently it runs on 20-minute intervals instead. It takes the bus around 13 to 17 minutes to arrive at the bus stop nearest to Siebel Centre, and from there, a 750-feet walk awaits me. For now, things are quite dandy because the weather is still conducive for walking, but I'm really not very sure how this is going to work out once winter sets in. And yes, I have switched to the imperial system (at least for distances) for now because the dimension of ``500 feet'' is a natural length for all the block distances that dot the landscape of the campus grounds.
The ``500 feet'' comment comes from the manner in which I have been navigating around the campus with---throughout the last fortnight or so I have been walking around with my Garmin eTrex GPS receiver in tow. It is pretty nifty the moment I got the Champaign-Urbana base map loaded into the device; by knowing which road intersections I have passed, and having a working memory of the local map made walking around campus relatively fuss-free. Considering the fact that I'm a graduate student who doesn't have the benefit of living in close quarters with other like-minded individuals, it is a really fast way to get the lay of the land on the back of my hand. I think I have geocaching to thank for this though---the months spent walking all over Singapore armed with nothing more than a GPS receiver and some local maps have indeed honed my geospatial reasoning skills, making navigation a much easier exercise than thought possible.
Anyway, not sure if I had said this in an earlier post (not checking only because I'm using Q10 to write up this entry), but the campus here feels very different. For one, since the department buildings are fairly far from each other, one is more likely to run into people in the same programme than anything else. This is different from CMU because, well, CMU's campus is so small that it is hard to not run into people from different schools. For two, because I keep running into the engineering/computer science folks, I do end up running into a lot of PRC students. It feels a little weird when one is in the US and end up hearing more mandarin spoken than english, but it is not something to be worried about I suppose; it is only when they start gathering in groups and being generally obnoxious that things start to get annoying, and even then that action is not limited to the PRC students alone. So far I've not managed to break into that little cocoon that many of them are stuck in, so I suppose I will have to take a little effort to make friends with some of them and see what things we can share and learn along the way.
Food here is still manageable---I have a full kitchen to work with. Well, almost full, since I have a refrigerator/freezer, an electric stove and oven, a saucepan and two different types of spatula. I just don't have enough of the other amenities required for cooking, like knives, cutting boards, flat plans, condiments and the like. And of course a microwave, the single most useful electrical appliance that one can have within an apartment, since it makes heating and reheating food stuffs that much easier. But all these things will have to come eventually when I start to see the need to actually cook, and when my allowance comes in; money is starting to get a little tight as I deal with the price of the text books that are needed for class and the overall need for survival through sustenance.
The bus system here is very good---there's at least one bus that will take one to anywhere that one might want to go on and off campus. More importantly, the bus system is quite efficient; there are different routes for the week day day time, week day evening and weekend. The routes are colour coded by the general service locations, and the numbers identify the route directly, with the weekend and evening versions having numbers ten times that of the usual week day day time ones. The general direction of the bus route is also encoded, so one can unambiguously state which bus it is they want to take, like the 120W Teal route or the 50E Green route. The buses also have an integrated system that tracks their movement, and the provided expected time of arrival at each bus stop is accurate to within five minutes, which is really useful. The buses are also handicap friendly since they can all ``kneel''---hydraulically lower the front of the bus so that the ramp can be deployed for those in need of them. All buses also have attached bicycle racks in front of them that can take up to two bicycles, which is a great thing to support cycling within the city. A pity that the Singapore transport system, in all its glory, don't even have such useful facilities without involving a lot of bureaucratic wrangling to get working. The bus schedule guide is also freely available on all buses, and that makes looking out for the various bus timings and locations that much easier for folks who don't have the Android phone application that polls the mass transit department's web site for such information.
So far I'm not really homesick yet, so I would think that things are going pretty smooth on my end. Many of my friends who live on the US east coast are terrified at the prospect of having to deal with Hurricane Irene that I do feel for their safely. Anyway, that's all I have for now, so till next time.
The first thing that one notices when one is in graduate school is the notion that no one really gives a damn about what you do. No one gives a damn about what you do, be it your advisor, your fellow colleagues, or any one else. No one except yourself, of course. The curriculum is tailor-made for you, and you have to take charge (with the assistance of a committee of course) of what you want to/need to take in order to fulfill your academic course requirements. And then there is the whole issue of intellectual discovery---it is up to you and you alone to decide how you might want to run your research. Of course if you have a slightly more caring advisor, he/she will actually attempt to make sure that you do something along the way, but other than that, you are on your own. I sort of knew this was going to be the case prior to entering graduate school, but having witnessed it first hand makes the stories that I have heard more concrete and real.
Of course, this being the first week of the semester, things are progressing a little on the slow side, but things are not as slow as it seems. Okay, compared to CMU, things are sort of slow now (usually we would have the first round of homework assigned by the end of the week), but it is really hard to tell if this is going to be the pace that things will be running at; for all I know, this is merely the first week syndrome where things are deliberately released at a reduced pace just to ensure that any last-minute class enrolment won't lose out too much, though to be fair, it doesn't seem to be the culture here to have ``last-minute enrolments''---there doesn't seem to exist a wait list from which people can queue on while waiting to be enrolled into a class.
Living conditions-wise it has been pretty peaceful. My dorm space is really a one-room apartment on the southern outskirts of the main campus, so it tends to be much more tranquil here than say the residence halls where the undergraduates might be living in. There are of course pros and cons of this set up---it means that when I finally get myself completely at ease with this place, I will have an excellent distraction-free environment to get cracking, and not have to get into my office just to get work done. The main disadvantage is that because I live on the southern outskirts of the main campus, the daily commute to my office up in the computer science department building (Siebel Centre) can be pretty brutal. I have to take a bus up north every morning; the bus comes in 12-minute intervals between 0700hrs to 0800hrs, subsequently it runs on 20-minute intervals instead. It takes the bus around 13 to 17 minutes to arrive at the bus stop nearest to Siebel Centre, and from there, a 750-feet walk awaits me. For now, things are quite dandy because the weather is still conducive for walking, but I'm really not very sure how this is going to work out once winter sets in. And yes, I have switched to the imperial system (at least for distances) for now because the dimension of ``500 feet'' is a natural length for all the block distances that dot the landscape of the campus grounds.
The ``500 feet'' comment comes from the manner in which I have been navigating around the campus with---throughout the last fortnight or so I have been walking around with my Garmin eTrex GPS receiver in tow. It is pretty nifty the moment I got the Champaign-Urbana base map loaded into the device; by knowing which road intersections I have passed, and having a working memory of the local map made walking around campus relatively fuss-free. Considering the fact that I'm a graduate student who doesn't have the benefit of living in close quarters with other like-minded individuals, it is a really fast way to get the lay of the land on the back of my hand. I think I have geocaching to thank for this though---the months spent walking all over Singapore armed with nothing more than a GPS receiver and some local maps have indeed honed my geospatial reasoning skills, making navigation a much easier exercise than thought possible.
Anyway, not sure if I had said this in an earlier post (not checking only because I'm using Q10 to write up this entry), but the campus here feels very different. For one, since the department buildings are fairly far from each other, one is more likely to run into people in the same programme than anything else. This is different from CMU because, well, CMU's campus is so small that it is hard to not run into people from different schools. For two, because I keep running into the engineering/computer science folks, I do end up running into a lot of PRC students. It feels a little weird when one is in the US and end up hearing more mandarin spoken than english, but it is not something to be worried about I suppose; it is only when they start gathering in groups and being generally obnoxious that things start to get annoying, and even then that action is not limited to the PRC students alone. So far I've not managed to break into that little cocoon that many of them are stuck in, so I suppose I will have to take a little effort to make friends with some of them and see what things we can share and learn along the way.
Food here is still manageable---I have a full kitchen to work with. Well, almost full, since I have a refrigerator/freezer, an electric stove and oven, a saucepan and two different types of spatula. I just don't have enough of the other amenities required for cooking, like knives, cutting boards, flat plans, condiments and the like. And of course a microwave, the single most useful electrical appliance that one can have within an apartment, since it makes heating and reheating food stuffs that much easier. But all these things will have to come eventually when I start to see the need to actually cook, and when my allowance comes in; money is starting to get a little tight as I deal with the price of the text books that are needed for class and the overall need for survival through sustenance.
The bus system here is very good---there's at least one bus that will take one to anywhere that one might want to go on and off campus. More importantly, the bus system is quite efficient; there are different routes for the week day day time, week day evening and weekend. The routes are colour coded by the general service locations, and the numbers identify the route directly, with the weekend and evening versions having numbers ten times that of the usual week day day time ones. The general direction of the bus route is also encoded, so one can unambiguously state which bus it is they want to take, like the 120W Teal route or the 50E Green route. The buses also have an integrated system that tracks their movement, and the provided expected time of arrival at each bus stop is accurate to within five minutes, which is really useful. The buses are also handicap friendly since they can all ``kneel''---hydraulically lower the front of the bus so that the ramp can be deployed for those in need of them. All buses also have attached bicycle racks in front of them that can take up to two bicycles, which is a great thing to support cycling within the city. A pity that the Singapore transport system, in all its glory, don't even have such useful facilities without involving a lot of bureaucratic wrangling to get working. The bus schedule guide is also freely available on all buses, and that makes looking out for the various bus timings and locations that much easier for folks who don't have the Android phone application that polls the mass transit department's web site for such information.
So far I'm not really homesick yet, so I would think that things are going pretty smooth on my end. Many of my friends who live on the US east coast are terrified at the prospect of having to deal with Hurricane Irene that I do feel for their safely. Anyway, that's all I have for now, so till next time.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
In UIUC
So, okay, while it may not be obvious at all here, I am actually in UIUC right now. That's right, my PhD journey has finally started officially, and I am now settling into my apartment and getting back the whole groove of studying once more. A PhD programme is different from that of the BSc---the whole purpose is to emerge from the programme being a much better researcher than what I once was, and to hone my skills in sniffing out and solving problems in acceptable manners. Class hasn't started yet, but I'm starting to feel the immense pressure upon myself. I think I'm mentally prepared for this, and given my current domicile location and office, I think it makes things easier to actually concentrate and get the work done.
So some people ask me here and there why did I want to go for a PhD programme instead of working my way up some corporate ladder and earning big bucks. I think the answer is simply that I like challenging myself. Yes, I'm a sucker for that kind of pain, and get easily bored by the mundane work that most people engage in. I may not have an overriding IQ, but I know that I can think up interesting and workable solutions when I put my mind to things. Of course, the flip side is that I need to work on the whole social aspect side of research and go around talking to people to learn more about what is going on, but that is a work in progress. I may not have what it takes to be a full-time academic in a university, but at the very least, I want to make that difference by contributing my know-how and ingenuity for the forces of good. Very idealistic, I know, but what is the world without some idealism? Besides, it's my neck on the line and not the rest of the people, so why should anyone else care?
Actually no one else cares, as a general rule of thumb. Those close to us might want to care, but there will come a point in time where the life paths have diverged so much that it becomes quite impossible to play catch up and care as much as one might want to. I suppose that's why people get into relationships with each other, each trying to find some middle ground with which they can share their need of love and to love with each other to unlock that hidden side of being human. I'm not gutsy enough to claim that I am past that stage now, but I think I'll manage without having this relationship business. Somehow the social side and the intellectual side grow at different rates, and there is always a time (and place) for everything. As a lady friend once said, men are like wine, for the older they get, the more desirable they become due to the appreciation of their value, whereas women just fade away as time goes by. Quite a sexist statement for sure, but I suppose that's how most of the world's population is wired up.
Ah, Champaign-Urbana. A lovely place even on the waning days of summer. My domicile is a pretty peaceful place: sheltered by trees, quiet neighbourhood, lovely chirping of the cicadas and crickets in the evening, the sound of children playing in the day time from the families that live in the same set of apartments as I. State university does have a much different perspective as compared to a private university (CMU is a private university)---the sense of anonymity is much higher, and due to that it is much easier to just get ``lost'' in the moment and not have to worry about people judging you or remembering what you had done. Of course, this also meant that the whole place is much bigger and really nasty for foot traversal (I clocked 18km of walking just to settle a few administrative procedures prior to getting my university ID which gave free bus rides), but I think eventually it will work out fine. I think what is important is to quickly get into the groove and hit the tarmac running.
Now, more so than ever, time is not on my side.
So some people ask me here and there why did I want to go for a PhD programme instead of working my way up some corporate ladder and earning big bucks. I think the answer is simply that I like challenging myself. Yes, I'm a sucker for that kind of pain, and get easily bored by the mundane work that most people engage in. I may not have an overriding IQ, but I know that I can think up interesting and workable solutions when I put my mind to things. Of course, the flip side is that I need to work on the whole social aspect side of research and go around talking to people to learn more about what is going on, but that is a work in progress. I may not have what it takes to be a full-time academic in a university, but at the very least, I want to make that difference by contributing my know-how and ingenuity for the forces of good. Very idealistic, I know, but what is the world without some idealism? Besides, it's my neck on the line and not the rest of the people, so why should anyone else care?
Actually no one else cares, as a general rule of thumb. Those close to us might want to care, but there will come a point in time where the life paths have diverged so much that it becomes quite impossible to play catch up and care as much as one might want to. I suppose that's why people get into relationships with each other, each trying to find some middle ground with which they can share their need of love and to love with each other to unlock that hidden side of being human. I'm not gutsy enough to claim that I am past that stage now, but I think I'll manage without having this relationship business. Somehow the social side and the intellectual side grow at different rates, and there is always a time (and place) for everything. As a lady friend once said, men are like wine, for the older they get, the more desirable they become due to the appreciation of their value, whereas women just fade away as time goes by. Quite a sexist statement for sure, but I suppose that's how most of the world's population is wired up.
Ah, Champaign-Urbana. A lovely place even on the waning days of summer. My domicile is a pretty peaceful place: sheltered by trees, quiet neighbourhood, lovely chirping of the cicadas and crickets in the evening, the sound of children playing in the day time from the families that live in the same set of apartments as I. State university does have a much different perspective as compared to a private university (CMU is a private university)---the sense of anonymity is much higher, and due to that it is much easier to just get ``lost'' in the moment and not have to worry about people judging you or remembering what you had done. Of course, this also meant that the whole place is much bigger and really nasty for foot traversal (I clocked 18km of walking just to settle a few administrative procedures prior to getting my university ID which gave free bus rides), but I think eventually it will work out fine. I think what is important is to quickly get into the groove and hit the tarmac running.
Now, more so than ever, time is not on my side.
30 Days of Driving
Ah driving. It is a very liberating feeling to finally have the license to operate a motor vehicle. Having had my license about a month ago, I took the opportunity to rent a car for about a month to drive around and get used to the road experience. And this entry chronicles the sights, sounds and experiences that I had from that little foray.
Driving in Singapore is a rather mixed bag of emotions; more often than not, the primary dominating emotion is that of anger. That's right, it is anger; not mine, but that of the other drivers. Armed with probational plates as a part of the law regarding newly minted qualified driver license holders, it simultaneously becomes a safe way of indicating the inexperience of the driver as well as an invitation for the more aggressive drivers to ``bully'' the new driver through intimidation techniques. I wasn't really fazed by their intimidation attempts, though it is rather unnerving when an aggressive driver keeps tailgating the car that I was driving. The speed limits of the roads were not something that most people seem to adhere to---each time I was travelling at the speed limit, every other car seems to just speed off in front of me, with excess speeds ranging from 10km/h or more. In fact, many drivers who wre following behind my car got so frustrated that I wasn't busting the speed limit that they ended up tailgating me for a while before dodging off to the left or right in an attempt to overtake me.
Drivers aside, the roads of Singapore are not very forgiving either. Granted that there are few tricky intersections to worry about, there are still many oddities of the roads that make driving a less-than-desirable experience. Extreme heavy traffic is one classic example of this. The arterial roads of Singapore are often full of traffic during the peak hours, and the mean speed of such roads drop from the standard of 70km/h to something along the lines of 40km/h, assuming that it is merely a heavy traffic condition and not some traffic jam, in which case the mean speed can fall to as low as 20km/h, uphill.
But I suppose that the best way to go about driving in Singapore is to be really comfortable with oneself and to understand that not all drivers are law-abiding---the most important thing about driving is to avoid causing or being in an accident, and I suppose that if that is met, it will guarantee one's survival on the road. Of course the law just provides a more stringent measure of what safety means, and more often than not, it is a good idea to follow it. But of course one needs to be flexible and adapt to the circumstance.
Driving in Singapore is a rather mixed bag of emotions; more often than not, the primary dominating emotion is that of anger. That's right, it is anger; not mine, but that of the other drivers. Armed with probational plates as a part of the law regarding newly minted qualified driver license holders, it simultaneously becomes a safe way of indicating the inexperience of the driver as well as an invitation for the more aggressive drivers to ``bully'' the new driver through intimidation techniques. I wasn't really fazed by their intimidation attempts, though it is rather unnerving when an aggressive driver keeps tailgating the car that I was driving. The speed limits of the roads were not something that most people seem to adhere to---each time I was travelling at the speed limit, every other car seems to just speed off in front of me, with excess speeds ranging from 10km/h or more. In fact, many drivers who wre following behind my car got so frustrated that I wasn't busting the speed limit that they ended up tailgating me for a while before dodging off to the left or right in an attempt to overtake me.
Drivers aside, the roads of Singapore are not very forgiving either. Granted that there are few tricky intersections to worry about, there are still many oddities of the roads that make driving a less-than-desirable experience. Extreme heavy traffic is one classic example of this. The arterial roads of Singapore are often full of traffic during the peak hours, and the mean speed of such roads drop from the standard of 70km/h to something along the lines of 40km/h, assuming that it is merely a heavy traffic condition and not some traffic jam, in which case the mean speed can fall to as low as 20km/h, uphill.
But I suppose that the best way to go about driving in Singapore is to be really comfortable with oneself and to understand that not all drivers are law-abiding---the most important thing about driving is to avoid causing or being in an accident, and I suppose that if that is met, it will guarantee one's survival on the road. Of course the law just provides a more stringent measure of what safety means, and more often than not, it is a good idea to follow it. But of course one needs to be flexible and adapt to the circumstance.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
SMS Musing #6
Earlier on Saturday, while waiting for some friends for geocaching:
The mere fact that there are multiple entries under this SMS musings tag should be an indication that I'm spending a lot of time waiting for people to arrive. What I mean is that the only reason why I write these entries is merely to pass the time a little faster during the wait, so that I don't get too bored to the point that I start to think too much nonsense.
Anyway, another day and I'll be flying. But an all nighter awaits me as I scramble to finish up that draft before I head off into the sunset. Flying off this time feels more serene than the last---it might be that I sort of know what to expect? But in spite of it all, there's still that little uncertainty over various things that are out of my direct control; I suppose I just need to hang in there and see what happens. As they say, it ain't the end till it is the end, and the end ain't here yet. The small setbacks just turn me ever stronger by helping me realise that one needs a certain level of thick-skinnedness to live well in the world.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
SMS Musing #5
While waiting outside a building...
Sometimes one cannot help but feel helpless in the face of things, especially when it all seems ready to overwhelm oneself. There is just too many variables that we have no control over, yet somehow life must still go on. Even the few things that we seemingly have control over turns out to be mostly a sham. If all of us do not really have true power over our destinies, then what is it that moves everything forward?
Illusionary they may be, I suppose there is still some truth amid all the lies. We probably have more power over our destiny than we realise, though much less than what we would have liked. Perhaps that is what life truly is about---to discover just how far our control is over our destiny. Maybe this can explain away all that we are seeing.
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
SMS Musing #4
While at Zirca earlier today for an exhibition:
It is kinda strange to be sitting on the top floor of a club and penning this down as a heavy beat is going on from the dance floor below. I suppose it would be a little odd to claim that the music is putting me to sleep, but it is true. The only reason I'm even still awake is all thanks to ConnectBot on the Android, which allows me to connect via SSH to other boxes that have things to keep me occupied.I suppose there ought to be a limit on how long an ``SMS Musing'' counts as its namesake.
But then again, the whole club scene is something that I don't really dig into; I'm not into the whole shallow social thing that dominates this whole scene. But of course the question to ask is, why am I even here in the first place? Mostly as a support role for one of my sister's exhibits at the exhibition, and that's about it. I seriously doubt if anyone cares though, since I've pretty much ended up sitting up here on my own. More than 2 years since I've come out of my shell and I'm still sitting om the sidelines: what a great ``progress'' there.
Anyway, it is fast reaching the time for me to make a sneaky getaway, the only type of exit I'm willing to put up with---not a fan of being a centre of attraction. Makes me wonder how the hell I can square this with my kob requirements of establishing reputation and street cred.
This is getting a little too long for an SMS Musing, so I'm going to stop here now and make my getaway.
Saturday, August 06, 2011
SMS Musing #3
While waiting at the carpark of Venus Drive prior to a MacRitchie Reservoir Park hike/geocaching trip:
At the risk of jinxing myself, what was supposed to be an easy 25-minute drive became an hour of horror as I kept making one wrong turn after another to the point that it was fucktardly stupid. How the blazes did I screw up so badly in spite of having read the gorram map multiple times? I think I have sunk to a new low this time. This is really so stupid---I've just wasted everyone's precious time. I feel like a failure now.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Funereal #1
I'm starting a new series of articles labelled ``funereal''. It sounds morbid, but really it is one of those ``start with the end goal in sight'' kind of things. Each time an article is tagged with the ``funereal'' tag, it represents my vision of what happens at my funeral at that point in time. Might prove to be an interesting psychological experiment.
Ahem.
Ahem.
There was muted silence all about as the candles flickered in the night time breeze. I lie dead in that coffin out in the centre of the funeral parlour, surrounded by strangers. It's a hush-hush affair; there was no priest nor reverend nor any religious figure officiating the austere setting---I had lived my life with a much stronger belief towards empirical science than religious followings. Of course there would be no one else there that I know; I have broke contact with most of them a long long time ago, once they all started to get married and have children and thus need to care more about their families than some crockety old man who was still clinging on to the old ideals of geekiness.
The grandfather clock chimed and there was a rustling sound as the pallbearers shifted my coffin towards the cremation chamber. The strangers present muttered their own words of farewell to a man they hardly knew as my coffin enters the hop into the chamber itself. Within a few short minutes, I made it into the furnace and was cremated into an urnful of fine white ash.
As per my instructions, they took my urn of ashes and brought it out to sea, commending my remains forever into the ocean, to travel around the world in the ocean currents and to seek knowledge wherever I may be.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
SMS Musing #2
While on the train, I just had that inclination to write something that occurred recently, and so here it is:
You would think that by now I would be used to the whole idea of going it alone, but I suppose I'm still human after all. These few days I have been interacting with one too many couples and it has a somewhat negative effect on me. I find myself a tad more anxious than usual, and somewhat more importantly, seemingly losing my ability to stay calm. I think I need to get back into the groove of not giving too much of a damn; must remember that when people are in a relationship, it has nothing to do with me, even if they choose to act all lovey dovey in front of me. That's the least that I can do for myself to do myself justice and avoid all these strange emotions. At the end of the day, those couples only have eyes for each other and don't really care about the people around them, no matter how close they are in friendship.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Tired?
Funny how things end up. Here I am about to embark on another leg of my life's journey, and instead of feeling excited, I feel tired.
Tired! For goodness sake, why am I feeling tired? This makes as much sense as the cow that refuses to eat grass, or the eagle that doesn't fly, or... well you get the idea.
Maybe it's the cubicle I'm in. It's too restrictive, too cramped. Or it could be the office environment, or that I don't really see a plausible and clear-cut shifting of one phase to the next---everything is an amorphous blob of blobbiness. Mostly likely the latter. I mean, even till now, nearly three days before I am at my last day, I'm still working on projects.
Maybe I'm no longer that great a workaholic as I think myself out to be. Perhaps that's a good thing.
I mean, I am liking the outdoors now. How much more strange/weird can it get?
Till the next rant.
Tired! For goodness sake, why am I feeling tired? This makes as much sense as the cow that refuses to eat grass, or the eagle that doesn't fly, or... well you get the idea.
Maybe it's the cubicle I'm in. It's too restrictive, too cramped. Or it could be the office environment, or that I don't really see a plausible and clear-cut shifting of one phase to the next---everything is an amorphous blob of blobbiness. Mostly likely the latter. I mean, even till now, nearly three days before I am at my last day, I'm still working on projects.
Maybe I'm no longer that great a workaholic as I think myself out to be. Perhaps that's a good thing.
I mean, I am liking the outdoors now. How much more strange/weird can it get?
Till the next rant.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Nivlek Conversation
Once more I find myself writing yet another blog entry on a late night session. There is clearly something different about the night as compared to the day that makes updating my own blog a little more intimate, even though I don't really do much editing in either case. But as usual, I digress a little.
I think that one thing that I'm starting to get used to is the flux of life. Life is non-static and full of twists and turns, some completely deterministic, while others completely unexpected. Slowly I find that the people I used to trust implicitly have now ``fallen off'' the trust model, while there are those whom I used to not trust have slowly entered into the hallowed ``inner circle''. But of course, the said ``inner circle'' itself has changed its nature by quite a fair bit, considering that I am mostly reclusive now, engaging people at the most superficial level that is required to maintain something that is meaningful yet at times impersonal enough.
It's not that I don't like to confide in people---it's just that sometimes such opportunities do not present themselves readily. It is much easier to find such people when one is younger, since the whole notion of political manipulation is something that is quite rare at that age group that finding someone willing to listen to and discuss one's problems makes as much sense as saying the sun rises from the East. But as time goes by, it becomes painfully obvious that such burden-free associations are far and few; the only group of people where this might still hold when one is of adulthood is likely to be that of the immediate family, with spouses falling in the gray area depending on the general state of the relationship.
Speaking of spouses and confidantes, I had a recent meet up with Nivlek and we had a helluva good time talking about the ``good old days'' (they were old, but they ain't good), the happenings now, and some future stuff. And I think we come to one simple conclusion about the whole get-a-girlfriend/wife-thing: people are taking things a little too seriously. Actually, I believe we are being nice, what we probably meant was that many people who are in relationships seem to fall a trap involving emotional abuse and manipulation. The idea of ``hen-peckedness'' and that somehow the woman being the lead in the relationship at around the time that marriage is considered somehow sounds completely wrong to me---it's a marriage for crying out loud, not a slavery bondage! Why do many women think that they are superior enough that their word is ``final'' when it comes to life after marriage? Isn't a marriage supposed to be a partnership where people be like true thinking adults and do things in ways that make the both of them happy and yet still have the desired outcome? Why then does marriage make things look so glum, like as though being married is some kind of restrictive burden?
Speaking of marriage and relationships I think I'm entering a new phase in my life. Back when I was younger, I find that I could not relate to my peers just because they were talking about things that didn't interest me enough, things that involve fashion, memes and other stylish things. I preferred talking to people who were older than me, simply because they had a more interesting and varied view on what life is, and can often discuss current affairs in ways that are more informative than whatever the press provides through their own analysis. But now, I'm starting to find it easier to talk to the younger folk instead of those older than me. I mean, I don't outright hate to talk to anyone older, but I've probably listened to their talk on getting married, buying their first flat, giving birth to their child and other really random talk of that nature one too many times to actually find it interesting. Yes, congratulations on reaching your next milestone, but that's just your own ``achievement''---pity the poor souls who have to listen to you gush about something that makes little sense to the young singles surrounding you. At least I can still get more decent conversations with the young'uns---I may not like some of their attitude, but among the black sheep there are still the few lily-white ones who give the whole generation a slightly better name, and those are the ones whom I genuinely enjoy the time we spent talking.
Change does not seem to faze me much anymore; I'm not sure if I had said it in any of the more recent posts, but it is a point that is worth repeating. I think this is a good attitude towards life, and gives me enough forward momentum to hurdle past obstacles that may stand in my way.
And on that note, I end this entry for the day.
I think that one thing that I'm starting to get used to is the flux of life. Life is non-static and full of twists and turns, some completely deterministic, while others completely unexpected. Slowly I find that the people I used to trust implicitly have now ``fallen off'' the trust model, while there are those whom I used to not trust have slowly entered into the hallowed ``inner circle''. But of course, the said ``inner circle'' itself has changed its nature by quite a fair bit, considering that I am mostly reclusive now, engaging people at the most superficial level that is required to maintain something that is meaningful yet at times impersonal enough.
It's not that I don't like to confide in people---it's just that sometimes such opportunities do not present themselves readily. It is much easier to find such people when one is younger, since the whole notion of political manipulation is something that is quite rare at that age group that finding someone willing to listen to and discuss one's problems makes as much sense as saying the sun rises from the East. But as time goes by, it becomes painfully obvious that such burden-free associations are far and few; the only group of people where this might still hold when one is of adulthood is likely to be that of the immediate family, with spouses falling in the gray area depending on the general state of the relationship.
Speaking of spouses and confidantes, I had a recent meet up with Nivlek and we had a helluva good time talking about the ``good old days'' (they were old, but they ain't good), the happenings now, and some future stuff. And I think we come to one simple conclusion about the whole get-a-girlfriend/wife-thing: people are taking things a little too seriously. Actually, I believe we are being nice, what we probably meant was that many people who are in relationships seem to fall a trap involving emotional abuse and manipulation. The idea of ``hen-peckedness'' and that somehow the woman being the lead in the relationship at around the time that marriage is considered somehow sounds completely wrong to me---it's a marriage for crying out loud, not a slavery bondage! Why do many women think that they are superior enough that their word is ``final'' when it comes to life after marriage? Isn't a marriage supposed to be a partnership where people be like true thinking adults and do things in ways that make the both of them happy and yet still have the desired outcome? Why then does marriage make things look so glum, like as though being married is some kind of restrictive burden?
Speaking of marriage and relationships I think I'm entering a new phase in my life. Back when I was younger, I find that I could not relate to my peers just because they were talking about things that didn't interest me enough, things that involve fashion, memes and other stylish things. I preferred talking to people who were older than me, simply because they had a more interesting and varied view on what life is, and can often discuss current affairs in ways that are more informative than whatever the press provides through their own analysis. But now, I'm starting to find it easier to talk to the younger folk instead of those older than me. I mean, I don't outright hate to talk to anyone older, but I've probably listened to their talk on getting married, buying their first flat, giving birth to their child and other really random talk of that nature one too many times to actually find it interesting. Yes, congratulations on reaching your next milestone, but that's just your own ``achievement''---pity the poor souls who have to listen to you gush about something that makes little sense to the young singles surrounding you. At least I can still get more decent conversations with the young'uns---I may not like some of their attitude, but among the black sheep there are still the few lily-white ones who give the whole generation a slightly better name, and those are the ones whom I genuinely enjoy the time we spent talking.
Change does not seem to faze me much anymore; I'm not sure if I had said it in any of the more recent posts, but it is a point that is worth repeating. I think this is a good attitude towards life, and gives me enough forward momentum to hurdle past obstacles that may stand in my way.
And on that note, I end this entry for the day.
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