A Time to Grieve

It's always hard having to take apart what was once built together with loving care and rebuild. It is not my nature to swing a sledgehammer to break something apart just to build it back. In fact, it is more of my nature to carefully put something together only after having put in some thought into how it might look like, taking into account the extent of the perimeters while doing the build so that in the end, if there are changes needed, the final built product will still be malleable enough within the perimeters.

You know, what they call the ``engineering mindset''. We plan, we build. We do not leave things to chance if we have means to control it. For things we cannot control, we try to estimate the range of possibilities so that we have contingencies for as large a proportion of them as possible---for everything else that we cannot estimate, we combine them into a number explaining the amount of catastrophic risk.

God is the master engineer. He creates, He builds, He shapes, He moulds. But He is eternal, so His sense of what risk/contingencies entails are completely alien to us mortals with a very severely limited life span.

For things of one's life that involves decisions that may affect others, it is important to consult God and to listen to His word. It is best to consult Him early, so that the path to His will is filled with potentially less suffering for all.

It is unfortunate that the romantic relationship I had was not of God's will. I don't blame anyone---what's there to blame? We miss 100% of all the shots we don't take after all, and even though it was five years (one seventh of my life thus far), it was five years of joy, good memories, lessons learnt, and discovery---I became a better person after it all. I do not regret it for a bit, though I do feel sad. Cui told me to take the time to grieve---I asked her a little confusedly, what was it I was grieving for?

``Grieving for the future you were hoping for, the plans you had. So it's more of having to set new plans, new things to mark your life. To give you some meaning and guidance in this otherwise confusing world.''

So, so true. Thank you Cui.

But I don't want to grieve, not like this. I want to celebrate it in joy. The joy of having known this relationship, the joy of helping a fellow pilgrim to learn of what it is God has for her, the joy of my realisation that there is eternal peace in the salvation from Jesus Christ at the end of my days. With the eternal future secured, I am safe to pursue what it is God has planned out for my life, through the talents He gave me, through the people I meet, and through the places I am at.

I still love her---I always will. But I love all those whom I call friends as well. Throughout my thirty odd years in life, it is only the last ten to twelve of which I started learning on how to really deal with inter-relationships of a romantic sort. My bad skin of the past haunted me, making it nearly impossible to cultivate any sort of understanding of romantic love---but it did teach me a lot of cultivating friendship love.

But before I get there, I need to grieve. I don't want to, but I need to---that's the difference. God is great and all, leading with wonderful guides to the goodness in His Word, but in the end, I'm still in a mortal body. The mind understands, but the heart is a laggard, and the soul is nascent and doesn't yet know how to lead the way. I am glad I finally met up with her face-to-face on Saturday just to talk, and get the clarity of where our relationship stood that I had prayed to God about.

Conflicted feelings are basically what I have now. I had kept it together for the most part for the past four months of circuit breaking, but I didn't really have a chance to heal, not with the types of uncertainties that I was still entertaining in my mind. With the clarity now, healing and transformation can finally begin in my heart, mind, and soul.

Till the next update, I suppose.

Resignation

The problem with me isn't with my stars---things that far cannot affect me after all, even if superstring theory holds.

It's that I'm an easy-to-read book.

It's not that I have no guile, but rather, I choose not to live a life where I am always cunning about what I do and what I think. I choose not to live such a life because it does not benefit me nor anyone in any way---it is not the right thing to do.

I say what I mean, and mean what I say.

I may choose when I want to say some thing, but I don't usually back down from saying it, especially when I am convinced that it is the right thing to say.

It was an epiphany from many years ago when I started to slowly meld all the different social groups together. So, instead of seeing MT-the-bleh, for different values of bleh depending on the particular social group, there is just MT the_laptop---the same person no matter what social group I happen to be in. Did it cause me grief? Yes, during that period where people are confused as to how best to deal with me. But in the long term, it helped let me be who I am.

Back to me being an easy-to-read book. It also means that it is easy to exploit me, to hurt me, and perhaps to ruin me if that's what the person so inclines.

Does it matter to me? Not any more I suppose.

I'm not destined for great things, be it earthly or godly.

I was not born into a rich or powerful family, I may have earned a government scholarship, but it was something that I did not fully exploit to gain unbelievable amounts of leverage climbing the corporate/civil service ladder. I'm good enough at what I do to not starve, and have no ambition of excelling so hard that I am the best in my field, and therefore according to most reckoning, am basically close to being useless without being completely useless.

I was not born into a Christian family, none of my parents are even Christian, am a new believer and I doubt that I will ever be skilled enough to be a pastor, or go on missionary trips to save the unbelievers---things that are highly valued among the godly. My talents as given by God through the careful opportunities as granted by His grace lie elsewhere, and how it can help advance the gospel is something that only time and His grace will tell. As at now, I just see myself as one of the many simple disciples of the Son of Man.

So yes, not destined for great things, be it earthly or godly.

All I have is just me. Plain old me, as unique as uniqueness can be given the 108 billion or so people to have ever lived on earth. That's all there is. That I am alive is a testimony to God's greatness---His grace allows for the existence of a useless dust mote like me to live, a dust mote that has no big dreams, no big promises to God or anyone, and no big ambition.

In some ways, I'm just glad I am alive; not happy, not content---just glad. And if I'm called to be with the Father, hey, it's okay. If it's my time to go, it's my time. I only hope that by the time that it is my time, I am relieved of responsibilities that I have in ways that will not harm the people around me; I'm not even praying for an easy passing. I just don't want to leave behind a lousy memory, even if it is going to be one that dies out within a generation. It doesn't matter if I'm remembered after death anyway---dust motes don't get remembered by anyone except for God, who will always know His own.

In the end, if the me that is present is good enough for someone to be a spouse with in this life time, it is God's will. If the me that is present is not good enough for anyone to be a spouse with in this life time, it is still God's will. In either case, I am still an easy-to-read book---I'm too old and serious to be playing silly games anyway; what-you-see-is-all-there-is. If anything is meant to be, it will be---no amount of human intervention and cunning on my end can change the outcome.

And since I've accepted Jesus Christ as my saviour and the Lord as my God, I will respect that acceptance and accept whatever it is that He has set up for me. Call it the blessing or the curse of being a believer---they are both the same thing anyway in this case. I get eternal life anyway, so no loss for me.

Amen.

I'm Tired

I'm tired.

I'm really tired of all the negativity that is happening in the world today.

I'm tired of the selfishness that everyone demonstrates, forgetting that it was the effort of society as a whole that enables their selfishness to be conducted without major repercussions to themselves. This includes the nonsense that is anti-science, anti-thought, anti-empathy, cancel culture, the five hundred different acronyms from identity politics, the two hundred different ways of virtue signalling, the ``me me me'' logic of social media, surveillance capitalism, and all the chilling effects that these come with.

It's not just something that comes from the US, in case folks are thinking that that's all I'm thinking about. It is really a general trend that comes with the hyper-connectedness of societies.

The current pandemic woes are a great way to bring to the foreground all that is wrong in ways that are louder than before. There are those who believe that they are making a change with their belligerent shouting, but failing to realise that with the precedents that they set with their ``the ends justify the means'' approach, it is just one revolution away before they end up on the receiving end of their tools.

If all of us were still in the bad old days of having to worry about when we can next put food on the table, all these ``first world problems'' would not occur. No, I am not advocating going back to the bad old days---we have advanced quite far, though we have indeed fallen a lot too. But overall, I still believe that we have progressed just a bit more than we had fallen.

Of course, whatever I say here is absolutely useless. I am no ``influencer''---I suppose only five people in the world are actual some kind of regular reader of what I write here---but it is one of those situations where I have no mouth, but I must scream. Scream I shall, indeed.

The theme for today's rant is ``why am I still alive''. No, it's not a suicide note---I don't believe in committing suicide in the conventional sense of myself taking myself out. If it is my time to go, it is my time---God will take me when it is my time; I do not have to hasten the process. If suicide were truly an option that I was seriously considering, it would not be the ignoble kind where I kill myself---I would rather make use of the last moments of my life to do things that no one would/could possibly do without being able to walk away from it alive. That's the kind of death that is most worthy, because it is a death that comes from doing something meaningful. It is the type of death that only the kamikaze of WWII understood.

But I digress. I'm not intending to die. Not just yet. Not before my time.

The normal answer is usually ``but I have so much to live for; I'm not ready to die!'' To me, I don't think that is true. I have been ready to die for quite a while really---I have very few regrets in my life, to my surprise. I used to think that when my life is over, it is done---there is nothing beyond it. That is the Christian notion of a fate worse than oblivion, a state where God literally turns His face away from one. I will say that I didn't really fear that state much---I was ready to be made unexisting anyway---but now that I've become a follower of Jesus, I am glad that I am at least saved in the sense that even after death, I still exist, and in a state that is perfect as it was God's intention.

That's a good thing.

But that aside, what I'm trying to say is, death didn't scare me that much. It scares me a bit less now with the assurance that Jesus has saved me, so it's all good. However, this doesn't mean that I'm going to roll over and die now. Allow me to back-track a little to add some coherence---I am starting to find my rant a little hard to follow, even for myself.

I don't have much to live for. I don't have big dreams. What is keeping me going on each day is just the remembrance of the responsibilities that I have. So it's less of me having things to live for and more of causing some bad trouble for people should I fail to live that keeps me living.

Is this Christ-like? I don't know---I'm still a neophyte in His ways. As far as I know, Jesus' life was totally ordered by God, just like everyone else's. But unlike everyone else's, His life, death, and resurrection was meant to fulfill the cosmic plan that God had to redeem His chosen. The reason of existence of his believers are to spread the gospel to redeem more of humankind from sin to be on the good graces of God.

There really isn't any other reason for existing.

KK did remind me of one thing though: I should remember to never take things to extremes. I thank him deeply from the bottom of my heart for his reminder. I don't really like to take things to extreme, but I suppose my attitude of not wanting to half-ass things does make it seem extreme at times.

But Jesus was a radical, was he not? Weren't we all taught to be as radical as he was, challenging the letter of the law with the intent of the law, to draw strength and divine inspiration through the Holy Spirit instead of trying to ``muscle'' our way through with the at-best misguided intentions without the consultation of the Holy Spirit?

Well, I think I'm going to stop here. Too much thoughts of these sort does strange things to my already not-super-happy state.

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In other news, I've finally had the opportunity to get some replacement jeans. My old jeans, especially after the massive weight loss over the past 8 months or so, are way too frayed and too lose to keep on wearing comfortably. The replacement jeans I have bought fit me better; their only drawback was that the length was a bit too long, but the alteration step seems straightforward enough that I would probably do something about it over this upcoming long weekend.

I'll probably have to adjust my wardrobe a bit more soon---need to cycle in a different set of clothes, and cycle out those that don't fit as well. But that may be for another day.

Till the next update, I suppose. Maybe I will have less depressing things to write about (haha... what a joke).

I Didn't Feel Like Writing Anything

I didn't feel like writing anything. Because it felt like too much effort. To be fair, I actually did start on something yesterday involving Ecclesiastes 3:1--8, but I couldn't follow through. It was the same reason when I decided to take down my own thoughts involving my journey through martial arts---until I have reached the proverbial ``black belt'' (i.e. to be in a position where I can comfortably say that I have mastered the basics), it just didn't feel right to be talking much about something I didn't fully understand the full implications of yet.

And that's also why it took me so long before I decided to write up on my dizi materials. I have played the dizi long enough that I feel comfortable sharing what I had learnt, because I knew that I had the experience to back it all up.

Talking about Scripture when I am barely a neophyte in the ways of Christ is the most hubristic thing that I can think of. Actually, I'm not even sure that when the day comes where I am conversant with the Word, whether I would even express my thoughts on it here. Such is the level of sensitivity of a knowledge that I cannot easily put into a form that avoids the fundamental notion of faith.

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So, if I didn't feel like writing anything, what am I doing here then? Mostly it is a way to test the typing comfort of Eileen-II's keyboard. There are some quirks here and there with the placement of the Home/End/PgUp/PgDn/Del/Ins keys, but that will always be a problem for all laptops. At least this one doesn't have the separate number-pad---I dislike laptops having that because it completely screws up the alignment of the keyboard itself. As a matter of practicality, the keyboard proper is ``centred'' with that of the screen, but when there is a numpad, the regular typing area is completely skewed to the left, which stinks. In the early days of using a full keyboard, I've developed the habit of realigning it such that the general typing area is aligned with the centre of my body, which itself is aligned to where I would like to look at the screen, which is usually dead centre.

Well, that's about as much as I would want to write for now.

Till the next update, I suppose.

Eileen-II and Other Stories

To say that the past week-and-a-half is a roller coaster is a bit of a cliché, but it is an unfortunate consequence of my lack of imagination in the use of the English language. Let's see what I can say here today.

I've bought a new 22-inch 16:9 monitor from Dell (P2219H) that can swivel, and is primarily set up to be vertical in nature. No name for this device, though it can technically be called ``Eirian-V'' since its role is similar to the Eirian series of devices---but I'm not going to. The problem I was facing was the reading of certain PDF forms of e-books that had the two-column layout. On a normal screen, no matter what resolution and dimension, if we keep it in the usual landscape format, each column ends up taking up at most one quarter of the screen by width. It is basically unreadable. What I needed was something that had more physical dimension in the height department. I could get a tablet like Eirian-III, but I didn't want to have to lug it around with my hands just to read the document---I have grown used to the smaller form factor. Eirian-IV has superior pitch density, but even then, it can be a challenge to read really tiny text that was supposed to be ``normal sized'' in a more traditional A4/letter sized setting. And so, the monitor was obtained.

Edythe-III is still hale and hearty, but her 3-year warranty is almost up. And if the behaviour of Edythe-II was of any indication, it was clear that I needed to get a replacement soonish. At the same time, Elysie-II was starting to become a little... unstable, partly because of age, partly because of hardware (old school spindle HDD), partly because of software (Windows 7), and partly because of circumstance (it was hard/impossible to head out to the venerable Sim Lim Square to source for parts, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging and stores closing left and right). So I decided to spend a little more than what I had originally saved for and get a new iteration of Eileen, now known as Eileen-II.

So, what's Eileen-II?

She's an Alienware m15 R3, with an Intel i7-10750H processor (6-core, 12MB cache, up to 5.1GHz with Turbo Boost), 32GB DDR4 RAM at 2666MHz, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super 8GB DDR6 discrete graphics card. Her screen is 15.6" (1920×1080) with a refresh rate of 144Hz, and her storage is a 1TB SSD.

Her specs are on par with Elysie-II in many ways, except for a slightly better parallelisation capability with 50% more cores and a faster secondary storage, and a much more portable form factor (laptop vs desktop). She's pretty portable for a stronk person like me, but I think I may actually need to use the provided carrier bag instead of whatever I had---she is a little larger than the 13" laptops that I have.

For a portable machine running the specs like the beast that is Elysie-II, Eileen-II runs surprisingly cool. Let's hope this continues.

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On more different matters, it had been quite trying for the past week-and-a-half. Work had some extra certification thing that needed to be done to address a tender, and I was tasked to get it with a colleague. The whole process was a little harrowing, partly because the item that we were getting certification on wasn't exactly directly aligned with my interests/area of work/domain of expertise per se, and partly because of the super shortened duration we had to actually prepare for it, even though we managed the expectations of that to have two attempts instead of the one that was originally envisioned. Then there was the need to book a time slot to actually take the certification exam---it had to be online proctored, and the only time slot that fit the original planned schedule was at six in the morning (or any time between three and six in the morning in roughly fifteen-minute intervals). Thankfully it is now over; well it had been over since the Wednesday just passed. I passed by the grace of God---the score I had was exactly the one needed to pass, no more and no less. Just to be clear, this was one of those exams that the passing grade was a ``high'' percentage that was not fifty percent.

The Friday before, I had a near breakdown. I don't know why---suddenly I felt completely useless for some reason. I felt as though I would just fade away if I didn't pay attention to myself. I think I was just overwhelmed with the stress of not willfully failing that certification exam, and the combined stresses of a general lack of coping mechanisms (no Chinese Orchestra rehearsals, no meet ups with friends, no more confidante in general) with additional social stresses (what is the new norm for me now that I am a believer, am without a wife-to-be-candidate, basically having my life rewritten to the past) meant that I just sort of lost sense of where I was. I mean, yes, I'm a believer now, I know God is with me because I've chosen to walk with Him in my life, but I'm still a neophyte in the ways of Christ, and more importantly, I'm still a mortal.

Given all that I felt, I did something pretty uncharacteristic; I posted a plea for reassurance on my ``wall'' in Facebook.

I am really heartened by the responses that came in. Friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances started coming out of the wood work to send me private messages, asking my well-being, and giving me really positive encouragement that I had indeed impacted their lives in a positive way during the times when we were walking closer together than now.

I teared up. I tear up still. I wasn't expecting all that love and concern to come in like that. Don't ask me why---I don't know. I've never really had these kinds of feelings before.

It definitely helped ground me back into reality. That I was, and am here.

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On yet another note, I've also bought some Oval-8 finger splits by 3-point products. They are for my two pinky fingers---they have a mild form of swan neck deformity. They only show up when I need to be playing the dizi or when I'm going for the pinky-notes of the right hand (instrument C♯, C, B), in which case it is bad. Most of the time I don't have to actually ``stretch'' my fingers, but under those circumstances highlighted, I have to, and it is a problem. The Oval-8 finger splits block the middle joint from bending backwards, which allows me to safely stretch out the pinky without jamming the joint up. It is super useful. I first learnt of them at the Flute Forum on Facebook, and bought mine from Fu Kang, a Singapore company.

And that's about it for now. Till the next update I suppose.

``Rightness is a Dynamic Process, not a Static Declaration"

``Rightness is a [dynamic] process, not a [static] declaration.''

This is is a working hypothesis that I have right now.

I am saying this because I think we are now in the age where the so-called ``optics'' of the statements are more important than the actual understanding and conclusions that are drawn by the person involved.

There are two parts in the inherent problem: one is the bullshit reaction that is currently known as ``cancel culture'', and the other is the equally bullshit reaction of ``virtue signalling''. Whatever part applies, it ends up with the same outcome---people either parroting the catchphrases of the day in an echo chamber, or more likely, practise self-censorship out of fear of their own lives in the face of near-total ostracisation of the various segments of society that they believe to be operating in.

From the previous paragraph, you can easily tell what my thoughts are with respect to these two really toxic types of reactions; yes, I think they are bullshit. No one other than Jesus can claim to be perfect and make no mistakes whatsover in their past---the reason for that is multifold:

1. They did not know any better then as a person;
2. The social context was different then, making the actions then acceptable but may not be acceptable now;
3. Even if they knew better and their specific social context didn't enforce the currently unacceptable behaviour as acceptable, they could've made mistakes that they have since learnt from.

If we accept that rightness is a dynamic process, and realise that people are so because they have the propensity to change, then ``cancel culture'' is bullshit because it makes the assumption that a person cannot change and therefore whatever they did in the past that is considered unacceptable now completely defines their [unchanging] being, and it is thus the morally right thing to shun them now for transgressions of the past that they might have changed from/were apologetic about.

That is bullshit. More importantly, ``cancel culture'' commits the cardinal sin of attempting to conveniently forget about the historical context, and therefore making it easier to repeat the same stupid mistakes in the future as we start to forget what the lessons then that had been learnt from blood.

The other bullshit is ``virtue signalling''. Look, I get it---we all want to appear to be wise, correct and right in this age of extreme hyper-survelliance culture. But ``virtue signalling'' is an actual sin, because it only shows a veneer of being aware of the [social] issues of the day, and demonstrating a superficial attempt at righting the perceived wrongs, but without actually having a significant impact at all at dealing with the underlying root cause. Take the whole brouhaha regarding the attempts at renaming ``blacklist/whitelist'' as well as ``master/slave''. I am well aware that words have power, but words also have context to be taken into account. The context here is a technical one, and forms a jargon that is well understood; how does a technical term used in a technical domain reinforce oppression is something I cannot easily understand, especially when the proposed terms to rename to often make things more obscure. At that point, why bother with English words then? Almost any English word can be offensive to someone---taken to its logical extreme, shouldn't we just rename every single technical term to a mechanically generated one comprising a Hungarian-notation inspired sigil for the semantic identity followed by some fixed number of digits to ensure that we offend exactly no one?

Isn't it also the fault of the person who takes offense to think about why he/she is taking offense over something that wasn't meant by the author to cause offense in the first place?

It is similar in problem to the whole ``community conduct'' fiasco---there has been many an open source project that, in some socio-political virtual signalling context, decide to come up with a code of conduct that had very strong [American politics flavoured] social justice overtures that are at best irrelevant to the code at hand. Someone on /. mentioned before that if someone demands a new code of conduct for an open source community and summarily refuses to use the ACM Code of Ethics, it should raise as many red flags as much as possible that what was at stake was not about decency but about pushing some kind of political agenda.

But all that aside, back to my working hypothesis.

I think that everyone has the right to change their views with respect to new information that come in, and that they be allowed to exercise that right. Only God has perfect information at all times (which is funny because ``time'' may not mean to God the way it means to us); the rest of us are operating on a very strongly Bayesian-type world that we have to take in evidence to modify our a priori assumptions to produce an a posteriori effect, i.e. to change our mind. Only God and His prophets can declare an unassailable static truth---the rest of us will have to slowly make our way there through the dynamic process of gathering information via observation, then altering our perspective based on the weighing of the evidence against our intuition, and doing this iteratively.

``Cancel culture'' and ``virtue signalling'' are not helping us along these lines, because they basically demand that all of us act with the omniscience that only God possesses.

And that is why for this blog, I have this very important disclaimer since the beginning:

All views expressed in this blog are #1 mine and mine alone unless otherwise indicated and #2 are consistent only at the time of publication of the particular entry. Specifically, do not take my views as the views of the general populace, and do not attempt to chastise me for taking a different stance from before. However, if you realise that there are factual errors, do not hesitate to inform me through the comment box---comments are moderated and if you would like me to not publish your comment, you can say so from within the posted comment.

I represent no one other than myself on this blog; I state my own views from my own perspective, tempered with what I know at the point in which I wrote the entry.

If I was wrong in the past, and I learnt about it in the future, you bet your ass that I will acknowledge the mistake in the future, but I will not alter the past to act as though I was right. I think that is the single most dishonest thing that I can do.

``Phase Two'' and Eventual Return to Some Semblance of Normalcy

Well, well, well... I suppose it is time to do a little bit of writing here again.

We are now in the so-called ``phase two'' of the ``circuit breaker'', a lock-down/shelter-in-place in all but name. In Phase Two, the supposed restrictions that were put in place to keep people from leaving their domicile for anything but the most pressing of essential needs have been loosened a little, allowing a very restricted amount of socialising (up to five people in a group, all respecting ``social distancing'' rules of course) despite making it clear that there shouldn't be any [unnecessary] socialising.

Do I have any comments about this? Sure, but they are mostly along the lines of ``just because it can be done doesn't mean it ought to be done''. And so with that in mind, I am personally still going to stay at home for as much as it is possible until things are more under control.

The magic thing I am looking out for is the so-called ``community case count'' for the week after Jul 10---that is roughly two weeks after the transition into phase two, and a week of monitoring the trend will also take into account the increased number of potential exposures from the students who are supposed to be returning to school from yesterday onwards.

Only if these numbers are on the low side that I will be more comfortable restarting my social activities, and even then, it will be at a very low gear for some necessary meet ups that need to occur. It will happen when it will happen, and I am not really fretting about the inability to plan for them---this whole year is absolute garbage in terms of planning anyways, so another month of waiting and non-planning isn't going to affect things more than it already has.

Oh, and there's apparently a General Election being held, with the Nomination Day concluding today, having all 93 seats of parliament being contested, and the actual voting day itself on Jul 10.

Do I have any comments on that? Not really, other than it being important to pay attention to what the party members who are contesting in one's ward or GRC saying and claiming to say, and to make one's own damn mind about whom they think can best represent their interests in parliament. While the party as a whole may provide the type of over-arching narrative/policy that is of national interest, it is still the individual members of parliament that are supposed to represent us---we live in a republic, and we vote for our own representatives to stand for us as members of parliament to fight for our interests. Singapore is small enough that there is often little impedence mismatch between what we citizens want and what is good for the country's development, and so, whoever is going to vote should just make up their own mind.

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I have been thinking over the past couple of months about life in general, the Scripture, and my own perspective on how things work. Ding told me to go read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, which I completed recently (am currently embarking on the sequel of sorts, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow). I can see the allure of the historic-anthropological perspective in which Harari uses to write his exposition, but don't see it as being contradictory to what Scripture is saying. What I mean is, sure, maybe the bible is indeed a myth created and written by humankind during the time when they didn't know any better, and maybe humankind was a by-product of four billion years of evolutionary processes that we can only explain in a sort of statistical sort of way; the real question is, do these really explain away the existence of God Himself? Who's to say that the setting up of four billion years of evolutionary processes was not the work of God? God is, by definition, unknowable by us, so what seems to be impossible by us through proof (hello computational theory and oracles!) may mean only that we are limited in our imagination.

Why do we need to assume that God needed to take the most direct and simple route to get something (like having His Word written down) done? Occam's Razor is just a heuristic to aid us combat the curse of dimensionality that comes with complexity---because it is important that whatever hypothesis we come up with can be communicated to a third person and then convince that said person, in time that doesn't last longer than our mortal life span. But faith and belief is very individual---you can choose to believe, or you can choose not to. Whether you are objectively right or wrong is a non-question.

God's relationship with humankind, through Jesus, is of a personal kind, and with that, a lot of it is therefore bound by one's experience and perception. Is it the scientific way then? Of course not---because experience and perception are not things that are falsifiable and replicable, the cornerstones for the scientific method. While it is important to go round spreading the good news [that one is saved through Jesus's sacrifice and resurrection], it is also important to remember that like all relationships, it can only be entered willingly, and not be forced. So it's okay if someone doesn't want to believe that Jesus died for their sins, it's also okay if someone believes that they don't have sin. They are still humans, just not God's children, that's all.

``But MT, there are so many different schools of thoughts/religions out there, why do you think that God is and the bible is the authoritative Word of God?'' There will never be a satisfactory answer to that question, because God's relationship with humankind, through Jesus, is of a personal kind. It is right and true for me, but is it right and true for you is something that only you can answer.

And that's about as much theology I am willing to indulge. I'm pretty sure that it is possible to poke holes in my arguments here, but I won't even bother providing responses to those if they come---I'm merely thinking and doing something that I personally believe in, with zero intention of attempting to convince someone, therefore ``it doesn't harm anyone and it works for me'' principles hold.

Till the next update, perhaps.

Talking Past Each Other

I had wanted to write a post earlier, but didn't really have any material to do so.

Then I hung out on the 'net for a bit more, and I remembered what it was that I wanted to write about---the violent attempt at selectively changing/erasing history to force it to match the current trends of what is considered socio-politically acceptable.

On the one hand, I can understand why people can get very angry at the historical monuments that were built in the past to commemorate the events/people that had oppressed them. They have every right to get angry, especially when the supposed improvements in relations between the formerly oppressed and former oppressors seemed to have regressed in recent times.

On the other hand, I do not think that tearing down such monuments in a violent way is going to do anything to help right the wrongs, neither is it productive to vandalise such monuments. To me, the act of the oppressed tearing down the historical monuments of their oppressors is no different in consequence as the oppressors tearing down any form of rememberance of the oppressed---in either case, history is effectively erased. This means that whatever lesson it was that was supposed to have learnt gets lost, which is arguably a worse effect. The oppressed should not want to be forgotten of the past where they were oppressed; the oppressors needed to remember that there was a time where they had done the oppressing, and had since learnt how not to be like that.

It's about the revenge cycle. If there is no attempt by either side to forgive the past, then the revenge cycle will just keep perpetuating, and no one will be the wiser from it. Wars that were meant to end all wars will return, and the philosophies that were demonstrated as being inherently evil/wrong will have the opportunity to return under the disguise of ``righting the destruction of history''.

When people are talking/shouting past each other, can any resolution ever be reached? I think not. But to get both sides to talk to each other requires a certain level of calmness that is really hard to come by in this time and age of ``fake news'', egotistical ``leaders'' who have no care about the nation, and the age of ``managing the right optics''.

I suppose all thoughts that humanity has matured after fighting two world wars is just a pipe dream.

I don't have an answer, just the lamentation.

Till the next update.

I Tire of The World

I tire of the world.

I think it has been an emotion that has been seething within me for the past decade or so. Before I launch into my rant on why I tire of the world, let me preface it with this comment first:

I know that some of the struggles that I am going to mention here are real to the people who are involved, I acknowledge that your struggle exists. But me talking about my own struggles does not invalidate your struggles---if you cannot see that and have a strong weird sense of a ``if you are not with me you are therefore against me' mentality, then I recommend you go away and read something else somewhere and leave me alone.

With that out of the way, here we go.

The key problem in the world today is two-fold:

1. Humanity has gotten more sectarian in nature; and
2. Hyperconnectedness has caused massive ``echo chambers'' that limit horizons, further contributing to the vicious cycle.

That humanity as a whole is sectarian should not be a surprise to anyone who is used to looking at human history. There were only three main situations where such overt discrimination were set aside among individual groups of people:

1. Existential threat from a third group of people who could be stopped/annihilated only through an alliance of the two (or more) groups of people who were formally discriminative of each other;
2. Commerce in the form of trade with excess resources a group has for resources that the group needs;
3. Hegemonic superiority of the other group either through sheer numbers or the use of technological/economical power.

The first of the lot can be seen through the shifting alliances among the different tribes/nations/countries, the second through the rise of industrialisation and globalisation in the late nineteenth century, and the last more prominently after the second world war.

I claim that humanity has gotten more sectarian now because those three situations are getting quickly ignored by people as being applicable. There are few ``enemies of the world/humanity'' than in the past, making people feel safer to be isolated with their in-groups instead of continuously engaging with their out-groups to maintain their existence; many developed countries have been developed for so long that they have forgotten the long supply chains that bind them to the development of the rest of the world, believing that if they had gone into isolationism (or nativism, to use the trending term now), they would come out ahead; many developed or nearly-developed countries are also benefitting from the world-scale ease of sharing of knowledge through the Internet that they start believing that any previously thought of hegemonic superiority of some other group's technological/economical power is no longer at play now, and with that, start embarking on a journey of overtly challenging the former hegemon.

Are those three observations that many people make correct? Personally, I don't think so. While Heinlein might say that only insects specialise, the fact is that our modern societies have an over reliance of technology-based goods and services that was woven tightly together for over two hundred years. And by ``technology-based goods'', I'm not even talking about computer/information technology, but am referring to things as fundamental as agriculture, and tool manufacturing. Every piece of technology has a supply chain of related technologies behind them, and there are many of these just to support the modern human. Even in the case of developing countries where these things don't seem relevant, they will need basic food, power, shelter, and information infrastructures just so that they can advance into larger and larger groups.

And yes, that is my criteria for advancement of humanity. That the better we are at cooperating, the higher the level of progress. Because it is within the concept of massive cooperation that we can build upon each other's work to achieve higher levels of effectiveness in improving our lives. And life improvement means to do more ``work'' with less ``effort'' so that we can really start living our lives beyond that of mere work.

But back to the point. I think that we are at a very dangerous crossroads for humanity in general, with these errorneous judgements on our supposed individual [group's] strengths and the apparent lack of weaknesses. And it is not being helped by the second big factor, which is the reinforcement of global-scale echo chambers via hyperconnectedness.

To claim that hyperconnectedness creates and maintains global-scale echo chambers isn't wholly correct. There are three parts of this story:

1. Hyperconnectedness increases fatigue and dilution of interest;
2. To combat such fatigue and interest dilution, people drift more towards what they know instead of exploring;
3. Companies that provide such hyperconnectedness further encourage people to gather into fewer ``niched'' groups to maintain minimal [high] levels of activity to stay relevant [and improve potential revenue through advertising].

Part one is something to do with human nature and not the actual communication/information network topology. It takes a certain type of nature to be willing to explore outside of one's comfort zone---this is true even in circumstances like these where there is no need to physically put oneself in danger. One can be quite anonymous on the 'net; usually there is no need to be ``registered'' just to read what others have to say, and it used to be the case where interactions could be relatively pseudonymous, before the concept of the ``social media'' came into play. With the rise of ``social media'', it takes even less effort to head out into the wild ``digital unknown'' to look around.

The unfortunate thing that has been demonstrated over the past decade is that even with a lot of things out there in the Internet, people are still more comfortable with things that they know. For example, maybe I discovered something cool about arbology, but in the end, I am more likely to spend time interacting/reading stuff on computer science than that. Now replace these neutral ``knowledge'' materials with something more socio-political, and we'll start to get the start of the echo chambers that we are seeing now.

Multiply that by the ``platform providers'' who discreetly set up algorithms that show more of the same to people who use their platform and rely on it to provide the ``latest news from things they are interested in'', we get the echo chamber of today.

That's bad because it is a regression from the tolerance that had formed in the Age of Exploration. Then we have irresponsible ``leaders'' who use these echo chambers to further their own agenda through all the echoing and make tolerance itself a bad word.

And then we get the increase in the sectarian nature of humanity all over again.

If you think I'm just talking about the US now, you're not quite right. It is not just the US right now. It is almost impossible these days to do anything without triggering off the self-righteous ``my-way-or-the-highway'' types. There is 2×2 comic of two people and a donkey, and a whole bunch of third party criticisms on whatever the people were doing with the donkey (it can be easily found with the terms I give).

If I write a novel, someone will say ``this is a cis-male written piece of novel---it is too anthro-centric and does not explore the non-binary nature of gender issues''. If I write a piece of music for the flute, someone can say ``this is cultural misappropriation---as a Chinese ethnic person, he should not be misappropriating European culture as it is disrespectful''. If I write a social commentary with evidence backing it up, someone will add ``his points cannot be taken to be valid because he is not intersectional with the group he is talking about---he needs to check his majority privilege as only those who are in the in-group are allowed to provide commentary''.

The previous paragraph is hypothetical for me personally---I'm not high profile nor controversial enough to be a target of such things. But seeing post after post, day after day of people saying things of that nature is draining on my so-called ``faith in humanity''.

``But MT,'' you might say, ``that ain't the whole world.'' And you'd be right, that ain't the whole world. However, perception can be reality some times, and that's what's getting me down.

And that, my friends, is why I turned to scripture and to God. This world isn't good enough for me any more---not that it was to begin with. And I've been shown a different way.

Circuit Breaker in All But Name

It's another long weekend, and I'm writing another post here. It is also nearing stupid o'clock, and boy does this remind me of the past.

It was nearly eleven years ago that I would be writing blog posts at stupid o'clock. How has time flown on by!

The circuit breaker was supposed to come to an end come June 01, but no one believed it for a moment---it already had one extension when it was supposed to be done by May 04, and given the current situation of triple-digit daily infections [that get the treatment of spin by deliberately conditioning the total daily numbers by the arbitrary distinction of ``citizens/PRs'' vs ``WP living in dormitories''], it was never likely going to be lifted come June 01, given the relatively conservative and reactionary nature in which Singapore is generally governed.

I didn't even bother to read up the minutae of the ``three-phase'' approach to re-opening things. Phase one is basically an extension to the circuit breaker in all but name, just like how the circuit breaker was basically a lock down in all but name.

As I've said before, 2020 is basically a bust. Everyone is just trying to survive, more so than before, and there really doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to, which is kind of a shame.

------

In other news, it seems that the new version of Ghostscript 9.52 broke something in the ps2write device. Shell scripts that I had written which helped me shrink down PDF files through resampling and other knick-knacks that used to work on Ghostscript 9.27 [in Cygwin] failed competely with some awkward rangecheckerror on --restore--. I managed to isolate the problem down to how Ghostscript was trying to convert from PDF to Postscript, and was stuck there.

I think I'd have to come up with a test case to file it as a bug, but effort is needed. I do have another thing that I would like to do first though, and will probably focus on that.

That's about all I'd want to write for now.

To anyone who is reading this (including future me---hi!), take it easy. Life's hard, and sometimes shitty, but remember this---you're still alive. That counts for something. Just keep on trudging onward steadily, and God will lead the way.

You never walk alone.

Till the next update.

I'm Sorry For The Past, Chara

This year, now specifically, it feels like a major ``reset'' than anything else. Much of what had been taken for granted as the status quo have been nerfed or turned completely upside down with the ever-increasing spectre that is the novel coronavirus pandemic situation.

To me, this is especially true. I am steadily losing the excess mass that I have put on since I was twenty years old. I am again in that state before I had gone steady for five years---alone, but not exactly lonely. I have returned to the time in my life where my main companions were still my books (or reading in general), my writing, and my music.

Don't get me wrong; Chara is still on my mind. There is no easy way in which she will completely disappear from it, not now, not ever. But what she means to me will evolve, just like how how and what everyone means to me will evolve. I cannot deny the time that we had spent together as a couple---it is a part of the collective history of me that makes me who I am today. But I will promise myself that this entry is the last time in a while that I will mention her by name, not because I don't love her any more, but that it is important that I too need to dust myself and get up to go forward, just like how she wanted to go forward [on her journey with God] when she came to the decision near the start of this circuit breaker.

Looking at Tino, Stuffie, and Awa no longer generates the ``bitter'' part of the bittersweet memories---they only generate good vibes and a little nostalgia of a past.

I have to move on with the times. There are things that need to be done while other things are stalled.

I've started on my path of self-discovery, and more specifically, the discovery of my relationship with God. It is an important thing to me to do so---for too long I have been fighting and fighting and fighting to know what is next for me, and frankly after thirty five years, I am just too tired. This circuit breaker imposed isolation with a parting of ways with Chara is a good time for me to really do some soul-searching and learn more about myself in ways that past me would just brush away as immaterial.

Past me would be right by a sleight of hand on words---it is immaterial because it is something that cannot be objectively measured, or rather, something whose axioms cannot be objectively measured. When I am ``trapped'' at home due to the circuit breaker, there is nothing objective to ``measure''. And long time readers of this blog of mine would know that I never did well under such circumstances.

This time though, it is different. Instead of feeling all manner of fear, anxiety, and worry, I find myself with a surprising amount of peace in me. And it hardly involved anything that I used to partake in to improve my mood---running, geocaching, play more music, and the like. I feel a sense of liberation in me that cannot be easily put into words that convince---they can only be put into words of personal testimony that old me would simply listen politely, nod, and not give it too much thought.

Old me was a bastard in many ways. Always thinking he is in the right, always thinking that he has everything figured out, and that if one was not following what he was saying, they were wrong. Recent past me was less so---he lost some of his arrogance, but his personal confidence of mastering the material world was still too much to bear.

Present me thinks that part of why he and Chara parted ways was because recent past me heard but did not listen. Recent past me thought he could out think things, even though an older past me was starting to have doubts about just how many things he was able to out think given the increasingly chaotic world out there. Present me, understanding a bit more now about the concept of sin and the precepts of Jesus's teachings, also realised that recent past me had unintentionally declared himself as an agent of Satan to the daughter of God that he was going out with by declaring that he would help her with the material world. No wonder she had such a strong reaction when she had time to converse the Most High, leading to the surrendering of our relationship to God.

Past me definitely did not intend to sound like an agent of the tempter, but words still have power. For even past me acknowledged that ``while something may not be true, if enough people say it, at some point the truth of the thing matters no more, because enough people have believed it to be true that they react as though the thing were true, leading to all the associated effects''.

I do not know if Chara ever reads my blog entries since that day, and if she is reading it now, I want to say, I am sorry for what I had done. I was/am a sinner and did not know any better then, because I wasn't a believer and didn't understand the lens in which you were viewing reality. Your choice of a parting of ways was a righteous one, and I agree with you wholeheartedly now. I said I understood you at that point of the parting of ways, but now I understand. And I now know in my bones that God will show the right way for you, and He will show the right way for me.

V xabj gung gur fgbel bs gur eryngvbafuvc orgjrra Punen naq V vfa'g bire whfg lrg, ohg vg vf hc gb Tbq'f tenpr gb qrsvar jung vg vf ng gur gvzr gung cyrnfrf Uvz. I have no say in this, for I have given it to God.

That said, the nature of this blog still remains the same. It is still my megaphone into the void that is the Internet on my thoughts and observations. It is as the banner text unabashedly proclaims:

An eclectic mix of thoughts and views on life and life-at-large, and interesting observations both in real life and in cyberspace, as well as other sparks of inspiration. Take things here with a pinch of salt, for they might be truth, yet at the same time, they are less formal than they seem to be...

And that will be all I would want to write about for now.

Till the next update then.

To Thine Own Self Be True

I have been thinking for a while on how to write this post. But I suppose at the end of the day, I cannot be false to myself---I only know how to write the truth, and even then, in a straightforward way.

Chara decided to part ways with me.

That was the traumatic event that had happened to me about two weeks ago that I had been dancing about in my allusions in posts here. This is after all the other weird stuff that I had reported here about other aspects of life.

It's funny in a not-so-funny sort of way. Her decision to do so helped eclipse every other annoyance that I had been experiencing thus far; in view of what happened, everything else seemed to be so minor that I now look back and wonder why was I so pissy about them in the first place.

I have lost my dearest friend.

She doesn't want to communicate with me for now, the reasoning being that words may end up leading me on, and giving me false hope.

How long is ``for now'', and whether we get to be friends again, or even lovers once more, neither of us knows.

All I know is, I hurt inside. Badly.

It took me two weeks for this to sink in ``in my bones''. Funny enough, I knew it would sink in only nowish. And that's why I have chosen to take leave this upcoming Vesak weekend to make it long enough to really work it through my system. I'm still functional, in no danger of harming myself or anyone else, or even do things that I will regret in the future. I'm still on that crazy scheme of mine to lose excess mass using Singapore's BMI standard (see logical page 1, physical page 8) (or see this for the summary). The rationale is that it is a standard that is applicable for sedentary asians, and the last I checked, I am indeed sedentary now.

I talked about some aspects of ennui in December, and more recently in this entry in March. I think I may have found the missing link that joins the two ends of the unspoken questions. But first, a little bit of history.

The thing is, I've always been keeping an eye out for my mind and body. I read, I study, I ponder, and I experiment, so that I can understand the natural world as much as I can. Despite my shitty beginnings of really bad skin that made vigorous physical activity untenable under other people's control, I have been trying to keep my body in some kind of usable shape through the various attempts at swimming, at running, at cycling, at practising Aikido, and practising Aiki-jujutsu. Music-making exercises both my mind and body, and even parts of my soul, but other than that, my soul has been something that I have not really paid much attention to.

I had no reason to question how/why I was here, and I had no reason to think about what would happen after I died---I knew I would cease to exist, and it was okay, or so I thought.

But it was not okay. All my life, I had been struggling and fighting my way from one milestone to the next, losing both sleep and energy trying to plan ahead and think ahead. But how can I keep on planning ahead when there's no eventual pay-off other than ignominy from oblivion?

In short, I grew tired. Really tired of just thinking and thinking and trying to out-think so that I can literally carve my path through life, a path that does not lead to greatness but to literal oblivion.

Then I looked around me. Many struggle, but there was a select group around me that did not seem to suffer so bad. Why was it that they were always so sure of their place in the world despite it all being completely bonkers and giving every statistician the type of headache that never goes away?

In some ways, I've always known the answer, even though I never had the guts to acknowledge it. In a recent post, I would even say that it was prescient, even though I think now that the person I was referring to wasn't quite right. I quote the relevant paragraph here:

... The world, as a whole, is also getting more bonkers, and there are just so many things that could have gone wrong that have gone wrong. To what extent I can survive through that is something that I need to consider carefully. Of course this time, I am no longer travelling alone for the most part---I have an ally, a friend, a partner-in-crime, a fellow conspirator with which we can co-support each other through. This will definitely make things different in a good way...

No, it really isn't Chara. I don't need her, and she doesn't need me---we only walked together because we knew we were stronger together, because we complemented each other's weaknesses with our strengths, and it was something that we both had known before what happened two weeks ago. All that hurt I feel inside was just the sense of loss of my dearest friend, hopefully for now only.

But really, I have been mistaken.

I have always had an ally, a friend, a ``partner-in-crime''---it's just that... I had never had the guts to acknowledge His existence.

Until now.

Doing Better Than Last Reported

I will make this quick because I am about to start a new [work] day.

I am doing better than when I last reported. This is despite other more traumatic changes in my life. If you want details, please contact me through other means, and perhaps I can share bits and pieces with you---I am still in the transition phase, and there are many things that are still going to take me some time to get to grips with.

In other news, the ``COVID-19 Circuit Breaker'' period in Singapore has been extended. This means that instead of releasing everyone back into general circulation on May 04, it has been extended to Jun 01 instead.

What that means for me, I don't know. What that means for the economy, I also don't know.

What that means for society, I really don't know.

On another note, I am still on exile from Facebook. All the COVID-19 business and their associated wild reactions, and heavy heavy bad news from the US are flooding my newsfeed so much that I simply cannot take it any more. I recently logged in to take care of some other business, and have seen more of the same that I was trying to avoid.

So, please, contact me through other means if necessary.

In other news, I've also given up my resistance against using Whatsapp. Sure, the behaviour of that app after 8+ years is definitely more understood now, but I am still leery. However, like many things in life, it is about seeking the right balance. In the past, I could make do without it, but now, with the extension of the ``circuit breaker'' and other traumatic changes in my life, the equation has changed.

And that's all for now. Till the next update.

Look, I'm Not Doing Well, Okay?

It's been almost a month since the last update. What might be new now?

Well, thanks to really bad behaviours of society in general, we are now in a lockdown in all but name. Those of us who can work from home are now demanded to work from home by law, and the only times that we are allowed to leave our primary dwelling is to purchase necessities like food. Oh, there's the whole talk about allowing us to go out and exercise, but I think that's a loophole that is going to be closed soon thanks to all the clueless people who decide to have a ``one last party'' before the city quasi-quarantine measures kick in.

Fools. The only people that they are going to hurt are just themselves.

Anyway, I will not spare another thought for those cretins. I already have much on my mind.

I'm not doing that well.

V'ir abg sryg guvf yriry bs shax fvapr gur qnex qnlf bs zl nggrzcgvat gb qb n CuQ. Ng yrnfg gura (naq orsber), V pbhyq trg uryc eryngviryl rnfvyl. Vebavpnyyl, vg vf jura V nz urer va zl ubzr pvgl gung V pnaabg trg uryc gung rnfvyl.

Naq rira vs V qvq trg uryc, jbhyq V or noyr gb ernyyl fgneg cvrpvat gur guvatf gung ner va zl urnq naq pnhfvat zr hagbyq nzbhagf bs haarprffnel cnva?

Orvat sbeprq gb jbex ng ubzr qbrf abg uryc znggref. V nz pbasvarq gb dhnegref, fgnevat ng zl jbex yncgbc fperra sbe nyzbfg rirel qnl bs gur jrrx---fher gurer vf ab bssvpvny cbyvpl gung bar zhfg jbex bire choyvp ubyvqnlf be gur jrrxraq, ohg V guvax gung gurer ner vzcyvpngvbaf gung bar bhtug gb qb fb. V fgvyy trg rznvyf bire choyvp ubyvqnlf/jrrxraqf, naq V'z fgvyy trggvat vafgnag zrffntrf eryngvat gb jbex bire gubfr crevbqf, naq ng nyy gvzrf bs gur qnl.

Fher, V'ir orra gbyq gung V fubhyq yrnea gb vtaber gurz bhgfvqr bs bssvpr ubhef. Ohg vg'f uneq gb qb fb, bxnl? V qba'g yvxr gb yrnir guvatf ylvat nebhaq gung arrqf gb or qbvat orpnhfr vg vfa'g arng! Va gur raq, qrfcvgr tvira n 40-ubhe jbex-jrrx ol qrsvavgvba, V abeznyyl raq hc jbexvat ng 20% bire gvzr ba nirentr, cre jrrx, pybpxrq.

``Url ZG, lbh'er abg obea lrfgreqnl... guvf vf gur abez va gur erny jbeyq! Lbh'er yhpxl gung lbh bayl unq gb jbex 20% bire gvzr! Va zl vaqhfgel, vg vf gur abez gb jbex sbhegrra ubhe qnlf! Lbhe chal avar gb gra ubhe qnlf vf abguvat, fb whfg fhpx vg hc, ohggrephc!''

Jryy... shpx lbh vs gung'f jung lbh guvax. V unir guvatf gung V jnag gb qb bhgfvqr jbex, naq abj V'z gbb gverq gb qb gurz nsgre jbexvat. Jura V jbex k ubhef, V shpxvat jbex gubfr k ubhef. V qba'g trg gb fvg nebhaq naq gjvqqyr zl guhzof jnvgvat sbe gvzr gb cnff---V ohea rirel fvatyr oenva pryy svthevat bhg jung arrqf gb or qbar qhevat gung gvzr. V raq gur qnl, rkunhfgrq.

V pna'g jbex sbhegrra ubhe qnlf. Uryy, V pna'g rira jbex gra ubhe qnlf. V'yy tb penml.

Gung'f ebhtuyl jung vf unccravat abj. V nz tbvat penml.

V nz ungvat zlfrys zber rnpu qnl. V ungr zlfrys sbe orvat fhpu n pbzcyrk crefba jvgu jnagf naq arrqf gung tb orlbaq jung n wbo pna cebivqr. V ungr zlfrys sbe abg orvat gur zrpunavzbgeba gung V gubhtug V jnf.

Shpx lbh, shpx zr, ZG.

------

In different news, I've finally finished up the accompaniment concept for Ruminative Thoughts for Concert Flute. I had written the main melody and theme for a long time, but was stalled on the accompaniment. I am really not into writing accompaniment with full scale harmony and counterpoint---partly because I wasn't really trained in it, relying on mostly my ears to tell me if it works or not, and partly because that's the part that takes the most time to set up, possibly due to the former reason. So insted of writing the ``full'' accompaniment for the piece, I ended up with some basic concepts, leaving space for a more enterprising individual (or even future me) to fill in the blanks.

I still have another piece, Cantabile in F♯ Minor for Concert Flute and Piano that is also done pending accompaniment, but this time, it is in collaboration with GY, and he hasn't really passed me his take on the piano part yet. Since this COVID-19 became a bigger thing, it had been hard to link up with him to get things moving along.

Currently I'm in the middle of preparing the conductor's score for the latest dizi solo that I had played, 《山村迎亲人》. I'm doing this again because we had some changes with the score since the performance, and that we had brought in some low brass and low woodwinds to help us, thus changing the original orchestration.

Maybe after that I will start working on one of the older concepts that currently don't have any names. I usually number my pieces based on when I came up with the concept, not when I have completed them. Perhaps this will make the numbering scheme more easy to understand.

------

In a final sort of update, I'm staying clear of Facebook for now. There has been too much news, both bad and nonsensical, about the COVID-19 situation. As I had said in the earlier part of this blog post that I'm not doing well, and seeing all these negative things are really not helping me. The last thing that I wrote on my ``wall'' (I still hate that term, by the way) is that I am feeling dejected (not depressed!), and am in no danger of killing myself or anyone.

Those conditions still hold. I am still dejected, and am still in no danger of killing myself or anyone. I would also add that I am in no danger of hurting myself either, though I cannot confirm if I do end up hurting anyone else.

I don't even know why I keep writing here any more. Blogs are so passé---maybe only Brian still reads this. If so, hi Brian---I know I promised that I will talk to you at some point, but I don't have the balls nor the organisation to do so. So, sorry for the moment. Same for roticv.

And same for Chara. I feel bad because I think she keeps thinking that somehow she is a big cause for what I am feeling, but it really isn't. She feels bad that I'm in this situation and that she doesn't know how to help make it better. I feel bad that I am making her feel bad etc. But I doubt she is reading this either, and if she is, I'll say it again: sorry love, please give me some time to figure out just what is wrong in my head.

Well, that's enough for now. Till the next update.

Le Téléphone Reste Éteint, Citoyen

After a series of false starts, I've started to reinitialise my original plan with respect to work---I am no longer going to look at my work phone nor work laptop on hours outside of work.

It was something that I had done all the time in the past implicitly. Firstly, I did not have a work laptop for the larger of my two big engagements with my old organisation (I've always preferred working on desktops for both the power:cost ratio and the obviously easy segregation of work and non-work); and secondly, I have never used my cellphone for work purposes (because there was a physical work phone that was tied to me in the office). If there was a need to be contactable out of office hours for quasi-emergency reasons, I would reroute the office phone number to my own cellphone as needed, otherwise it was strictly left alone. Finally, much of the work was done among colleagues who were physically in the office almost all the time, which meant that there was no need for any sort of always-on-call nature of instant messaging.

All three conditions had been shattered from the first day at my new work place. I was issued a work laptop only (no desktop), had no office phone (had to supply my own cellphone for work uses, but thankfully due to an unintentional acceptance of upselling from a Singtel representative, I had an additional line leeching off my own personal number for use), and had to rely on a lot of instant messaging due to having colleagues spread around the globe (a situation further exacerbated by the recent pandemic of the COVID-2019).

I am not grousing that those conditions were shattered. I am grousing that those three conditions were all that kept me from turning into a complete workaholic. And for the first few months, that was exactly what had happened to me---I was working almost non-stop, responding obsessively to every instant message that came by, powering up my laptop to work on things over the weekends, responding to queries and replies after office hours due to some of my colleagues' very different operating hours (they just sleep very late and wake up not-early). True, there was never an official directive that a ``9-9-6'' or even ``24×7''/``24/7'' operation requirement was expected of me, but since there were no checks and balances otherwise, I felt compelled to keep working like that.

It affected me negatively. Sleep was nearly impossible---all the thoughts about work was always swirling in my mind. And I am a person that cannot operate without enough sleep---it physically hurts my brain, cognitive abilities, and general mood. It reminded me of the time when I was still idealistic and in pursuit of my PhD, right up to the point before I decided it was not the lifestyle for me---monomania was definitely required, and that only the hungry/desperate/suicidal would be allowed to ``pass''. I tried it and failed; I didn't have that one-tracked obsession that would allow me to do the same thing day in, day out, without driving myself (suici|homi|geno)-cidal. In a lame way of describing it, my life has too many interesting things for me to look into to just limit myself to only one thing. Sure I loved programming, I liked machine learning, data mining, information extraction and integration. But I also liked writing stories, reading/learning knowledge from different fields, playing/composing music, geocaching, cycling, practising jujutsu, you know, living life other than just doing work.

Maybe I'm soft. Maybe I'm useless. If I'm the latter, maybe the company will decide so and fire me---I am starting to convince myself that perhaps it is not my place to decide what my true worth is to a company other than to let the company decide for itself.

So I've decided to take a stand, with Chara metaphorically staring daggers at me and forcing me to realise just the kind of self-destruction route I've been on. The work phone and laptop stays off after office hours. They stay off during the weekend.

This is the first weekend I am doing this, and already, on a Sunday early afternoon, I am feeling all kinds of uneasiness and anxiety. Will what I am working on/with require desperately require the input from me that completely precludes positive progress had I not looked into it over the last 60+ hours by the time Monday nine o'clock arrives?

I don't know. I will only find out when I wake up on Monday morning and power up my phone. While it is not a good idea to work longer than my official end working hours, no one has said that I cannot start the day earlier to ensure alignment of my schedule with that of Chara's. In some ways, it is probably less damaging, only if I can figure out my sleep schedule properly. I think it is less of the hours and more of how long it takes to calm the mind down at the end of the day so that proper rest may be obtained. But this will forever be a work in progress until something more concrete is determined.

It is at times like this that I sometimes (not always!) wish that I were a more boring type of person, the kind that lives to work, not have hobbies, and not having to think so much about things. It is not often though, because I've lived this particular life for too long already---I like the myriad of hobbies I do. If I'm lucky, I'd get around 3.1 billion seconds to live, of which I've already used 1.1 billion seconds. There really isn't that much time left to live out a full life.

Things will always work out, eventually. That's what being alive is all about---we think, and we work our way around any and all problems. I should really learn to keep my mind open more, and not let the vagaries of localised temporary setbacks throw me off balance.

Nothing Seems Fun Any More

Clearly this is not written at the silly time that you are seeing for this post.

Have you ever had one of those days where you metaphorically look at yourself in the mirror, wonder why the hell you are doing all that you are doing, what it is all for, and then coming to a realisation that nothing that you do seems fun and that you just want to end it all because it felt like it was probably preferable to what can be nicely described as a meaningless life of ennui?

Yeah, it felt like one of those days today. Why? How the hell would I know?

Nothing seems fun any more. I wake up, I get dressed, I get my ass to work, I work, I take my lunch break time to read, I get back to work, I drink lots of coffee, I leave the office, I meet up with Chara, I go home, I read, I sleep; then rinse and repeat. On weekends, I wake up, I get dressed, I do something ``fun'' (read, watch the VODs for the latest speedrun marathon or from some of my favourite Youtubers, play dizi/flute/saxophone, write/transcribe music), I go for rehearsal, I go home, I sleep.

Maybe it's the lack of a pay-off. Lots of things done, but the pay-off always seem so far away. I was looking forward to going for the International Low Flutes Festival in Urayasu Japan with Chara this year, but thanks to the rise of the pre-pandemic levels of the COVID-2019 event, the event has been postponed till next year (a slightly fancier way of saying ``cancelled for this year but we will skip the crazy planning and re-use the original plans for next year''). We have since replaced it with something different and local, and I am looking forward to that, but I cannot deny a certain level of being bummed out.

I was supposed to meet up with some of my old colleagues/friends for an evening of beer and talking cock, but well, it's been ``postponed indefinitely`` also due to the COVID-2019 event.

I can go on and on, but why bother? I'm just going to make myself feel worse. In fact, I don't know why I am even writing this entry in the first place. Oh right, just as a means of documenting a transient period in life.

No, I'm in no danger of offing myself, at least not in a direct sort of way. I do feel this compulsion to just work so hard that I collapse or something though... I suspect this is just a side effect of just wanting to reach the state of drowning myself so hard that I don't need to think any more.

Thinking is just making me more and more depressed over time. The world is not a nice place.

Till the next update. Hopefully things are less stupid by then.

Anniversary Update

Well well well... what can I say? It's that time of the year again, where the confluence of all the natural (and semi-natural) markings of the passing of an integer increment of years has come.

It is right smack in the middle of Chinese New Year now. The situation this year is more dire than usual, because there is a new spread of a new viral disease that found itself starting from within Wuhan, China. While not directly affecting me personally, it has, in many ways, dampened down the over festivities by the Chinese nationals who are making their way back home for the holidays. Locally, while the scare isn't as strong as that of SARS back in 2003, it still casts a certain background dampener on things. I guess it also does not help that the Chinese New Year this year is happening so damn early, having shown up in the middle of the last third of January. Folks were barely recovering from the massive commercial festivities that is Christmas, and now they are scampering to mark time for the Chinese Lunar New Year.

But the main purpose of this post isn't to talk about the Chinese Lunar New Year---it is more to reference my own personal anniversary of living on this planet.

At this point in my life, I think I have officially transitioned from ``young adult'' to ``early middle age''. Seems like it was only yesterday that I was just happily graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with a sinking feeling in my stomach because my QPA did not meet the 3.8 quota that was demanded of by my funding organisation (it was slightly more than a decade ago). It's also nearly fifteen years since my first existential crisis in my early twenties, where I was wondering if I could even live past thirty given the odds that were stacked against me (I had bad skin, I was socially under-developed, and I always felt that I was never quite good enough at whatever I was doing). Naturally I had lived past all that by now, and oh boy, what a crazy ride it was over the last decade!

So many things came and went. Each time when I was confronted with something that seemed impossible, I somehow managed to make my way out of it, not damageless, but often with enough luck to get away with damage that I can [eventually] recover from. Each step of the way, I fell, I got up, I got bruised, I healed, and I tried again.

I think that's just how life works, and I am thankful that past me never did fall into the dangerous spiral where the only way onwards was just tapping out of life completely.

Now that I am in ``early middle age'', priorities have altered again. I am no longer filled with the wild abandon of positivity that youth has, and am instead armed with that kind of suspicious eye on overly-optimistic view on things in general. I can also feel that my mind is ``slowing down'' more in some sense, more so than the first detection of the ``slowing down'' back when I was around twenty-two or so. I cannot tell if this is part of the aging process, or is it part of the fact that the past decade has seen the air quality of Singapore going down woefully, from an old average of less than 30 PPM (PM-10/2.5) to less than 50 PPM (PM-10/2.5), for every friggin' day. Some scientific studies have shown that starving the brain of good air has a tendency of fouling up its processes, but to what extent that is a real effect on me versus my own nocebo effect is something that I do not know.

Anyway, I'm ranting again.

Well, for this year, I think that it is time to do a little regroup to plan for the future, more so than any of the other years that I have lived for. My living situation is starting to go on a different path than the ``happy-go-lucky single'', and with that comes more responsibilities, financial and otherwise. That I had to leave my old job with the old organisation due to the ever-increasing impossibility of being allowed to actually do my work is not helpful in the least, since it takes away a good anchor point in my life. The world, as a whole, is also getting more bonkers, and there are just so many things that could have gone wrong that have gone wrong. To what extent I can survive through that is something that I need to consider carefully. Of course this time, I am no longer travelling alone for the most part---I have an ally, a friend, a partner-in-crime, a fellow conspirator with which we can co-support each other through. This will definitely make things different in a good way, and is something that will make us stronger in the years to come.

That's about all the ranting I care to do here for now. There are other things that I could be writing about, but with my real-life dead-tree diary in existence, those things are relegated to the one physical copy that is kept in close possession.

After all, what's on the Internet stays there forever. With the type of media climate we have now, why should we keep things that are that ephemeral in a place that is basically a forever-archive?

Till the next update.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2019:

1. 2 poems posted here
2. 8 essays/rants posted here
3. 0 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
5. 3 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 14 articles, up from the 12 articles in 2018.

That's an average of 0.038 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.033 last year. It's horrifically low, but it is, as I mentioned before, a natural progression as life starts to fall into a discernible pattern.

2019 was a mixed bag. On the one hand, I think I've hit a new high with what I can do on my 笛子 and concert flute, and Chara and I have never been closer than where we were at in 2019 when she has finally rebased herself in Singapore. On the other hand, anti-work management at my old work place forced me to make the hard decision to leave it and head out to the great unknown, where I am now working for a medium enterprise, in the middle of a project that was started on a wrong foot and that we are trying to salvage as best as we can. It is a difficult position, to say the least, because I'm used to starting on a good foot, winning the initiative and then just running ahead with it, and never allowing myself to fall behind. This project is the very anti-thesis of how I would normally be running it, and there are many times where I feel that perhaps I am not doing good enough.

An emergent issue came up in my health that can hopefully be resolved with a minor surgery, and that has finally moved along, after getting stalled at the Polyclinic referral stage due to weirdness in their processes in reaching out to patients.

2020 is going to be a tough year. Geo-politically, things are likely to get even weirder with all the big players starting to flex their muscles really hard. Apart from that, at a personal level, there are many other things that are happening that I do not necessarily have control over. I cannot even see past the March 2020 horizon for some reason---that is how myopic I feel at times.

Ah well. As I keep saying to myself, life goes on.

Life

Life is both hard and weird.

Life, in a reductionist sense, is the accumulation of billions of years of chemical processes that manage to interact with each other in a way that allows a package to be created that contains them. Life can be as small as a single cell, to as large as a multi-cellular organism, or it can be extrapolated into the larger view of the ecosystem as a whole.

Life is not guaranteed. If we let life be defined as the set of sets of chemical processes that create a package that is in some ways self-propagating and capable of having a well-defined border of what is itself and the outside, then we find that there are many viable such sets of chemical processes, which explains the diversity of life as a whole. But as I said, life is not guaranteed---some form of life can arise eventually, but a specific instance of a specific life has an infinitesimal chance of appearing.

Why all the verbiage? It is the end of the year, and like always, I get a little more introspective and in some senses, retrospective as well. The contemplation of what I had done over the past ten years to get to where I am now has made me mull over what it means to be ``alive''. I used to believe that I would die at the end of twenty-one years old, and in many ways, I did die then. The cells that make up by current body are not likely to be the same cells some fourteen or so years ago, and the experiences that I had undergone since then have also changed the harder-to-pinpoint parts of me as well.

But to make it more to the point, the verbiage on life is the start of my beginning understanding of the world, in that each of the specific people that we meet in our lives are themselves specific forms of life that, short of a better word, underwent a miracle or two (or more) just to be where they are. And it is because of that type of infinitesimal existential probability of that specific person existing at this specific time and interacting rather specifically with me makes me start to appreciate people (as a whole) much more than I ever did.

I am not turning into a saint or a buddha by any degree, but at some fundamental level, I am starting to ``feel in my bones'' some of the truths that some of the sages have been trying to tell us over the ages, no matter their creed or belief. Existentially, there is no reason for any one of us to be here, not because of fatalism or nihilism, but because if we were to attempt to ascribe a reason for existence, we start running into the attribution problem of to whom this reason is meant for. That is an unanswerable question. It is more of the case that we are here, therefore we exist, and from there, we try to discover our own reason and meaning of existence for ourselves.

I used to have dreams. I liked codes, inventing, and thinking, and was drawn rather deeply into the whole sneaky aspect of espionage. I used to have a solid core of morals (I still do, but things were more black and white to me then, as compared to now), and I used to be someone who was willing to sacrifice myself for the sake of the society.

Then somewhere in between, reality hit me hard and I started to lose those vagueish qualitative dreams. I went with the flow, riding out the probability waves as best as I could, each time trying to position myself in ways that would minimise the type of damage that could be inflicted upon myself. I was never truly ambitious, but I was definitely competitive. If I could see a reason as to why I needed to be competitive, I would go in whole heartedly.

Today, I look back at myself and am a little concerned. I don't have much dreams any more.

It is not that I do not have any dreams---that would be a patent lie---but I do not have those ``big'' dreams any more. Come to think of it, I never really had ``big'' dreams ever, just really small qualitative ones involving a state of being than being in a state. Wordplay aside, I mean that my dreams involved me positioning myself in life such that I would not suffer at the very least, and have a type of contentedness at the very most, where ``not suffer'' and ``have contentedness'' were the extent of my dreams, as opposed to the quantitative ones some folks might have (e.g. ``be married with children by thirty two'', ``reach my first million by thirty'', ``own my company by twenty-five'').

Each day was a blessing if I could wake up, move about, do paid honest work, hang out with people I like, partake in my hobbies, before finally going back to sleep. That's about it for me. It feels as though I have reached the peak of the modern day peasant.

I am bringing this up because I realised that over the past year, I had more overtly started to care more about the people around me. These people aren't necessarily friends nor family, they are just people I meet often when I walk about. I don't know who they are other than how they look and what they are doing when I see them, I don't know anything else about them. But I take the effort to at least acknowledge their existence, to assure them that yes, they had won the infinitesimal probability of existing as a life form, and that they are.

I think it is because of two things. The first is the positive influence of Chara, who does these things by a second-nature that is likely forever alien to me. The second is that I know how it feels to be treated like one does not exist. It is a nasty feeling; while it is often important that one knows how to self-substantiate one's existence before seeking external validation (i.e. ``love thyself before asking others to love thee''), sometimes one is just so angry at oneself that one does not readily see that one's existence is miraculous and should be cherished instead of wallowing down the path of eventual self-destruction. It is in those circumstances that having an external validation can make the difference between gritting one's teeth to soldier on out of the pit, or to go down the path of no return.

It isn't much, but we are all we have for each other. If we don't look out for the people around us, who will?

Life is already hard and weird enough, why do we want to make it even harder for ourselves then?

Existential

Existential.

That's the general type of feeling I get at the end of the year.

In the past, I would often end up wallowing a little in the kind of self-pity thanks to the triple whammy of aging thrice---once through the end of the Gregorian year, once more through my birthday, and yet a third time through that of the Chinese lunar new year.

I don't self-pity any more. There is nothing to pity myself about---my bad skin has significantly become less bad over the years, my old issues of wanting to love and being loved are no longer an issue now, and my usual refrain about how friends often ended up being further apart is no longer that big a deal.

But ever so often, I still get bouts of what I might politely call an existential dread.

This year, it is heightened by a few things that can at best be called coincidental.

Work has gotten to the point where I vacillate between feeling in control of the situation and being completely overwhelmed. It's simultaneously bad and not that bad, and I really cannot decide which of the two states it is in. Regardless of how I feel, the proverbial show must still go on, and things need to be done and delivered, and so that is that; everything else is mostly an academic exercise of wielding and parrying off of power/authority with different types of power/authority.

My hobby time has gone a little weird---I feel a little weary from having been played for a chum every now and then, and the gradual realisation that if I want to go even farther, I may need to take a different tack on things.

My reading time has gotten even weirder still; having finally finished reading 《厚黑学》 recently, I had started on Little Women, which I am now regretting a little, because it has such strong emotive content that it is doing nothing towards resolving my innate existential confuddlement. It also did not help that I had finished the manga Battle Angel Alita, which itself is a type of existential exploration of what it means to seek meaning of oneself.

Vg vf ng gvzrf yvxr gurfr gung V rail gubfr jub unir n fgebat snvgu va gur oryvrs gung fbzrbar be fbzrguvat bs gerzraqbhf cbjre bhg bs gurve xra vf ybbxvat bhg sbe gurz. Juvyr gur rkcynangvba bs cbffvoyr pnhfr naq rssrpg pna or dhvgr uneq gb whfgvsl jvgubhg oryvrivat va gur fnzr nkvbzf, gung gurfr crbcyr pna frrx fgeratgu sebz n fbhepr gung vf fvzhygnarbhfyl sebz jvgubhg naq sebz jvguva vf n fvtug gb orubyq, rfcrpvnyyl jura gur bhgpbzrf ner, sbe ynpx bs n orggre grez, zvenphybhf. Va znal jnlf, jurgure be abg fbzrguvat unf qverpg pnhfr naq rssrpg vf vzzngrevny gb gurz; gurve fgebat oryvrs unf perngrq gur ernyvgl gung gurl jrer ybbxvat sbe. Nz V raivbhf bs gurz? N yvggyr, ohg vg vf gur xvaq bs ``yrnc bs snvgu'' gung bar zhfg xabj ``va bar'f obarf'' orsber vg znxrf nal frafr.

Existential.

It all goes back to that word. This year had been quite awkward, and I am not quite sure what to expect for the year to come. But one can always hope, and perhaps as the days of 2020 make their way known, the existential dread that I feel will ebb away temporarily, only to make itself known once more nearer the end of the next year.