Work is back

Work is back. It didn’t really leave me, just that I forgotten how work looks like, just like how I completed forgotten who that Russian bird who waved at me at the café was; I made a complete donkey out of myself that afternoon.

So work is back just sitting on my desk. I somehow managed to overlook it for the last couple of days. I have been a bit more than clouded lately that my worldview has been somewhat skewed. Work became the least of my worries, but now that much of the other aspects of my life have been sorted, work is now waving at me like a blinking lunatic.

My application for ethics approval did not go so well. As part of the ethics committee’s mission to create hoops for research students to jump through, I have to resubmit my draft questionnaire. Well it is not like there is anything fundamentally flawed with my initial draft. It was highlighted that the draft questionnaire was littered with typographical and grammatical errors. I have got no problem asking my mom to read through my questionnaire again, but I’m still perplexed as to how grammatical errors have become an issue for consideration by the ethics committee. I mean, since when has subject-verb agreement become an ethical concern? And I thought the bureaucracy of the armed forces was bad.

The better work-related news is perhaps that I have a paper accepted in a conference in Perth. Fine this conference is probably as prestigious as TCS Star awards, but the point really is that I have never been to Perth. A five-page paper for a ticket and accommodation to Perth ain’t that bad. The reviewers’ comments were quite interesting. The first reviewer actually rejected the paper claiming that it was too conceptual and boring. If I know who this reviewer was, I’ll just like to let him/her know, it is only a local conference, not a nomination for the Nobel prize. The second reviewer recognized that it was an obvious cheap attempt to get a free flight to Perth gave me two thumbs up. Whoever you are, bless you.

Back to the office for the weekend. I ain’t complaining.

Change

What is it about change that we hate so much? It is so easy to say that we need a change, to move out of the status quo and yet when we find comfort with the latter, we cling onto it like a baby chimpanzee on mommy’s back.

It has been a traumatic week, with displeasure and resentment surfacing and manifesting in ways so quickly that I struggled to grasp and cope with them. A lot of time was spent introspecting and appreciating where I fit in this tapestry of uncertainty which I like to call my life. It has not been easy and sometimes when the thoughts overwhelm you, you feel like mash potato in a blender when you are consumed by those thoughts.

Things change, people move on and sometimes fighting against change becomes futile. These are lessons I have learnt before, but they can so easily be forgotten, especially when you have been exposed to moments of delight where rainbows and lollipops make sense once again, and you will become so disheartened to watch them vanish in the harshness of reality.

Things change, people move on. What really can you do, except to continue to learn how to cope with it, and find strength and comfort in yourself to journey on.

what is there left to take,
from an empty house,
once filled with balloons
and confetti
and laughter of hope.

A broken place remains
when abandoned
despite years of keeping.

What is there left to take from this vacant place?

The walls cracked,
and picture frames broken,
what is there left to take?

smokey pallet and sweet melancholy

I sit here,
and the words flow with such ease,
like an undisturbed stream
with waters cold like the winter air.
Melancholy finds me again,
the scars of old aches again.
I embrace melancholy like an old friend,
whom I have forgotten its name,
only for a brief moment,
a moment of naiveté

I have failed yet again,
to find comfort through my own strength.
Perhaps it was wrong
to have started such a challenge to begin with.
Could someone live life like an island?
To find contentment because there are no desires?
The intoxication of a smoky pallet wearies me… …
I must rest.
I think none of logic or rational,
my judgment is clouded only by resentment of so many events past.

Why wait to be excluded
when I could exclude myself first?
The desire for affiliation,
the desire to be revered is like poison
that entices the empty soul.
I yield so very often,
only for regrets to caress me like parental arms
in a forgotten dream.
Perhaps, an island is where I could find sanctuary
from the heartache that is imposed by so many others
……. perhaps,
perhaps………

sweet intoxications finds me….. I must rest……..

i was in church yesterday

I went to church yesterday. Now that is almost as close to me saying that I signed up a GIRO donation scheme to NKF. The last time I was in church was probably two years ago, when I was young, naïve and attached. I was probably only there to keep my then significant other company. Or perhaps, it was just to bring back memories of the days in St. Andrews, where Wednesday chapel lessons meant more about not having to stay in classrooms rather than to get in touch with divinity.

I am not Christian, I do not have a religion, actually, I don’t really know what I am. If I have to be labelled and categorised for the benefit of national statistics, all I can say is that I am not atheist, because I do pray in my most desperate hour, but my prayers are addressed to ‘whom it may concern.’

I asked dad when I was little, what is our religion and he said “free-thinker”. I think he meant free to think whatever made sense, rather than ‘no religion’ as what most others brand us. Typically together with a look of pity that my family and I have bought the wrong ticket for a train that departs to some nasty destination where they don’t serve bacon and eggs for breakfast.

Sometimes it is difficult to be a ‘free-thinker’ when they don’t come with printed instructions as to what we were supposed to do. The Bible, Quran, and Sutras are like street directories in a rented car where members, and only members of Thrifty get to refer to when negotiating their way through the tapestry of life. The only guidelines I have are certain principles and values that I cling onto just to make sense of the world around me. I really don’t know how they got there, because my parents did not sit me down on Sunday mornings and drill Confucius teachings in me. At some level, I probably picked up some cheesy notions of societal dogma from Hong Kong movies. But the larger part of it is probably through watching my parents adhere so staunchly to these values that it only makes sense that I follow them. I am really happy about this system, because I don’t need to have ‘thou shall be filial to thy parents’ engraved on stone for me. I know that my children will not send me to a home, because I am not going to do so to my parents.

I like being a free-thinker; one who is free to think and believe in whatever that makes sense. It makes sense to me that I am not perfect and I do wrong, and my concept of sin is if you don’t learn and do it again. It makes sense to me that happiness is a paradoxical pursuit, because the drive to achieve your wants may bring pleasure but so does not having the wants in the first place. It makes sense to me that values, love and kindness are passed forward as how my parents are passing them on to me, and I will repay them on to my children. At the same time, if I ever get to meet God, I will like to thank him, because even though I don’t sing a lot of songs about him, I know that he saved many of my friends who are using his street directory.

I am not Christian per say, not exactly Buddhist, and I think that Confucius is a really cool teacher. I am a free-thinker, and probably a naïve one, because I like to believe that different religion and creed have no reason not to co-exist; we all journey through the same tapestry of life, just using a different street directory to find the way that makes the most sense, and maybe, just maybe with a bit of luck, find happiness along the way.

let me not.... ...

Let me not taste wine,
for I will yearn for intoxication.
Let me not taste poison
and I will be ignorant
and will never learn.
Let me not taste happiness,
so that I will not weep as I am doing so… …