heartbreaks

I’m in the mood for clichés tonight; how would you mend a broken heart. Damn it sounds cheesy just typing it out. But being heart broken can be more than having a member of the opposite gender walking out of you for some droopy-eyed junkie who wears camouflage pants to buy his daily milk. It really is anything that brings about a wave of disappointment, sometimes even brining a person to the point of disillusion. Maybe the last couple of days could have been filled with sunshine and lollipops, but being the typical me, I was only aware of the air of pessimism which basically rendered me vulnerable to be heart broken.

I constantly need to have something before me to look forward to. This carrot of hope keeps me going, and makes sense to my world. However, this carrot also opens the flood gates to disappointment which has a habit of hitting me with in backlash. For the last weekend, it was the heartbreak of watching Rovers being creamed by Newcastle. 14 shots on goal versus their 3, and they scored three goals and we continued our goal drought this season. The pain of disappointment feels like having your heart slowly squeezed by a bench clamp while being showered with pins all at the same time. We are playing Manure this weekend, and we don’t seem to have a hope in the world, yet I have ten bucks on rovers to kick some ass. Bring on the heartache, I can see the calling.

Maybe I need something else in my life to look forward to. Sometime that promises more than heartbreaks. I don’t exactly know what that will be and I seriously doubt relationships will fit the bill. I’ll be packing my backpack and head for Sydney next Thursday. I have no idea what I’ll find there, and maybe the only way to defend against heartbreaks is not have the carrot dangling in the first place. I hope it’ll work.

Sandcastles in the air

Sometimes without any conscious effort, I would just slip into a daydream. Building sandcastles in the air is a really cool pastime; it kills time; allows you to escape, if just for a moment from reality; and it gives you the pleasure of a short-lived thrill otherwise found in bursting the air pockets of bubble wrap.

It takes creativity to fabricate a daydream that is involving enough for you to dwell upon; well, at least that is what I like to think as a weak excuse for my subliminal endeavors. On certain Thursdays for instance, a certain jingle will ring in my head. It is the jingle for PowerBall, with the lyrics, ‘life can be a dream, shaboo’. It is not surprising that I will typically be holding a PowerBall QuickPick ticket as the jingle plays between my ears. One would call spending twelve dollars a futile attempt to purchase hope, while I call it money well spent to buy myself a daydream. The difference being, I don't spend the money in hope to win ten million big ones, but I spend the money to buy myself a moment where I could indulge myself within the imaginary walls of an alternate reality.

Questions of ‘what ifs’ and ‘what would you do ifs’ race across my mind, and I have to confess that I take a lot of pleasure solving these seemingly fruitless riddles. If I had ten million dollars, I would invest one third of it in property, perhaps in New Zealand, or maybe one of those new apartments in Docklands. I’ll place two million with my parents perhaps for their retirement fund and the rest will be nicely distributed in stocks, shares and unit trusts yielding a decent return equivalent of a clerk’s monthly pay. I would perhaps strut into merrill lynch with a cigar and ask for the best personal financial consultant and expect service standards meant for royalty. See, daydreaming is a pleasurable pastime. The pressure to solve self-created problems presents its own challenge and can create a rather unique hedonic experience; much like how dogs chase their own tail.

It is amazing how spending too much time sitting in the office can do to one’s head. Maybe I should get out of here, walk across the street, to the newsagent, and buy a powerball ticket.

thoughts

Mental disengagement. This is one of the constructs I’m studying in my research. It seems almost like some noble talent for one to take a closer step towards Nevada, yet there is a connotation of giving up as defined by the literature. When I am in the mood to dissect every philosophical notion known to men, my head swells with too much thought and it makes me go crazy.

What constitutes the self-image? Which self of Johari’s window best depicts me? What self is the self perceived by my peers? Which self would they prefer? Which is the ideal? Which is the self that I should select to mask my agony?

Sometimes I just want to sit alone and find peace; stripped from the paradoxical attributes of ecstasy knowing that it is only a holy grill that one must suffer to find. In the sporadic moments of joy is when I find myself stripped from the concerns of these notions. It is a moment where one doesn’t second guess another and over analyse and accept gratitude in its purest form. Yet, I will find myself slipping into a paranoia state where conspiracy theories surface like slow shadowy vapour on hot bitumen. Why has trust from my peers escaped me? How do I earn it back? What does this trust really constitute? Why must I suffer in a portrait which was painted by my own palette?

The thoughts that envelope my mental state can sometimes be dangerous things.

another day past

How can a day not start off well when you get a surprise phone call all the way from UK from someone you were least expecting. I met this lady from London on my last backpacking trip to Thailand and she dropped me a line when it was 3am over there. It was really sweet of her to give me a surprise, but I do accredit her sudden desire to call me on my mobile, from her mobile, to the fact that she was somewhat drunk. Nonetheless, it is always a pleasure to be greeted by a London accent.

Amazingly, I was productive today. I only slept for 20mins in the office compared to the usual 45. Think I have just proven to the Spaniards that you don’t need an hour to call it siesta. I sorted out the marking, arranged my proposal for funding and prepared my supervisory meeting for tomorrow. It is funny how the joy of satisfaction can be so short-lived given the fact that I have only a few more hours before the new day starts again with a brand new set of work awaiting to be cleared. It seems almost unfair that in order to get work done, one has to go through the entire agony of procrastination leading to drudgery before sensing the short-lived pleasure. It feels almost like sex from the male perspective.

creme brulee

I made crème brulee this week. As I am sitting here at almost two in the morning, I am running out of things to talk about in this entry that I figure that probably the most exciting thing I may share to my imaginary audience is that I made crème brulee this week.

I asked my chief friend that I am not keen to learn how to make deserts to make the ladies wow, but I want something that will make them swoon. Crème brulee it was. I actually tried it with someone over dinner, and the effects was somewhat disappointing; I did get the praises which was sufficient to appease the male ego, but there weren’t fireworks and magic in the air you find in old black and white romantic movies. Maybe I was expecting too much, it was after all cream and eggs, not really aphrodisiac.

Having high expectations appear to the theme of my life. Finding contentment for me is like chasing a dangling carrot; it appears futile yet it drives me towards achieving an unachievable perfection. The tension in my neck is a good indication that I’m not being very smart about setting the goals in my life, yet I do not know any other way to lead my life. They call me a type A stress freak and I am pretty happy with the label as long as the tension headaches didn’t come with it. I constantly tell myself to set lower levels of expectation and be surprised by life’s little surprises, but the deliberate effort to set lower expectation levels in itself, defeats the entire purpose. It is like telling myself to think about not thinking in order to give my mind a rest. This paradoxical notion is as merciful as tying a ribbon on a dog’s tail.

It is late now, think I should hit the pillow. Maybe next week I’ll stress about making a chocolate soufflé. If life is like desert, I am a vanilla panacotta; really I have no idea what that metaphor means, but it makes me sound philosophically smart with a touch of Italian flair. Think I can be happy with that.

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.