A Christmas Raptor
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Before I get into my usual rants and idle thinking, I would like to wish all of you a Merry Christmas or a Joyeux Noël (as they say in French).
As a child, Christmas was special because it was one of the few times a poor kid like me could get presents, other than birthdays. As a I grew a little older, Christmas connotated a more religious dimension because my mother decided that we, the whole family, should convert to Roman Catholicism. After that, Christmas became special because of three things: presents, school holidays and midnight mass. Presents were essential to a child's life because they made him feel special, like he was the only kid in the world. School holidays meant being able to play computer games (console rather, remember the Sega mega drive?) all day long, pausing briefly only for lunch breaks or toilet breaks, because my mother would lock the Sega drive during the school term. So far, the above two reasons have been selfish desires of a kid. Now midnight mass was special because I discovered that we could dress up prettily and go to church and find everyone else dressed equally as nice, or not better, plus the fact that the Christmas lights were beautiful and the presence of God seemed stronger where everyone was gathered in the happy spirit of the joyous occasion.
As I passed into the more conscious level of the life, I discovered the joy of writing and sending Christmas cards. This, unfortunately, seems to have been lost with the coming of time and the internet where everything was electronic, including cards. Nevertheless, I still continue writing
real cards with
real writing and
real material that others could keep, even after Christmas and the previous Christmases. Now I assume they keep their cards because I do, perhaps out of nostalgia or simply because they're too nice to be thrown away, so you could just imagine how much junk I have in my house because of the above reasons, but let us not go there for the time being, shall we?
Speaking of Christmas presents, my nine-year-old sister has got a humongous present from my brother (who is notorious, at least in my family, for not remembering birthdays and for not giving any presents): a roboraptor, which I think costs about a hundred over bucks at Toys'R'us. Ah yes, my sister couldn't contain her excitement and has ripped her present open to unveil the enormity of it all. All this enthusiasm, despite that fact that she practically coerced my brother into buying it for her just last night. And knowing my brother and my father (and sometimes my mother and myself for that matter), we have a soft side for my sister's 'puppy' looks and requests. My, my, it is quite a large robo-dinosaur and has a remote control. No wonder it costs so much for that darned thing. Now my house is in an uproar, with everyone searching for AAA batteries in order to make the thing work... Nope, we do not seem to have a single battery in the house, despite having searched the house for it, and that darned roboraptor needs six.
*Pause*My sister and her entourage (consisting of my little cousins) have just entered the room, asking for AAA batteries a second time. "No." They leave the room, followed by my father who comes in to ask the same question. "No." I think he is just as excited as they (my sister and my cousins) are at seeing the roboraptor work. They have just given up on the search for AAA batteries and have resigned it to the fate of buying them tomorrow. Well, the raptor can afford to come alive tomorrow I suppose. My family believes in toys and laughter, except perhaps for my mother sometimes who lets her fierce side overtake the childish side of her sometimes. Toys and games were mandatory (and still is I think) for our growing up, we could never have grown up without them. Laughter included lame jokes and 'cold' jokes, even my sister has in recent years inherited this trait. Wait... I hear unhuman roaring sounds.
*Pause*The roboraptor is alive! My father has mysteriously found enough batteries to make it work. My little cousins and sister are squealing both out of delight and fear (it does look ferocious after all). My father and uncle are laughing at their reactions and shouting out instructions on how to make the raptor move: "One of the buttons makes the raptor bite!" or "Be careful! Don't break its tail!" I think they would have liked to have the raptor in their own childhood. So would I actually. Come to think of it, I never had a roboraptor for Christmas, nor for any of my birthdays. We weren't able to afford it then.
The commotion continues... my little cousins and sister are still screaming and laughing over the raptor. This year, instead of a Christmas tree, we have a Christmas raptor. Why do we not have a Christmas tree this year, and last year for that matter? My mother has packed it into a box upon moving to our temporary abode now and has never retrieved it since, claiming that we'd have to move out soon enough and only then could we release the Christmas tree and all its decorations into the open. Two Christmases has passed. Where has the joy of the Christmas tree gone? As a child, I would excitedly volunteer, together with my brother, to help build the Christmas tree and place each decoration carefully in the midst of the tree.
But we now have a Christmas raptor.
8:07 pm
クロサギ
Mourning and Miscellaneous
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
I will spend one post (one-third a post to be exact) mourning for my results for this semester. Even though it wasn't all that bad by itself, the culmulative part of the system did wonders by belittling any good and enlarging the bad. So no matter how I moan or whine about it, the past can't be erased so I end up mourning about it instead. Let me see, what should I mourn for most: the fact that my non-core modules fared much better than my core modules, or the cumulative average point (CAP) system, or the fact that I should be rejoicing by the miserable 0.1 jump in my CAP?
***
On what seems to be the brighter side, or rather the miscellaneous things, I had gotten a ten-dollar parking fine for my expired coupon, which doesn't sound that bad compared to a thirty-dollar fine had I not run back to the car hastily to place one coupon there (just for fun), before rushing off to meet Sherina and Druce, already late for more than half an hour. So now that I know how much fines cost (those I know at least), I shall enlighten all those who are ignorant of them (including myself before I got that fine):
$10 for expired coupons
$30 for no coupons at all
$20 for jaywalking (no... I'm perfectly serious... I now know of two people who have gotten this and who shall not be named on account of saving their pride)
$200 for beating the red light
Anyway if you were wondering where this stupid fine came about and what time, in case you want to be warned too, it was at Serangoon Gardens where parking was free after 10pm and the carpark attendant came at 9pm. So the moral of this tale is that at Gardens, it is mandatory to put parking coupons because they check quite regularly. Ok enough said about my diminishing finances already.
***
Only yesterday I met Juline at Harbourfront and we were supposed to go to Sentosa for an afternoon of the beach and mini-go-karting (the new Sentosa Luge, if you've heard of it). Unfortunately, we somehow managed to spend more than two hours having lunch and shopping (!!!) that by the time we arrived at the ticket booths of Sentosa, it was already 4pm and raining heavily. How we managed to go shopping when we were
supposed to be at Sentosa having fun, I don't know. Instead of going into Sentosa, we were on it (well actually only at the ticket booths, we didn't make it past the gantry) for ten minutes before we decided to pack our bags and head back to mainland. And how on earth did we manage to go shopping? Juline walked into a shoe shop to see something and I went in with her, an unknown prey to the extreme dangers of shopping. I did not intend to buy anything more, for I had already spent almost all of my 'spendable' money during the past few weeks. I did not intend to shop either because I knew I would be tempted to buy something. And despite all this, I followed Juline
into the shop, and emerged half an hour later with a pair of shoes.
This is definitely the last thing or Christmas present I'm going to buy for myself... that's what I say everytime I spend. Unfortunately for me, my brain is not the centre of my decisions, my heart is.
If you were wondering what we ended up doing: we went to Plaza Singapura, hoping to catch a movie, only to discover that
Pride and Prejudice started twenty minutes ago and
Memoirs of a Geisha hadn't even started its run yet. Eventually we ended up at spotlight shopping and then decided to rush to Bugis to catch
Pride and Prejudice at a later time, which we discovered thanks to the sms information technology of today. So there we were rushing to the cinema, on a pathetic mission to enjoy what was left of the day ruined by the lost of time and the bad weather and also to finish up the drinks and snacks which we bought for Sentosa. Well, I guess we managed to save half of the money we intended for the Sentosa Luge, with
Pride and Prejudice thrown in, so it couldn't have been a totally unfruitful day, could it?
10:04 pm
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Escape
Friday, December 16, 2005
What is the most powerful impulse of human beings in the face of night, of danger, of the unknown? - It is to run away; to avert the eyes and flee; to pretend the menace is not loping towards them in seven-league boots. It is the will to ignorance, the iron folly with which we excise from consciousness whatever consciousness cannot bear. No need to invoke the ostrich to give this impulse symbolic form; humanity is more wilfully blind than any flightless bird.
~
Shame. Salman Rushdie.
The time will arrive when one has to open the door to his past and face his demons, his ghosts long ago repressed by his foolish will to escape in order to gain temporary comfort. This time has come for me. Concerned calls, sympathetic looks, bewildered expressions which evoke the emotions of those who feel for me, perhaps not quite as much as my own but for which I am grateful. Support in the form of love; love calls me from my deep sleep and beckons my soul into the real world. It is time to do what's hardest for all humans: to stop running away. For most of my conscious life, as far as I can remember, I've been playing the game of pretending. In fact, I've become so good at it, I've may even have forgotten who I originally was. My childhood days were spent imagining and hoping I could be someone extraordinary like the superheros in books and cartoons, and later, even as I grew up and realised that such people didn't exist in reality, I secretly continued to desire at the bottom of my heart that they did, and that I could be, if I pretended, someone more than what others saw. So in this hankering after being someone I wanted to be, I had completely forgotten the real me, or did I? Perhaps there is still a part of me waiting to be uncovered that belongs rightly to me.
The door to the past is one I bitterly remember and desperately want to forget, but it is also one in which beautiful memories lie beyond - the other side of me that I want to keep. Therefore to live in hatred of the door to the past is to forgo everything good associated with it, which would pretty much mean a life of emptiness for me. Unfortunately for me, I like to live in a stage of limbo, where decisions are left unmade and the door to the past is temporarily forgotten, yet the fear of what lies beyond the door increases steadily. And when I finally unlock that door, I imagine my ghosts will eagerly push their way out to get to me, so that all feelings of guilt, fear and anguish will be simultaneously regurgitated. This process will repeat itself from time to time when the door to the past unlocks, thus the simplest and easiest way for me is to escape, to ensure that the door remains locked. However, this effort seems to be futile throughout the years, for the door gently and gradually creaks open, unconscious to the self. Even if the self is aware of this opening, it refuses to acknowledge it, for in all its wilfulness, it stubbornly remains adamant about staying blind. This is why even after the door to the past has been opened and closed, the reluctance to reopen a second or third or fourth time continues to dwell in the heart. The fear of it is a result of self-defence. Everytime the door is opened and closed, the mind pretends it is getting closer to its freedom but the heart retreats further from the door so that the next time round, it has to climb more arduously towards its next opening.
This is the weakness of man: as an ostrich claims to be a bird but know not how to why, man claims to be human but does not have the courage to face his demons.
4:01 pm
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My Imaginary World
Sunday, December 11, 2005
If you're wondering where the hell I've been for the past few months, I will tell you this: I would like to know too. The truth is, try as I might, I can never undercover the mystery of how fast time flies especially when you don't notice it. Perhaps during this time, we're all trapped in the midst of our imaginary worlds that the real world does not seem relevant until we fly back to reality all of a sudden. And then the feeling of re-joining reality seems awkward again as it does after every cycle of this shuffling between your imaginary and real worlds, which is exactly what I'm doing right now by writing this and in doing so feel exactly as clumsy as any person trying to form words in his/her head in another language. Which probably explains why I'm writing in half-sentences and am incoherent at that too, and also why I'm taking all of fifteen minutes to write up to here. Verbal constipation, it seems, and then I swiftly and safely swing back into my imaginary world yet again.
Why do we create imaginary worlds for ourselves in our heads? (I assume that everybody does this even at the subconscious level and if you
seriously think you don't, I won't force you) Escapism? Creativity? Out of boredom? Maybe. It could be all of the above. Perhaps I am pessimistic and I need a space where I can comfort myself and assure myself that I am going in the right direction and am not lost like what I think I am in the real world. But perhaps the imaginary world also makes me feel more optimistic about myself that I might build my self-confidence in this world and hope to bring it to the real one.
Then I have another problem: how do I bridge the imaginary and the real? In my dreams? Perhaps, because dreams are supposedly imaginary and thus false, yet they have a certain quality of truth in them because they come from our subconsciousness. In novels? In movies? i.e. reel life reflect real life in the certain morals which the movie embraces, the same goes for novels. Why do we read novels or watch movies? Because they reassure us of our own principles? Because they kill time? Because they reflect our sentiments about certain issues? Sometimes the imaginary and real are so closely connected in my mind that I can't tell the difference between the two or which thing comes from the real or the imaginary. And sometimes I even wonder if my mind is playing tricks on me in making me think about these things.
Then I think: is it dangerous for me not to know what's real and what's not? There are some things that aren't real but my mind persuades me, very convincingly I might add, that they are in fact very real in my life. These are things I can't seem to ignore in making decisions, be it big or small or in any form or shape that they take, so that I often feel conflicted and tempted to sit on the fence all the time (because that would allow to change my mind as and when I feel a strong impulse to). And why is it so difficult to choose one thing from another? I mean it could be as simple and innocent as choosing what to eat for lunch right, but no... I can't decide all the same. I would try to think of the various reasons that would actually allow me to verify and validate my choice of food. Why can't I just choose something out of fancy and not have a reason to suffice my decision? Because that would mean being rash and impulsive in the real world, whereas in the imaginary world, choices can be made just because it feels like the right thing to do. Nobody can dispute why you chose this and not that (well you can but you won't feel that you will suffer the grave consequences of having done so).
So what is this thing that is holding us back from making decisions? In the imaginary world, alot of weird things can happen that we can't explain. What's more, they can manifest from real events from the real world like a fastforward of what
may really happen if you do this or do that, like a grand display of all your horrors, fears and desires that makes you alarm just by thinking about it. Maybe that's why I've always been more afraid of what a man can think than what he can do, and when I watch psychological thrillers that blatantly toy with your minds, I get scared because they generate a whole series of thoughts and what-ifs which I know aren't true, at least on the surface level, but I secretly (and most irritating too, to my own frustration), at the bottom of my mind, think they are true and can and may happen in the real world. So generally, I try to avoid genres like that to prevent a regurgitating of reel time interwoven with my own phantoms and fears. And also to ensure that I do not remain sleepless for the next few weeks.
12:10 am
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