What’s the point?

12Jun09

Based on what I say and write, I can understand how certain people may misunderstand and think that I have something against certain institutions and/or types of people. I don’t.

I just happen to think that everyone has the right – and in fact, the responsibility and obligation to think for themselves if they consider themselves living beings – and that any institution or person who claims that there is only one right answer to anything and everything (theirs, of course) is dangerous, because it seeks to take away our right to think for ourselves.

When we stop questioning and fighting and struggling and going through changes and seasons in our lives, when we accept that we know all there is to know and there is nothing more to be learnt, when we stop exploring and desiring to know more, feel more, experience more… we stop living. We are merely surviving.

When we decide that a certain lifestyle is all there is to achieve, that a certain way of thinking is the only correct way to think, that a certain set of behavior is the only proper and acceptable way to behave, that a certain type of people is the only type we should strive to surround ourselves with or to become… then life becomes meaningless. Routine. Every day is spent going through the motions, with no desire for anything more, because we have already achieved all we think there is to achieve or all that society tells you there is to achieve.

Each day drags past. Everything seems to take forever. Meetings. Presentations. Explaining to your wife why you had to work late. Getting the baby to stop crying. The queue at the ticket stand. The queue at the bank. Dinner with the family. We stop living in the moment and are only concerned with getting through one task so we can move on to the next. Our desire to live slowly gets eaten away from our souls and the poison of bitterness starts seeping in.

When that happens, we fail to see that life is not long at all. It is so temporary, so short. We fail to live in the moment and see the good things that happen to us everyday. So I may not have something against any institutions or types of people in themselves, but I find something very, very fundamentally wrong with the idea that we can know everything and that there is only one right answer to anything.

I refuse to stop questioning. I refuse to accept things the way they are. The more I learn, the more I realize I have to learn. The more I explore, the more uncharted territory I realize I have yet to conquer. This way, life is a constant, exciting, unpredictable journey, and I am always facing new challenges, overcoming new obstacles, making new discoveries. Though I have encountered and will continue to encounter setbacks and pain and disappointments, I refuse to let them poison my soul. Life will never be long for me – only too short. Every hour is not enough, each day goes past too quickly. I do not have enough time to do all I want to do, say all I want to say, write all I want to write.

If my behavior has to be limited on the outside by certain laws (government or religious), I refuse to be limited inside. I refuse to limit my mind to thinking only within certain structures. I refuse to limit my soul to experiencing only certain emotions. I refuse to let fear dominate my life and dictate my actions. I want to hate, to love, to feel anger, to feel despair, to feel joy, to feel peace.

I acknowledge the right of others to believe what they want to and their freedom to express their beliefs. But I am merely exercising the same right to declare mine, and it is this.

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Favorite quotes from Veronika Decides to Die

11Jun09

“I don’t know what it means to be crazy,” whispered Veronika. “But I’m not. I’m just a failed suicide.”

“Anyone who lives in her own world is crazy. Like schizophrenics, psychopaths, maniacs. I mean people who are different from others.”

…”you have Einstein, saying there was no time or space, just a combination of the two. Or Columbus, insisting that on the other side of the world lay not an abyss but a continent. Or Edmund Hillary, convinced that a man could reach the top of Everest. Or the Beatles, who created an entirely different sort of music and dressed like people from another time. Those people – and thousands of others – all lived in their own world.”

This madwoman talks a lot of sense, thought Veronika.

“I once saw a woman wearing a low-cut dress; she had a glazed look in her eyes, and she was walking the streets of Ljubljana when it was five degrees below zero. I thought she must be drunk, and I went to help her, but she refused my offer to lend her my jacket. Perhaps in her world it was summer and her body was warmed by the desire of the person waiting for her. Even if that person only existed in her imagination, she had the right to live and die as she wanted, don’t you think?”

***

“Do you remember the first question I ever asked you?”

“Yes, you asked me if I knew what being crazy meant.”

“Exactly… insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.”

“We’ve all felt that.”

“And all of us, one way or another, are insane.”

***

These days most people have replaced all their emotions with fear.

***

Now she was feeling something she had never allowed herself to feel: hatred.

Something almost as physical as walls, pianos, or nurses. She could almost touch the destructive energy leaking out of her body. She allowed the feeling to emerge, regardless of whether it was good or bad; she was sick of self-control, of masks, of appropriate behavior. Veronika wanted to spend her remaining two or three days of life behaving as inappropriately as she could.

At that moment she hated everything: herself, the world, the chair in front of her, the broken radiator in one of the corridors, people who were perfect, criminals. She was in a mental hospital, and so, she could allow herself to feel things people usually hide.

Veronika hated everything, but mainly she hated the way she lived her life, never bothering to discover the hundreds of other Veronikas who lived inside her and who were interesting, crazy, curious, brave, bold.

Then she started to feel hatred for the person she loved most in the world: her mother.

How can I hate someone who only ever gave me love? thought Veronika. But it was too late; her hatred had been released; she had opened the door to her personal hell. She hated the love she had been given because it had asked for nothing in return, which was absurd, unreal, against the laws of nature.

That love… had managed to fill her with guilt, with a desire to fulfill another’s expectations, even if that meant giving up everything she had dreamed of for herself.

***

Veronika pushed open the door to the living room, went over to the piano, opened the lid, and, summoning up all her strength, pounded on the keys. A mad, cacophonous, jangled chord echoed around the empty room, bounced off the walls, and returned to her in the guise of a shrill sound that seemed to tear at her soul. Yet it was an accurate picture of her soul at that moment.

“I’m crazy. I’m allowed to do this. I can hate, I can pound away at the piano. Since when have mental patients known how to play notes in the right order?”

She pounded on the piano again, once, twice, ten, twenty times, and each time she did it, her hatred seemed to diminish, until it vanished completely.

Then once more, a deep peace flooded through her and Veronika again looked out at the starry sky and at the new moon, her favorite, filling the room she was in with gentle light.

…she had felt such pure hatred that now she had no more rancor left in her heart. She had finally allowed her negative feelings to surface, feelings that had been repressed for years in her soul. She had actually felt them, and they were no longer necessary, they could leave.

She sat in silence, enjoying the present moment, letting love fill up the empty space left behind by hatred.

I just discovered that the movie based on the book is to be released this November (in the US, that is)!!! I didn’t even know there was a movie being mad, and I can’t wait to see it.

Oh, and playing the leading role as Veronika is none other than Sarah Michelle Gellar. Now Veronika has a face.

Check out the trailer below:

Filed under: Discovered, Inspiration   |  2 Comments

Censorship

07Jun09

I guess there’s no escaping it so long as you are in Malaysia.

Blog about politics, and the government is on your back with the ISA.

Blog about sex, and your parents are on your back.

I guess I should be thankful they’re actually reading my blog.

So as long as I live under their roof, I follow their rules.

But I still believe even if “I do not agree with what you have to say… I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” (Voltaire)

Oh well. I need to cheer myself up with some funny quotes about censorship.

What progress we are making.  In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.  Now they are content with burning my books.  -Sigmund Freud, 1933

Pontius Pilate was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship. -Ben Lindsey

All books can be indecent books, though recent books are bolder.
For filth, I’m glad to say, is in the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.
I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of OZ, there’s a dirty old man! -Tom Lehrer

And some more serious ones by some authors I respect and other significant people:

Every burned book enlightens the world. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am opposed to any form of tyranny over the mind of man. -Thomas Jefferson

Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education. -Alfred Whitney, Essays on Education

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. -John Morley

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. -Winston Churchill

Filed under: Reflections   |  2 Comments

Are you watching closely?

04Jun09

Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled. -The Prestige

Maybe everything is an illusion. Maybe we don’t want to know the truth. Maybe deep down, we all know that illusions are always more appealing than reality.

Maybe we know that reality is always harder to accept than illusions. Maybe we know that nothing ever comes without sacrifice. Maybe we know that life is painful and disappointing. Maybe we refuse to accept reality because it’s better fooling ourselves with illusions of magic and wonder and suspense.

Maybe we fool ourselves everyday.

The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? -Jeremiah 17:9

Maybe we’re not really looking for the truth. We’re not looking for it in our relationships, in our dreams, our ambitions… ourselves. Maybe we’re looking for anything but the truth. Illusions.

Maybe if we really saw others for who they were inside, and not for what they look like or who we think they are, we would not be able to love them or accept them.

No one is good but One, that is, God. -Matthew 19:17

Maybe if we really admitted to ourselves our true motives we would not be able to look into the mirror and face the person staring back at us, that other stranger with hidden agendas, secret desires dwelling in the same body.

Maybe if we really asked ourselves why we want certain dreams to happen we would realize it has less to do with the dream itself than subconscious driving motives.

I ask myself why I write. I say that I write as part of an alternate reality I create for myself.

Sometimes I think my writing is more real than my actual life, more raw and honest. But maybe that is only an illusion, what I’d rather perceive it to be.

I always say that I want to live. I want to feel life. Drink it in.

But maybe sometimes I want to die. Sometimes I want to hurt myself because in some ways, bleeding makes you feel more alive.

What I do know, is when I write, I feel. I feel things I spend my “real” life trying to numb. In my “real” life, I justify my actions. But sometimes I think I sabotage my real life in order to feed my alternate reality with more things to “feel”.

Maybe I numb how I feel in my real life because when I do feel, I also feel powerless over how I am feeling. But when I spill feeling into my writing, I have control – I dictate how those feelings unfold, how they are written, how I respond to them.

Maybe I sabotage my relationships so I can write about the pain of broken relationships, of loving and losing. Maybe I alienate and push people away so I can write about loneliness and isolation. Maybe I compromise my values and principles so I can write about being torn, jaded, and broken.

So why do I do it? Why did Angier and Borden sacrifice so much of their “real” lives for their craft? For illusions only they knew the secret to?

Maybe the reasons are not so different. Maybe we are afraid of losing control. Maybe we are afraid of reality because we know that we cannot control life.

And so when the opportunity presents itself to manipulate others – or even ourselves – into believing something beyond the ordinary, it’s not so hard to understand why anyone would take that opportunity.

Maybe the pursuit of an alternate reality is also the pursuit of complete power, limited and dictated by no one else. And maybe along the way, the pursuit becomes an obesession. And the power that we seek to hold, to control, eventually takes hold of us and makes us slaves to it.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. -Samuel Johnson

Maybe there is not such a big difference between the “good guy” and the “bad guy”. Maybe they are both driven by an obsession, or call it dedication if you will. Maybe in the end we all hurt others and sacrifice bits of ourselves for ideals and values we deem to be more worthy of our time and sacrifices.

Nikola Tesla: Mr. Angier, have you considered the cost of such a machine?
Robert Angier: Price is not an object.
Nikola Tesla: Perhaps not, but have you considered the *cost*?
Robert Angier: I’m not sure I follow.
Nikola Tesla: Go home. Forget this thing. I can recognize an obsession, no good will come of it.
Robert Angier: Why, haven’t good come of your obsessions?
Nikola Tesla: Well at first. But I followed them too long. I’m their slave… and one day they’ll choose to destroy me.
Robert Angier: If you understand an obsession then you know you won’t change my mind.

Maybe that’s why the media has such an important place in our lives. Because it helps us avoid reality. Because we’d rather be entertained with illusions of happiness than face the reality that life without pain is not really life at all. (But then again, look where I am deriving all these thoughts and possibilities from?)

Alfred Borden: You went half way around the world… you spent a fortune… you did terrible things… really terrible things Robert, and all for nothing.
Robert Angier: For nothing?
Alfred Borden: Yeah
Robert Angier: You never understood, why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you… then you got to see something really special… you really don’t know?… it was… it was the look on their faces…

Maybe we don’t want reality because reality is hard. Reality is disturbing. In reality, everyone dies for what they believe in. Every significant person in history who made it into the textbooks died for their causes. Their obsessions. Maybe that’s a little too morbid for the rest of us.

Maybe we fool ourselves into thinking that living life is about having dreams,  feeling young forever, not letting bad vibes bring down our inner happiness or crush our inner child and all that. Maybe we want to be fooled.

Are you watching closely? Or rather, do you really want to see?

The unexamined life is not worth living. -Socrates

Filed under: Reflections   |  1 Comment

the best place in the world

03Jun09

“in london, you can keep secrets. you can be anonymous. you can be whatever you want.

but as long as one person knows you entirely and loves you still, it’s the best place in the world.”

Filed under: Inspiration   |  Leave a Comment

Sundresses are meant to be worn in sunny places

02Jun09

Guess who launched a new line of gorgeous carefree sundresses that are retailing for as low as $14.00 each?

That’s right it’s none other than the beautiful Taylor Swift who I would be madly in love with (if I were a boy… but I still think I am anyway).

Yes, she’s gotten herself involved in designing affordable apparel… specifically a line of jeans and a line of sundresses called L.E.I. that are retailing at Wal-Marts everywhere. (Why can’t we have Wal-Mart in Malaysia?) Sigh. If only sundresses were that cheap here.

Heck. If only more Malaysians learnt to appreciate the carefree beauty of sundresses in the first place. We’re in a tropical country! Why the need for fancy dresses and heels and boots? I think we should ALWAYS be dressed like we’re on holiday.

Sigh. She’s so pretty. Dresses are so pretty.

Filed under: Discovered   |  12 Comments

Someone please see through these quills

02Jun09

The porcupine is a hard creature to get to know.

It is covered with as many as 30,000 sharp quills with barbed ends. If a porcupine is approached by a would-be predator or any other creature viewed as a threat, the porcupine will turn its back to the animal, raise its quills, and lash out at the threat with its tail.

If the quills hit the animal, it will become embedded in its flesh, and body heat makes the barbs expand, causing the quills to become even more deeply embedded in the flesh, which will cause serious damage if pulled out, or can even be fatal if vital organs are hit.

The porcupine is by nature not an aggressive animal, and only attacks when threatened. But when it is threatened, what a poisonous, dangerous creature with so much potential to hurt and wound others that may hurt it. But then a porcupine needs its defense mechanism, because underneath the sharp quills is a soft body that would be an easy target for attackers.

So in order to protect itself from being hurt, the porcupine hurts others.

Incidentally, the porcupine is a solitary creature, only interacting with other porcupines to mate or occasionally to hibernate. The rest of the year, it lives alone.

As much as one side of me tells me that it’s so much easier that way, another side of me thinks: “I want to dare to risk being hurt. I want myself to matter to someone other than myself. I don’t want my actions to be driven by the fear of getting hurt.”

As much as its easier to defend myself with these sharp quills of sarcasm I’ve grown with bigger and sharper barbs over the years, the truth is, deep down, inside this soft, fragile body,

I don’t want to be a porcupine.

Filed under: Yours truly   |  4 Comments

I want to…

30May09

1. Go on a roadtrip around the U.S. in a convertible

2. Go on a roadtrip around Europe in a caravan

3. Ride a Vespa around Rome

4. Sail a yacht in the Pacific Ocean or the Gold Coast

5. Stay in a farmhouse

6. Visit Santorini

7. Watch Mamma Mia! live

8. Make a snow angel

9. Drink hot chocolate with marshmallows while it’s snowing outside in a house with a real fireplace at Christmastime

10. Have a White Christmas

11. Slow dance on board a cruise ship

12. Live in an apartment in London

13. Live in an apartment in New York

14. ***Censored***

15. Get married outdoors

16. Roast marshmallows over a bonfire on a chilly beach

17. Have a guy write a song for me and sing it to me

18. Lie naked in the snow after a Finnish sauna

Peace.

Filed under: Yours truly   |  7 Comments

Maybe

26May09

I have no idea who wrote this… but I found it on someone’s MySpace page and I love the way the writer put those words together to mean so much.

Maybe we are suppose to meet the wrong person before meeting the right one, so that when we finally meet the right person, we will know how to be grateful for that gift.

Maybe the best kind of friend is the kind you can sit on a porch swing with, never say a word, and then walk away feeling like it was the best conversation you’ve ever had.

Maybe it is true that we don’t know what we have got until we lose it, but it is also true that we don’t know what we have been missing until it arrives.

Giving someone all your love is never an assurance that they will love you back. Don’t expect love in return; just wait for it to grow in their heart; but if it doesnt, be content it grew in yours.

Dream what you want to dream; go where you want to go; be what you want to be, because you only have one life to live and one chance to do all the things you want to do.

Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried, for only they can appreciate the importance of the people who have touched their lives.

The brightest future will always be based on a forgotten past, you can’t go on well in life until you let go of your past failures and heartaches.

Filed under: Inspiration   |  3 Comments

Pressure

25May09

Here’s another heart-wrenching story written by an amazingly talented writer and someone I’m proud to call a friend, Jean. Her writing – especially writing about love – is like… food for my soul. She manages to capture raw emotions and put them into words, into black and white. It’s always so, so beautiful. I could go on and on, but you should just read it for yourself.

Pressure
by Jeannette Goon

Aidan fingered the grey matter between his hands. It wasn’t the sort of grey matter his father would have wanted him to be touching. “Neuroscience. Is the way to go,” Aidan’s father had stated, to no one in particular about a month ago. Aidan had been the only other person in the room. He was also the only one in the family that was not, had never been “in love” with Science. His mother was a professor of biochemistry and his father was a physicist. Aidan’s sister, Diana, having obtained a biology major, was studying to be a doctor.

Aidan pushed the clay this way, then that way. Under the pressure of his hands, what started out as a block of grey, shifted, became round. Aidan had never been able to withstand pressure. His father had pushed. His mother had suggested. Diana had raved. Aidan caved. He was shipped off to study science abroad. He wanted to be a philosopher. In exchange for his philosophy major, he majored in neurology as well.

He got through almost four years of university believing that if he did what they wanted for long enough, they would finally let him do what he wanted. But now, he was graduating and “neuroscience was the way to go”, especially since his results showed that he was capable of even that. His hands continued pressing on the piece of clay. It was now beginning to look like some kind of nut.

It wasn’t that Aidan was completely disinterested in science. He liked it. It could be philosophical at times. In learning science, he had learnt rationality, objectivity and persistence as well. He just wasn’t in love with it. He had mentioned that to his father once. Aidan no longer remembered exactly what his father had said but it was something along the lines of, we don’t love every part of everything we do. It’s tough. Pressure’s good for you.

Then he went on to talk about how diamonds formed only under high heat and pressure. “That’s the difference between graphite and diamonds,” he had said. Aidan had seen that his father was right. After all, both graphite and diamonds were made purely out of carbon. At that time, Aidan hadn’t wanted to be graphite. It was black and rubbed off on everything. Diamonds, on the other hand, were admired.

So Aidan had begun searching for postgraduate neuroscience courses. Cognitive neuroscience, since he did want to find out where creativity came from anyway. He wanted to know where dreams came from, and how the pictures in his head formed. He wanted to know why every story was the same story and what music really was. Maybe after he found all that out he would finally understand why he sometimes felt the need to cut himself, in places that were so obvious that no one thought the wounds were self-inflicted, like his arms and calves.

Everyone assumed he was clumsy, which they found surprising as he had been the top soccer player in high school. No, he would say, I’m really very clumsy. People looked at him and saw that he walked with a perpetual limp, a half-swagger. His fringe covered one of his eyes. No wonder, they thought.

Aidan traced his fingernail through the soft clay. A small rut formed. He applied pressure to the ruts, defined them. He daydreamed while his fingers moved. He had never been fully in control of his hands. Sometimes he looked at his creations and wondered where they came from. Did he intend on making them when he began? He wasn’t sure. Oftentimes, he would grasp a lump of clay and when it was finished, he would emerge from whatever dream he had been in and something would have been formed out of the once shapeless stuff.

Aidan’s friends said he had talent. They often asked him why he was studying science. He should have gone to art school, they said. Aidan thought they made it worse. They were constant reminders that he didn’t belong in the School of Science. He wasn’t good enough. Only a certain sort of person could survive science.

“Screw them!” Jules would say when he complained to her. Then she would give that sly smile of hers and say, or better still screw me. Aidan would think about sandwiches. Despite being an “artso-fartso” (as Diana called him), he was still very much a man. But Aidan believed in abstinence. Not because of God or anything, which his science-crazed family still believed in, but because his art emerged from repressed longing.

Jules, however, was going to be a writer and she never held back. There were no restraints. Her parents were hippies compared to his. Diana didn’t like Jules. Aidan thought he might be in love with Jules. He never knew how to tell her, though. The closest he had come was when he had said, “You’re my anima in human form.”

And she had understood. She’d said, “I love you too.” And Aidan knew that she had his back. She would love him, whichever he chose—science or art. But she would be disappointed, he knew, if he chose something he didn’t really love. And he knew that she would hide that disappointment and smile and pat him on the back anyway. Then all their lives (yes, he did intend on spending the rest of his life with her), he would feel the pressure of her hidden disapproval.

“Hey,” a soft voice said, “Nice brain.” Aidan looked up. In his hands, he held a model of the human brain. It was slightly distorted. The right side was bigger than the left. He shrugged and looked up into Juliette’s face.

“I don’t want to be graphite,” he said. She sat down. She put her hands on his thighs, one on each. She knew all about the graphite and diamond speech.

“Diamonds are beautiful, sure,” she began, “but they’re also hard. Graphite on the other hand, rubs off on everything. They leave a mark.”

Aidan looked at Jules. He put one of his hands over hers. He pulled her face towards him. “I love you,” he said. And then he kissed her.

you can look for a lifetime
you can love for a day
you can think you got everything but
everything is nothing when you throw it away
then you look in my eyes
and i have it all
once again

it’s been a long time coming
down this road
and now i know
what i’ve been waiting for
just like a lonley highway
i’m trying to get home
love’s been a long time coming
didn’t know i was lost
til you found me
-Long Time Coming, Oliver James

“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.” -Erica Jong

Filed under: Expressions   |  3 Comments