Super di siao Saturday night with fellow di siao-ers.
Now we know that Mendi is a sensitive fella. (outraged and slightly violent response to Lulu's mention of his lack of girlfriend)
And we know that we must suit up if we wanna get girls. (Kumar)
Or that good looking people earn 25% more than average people. (Teh)
And that pursuing a healthy lifestyle can provide good conversation topics with kips. (Me)
Most importantly, "Don't cross the line" (Mendi)
All of the above is true of course, being the highly intelligent (and vaguely deluded) individuals that GMH has come to represent. (ok, maybe not everyone is intelligent or deluded, no pointing of fingers.)
Perhaps the most important take-way point of the evening, we are all nice, decent-looking guys with good futures and careers, so why are there no kips in GMH???
Although I must say, I've gotten so used to a kip-less existence to the point that its almost dangerous. Get home to an empty house at 3am. Sit down at the dining table with a tea and my dogs around me. Work on my paper til 5am, in time to see the start of a new day. Collapse in bed. Wake up a mess at 3pm to pick my folks up at the airport. Work on my other paper til now.
Somehow I'm happy. (Although having a kip will make me even happier.) I've lived the life of a carefree writer for the past few days, cooking meals for myself at all the wrong times, sleeping at weird hours and waking up at even weirder hours. Driving out when I need something and zipping back home in time to write. Wearing geek t-shirts to town. Talking to my dogs and admonishing them for bad behaviour, as if they're the kids I never had. (They are.)
Can I live that sort of life for the rest of my life? Certainly, I just need credible first book to be published. Maybe a fellow pomo traveller as my significant other would be fantastic. If not, so be it. I'll write more.
2am at Hougang: guy lugging his friend home, completely knocked out.
Forever-am at wherever: my mind lugging my soul home, completely numbed.
Ang Heng
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Bed-shaped and legs of stone.
Just came back from meeting a kip financial adviser. (Yes, I only meet kip ones.)
I realise that being in the line I'm in has negative social consequences. A gap is building between me and many of my peers. I'm starting to not understand other young people in pretty much the same way they're starting not to understand me. The ideas that drive me are pulling me further and further away from the people around me. I've been climbing a mountain out of faith and forgetting that there are people at the base-camps as well.
We are all climbing our individual mountains, each trying to get as high as possible. Along the way, we have guides who teach us where to step and how to climb. These guides affect the way we think as well. Along the way, we make great friends who climb that mountain with us, or simply the guy over at the other mountain, hollering at you, asking you how's the weather on your side.
I started climbing way back, with Karl Marx (man of much balls and facial hair) rallying me to climb up there and kick off whoever's at the top. Somehow, Nietzsche came along and told me (with that glint in his wizened eyes) that no, you climb that mountain because others prefer you not to, and they don't even believe that moutains are meant to be climbed. As I went to slightly headier heights, Derrida came along, with his cigarette trailing an eternal wisp of smoke and in that paternal way of his, telling me that the mountain is only high because I've been looking at other people's mountains far too much.
Foucault was a great companion too, beautiful person that he was, with a ready sense of humour. He reminded me that a moutain was only treacherous because lesser folks thought so, and people who've climbed it prefer to tell you that it is treacherous, so that you won't even bother to try and displace them. (Good buddy of Karl that he was.) Notes of encouragement from a man who shares my hairstyle, Antonio Gramsci, reminded me how pervasive the views of those people at the top are, no I mustn't listen to them or watch any TV on the way up.
Then came the greatest teacher of all time. Jean Baudrillard, who told me: look that is not a mountain you're climbing you're still stuck in the simulacra. That's an ice-berg, you need to climb to the top and take a deep breath of air, for you've been drowning for so long now that you've forgotten you were dead in the first place. Now's the time to reborn. Now's the time to stop living in the land of the dead.
I've learnt a lot about how to live from dead men. Someday I know I will throw myself behind an idea, and start to live. Today, I'm barely half-way up that mountain. We must all climb our mountains, because there's only up or down and honestly, down is never an option.
Ang Heng
I realise that being in the line I'm in has negative social consequences. A gap is building between me and many of my peers. I'm starting to not understand other young people in pretty much the same way they're starting not to understand me. The ideas that drive me are pulling me further and further away from the people around me. I've been climbing a mountain out of faith and forgetting that there are people at the base-camps as well.
We are all climbing our individual mountains, each trying to get as high as possible. Along the way, we have guides who teach us where to step and how to climb. These guides affect the way we think as well. Along the way, we make great friends who climb that mountain with us, or simply the guy over at the other mountain, hollering at you, asking you how's the weather on your side.
I started climbing way back, with Karl Marx (man of much balls and facial hair) rallying me to climb up there and kick off whoever's at the top. Somehow, Nietzsche came along and told me (with that glint in his wizened eyes) that no, you climb that mountain because others prefer you not to, and they don't even believe that moutains are meant to be climbed. As I went to slightly headier heights, Derrida came along, with his cigarette trailing an eternal wisp of smoke and in that paternal way of his, telling me that the mountain is only high because I've been looking at other people's mountains far too much.
Foucault was a great companion too, beautiful person that he was, with a ready sense of humour. He reminded me that a moutain was only treacherous because lesser folks thought so, and people who've climbed it prefer to tell you that it is treacherous, so that you won't even bother to try and displace them. (Good buddy of Karl that he was.) Notes of encouragement from a man who shares my hairstyle, Antonio Gramsci, reminded me how pervasive the views of those people at the top are, no I mustn't listen to them or watch any TV on the way up.
Then came the greatest teacher of all time. Jean Baudrillard, who told me: look that is not a mountain you're climbing you're still stuck in the simulacra. That's an ice-berg, you need to climb to the top and take a deep breath of air, for you've been drowning for so long now that you've forgotten you were dead in the first place. Now's the time to reborn. Now's the time to stop living in the land of the dead.
I've learnt a lot about how to live from dead men. Someday I know I will throw myself behind an idea, and start to live. Today, I'm barely half-way up that mountain. We must all climb our mountains, because there's only up or down and honestly, down is never an option.
Ang Heng
Monday, May 03, 2010
Good Night and Good Luck
Dear Alvin, I think you were right all along. It feels as if it is time for me to pack up and ship off to somewhere new for a while. Hopefully, to a place where I can be accepted as who I am and not who I am supposed to be. I've made my formal application to UWA today, to do my PHD. I'm working on proposals to Sydney, Melbourne and ANU. I'll need your help with looking for accomodations and advice on living in Australia soon, thanks in advance!
On a separate note, I've taken so much flak for the things I do in my personal life and I think I've had about enough.
My decision to do my Masters has on numerous occasion come under ridicule and denouncement. Truth be told, if someone is willing to hire me to think, research and publish, I'd have thrown all qualifications away and gone to become the writer I've so wanted to be for so long. Sadly, a PHD is an entry qualification for a life as a academic writer and thinker. While being a Masters student does come with many bragging rights, it is also the lowest place to be, academically. I find myself halfway between the stars and the gutter, and everyday is a battle not to fall back into that gutter.
Even simple things like buying a lap-top skin provokes such antagony. How I spend my money is nobody's business but my own. Honestly. If I want to coat my laptop with polytetrafluoroethylene and fry eggs on it in the mid-day sun, then its really my own problem. Giving me grief over such mundane things is seriously a waste of my neural synapses.
Calling me a rich man's son is nothing but a sign of ignorance on my upbringing and background. I was born in a one-room rented flat and lived 16 years in a 4-room flat before moving on to a condo and subsequently a house. I watched my father rise from a factory shop-floor supervisor to GM. I have high expectations to live up to and sometimes I wonder if I'm ever going to make it, to become someone special and worthy of everything I've been given so far.
Blessed are the shallow, for depth they'll never find. I can no longer be the sort of simpleton who lives for himself and cares only about things like drinking and clubbing anymore. I owe a debt to the society that has given me time, money and opportunity to pursue my studies. I intend to pay it back.
Ang Heng
On a separate note, I've taken so much flak for the things I do in my personal life and I think I've had about enough.
My decision to do my Masters has on numerous occasion come under ridicule and denouncement. Truth be told, if someone is willing to hire me to think, research and publish, I'd have thrown all qualifications away and gone to become the writer I've so wanted to be for so long. Sadly, a PHD is an entry qualification for a life as a academic writer and thinker. While being a Masters student does come with many bragging rights, it is also the lowest place to be, academically. I find myself halfway between the stars and the gutter, and everyday is a battle not to fall back into that gutter.
Even simple things like buying a lap-top skin provokes such antagony. How I spend my money is nobody's business but my own. Honestly. If I want to coat my laptop with polytetrafluoroethylene and fry eggs on it in the mid-day sun, then its really my own problem. Giving me grief over such mundane things is seriously a waste of my neural synapses.
Calling me a rich man's son is nothing but a sign of ignorance on my upbringing and background. I was born in a one-room rented flat and lived 16 years in a 4-room flat before moving on to a condo and subsequently a house. I watched my father rise from a factory shop-floor supervisor to GM. I have high expectations to live up to and sometimes I wonder if I'm ever going to make it, to become someone special and worthy of everything I've been given so far.
Blessed are the shallow, for depth they'll never find. I can no longer be the sort of simpleton who lives for himself and cares only about things like drinking and clubbing anymore. I owe a debt to the society that has given me time, money and opportunity to pursue my studies. I intend to pay it back.
Ang Heng
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