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