>>insert something randomly funny here
Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a Lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest Gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a Lion or a Gazelle… when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.
-African proverb
The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain-
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.- Emily Dickinson
A little sappy, but nonetheless;
One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.
Having started a regular 9 to 5 job now, I don’t nearly have as much free time as I once did. Because time is a lot tighter than it was in the past, I have had to budget my time carefully.
My Google Reader has over 20 feeds, which on a high-volume day can pull in more than 1000 items in a single period. On an effort to make it manageable, I have a separate folder for the nice-to-read-but-not-essential feeds, feeds like xkcd and Digg, which I just ignore if I have no time.
Other feeds though, have a higher importance. Some of these feeds include the New York Times, Metafilter and Paul Krugman. These feeds require a lot of quiet reading time, which is a luxury nowadays.
I’ve taken to installing the Google Reader application on my Android phone. It allows me to quickly star items that I find interesting, and when I get back home at night I can peruse them at my own leisure.
Some items are magazine-length articles, which given the sheer volume of items, can become too time-consuming to read, given the limited amount of reading time I have. For articles like this, I use Instapaper to save them with all extraneous formatting stripped out. I then sync my phone with the Instapaper server to download these articles.
Because my commute sometimes involves going into tunnels, my 3G signal may get cut off, and dropping to GPRS makes me want to pull my hair out. In cases like these I break out the Instapaper application to clear the backlog of articles.
In this way, I’ve cut down my computer time by write a fair bit, leaving me with time for other pursuits, and some much-needed rest.
“Could you come to my house to advise me?” my mother-in-law asked. “I would like to build a small altar for Buddha. And I want to know where’s the best place for doing that.”
“Madam,” the fengshui master replied, very seriously. “Your heart is the best place to build an altar for Buddha.”
I thought that was quite cool.
-Mr Wang Says So
At the start of the year, I set myself the target of reading 52 books. Today, I completed it, the last book being Can Asians Think? by Kishore Mahbubani.
There was a set of criteria that I needed to follow; I couldn’t just pick some easy-to-read book to fill up the quota. The books had to be of some value, either having literary merit or being educational. They had to broaden my mindscape or stimulate my faculties. Award winners were preferred (Wolf Hall, The Fiddler in the Subway, The God Delusion). By virtue of that criteria, all the books completed for the challenge were of good quality, and in one way or other enriched me.
The challenge started out easily enough, as I had 2 books that I had started at the end of 2009 and finished in early January (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle). Towards the middle of the year, my enthusiasm started to flag. It was exhausting to read so many books at the same time. While 52 books works out to 1 book a week, I was often starting books in parallel and the energy needed to jump from book to book was frankly, quite taxing. Because books that did not fit the criteria did not count towards the quota, it was quite demoralizing at times to see the count not increase.
But overall, this has been interesting, if only to see if it was possible (well, it was possible, though unpleasant at times).
A few books of mention:
The World According to Garp, by John Irving – this was my second Irving novel after The Cider House Rules, and was significantly more violent and graphic. I preferred Cider House for its subtleties and exploration of abortion.
The Complete Plain Words, by Ernest Gowers – this book was a manual of writing style, and was without a doubt the driest book I’ve had the misfortune to read, though it was useful.
The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum – though spy thrillers aren’t normally considered to have literary merit, this one was different. The plot intricacies of this thriller was, put simply, mindfuck.
The Religion Wars, by Scott Adams – this was a sequel to God’s Debris, which was a philosophical exploration of epistemology and probability in the form of a novella. This was probably the book to have blown my mind the most and widened my mindscape.
The Swan Thieves, by Elizabeth Kostova – this is Kostova’s sophomore effort, after The Historian. Her writing still remains as good as ever, and her research in both books are impeccable and thorough.
Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn – definitely the most freaky book amongst the lot of novels. It doesn’t bear thinking about it.
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel – probably the best novel of 2010 that I read, though Edgar Sawtelle and Swan Thieves are very close. This is an epic novel, spanning the first few years of the rise of Thomas Cromwell. Her attention to detail and tightly-woven plot make for a very fine read.
It’s been a long 2 years. Two years of service in a green pixelated uniform, in an organization that demands utter loyalty and unswerving diligence.
In these 2 years, I’ve been forced to grow up a lot. I hope I can say that I’ve matured, though sometimes I still see flashes of childish petulance within myself. In the army, I learned to keep my head down and push through. I learned that no matter how tough things seemed, there was always someone suffering a worse fate than I. In the air force, I learned to be mentally strong and to push myself past my limits. Things that I once thought impossible were within reach. It has been an exhilarating ride, these 2 years. They’ve taught me a lot, and given me so much.
I’ve been lucky, really, to have the course mates I had. I often marvel at how close we are, despite the squabbles and clashes we had in the course of our work. How, despite having different job scopes, we’re still pretty close. It’s something that I’m really thankful for; they formed a support network of sorts when I was about to go crazy from all the pressures of work.
The cockster, whom I’ve known for so long, and has always supported me without complaint.
The hardcore IPPT gold, who was always good for a few laughs and company.
The round boy, who despite having his own quirks, never complained when I had to offload work to him.
The white guy, who tried his best to help, even though he had his A levels.
The Tasmanian gamer, who was always there to lend a helping hand.
The other platoon, though we had our differences, gave us their help unreservedly.
These are people I’ll always be grateful for. If we go off into the big wide world and our paths never cross again, I’ll always remember them for what they did, and simply who they were.
It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon…
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.- The Invitation, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
No doubt they will suffer, some of them. They will have nightmares and mysterious aches. For some of them, anger and resentment will replace their joy. Some of them will have trouble adjusting to the light.
But the ones who are lucky enough to survive twice, they will become astronauts. They will become men who’ve walked on the moon.
They will be men who know true deprivation, who know true fear, who know true darkness. And now, one by one, in that singular instant, they learned true joy, true beauty, true love. They will understand how good a steak really tastes. They will know how lucky we are to be able to turn on a tap and feel hot water coming out of it. They will hear a baby’s crying differently in the night. They will stand in the rain with their faces up rather than down. They will never get mad about being stuck in traffic. They will never try to figure out magic tricks. They will be believers.
Men and men like them won’t just talk about transformation, won’t confuse importance with triviality. They won’t settle for being anything they don’t want to be. Now each one of them can choose to become a giant. He can become a talisman. He can become a hero without having first to become a ghost, but he can become a ghost if that’s what he chooses to be.
Those thirty-three men, trapped for sixty-nine days, have been reborn by their fifteen-minute journeys to the surface.
I must say, I never did have a taste for autobiographies – people who write them tend to be unforgiving and critical, or rewrite their own revisionist history. Browsing in Borders, I came across Andre Agassi’s autobiography. While it suffers from the same flaws, his memoir was inspiring nonetheless.
I’ve never been much of a tennis fan, but amongst those tennis players I really admire, two of them stand out the most – Roger Federer, for being the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen and for being an utter machine on the courts, and Andre Agassi, for his passion.
Agassi’s autobiography is focused on his tennis career (well, what else?), but captured within his words is his motivation for playing, his dedication to a sport he never really loved, his commitment to get the best he could out of his body, and his determination to quit the sport on his own terms, not because someone asked him to.
I only managed to catch the last 50 pages or so, by which time he had already formulated his plan for building a school for underprivileged children, and that became his motivation to keep on playing, because like he said, every ball he continued to play meant an extra dollar for his school. His school. It would be easy to dismiss his efforts at giving as trivial or showy, but I think it demonstrates his willingness to give. It became his driving passion and reason for playing a sport he hated.
His dedication to his sport saw him tweaking his gym routine constantly for optimum output, undergoing cortisone shots at a time when little was known about the side effects, and dragging himself from court to court despite crippling back injuries (after one match he couldn’t make the distance from the court to the car, which was some distance away, and had to lie down while someone went to get the car). All this, despite the fact that he never liked tennis, playing at first because of his father’s coercion, then because he liked winning. I think it says a lot that even though he hated it to its core (he and Steffi Graf both swore to not encourage their children to play tennis) he still persevered, because of what he had riding on it.
He quit tennis at a time when his contemporaries like Pete Sampras had already retired, stopping because his body called it a day, not because of any other external influence. Reporters had been asking him persistently if he had considered quitting, and his reply was that he did not. He intended to play for as long as he could, for as long as his body could give. When he did quit, it was because his body could give no more.
More than that, he was a true sportsman. He understood that losing teaches more than winning, and that his losses to Pete Sampras in major competitions probably kept him going in his career because of the experiences gained. He understood that sometimes to get the best performance out of yourself, you have to let go of intellect and rely on instinct. Though this lesson had been repeated many times over by various people, including his coaches, the person who really brought the message across was Steffi Graf, his wife. He understood that playing for the sake of playing, without the pressure of expectation, can sometimes be more powerful than the will to win.
Agassi has always been a player I admire because of his passion and dedication. He is by no means perfect – witness his anger management issues, and how he slams Pete Sampras (who he called uninspiring) and Brooke Shields (his first wife). But these flaws do not mar the person that he is – generous, passionate and dedicated. There is so much I wish I could say about how eye-opening his book was, but for now, I will just leave it at that.
