Come the Millennium, month twelve
In the home of greatest power
The village idiot will come forth
And be acclaimed the leader.

- Nostradamus, 1555

I don't know if this is a real reference or not, but if it is, I'll begin to put some faith in prophecy.

Pretty girls' heads

Ahhhhh, Singapore. Love this place. The people, the food, the simple calculations of prices (no tax, no tips). What's not to love? Well, maybe the weather. Bloody hot here. Never taken so many cold showers in my life. Ah well, the price of being at home.

I just figured I should update this thing once in a while, not nice to leave it hanging while I'm on holiday. I wonder if jet lag should count as sleep deprivation? Anyway, so an absolutely fascinating thing happened to me on the flight home. I was sitting on the plane from Tokyo to Singapore, and there was this pretty, petite girl, about my age, maybe a year or two younger, sitting next to me. Marvellous, I thought. Certainly better company than the giant guy on my other side. Well, just as the flight got underway, this middle-aged woman seated behind me opened the overhead storage compartment, and my laptop bag fell out and hit the girl right on the noggin. Extreme embarrassment. I was going to scold the woman for not being careful, but she snatched the initiative and started in on me first. I have no idea what she used as an excuse, because she was going on in Japanese. Unfortunately the injured girl also only spoke Japanese. So I could only sit there in dumb admiration of the speed of that woman's speech and be thoroughly lambasted for something which is NOT my fault.

It gets better. So momentary humiliation over, I settled in for a flight made less pleasant by that incident. Now, a flight attendant, seeing me making profuse apologies to the girl, somehow concluded, I know not how, that she was my wife. I didn't really care what he thought and pretty much ignored the fellow. When I went upfront later and was chatting with my lovely travelling companion, who, unfortunately, was not seated with me during this flight, the flight attendant floated by and sort of hinted that perhaps I should not be chatting up some pretty girl while my 'wife' was asleep in the back. At this point, I was wondering what business this fellow had poking his nose in my affairs, regardless of whether his assumptions were correct or not. I decided not to let my travelling companion know of this and retired to my seat for the landing. The attendant persisted in his not-so-subtle admonishments of my 'infidelity', and eventually managed to irritate me to the point where I just told him, "Yes, this is my wife, and that woman upfront is my girlfriend. I'm juggling the two of them on the same flight. Now, what business is that of yours?"

Shut the fellow up.

I am glad the girl beside me did not speak English. On the other hand, if she did speak English, I might have done a touch of chatting up; she was quite pretty. Just my type. Oh well.

So, I could now go on about the nature, as I perceive it, as always, of moralising to others when their affairs do not really concern you, but I don't think I shall. I'm on holiday, and shall avoid torturing readers with my amateur philosophising. So I'll leave this post as a simple story that is somewhat, in my opinion at least, amusing.

People only truly experience life during the holidays. All else is just designed to get you to the holidays. So shouldn't work be a holiday from life?

The dead shall rise again . . .

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040314/ap_on_sc/undead_lobsters_2

Sleeping on an impossible dream

Everybody at some point in time decides that a dream, an ideal, an ambition is beyond their reach. This dream is then classified as impossible and relegated to the realms of pure fantasy and memory. Yet, why should this ever happen? Impossible some things may be, but that is hardly a reason to not give that assumption a chance to be tested. A cliche, I acknowledge, but embarrassment is fleeting, regret is not.

Life only happens once, and chances, opportunities are only available once. Even if a second chance arrives, it will never be quite the same as the first time. Every moment in life is unique, and once it has passed, the moment has passed permanently, existing from that point on only in memory. Memory is a tricky thing, mostly filtering out the inconveniences until they can no longer hurt you. The problem is that some memories, suppress them as you may, last too long, and frequently, the only emotion evoked by the memories that last the longest is that of regret. Well, supposing you count regret as an emotion. Let's not go there.

If life is inherently meaningless and transitory, why then should there be any fear of emotional and psychological repercussions from any action? Everything we do in life should be done according to our beliefs and desires. If you want something, or someone, for that matter, go out and find a way of getting it, or him, or her. Difficulty only adds to the fun. And nothing is impossible, but only, in the immortal words of Captain Jack Sparrow, "not probable." And we all know there are exceptions to every probable situation. How ridiculously silly is the notion that simply because it is not probable that I will succeed, I shall never attempt to obtain my heart's desire. If you encounter a hundred impossible dreams in your lifetime, chase them all, then it is probable that at least one will be a successful hunt, and one is all we need, isn't it?

To all those who sleep on impossible dreams tonight, may your dreams be sweet, and may you have the stubbornness to at least try to make them come true.

Collections of noises

Heard something strange today. "Lyrically dense, formally experimental music is more interesting."

Worth a thought. What is music for? What is its purpose? If music can only be considered interesting if the lyrics in it are considered worth analysis and mining for deeper meanings, then why bother with the music at all? Why not stick to poetry or some such medium without the distraction of the melody to contend with? Bob Dylan would probably have worked as a pure poet, if not for the need to make the money a poet cannot and the desire to be a musician, cool as that occupation is in our society. After all, the music seems to take a back seat to his lyrics. In fact, the melodies and instrumentation seem to be a bit convoluted as they are warped to fit around the lyrics. The message becomes a bit distorted. People can listen to a Bob Dylan song without ever bothering to ponder meanings of lyrics, because there may not be a need to, if the music overall appeals to their aesthetic sensibilities.

I have nothing against interesting, meaningful lyrics, notwithstanding my previous rants about meaning overall. Within the context of the common and popular understanding, meaning can exist for most people in the lyrics of songs. In fact, when lyrics do not mean anything, it usually becomes quite difficult to produce a decent music video to go with the single these days. Do please note the sarcasm here. But I'm not ranting about commercialism today, mostly because I do not really have too much against commercialism. Topic for another day. Anyway, the point is that music can bbe interesting and certainly pleasant without the burden of having to mean anything beyond an aesthetically pleasing collection of noises. That is why I have nothing against musicians such as boybands. I figure that so long as they produce music that sounds good to my ear, I shall not judge them for what they do not even attempt to do.

Which accounts for my partiality toward fluffy Chinese ballads about angsty love.

Believing is seeing

Ever wonder about images of other people? How you form them, how they change? Observing the way people interact is fascinating. What is less pleasant a pastime is examining how your own views are crafted. After all, the deceptions and facades everybody maintains are usually obvious to the onlooker, less so to those the deceit is designed for. The same must be true of yourself, mustn't it?

When I look at others, I only see what I want to see. Reality has little bearing on my view. This is not an admission of deliberate self-delusion, but a recognition of the way my mind operates in forming judgements and opinions. When I look upon a person, I see a caricature, a simplified outline of what the person really is. Every person can be described in a finite number of words or images, but the complexities of the human go far beyond this. In fact, a person can never be completely known to another. If that is the case, then all knowledge we possess of others is incomplete and misleading, for in that infinite set of knowledge we do not possess about any one person, there must be something that contradicts what is known. If so, nothing we know can be considered an absolute and undeniable truth. So we see others only in the light we cast ourselves. The shadows left cannot be erased or seen into, for any attempt would simply cast more shadows. The only light we have to see by is our own. When others provide theirs, it simply adds to our light before we are able to make use of it. Even then, the distortion is obvious in that this amalgam of light is necessarily incomplete, for this other is also unknowable. So the addition of a new light to your own expands somewhat your field of vision, but does not encompass all that is known by the individual light-bearers. In fact, there is liable to be some refraction involved, for the addition of knowledge is not a simple addition, but an alteration of the existing set of knowledge such that the relationship to the subject changes. Think of it as a mathematical function. Altering the set of the domain is accomplished by adjusting the function itself. This will usually result in an alteration of the set of the range. The problem is that in these particular functions, the range cannot encompass negative infinity to infinity without having a domain that is also infinite both ways. But we have already established that the latter is impossible, so the former is also impossible.

In other words, what we see of others is crafted entirely by two aspects. What we know of them and what we want of them. Take the former. Clearly the perspectives we have of others is dependent heavily on and bounded by the knowledge we possess. We take what is available to us, data, images, signs, and generate or arrange a picture, or a system of understanding the other. The various pieces are taken to compose a greater strucure that is our understanding of the other.

Consider now what we want of the other. When I look at a pretty girl, I want to believe that she is interested in me. So I look for signs of interest that may or may not be signs of interest. If I am actually seriously interested, I begin to actively seek out what may be called buying signals, signs that she is ready to be approached in a romantic sense. The same cannot be said of male friends or females I have no interest in. Then I would not be looking for such signals, and in fact may ignore or screen them out if they are present. So in the former case, I look for certain actions or words, and may in fact imagine them, or misconstrue innocent gestures. In the latter, I would ignore such signals if they were present. So the fact that there is or isn't a romantic interest influences my view of the other's actions. The structure I create of her image and her meaning to myself, and what I desire of her, conspire to generate an active search for certain parcels of knowledge, or I may imagine these parcels up from nothing, to feed back into the structure to support itself.

So what we see is what we believe. Or perhaps what we believe is what we see.

Saints

Sometimes I wonder. Well, not sometimes, oftentimes I wonder. Everything is so snarled up and tightly wound in life. Everything needs to be simpler. Why must there be a system to prevent you from getting what you want without effort? Why cannot all things be readily and easily available? Why must things, even when achieved, only be enjoyed conditionally? Fine foods cannot be consumed for fear of high cholesterol, fine spirits cannot be imbibed for fear of liver cirrhosis, love cannot be pursued without consideration of consequences.

Love, a very interesting thing. As I grow older, love becomes an all-consuming passion for people. Everything is about finding romance. A man cannot maintain a close platonic friendship with a woman without inviting speculation of his intent romantically. Why should this be? The furore over gay marriage revolves around one basic fact, that these couples are obsessed with finding recognition of their love. After all, who cares about marriage if the love is genuine? But people do care. Marriage is a mark, a way of defining the other as a piece of one's own social property. No other can possess the other as I do. To even define someone else as a romantic partner is an exclusive relationship. A girl with a boyfriend is off-limits to other guys, unless she is separated from that boyfriend.

Ah, the complications of everything. Why should one not simply express everything in the heart without fear of consequence? Is pursuit of an ideal with no regard of failure or external opinion such a terrible thing? Why should people not seek out what they desire and attempt to obtain it without having to fear the fallout? If you love, speak it and let the other decide. If you desire freedom, cry for it, and hope it is heeded. If you crave fame, become famous, half-assed as it may be, and be damned with the condemnations of the world.

Thoreau said it so brilliantly, 'Our life is frittered away by detail ... Simplify, simplify'

All things should be direct and simple. But they cannot be. That is the curse of society. That is the curse of existing in close association with other thinking beings. It is so exhausting to constantly maintain the facades and deceptions that are necessary to life. Yet the exhaustion cannot be resolved or waved away, cannot be dismissed by mere rest. The pain and contradictions of life will ever torment us all, for the only ones who do break free are those considered mad, and who admits to madness? No wonder insanity was once considered the mark of saintliness.

When then, can I achieve sainthood?

Rich Kids

A friend commented last night that I should update this thing more often. So, just for this friend, I shall throw in something here. Even though it's Sunday morning and I am in no way sleep deprived. Ah well, here goes.

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with some people about the correct methods of raising a child. One particular person was quite vehement in his condemnation of allowing extravagant spending on the part of the child, no matter the financial situation of the parent. I found this very odd. I personally think that this is a very narrow sort of view, for the definition of extravagance is quite nebulous. Is the son of a billionaire being extravagant if he purchases offhand a diamond watch for a tenth of his monthly allowance? Yes? In that case, what about the son of a far poorer man, who saves his pennies and gathers two months worth of allowance to buy an iPod mini? Both are luxuries, but the rich son spent far less as a proportion of his father's wealth and his own allowance than did the poor son. Why is the willingness to scrimp and save to buy luxuries considered admirable and a sign of character, but the readiness to buy such luxuries if they are comfortably within one's budget considered inappropriate and extravagant?

Perhaps money corrupts in the sense that if the luxuries mentioned above are easily available without sacrifice to the children, then they are not willing or motivated to make any money or forge a career of their own. I doubt the validity of this. I am certain that, statistically, those with rich or well-to-do parents tend to do better in life than those who do not. Why is this? A work ethic that goes beyond a simple willingness to work to avoid poverty and make as much money as possible is embedded in most successful people. It is almost a prerequisite that people must be self-motivated in order to be successful in what they choose as a career. This self-motivation has little to do with money, but rather stems from a desire to be as good as one can be in whatever one does. To find personal satisfaction in being good at something. Money is a secondary consideration that must be yielded to, but is never the overriding concern. It is a common characteristic of successful people that many people who are not do not seem to understand. The factory worker sees the CEO earning many times his own salary, considers that their hours are fairly similar, and so moans about the unfairness of it all. What they cannot see is that the CEO probably works every waking hour, even at home or leisure, letting the problems and issues at hand roil in his mind constantly. Why does he do this? Why does he not simply forget all about work once he steps out of the office? Because he wants to be successful. Not simply in the sense of wanting pay raises and stock options, but simply because it is a satisfying thing to be the boss of a successful company.

Hardship shapes character? Yeah, sure it does. But is character necessarily shaped by hardship? If one does not experience hardship, is it then impossible to have character in the common sense that it is used? Is a person brought up in a privileged and sheltered environment unable to work hard and fight when necessary? That is a remarkably skewed and prejudiced view. Look at the two richest people in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, neither of whom inherited much from their parents to contribute to their current fortunes, but were raised in fairly well-to-do environments. Both were country club types who likely have never had to scrape for a cent in their lives. But both are workaholics who do not spend a great deal of their fortune, but remain focused on their work to the point of fanaticism. Gates in particular fought and struggled to make Microsoft the dominant player in the software and operating systems markets in the face of unpleasant odds. Character? I think he qualifies.

If nothing else, money and power provide a unique opportunity for a parent to give a child an education in the ways of power and money. Learning early how things work at the higher echelons of this capitalist society in which we live can prove to be invaluable. A child of a rich, successful person will have the resources, not purely in monetary terms, to succeed far more than the child of a poor man. Value systems are shaped by the personality and parenting style of the parent, not the money. Life skills are taught by all parents, the question is what particular life skills these are. Are they a strong work ethic and understanding of how the rich and successful operate, or a distrust of money and trust in the working classes? Every person endeavours to be rich. No one can honestly say that he or she would be happier with less instead of more. Fabulous wealth can, in itself, change the view of the world of the possessor, but it is not necessarily for the worse. It is only when the parent has no interest in imparting his or her own views of the world and the work ethic and methods that brought the wealth in the first place that the change is for the worse.

While I'm ranting, I might as well riff on the common idea that wealth and happiness exist in an inverse relationship. Quite ridiculous. Many many people have said to me, 'would you prefer being poor and happy, or rich and lonely?' What a ridiculous question. I do not see any nexessary correlation. Happiness in what sense? Family? Friends? Why can you not have these if you are rich? The usual argument is that if you are rich and successful, you never know if those who become close to you are interested in you or solely in your money. Well, I think that's simply a problem on your own part of judgement of character. If you are unable to discern if your wife loves you or your money, then too bad for you. In any case, does it matter? So long as you think that those you love reciprocate your feelings, it hardly matters if that is the truth. If you have no idea that your wife has no feelings for you other than for your money, then what does it matter to you? As far as you're concerned, all is right with the world. What you don't know can't hurt you. Fair-weather friends? Those exist everywhere. Say you're a poor man. Your friends obviously are not after your money, but they may be after your personality. If you become a hopeless drug addict who steals to support your habit, steals from them, or gets sent to jail frequently, or something like that, how many of your friends will stick by you? Few indeed. Money and success in a career are as much a part of you as your personality. To place a value judgement on those who value success over personality is presumptuous and arrogant.

Which brings me to value judgements. I am a person of many prejudices and biases. I certainly try to convince others of my view whenever there is an opportunity, but I do not expect everyone to agree, and I do not condemn those who disagree with me. Unlike many so-called open-minded people who expect you to agree with them, and be damned if you don't. Everybody has a unique view of the world, and I respect that. Can you respect mine? My worldview includes people who disagree with me, people who think that Chinese are slitty-eyed job-stealers, that fat people are evil, and that those who readily spend what their parents give them are extravagant and spendthrift. Do those people who believe in gay marriage, solving the problems of world hunger and redistributing wealth to the poor in society include in their worldview people like me? Some do, many do not. Learn to respect others if you expect others to respect you.

Egomania

Ok, some people have commented that I haven't been posting recently, but hey, I haven't been as busy, so I haven't been having late night/early morning sessions, therefore I haven't been sleep-deprived. Simple logical progression, really.

Since I'm not sleep-deprived, I'm not going to do any psuedo-philosophising today. It's a bit unseemly to do such things when you're not sleep-deprived, drunk or stoned. Which reminds me of something which really bothered me today. I've been reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac for class, and I actually quite dislike it. Not the book itself, but its subject matter, the so-called beat generation. For some reason, I don't really see how these people are any different really from any other generation. Just because they're disaffected with society and trying to find new definitions and frontiers does not make them unique. There is always a group within society that is disillusioned and disenfranchised. At any time. Seriously. Going through a war is unpleasant, I'll give them that, but wars have been going on forever. Capitalist or other oppressive social structures have existed forever as well. What really makes this 'beat generation' irritate me is the apparent assumption that they were something new and unique. That they were discovering something no one had before.

What I see when I read this book is a bunch of losers in the world who muddle through as a lot of psuedo-intellectual, poseur drug addicts, who find themselves unable to come to terms with their personal failures and instead seek to blame it upon the world and themselves, so as to avoid taking responsibility. An external failure is completely excusable, of course. A personal failure is also a way of escaping responsibility, for if one is simply unable to succeed, then one does not need to try.

Go read The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene instead. It's a brilliant novel, written around the same time, I think. Also about a loser in life, someone who is a personal failure, and is also persecuted, quite literally, by society. Yet this person is willing, in the end, to take responsibility for himself and his identity instead of using his failure and society as excuses. He does what he is expected, and expects of himself, despite obvious failure and persecution.

Or if that's not your cup of tea, and irresponsible egomania is more your thing, go read Trainspotting, also about a bunch of escapists.