Work in Progress

"The difference between animals and robots is robots get stuck while animals squirm their way through."
- Joseph Ayers

Sometimes it is worth wondering why humans get stuck so often. We are supposed to be the supreme species on earth, superior to any other animal. Yet we find ourselves confounded by the simplest things you could imagine. When we are confronted by problems, the first thing we do is stop. Well, that is certainly my reaction. I always pause before ploughing ahead. It just seems more prudent.

Ok, long spiel planned, but I'm tired, and I feel like reading more Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Cannot believe I'm spending time reading an ancient Chinese novel. Pretty good stuff though. I'll write the rest of the above later.

Maybe I should be more suaku

Hmmm, this may be a good development. For the first time in a while, I'm not thinking about things that I can't change. Perhaps being busy is a good thing. Consecutive fifteen hour days do have the convenient side effect of leaving you too tired to think about too much. Of course, when you supplement that with maybe three hours of compulsory anime viewing per day, the hours of sleep left over are remarkably dreamless.

I guess this is what people mean when they say it's important to keep busy. When I lounged about and did absolutely nothing, as I have for most of my college career, so many things swirled in my head that I had to find outlets for them. So I resorted to proxies sometimes, which was not very nice for all involved. And things got messier since independent complications arise because I tried to use unrelated people and things to deal with existing complications.

Hmmm, I doubt anybody will have the faintest idea what I just wrote about. Explanations, clarifications, analysis? Naw. It would take all the fun out of it for the bored. As I told someone recently, I think I'll just sensationalise and blow up out of proportion every single thing from now on, just to please the gossipmongers and voyeurs out there. Hey, why not, right?

I recently heard an utterly hilarious explanation for singlehood. I'm not going to elaborate here, but the gist is, good girls dig suaku guys. If you're too confident, ambitious or sophisticated, the kind of girls you'd want to marry won't be attracted to you. What can I say to that? I can't say I've actually been attracted to, or found attracted to me, the classic marrying type of girl. In fact, I don't even know very many of those. So if there are any girls out there who are pretty, but not too hot, can cook, clean, have impeccable fashion sense built on budget clothing, can manage finances brilliantly on a shoestring, be sweet and attentive, not too attention-seeking, and will bear a large number of smart, healthy children, give me a call. I promise to act as suaku as I can manage. Or actually, I might cage you and charge entry for the public to view a rare creature, long thought to be extinct.

The idea here, if you don't get it, is that I cannot even conceive of a girl who meets all the items on my wishlist. As such, anybody I do end up dating will inevitably fall short of my ideal. So to avoid subjecting anyone to something like that, I don't think being too serious about these things is a good idea.

The thing is, I'm naturally a very critical person. Given anything at all, I can tear it apart. I'm pretty good at it too. Plus I rather enjoy taking something apart and seeing the flaws. Which can be a problem when you walk through life seeing the flaws in everything and everyone. How can you enjoy anything if everything is screwed up?

Ok, just quickly ambling through my currently rather uneventful mind. Not much else going on. No existential musings, no agonised ruminations on the meaning of anything. Just pointless, shallow surface thoughts.

A week ago

I cannot believe it. A week ago I was in Paris, cultural capital of the world, home to the sophisticates and all that jazz. Now, I'm in the tiniest town I have ever lived in. I can literally walk across the entire town in ten minutes. Which I actually did last night. I've never lived in a city with less than 3 million people in it before. This is going to be quite a challenge.

I should have known when I arrived, and promptly found myself in a taxi with a driver who looked straight out of Wrong Turn, that Eliza Dushku movie. Unfortunately, he did not remind me of the teenagers, who were, as all teenagers are in Hollywood movies, very attractive, but of the hicks who ran about trying to kill people with chainsaws and kitchen knives and whatnot. Seriously. Old man, long, straggly white beard, plaid shirt and jeans, red trucker's hat on the head. Can you get any more cliched? Then there are the accents, which are quite amazing. Still think the Boston accent is far less comprehensible though.

I cannot even think of anything to type about this town, tiny as it is. It's not a town, it's smaller than Choa Chu Kang. Of course, they still managed to charge exorbitant rates for hotels. I had to cross a river and a state line to get a room for less than $150. Of course, even though the hotel was two whole towns away from the school, it was still ten minutes by cab. Mindboggling.

Oh, a rather bizarre and quite irritating thing happened on Sunday. I called a cab from the lobby of the overpriced hotel to go to my slightly less overpriced hotel. So the cab shows up and parks across the street. My brow got a little furrowed at this point, but I can only shrug and cross the street, dragging my luggage behind me. Then when I got to within ten feet of the vehicle, the driver suddenly drives off. I'm left standing there, luggage in hand, slack-jawed. I release a markedly unsatisfying stream of curses, then haul my luggage across the street again to talk to the equally bemused parking attendant at the hotel who called the cab for me. I did eventually get a taxi, but seriously, what the hell? Did he not like my face? Maybe he objects to Lacoste shirts. Or perhaps he suspected that I was concealing a dirty nuke in my Samsonite, which would explain his dramatic swerve and escape.

Bloody idiot. Piss me off.

Classes here are damn heavy. Six hours a day. Hardly reasonable. In two days here, I will have exceeded my weekly allotment in Chicago. Then there are the readings and homework at night. I just spent a good half hour drawing out a spreadsheet. Why couldn't I have built the damn thing on Excel? Because he wants us to get used to planning on paper first. Curiously, for this assignment, I used Excel to plan, then wrote it out on paper. Professors seem pretty decent though. If nothing else, I guess I will learn something from this. Beats crunching numbers in a bank for summer.

Also another interesting development that I will keep under wraps for now. I'll try to avoid getting too excited about it. Emotions are liars anyway. Just ask Descartes.

Ode

"There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other."
- Ernest Hemingway

As some of the more astute might have surmised, I actually rather like this city. Not too many cities can claim that from me. Small as it is compared to the metropolitan behemoths, never in my weeks in this city have I stopped discovering more about the city. Even today, I found a lovely little bistro, with fantastic food and a wonderful view. I walked past it a million times without venturing in, and on my last day, I find that it is brilliant.

What is it about Paris that makes it such a fulfilment of its own image? After all, it seems almost impossible that any one place can encompass so much. Yet it does. Perhaps it is how personal it is. Paris can be anything you want it to be. It can be the city of Haussman, with immense, straight boulevards, glittering monuments marking the junctions, gorgeous landscaping in gardens scattered all over the city. This version of the city is overwhelming. A person can spend days simply marvelling at the perfection of the city. Nowhere else have I seen a city that is designed to be so beautiful on such an immense scale.

Or perhaps you prefer the Paris of intense debauchery. Clubs and bars of every description abound, catering to any and all tastes in a way that would shock the most jaded traveller. Ten restaurants in Paris hold the coveted three Michelin stars, and even if you find those to be somewhat out of your wallet's reach, great little bistros and brasseries abound, with good food to be found at almost any price level. Of course, more money never hurts, and some of the lushest hotels in the world are here. I must say that the Four Seasons in Paris is the nicest one I have seen yet. The way it fires so far over the top is quite endearing. Wine is cheap and plentiful, but you can always find the finest tipples in the world, at a premium, of course. An evening at a wine bar is one of the best you can hope to have.

There is, of course, also the Paris of history and culture. There must be dozens of monuments in this city, each telling a stirring tale of bravado, ideals or the immensity of history. Museums are everywhere, many of them truly excellent. It is hardly possible that a human being cannot find something of interest in the myriad exhibitions in Paris. Better yet, observe the streets and see history reflected in every twist, every straight avenue, every snaking pathway. Operas, concerts, independent artists, fashion designers, Paris hosts them all in style. What's not to love?

What then is my Paris? Almost impossible to answer, that question is. If every person's Paris is different, then no trite words of mine can make a reader understand what I see. Still, I shall try. My Paris is what I experience when I sit in a cafe on a lazy afternoon, coffee before me, facing the street, watching individuals impossible to typecast as Parisians, but equally impossible to describe as anything else, walk past, as my newspaper lies forgotten in my hand. It is what I see when I sit in the parvis of Notre-Dame at night, feeling the cool breeze as an old man plays the guitar beside me. It is the four piece band that sets up on a bridge on Sundays to play some excellent music for pennies. It is the waiter taking immense pleasure from my compliment on a fantastic meal in a tiny bistro. It is idling by the river on a sunny day, feeling the light penetrate me. It is the dog under the bar counter yelping as I accidentally step on a paw. It is grabbing a beer to go and sitting on a bench just because. It is all of these things and more, everything I have seen, done, experienced in this city. My Paris, as surely as it is anyone else's Paris.

And now, as I pack my clothes, I cannot help but wonder how my Paris will change as I return over the years. Living here, even for a short few weeks, is so different from being a tourist. I want to stay. That is a rare emotion for me. I have so little attachment to places. But I want to stay, and keep discovering Paris.

As Hemingway so aptly puts it, there is never any ending to Paris. Except there is for me. And it comes in 13 hours.

I knew it!

Turns out love and trust really are biological urges.

I'm not sure whether to feel vindicated or horrified.

One day in Paris

Hmmm, that wasn't too bad. For those not in the know, my birthday was fairly recent. I don't generally bother with it, and most of my friends don't even know when it is. In fact, I had actually forgotten about it until my mom reminded me.

Ok, this is going to be a complete mindless travelogue. Nothing deep or thought-provoking here.

So, anyway, this one was alright. I got as a present the most utterly hilarious thing I have ever seen. Sometimes that girl gets me. Too bad it's only sometimes though. I also managed to start off the day right, getting slightly drunk and talking loudly about old movies in the middle of the night, irritating the hell out of my neighbours. Then I decided to stop work for the day, and headed off to see a little of touristy Paris.

I hopped off to the Louvre, raining though it was. The place was kind of humid, but not as crowded as I thought it would be, so it's all good. Managed to totally fall in love with Fra Angelico. The fellow was a genius. Seriously, I need to learn more about him and his work. Well, mostly his work. I don't really care about long dead artists who were (I think) monks. But as a professor once told me, two hours is about as much of a museum as anyone can take at one go. I lasted three hours, but I was completely out on my feet near the end.

Headed off to have one last late lunch at my favourite brasserie in Paris. I totally love that place. The food is old fashioned, and not exactly mind-blowing, but very reliable and comforting. Nothing to really distract you from a newspaper or a book or a conversation. Sartre and Camus used to go there for dinner and argue for hours. Maybe I sat in the same seat as Sartre once did. I am a sucker for such things.

I took a walk to the Pantheon after that, and was fairly underwhelmed at first. I think I've been in Paris too long. Monuments no longer impress me. The Pantheon is a fairly impressive piece of architecture, big and imposing, but nothing special. Foucault's experiment was kinda cool though. Leon, by the way, not Michel. The pendulum that proved the world spins on an axis. Is that cool or what?

It was when I descended to the crypt that I totally geeked out. I walked in, looked around, and saw a statue of Voltaire. Then I realised that Voltaire's tomb was right there! Turned around, and saw Rousseau's tomb directly opposite! Come on, is that cool or what? Then I went a little deeper in, and saw Pierre and Marie Curie's remains, and saw the room that the coffins of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola shared. Now this was the kind of touristy Paris I could get used to.

Climbed the stairs after that to the top of the building and managed the best views of Paris I've seen so far. Not the highest spot in Paris, but perfectly situated. You can see Sacre-Couer set beautifully against the hill, a decent shot of the Tour Eiffel, and Notre-Dame, the first time I've seen it from above. Tout Paris was laid out pleasingly about me, and I was calm and chill for the first time in a long long while.

After paying tribute to the heroes of modern France, I slipped over to the church of Sainte-Genevieve. I may not be a Catholic, but I paused to pray (not to the saint) before the coffin of Genevieve, the exact same spot where Pope John Paul II had, then lighted a candle to the patron saint of Paris for the people I've gotten to know in her city.

Rounded off the day with a gorging on seafood. Some of the finest oysters I've ever sampled had me at a loss for words and reduced to cursing incoherently. La Coupole. Excellent place for the cold seafood done so well in Europe. Try their special Number 1 oysters. Even better than their non-special Number 00 oysters. Pretty good crabs and wakles too. Even had a pretty good bottle of wine, which, unfortunately, got mostly forgotten in the assault upon the shellfish.

Oh, btw, continued my journey to visit the resting places of great men in Paris today. Went to see Napoleon's tomb. Very impressive place. I tell you, that is the way to be buried. Build an entire cool-looking church, with a gigantic golden altar, and an immense coffin in the middle of a circular depression, relief carvings of your deeds all about, statues of angels surrounding you, the place names of your famous victories inscribed in the floor. Then charge admission to come see it. I still don't know why Napoleon needs seven layers of coffins though. Maybe it's to protect him from the ornery relatives interred in the same building.

Ok, done with this mindless ramble. Bloody tired now. Going to find some food and wine, then chill for the night.

One, Two, Three

A friend of mine asked me a little while back what I would wish for if I were offered three wishes. I really couldn't come up with anything that I really wanted then, but after a little thought, I think I have it.

First, I want to know what happens after I die. Is there a heaven and a hell? Is the division of souls made by some sort of sin counter? If so, then what exactly constitutes a sin, and what constitutes a good deed? After all, since we on earth have no means of knowing absolutely what is a sin and what is not, how can we be held accountable for failing to follow rules we were not made aware of? If this line of reasoning holds, then God must be unreasonable. If sins are held against us, then we will be punished for doing something we did not know was wrong. If they are not, and the doctrine of predestination holds, then no matter what we say, think or do, we have no influence over our eventual destination at all. If Mother Teresa was predestined to go to hell, then all her good works were for nothing, since things have already been decided, regardless of her intentions and actions. The good of heart can go to hell, and the truly may end up in heaven. Predestination is a horrible sort of thing to believe in. Of course, my views on predestination have been laid out before on this blog, I believe, and I will not go into them again. Maybe the way out is that if we are meant to go to heaven, then God would have made us so that we will inevitably perform more good deeds than sins. Similarly, the evil were predestined to go to hell, so they are crafted to be evil. In this way, both sides can be satisfied. Naturally, it must be said that the evil likely do not believe that they are evil. Every person sets out to do what he or she feels is the right thing. Hitler believed that he was doing the world a favour by engaging in ethnic cleansing. The whole genocide thing was perfectly justified in terms of the big picture. Even a simple hatred is justified, for if one hates another, the other is seen as evil, and one remains on the side of good.

And what if there is no afterlife? What then? Do we simply stop? Perhaps we become souls floating about the universe. That wouldn't be so bad. I could find out a lot of stuff that way. But if there is no afterlife, then where does consciousness come from? I can sort of understand how the physical body comes to be, since that is explainable in terms of the matter, but how about consciousness? How do I think about things? I cannot find my way out of the notion of some sort of supreme being that exists beyond our understanding. There has to be something at the beginning of the chain of creation. Further up, I assume is something completely beyond my conceptualisation, so I will not bother to try. Of course, even if there is a supreme being, that does not automatically mean that there is an afterlife for us. Perhaps we only exist in the here and now.

In any case, knowing will solve so many of my issues. Probably won't make me more satisfied, but I will be a lot less curious.

Second, I would like to be quite a bit less smart. I think a lot of my issues come from having too much excess power lying around. So I end up thinking about all sorts of pointless things. If I were average, I would probably be quite happy to study hard to get good grades, work hard to get promotions and pay raises, save money to get married and raise kids, then die happy, fulfilled by life. Instead, I think about these things, and find that there really is no point to it. Grades don't really matter all that much to me, other than keeping the world off my back. I don't really give a damn about a career. What is the point in achieving in a career? What does that give you? Respect? I don't need that sort of validation. I know who and what I am. I know what I am capable of. I do not need some external indicator of it. Money? Is that it? I don't want success, I just want stuff. My dream career would be to hit the lottery. Then I can go out and get all the stuff i want without having to work for it. I do not experience a sense of achievement when I accomplish something, so why should I try to accomplish anything? Kids. Who needs them? I certainly don't. Companionship for old age? What a pathetic thing to say. I don't want to be a lonely old man, so I'm going to raise some humans to keep me company. Might as well keep a dog or two. And I don't think it's a good idea for me to get married anyway. I only seem to really get along with unhappy people, and a marriage of two unhappy people doesn't seem likely to succeed.

See? If I just didn't think about it, then I would be fine. I would soldier on with life, trying my best to achieve the petty goals set out before me by society. Instead, I'm stuck between doing what is demanded of me, and giving up completely. Trapped, I tell you.

Third, I wish I could forget that I don't believe in happy endings.

Manners

"Good manners make any man a pleasure to be with. Ask any woman."
- Peter Mayle

Sometimes

I sometimes wonder why I even bother. I really shouldn't. After all, what do I care?

Problem is, sometimes, I do.

So unload on me when you feel like it, sponge off me when you need to, ignore me when it suits you, take from me when you want to.

Just don't bother to worry about things going both ways.

Bah, I'm tired.

And hungry.

I think I'll go find something to eat.