weekends.

for the working population, weekends are precious, happy and relaxing.
the last weekend i had in particular was pretty emotional, but set me thinking forward.

i had attended a wedding solemnisation on saturday and a funeral on sunday.
it was like a fast forward of an ordinary life.

saturday's wedding was a young friend's. she was young and it came pretty sudden, but i was happy for her, reason being she found her true one, the best (most suitable for her) out of all that has crossed her path. everyone gathered, mingled, there were laughters and smiles all around. that made it blissful.

sunday, however, was a different phase of life, which unfortunately, we had difficulty coming to terms to. grandaunt was, apart from granny, one of the kindest souls i have ever met in my life. they would never harm anyone, and was always too eager to care and give. she was almost a decade younger than my granny, and they used to be close. she had promising sons who had established their own families, and most of all, a loving husband who was with her thru thick and thin, in sickness and in health, and even now, till death and everything about her was still deeply embellished in his heart. her sickness was a blow to them, her suffering was pain to them, and her death was a dilemma & shock to them, because on one hand, they wanted her to be relieved of all pain, but above all, they did not want to lose her.

granduncle had spoken to me and talked to me about cherishing my parents, and more importantly, the granny i love the most.. he said i would have to go thru this someday, even if she could live till she was 200, with sickness and pain and age setting in, no one man would feel happy. and that made me realise that ever since i had started moving out, i have not been visiting her very regularly. anyone who knew my grandma would know that she loved me the most. she stayed up till i fell asleep each night because she knew i would be afraid, she woke me up for school every morning, and she cared for me more than she cared for herself. that is so selfless that i tear just thinking of her, and i know that she hasnt been in the best of health in recent years.

and i know, i wouldnt want to regret not visiting her enough or not having the chance to treat her well now that i am more able to, just like how grandaunt just left swiftly, quietly, only leaving us with her legacy.

rest in peace, grandaunt. it pains me simply recalling how still and serene you look now, and thinking that i will not be able to see you ever again.

wc forwarded this meaningful and almost very apt article to me via email which i thought i should post it here to serve as a reminder as well as sharing with whoever is fated to read this ;)

This is Adrian Tan's speech at the convocation of students (class of 2008) at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (NTU).
Adrian Tan is a litigation partner at Drew & Napier LLC.

LIFE AND HOW TO SURVIVE IT
I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address.
It's a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation.

I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.
My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one.
She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living.
She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator.
Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are.
I make my living being disagreeable.
Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home.
That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.
And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men:
when you've already won her heart, you don't need to win every argument.
Marriage is considered one milestone of life.
Some of you may already be married.
Some of you may never be married.
Some of you will be married.
Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times.
Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation.
The end of education.
You're done learning.
You've probably been told the big lie that "Learning is a lifelong process" and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters' degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on.
You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers.
Don't you think there is some measure of conflict of interest?
They are in the business of learning, after all.
Where would they be without you?
They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they're wrong.
The bad news is that you don't need further education because your entire life is over.
It is gone.

That may come as a shock to some of you. You're in your teens or early twenties.
People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old.
That is your life expectancy.
I love that term: life expectancy.
We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people.
But I'm here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy.
We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino.
It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long.
We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless.
There's very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup.
Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.
Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years.
Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you'll have another 40 years to go.
Four decades in which to live long and prosper.
Bad news. Read the papers.
There are people dropping dead when they're 50, 40, 30 years old.
Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation.
They would be very disappointed that they didn't meet their life expectancy.
I'm here to tell you this.
Forget about your life expectancy.
After all, it's calculated based on an average.
And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations.
You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family.
You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you.
And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.
If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself.
You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people.
I have nothing against average people.
But no one should aspire to be them.

And you don't need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess.
Life's a mess.
You are not entitled to expect anything from it.
Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end.
Life happens, and you have no control over it.
Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment.
Your degree is a poor armour against fate. *Exactly.

Don't expect anything. Erase all life expectancies.
Just live. Your life is over as of today.
At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be,
you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look.

This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up.
No one knows.
What does this mean for you?
It is good that your life is over.
Since your life is over, you are free.
Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.
Work is anything that you are compelled to do.
By its very nature, it is undesirable.
Work kills.
The Japanese have a term "Karoshi", which means death from overwork.
That's the most dramatic form of how work can kill.
But it can also kill you in more subtle ways.
If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there's nothing left.
A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

*** There's a common misconception that work is necessary.
You will meet people working at miserable jobs.
They tell you they are "making a living". No, they're not.
They're dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful. ***

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity.
Work makes you free.
The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps.
Utter nonsense.
** Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

***Resist the temptation to get a job.
Instead, play.
Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again.
You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often.
Soon, that will have value in itself. ***
I am enjoying my job.. not 100% of the time, but most of the time.. as compared to office work.. I think I would be much happier continuing this job.....
I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator.
I enjoy it and I would do it for free.
If I didn't do that, I would've been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction - probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do?
You will find your own niche. I don't imagine you will need to look very hard.
By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do.

In fact, I'll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions.
By this time you should know what your obsessions are.
If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.
Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession.

Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm.
If you don't, you are working.
Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication.
To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth.
I'm not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things.
The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth.

Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating.
There is also great skill.
Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences.
It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.
In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it.
That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.*

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth.
I now say this to you: be hated.
It's not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you?
Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many.
That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.
One does not have to be evil to be hated.
In fact, it's often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one's own convictions.
It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions.
Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average.
That cannot be your role.
There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself.
Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.
I didn't say "be loved".
That requires too much compromise.
If one changes one's looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.
Rather, I exhort you to love another human being.
It may seem odd for me to tell you this.
You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation.
That is false.

Modern society is anti-love.
We've taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings.
It is far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise.
Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance.
It is hard work - the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits.
There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness.
In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way.
We learn the true worthlessness of material things.
We celebrate being human.
Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person.
Despite popular culture, love doesn't happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor.
It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming.
It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain,
and the body is less important than the heart.
You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated.
You are not doing it to be loved back.
Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone.
You either don't, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology.
It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don't work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.
You're going to have a busy life.
Thank goodness there's no life expectancy.

and YES i am very very bothered.

casual conversation ignited the very frustration in me.
whats in a clique that judges,
that everyone has an unspoken desire to dissolve,
voyeurism present,
and pretence permeating?

complex complex complex.
afraid to thrash, unafraid of hurting.
is that the proposed hegemony introduced by Gramsci,
a dominant discourse path chosen by members of it,
or are people plain too skeptical and assume too much like the tabloids?

it has to be realised that its either make, or break.
in between is just being a Pharisee.

let's thrash, game for that?

12 may mgt maths
15 may mgt science mtds
20 may orgn theory:interdisciplinary approach
21 may corporate finance

12 jun strategy

why o' why the outlier? :(

let the happy memories sweep the bad ones away.

LIFE IS A GIFT

There was a blind girl who hated herself because she was blind. She hated everyone, except her loving boyfriend. He was always there for her. She told her boyfriend, 'If I could only see the world, I will marry you.'

One day, someone donated a pair of eyes to her. When the bandages came off, she was able to see everything, including her boyfriend.

He asked her, 'Now that you can see the world, will you marry me?' The girl looked at her boyfriend and saw that he was blind. The sight of his closed eyelids shocked her. She hadn't expected that. The thought of looking at them the rest of her life led her to refuse to marry him.

Her boyfriend left in tears and days later wrote a note to her saying: 'Take good care of your eyes, my dear, for before they were yours, they were mine.'

This is how the human brain often works when our status changes. Only a very few remember what life was like before, and who was always by their side in the most painful situations.

Life Is a Gift
生命是一份禮物

"To err is human, to forgive, divine."
~ Alexander Pope

sometimes the world isnt ideal, and from watching the 90s mediacorp drama, i sometimes wish everything else was as simple and rosy.
perhaps technological improvements also has its demerits.

somehow, i still believe that deep down, if everyone does their bid, be less judgmental, more forgiving, the world would be closer to ideal.

very soon, i'm gna try to evict hearsay bit by bit.
hopefully i'll be able to release myself from the prison in my heart.
wad impedes this is knowing that what one can do is only that much.
and i guess thats the mere amount of courage i own, for now.

please start to study, u need to graduate!

i guess the reversing of an adjusted biological clock is not an easy feat.
besides, weekend lectures add on to the fatigue.

supposed to have an 830 class this morn,
and my mind just didn't want to give way to that 715 alarm,
the snoozed 724 alarm,
the bro 730 alarm,
and i woke at 740.

but the fatigue didnt wear off as i strode to the bus stop.
and all the buses seemed so packed.

so i took a u-turn.
and im home. :(

“My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirred;
And I myself see not the bottom of it.”
-Shakespeare