Letters

So my friend al sent replied to a letter i sent last christmas. It's always nice to see your friends reply to you. Even if it took 5 months. Bu honestly, what she wrote was touching and i would love to keep this penpalship thing going,

Since she never picks up her phone or replies to her emails.

Thanks al, really appreciate it

Lots of love.

Novel idea

So recently im thinking about writing a story, not so much a novel type fiction. More of a biography style. But considering how i have never read either of them, i figure im going to do a pretty had job at it.

Also, in case you were wondering, im thinking about writing about my parents or maybe only my father. Im also thinking about interviewimg them during weekends around their schedule, like how the writer of "The Last Lecture" wrote. I think there as pretty serious gaps in what i know about my parents' life before my birth. Not just what decisions they made but also the social circumstances surrounding them as youths.

It should be easier to write about my father because he went through polytechnic and army life, which means everything that happened before is pretty easy to extrapolate from my own life because school is still school, although i would still ask a bit here and there.

My mum should be more difficult considering that she stopped schooling at secondary school due to good old sexism. Also she lived in Penang as a kid so there's more to find out.

Some of you may be wondering why i'm doing this. It's pretty simple. My parents have never been great storytellers, at least not with their lives or their past. When they do tell, it's mostly about a funny thing that happened to them that day. So while occasionally i do get glimpses into their past lives, like how my mum knows how to read fortunes from this red chinese book, it never really paints a clear picture. I mean all my life i have been told i was lucky to be born in this generation, in this country and in this time. I think its time i started to examine why people call my generation lucky and appreciate, for what it's worth, what those who came before us struggled for.

I also wanted to know what major decisions my parents made and the circumstances revolving around them. Form what i've heard since my grandma's death, they did have some pretty dramatic moments in their lives and it's a shame i still don't know about them. May be i will learn some lessons here and there. Who knows.

I'm also thinking about learning cooking, particularly on sundays when my maid leaves for her lessons. That usually leaves our lunch unaccounted for and either me or my brother has to go somewhere to buy. It's getting very tiresome to do so and i figured might as well squeeze in some time to pick up something useful. I used to worry that i could not settle my own meals when i moved out to hostels in university life and more urgently, when i went to europe, i would have something local to offer to my couchsurfing hosts.

Here's hoping both ideas succeed.

Eating

Im pretty sure someone at some point in time made a scientific imquiry as to the link between hunger and crankiness. I actually read about this quite long ago as merely anecdotal evidence and was reminded by a blog post from revered genius, and dilbert artist scott adams. I myself noticed the link in that most rage occurs happens just before meal times and almost never occur after. 

I think most people frown upon my suggestions of going for makan because i always seem to suggest it more often than others. Because i am not exactly skinny, people get annoyed when i do so and i know for a fact that the more vocal people like to call me out on it. Saying that all i think about is food. Which is only partially true. Sometimes i have a good day simply because im looking forward to a particularly delicious meal later in the day. Yeah, im easy to satisfy like that.

Accounting Interview

I was thinking back about my interview at SMU. they asked me about what i did as a student councillor and what my leadership style was. i blabbered on abou tthe open house and getting everyone down to talk about internal politics which was stupid as hell. only in the shower did i realise i could have told a much better story.

this is it.

i headed the student study program where we invited a few ex students who scored exceptionally well to come back and tutor some of the weaker students after school. my head teacher advisor was worried about the growing trend with student councillors and other high profile cca-involved students that their grades were steadily declining due to cca involvement. she approached me to head the program to help these kids improve their grades by spending more time in school studying. i had to come up with a way to get reliable tutors for them as more teachers were in meetings or other commitments after school, also there was a problem with not being able to stay awake for such prolonged periods of time, especially when self studying. we managed to solve both problems, with my relatively small team of 4 people, but we did a lot of good in that time. most students grades started to pick up and while it was not an overnight jump, it was better than nothing. and it helped those kids get back to the rhythm of studying after most of their major events such as SYF and A division competitions.

sounds quite impressive until you consider how little i actually did.

Through the eyes of madness

I'm not really sure what this says about my childhood, but since i was a kid, and i do mean when i was like 5 or younger, because i specifically remember thinking this in my god grandma's house until my nursery years.

I used to think about perception and colours, particularly, would the colour red that i see be the same as the colour red that you see, and even if it isn't, we wouldn't know the difference because that same object would always have been that colour and if what i saw red i called red and what you saw was (to me) green, you would also call red as well. I'm to really sure how to make this clearer, but i'm going to try.

Consider that a dog is essentially colourblind, which in case you don't know doesn't mean that a dog's world is black and white and gray, it merely means they can see much fewer and less rich colours than humans. （Scroll to the spectrum to see what i mean). In this case, red to use would appear brown to a dog. But if you had 2 identical toys where one was red and another, say blue, and you trained a dog to pick up the red toy. the dog would in fact pick up a toy that to you is actually red, but yet to him brown, even though he was "trained“ to associate red with that colour in his mind.

So, i was rethinking this old question (in the shower, unsurprisingly) when i thought of a plot for a movie script. i wish i could direct it. it goes a little something like this.

A guy/girl who goes on through life seein

g images (ala Constantine) and words on surfaces(ala Splinter cell conviction) and hears things and occasionally is able to do things like move a cup with his mind or anticipate a phone call or other "randomly coincidental things".

He goes on this great adventure (which i haven't figured out yet) through fantastic landscapes elements embedded in his modern 21st cityscape and suburbia. But as he drags his friends along (the movie actually chronicles their life and friendship from about 10 or 12 to 16 or 19, to capture the difference). It becomes increasingly clear that his friends are unable to see the things that he can see and he is the only one that can do so yet things around him revolve and changes in such a way that it would be impossible for him to have done it himself (ala Calvin and Hobbes, see below panel 3). eg in movie, a crater appearing in the middle of the city. It also becomes increasingly unclear to the audience as well whether he truly does have powers or whether he is schizophrenic or mentally unsound.

So at the end the audience sees (from the camera) pulling out from his eyes and he is sitting in a white room on a brown wooden chair surrounded by his 2 friends in civilian clothes, looking at him and he is in this white flowy clothes that resemble but ultimately do not look like hospital gowns. At first, he has this intense look as if he has been thinking about a very difficult problem and then he just smiles and the screen fades to black.

i have a basic, almost fundamental (if you know what the word means) belief that eventually i will reach a stage in my consciousness and mental facilities that i will no longer be able to differentiate the illusions in my mind from what is going on in the real world. Even now, when i get a message or a phone call in the middle of my sleep, even if i can remember the exact details of the message and the details, i never seem to fully trust that said message didn't just happen in my mind, (and nobody actually called me.)

Often, i wonder how other people perceive their world. That's one of the reasons why i enjoy shows with narrators, like Burn Notice or How I Met Your Mother or a particular episode of 30 Rock, where they showed the individual viewpoints of the different main characters.

In Burn Notice, the narrator is the main character who is a blacklisted spy who can't work, so he goes about his day helping people solve problems they couldn't ordinarily solve. While that on its' own is pretty boring, the narration adds another layer of depth because as he is faced with different situations, you can hear him explain what is going on in his mind as he analyses like for example, how to take out a large biker guy while he is much smaller, or how a certain plan where he needs to physically hurt himself to con another person. How I met your mother works differently, as a comedy, much of it is directed in such a way that what happens to the main character's is different from what he actually thinks. For example,

Ted: That girl totally got the hots for me

Future Ted: She didn't

Something like that, i can't remember the exact scenario where something like that happened.

So, as i have explained i enjoy learning how others perceive the world. So, i figured i share my perception of the world. I cannot see the last sentence of any text message. it has been repeatedly proven with 4 different occasions where i was either early by an hour or even a day, or late by 12 hours ( I didn't see the AM in the text).

Example:

I also have this peculiar way of listening to music. Because i can listen to music on loop for about 2 weeks before i get tired of it, i often will be able to hear the background tracks or tunes or whatever it is called only after hearing it for about 200 times, roughly. about 1 and a half weeks in then i can hear that background beat. but when i hear that tune, it almost changes that song completely, such that i can filter out which "layer" i want to hear, becoming possible to hear 2 different songs. I'm sure musicians are able to do this immediately, but it's quite surreal when i found out about it the first time.

Another weird tidbit, which i'm pretty sure happens to most people, i explained it before. When someone, a stranger, is far away, I see them as if it's someone i know, but as i walk closer the face "morphs" into one of a stranger. I believe it is because as my eyesight is pretty bad, my brain is processing on limited perceptive data and so, fills in the rest with pictures from memory, forming a part stranger part memory kind of face, which is totally not as horrific as it sounds. as you get closer more data and information becomes available and the face becomes what it actually looks like.

And of course, there is how I would look at a woman (LIKE A PIECE OF MEAT, joking). I originally thought of using a picture to describe like what i did with my phone then i realized how completely inappropriate that would be. But suffice to say, my concept of attractiveness, stems from the face. I see someone's face first before moving down, in that order. Generally i find women attractive if they have a nice face, especially so when they smile. But like i told some of my friends before, she has to have a nice voice. Having a nice voice is a greater factor in how attracted i am to her.

So this is how i view, through the eyes of madness.