Hole in the wall

The hole in the wall that used to be my toilet.

Now that construction work is ongoing, there is drilling every other hour and worse, I have no access to a reasonably clean toilet. There's also dust everywhere, and I do mean everywhere.

To put this into perspective, the drilling is done in a toilet, in the kitchen outside the dining hall. The dust managed to spread all the way to the doorway and even the stairs. 

The guts of my once functional bathroom.

Excerpts from my iPhone: Education system

Having an education system instilled a sense of assuming subconsciously that everything you need to do and know is set aside for you and you just need to listen to instructions and do as you're told.

31/12/11

Excerpts from my iPhone: Worries

You know what I'm worried about? That my results in A levels will cause a repeat of what happened in Sec 2. That because I didn't work hard for my results and still got them anyway, I'm going to think I'm some punk ass genius and arrogant my way throughout Uni. Yes, I just made arrogant a verb.

22/01/12

Excerpts from my iPhone: Uncomfortable

I just realized how uncomfortable I am around smart people. I guess it's unfair to lump all smart people into one group and label them "uncomfortable to hang out with"

Excerpts From My iPhone: Naked Eye

At one point, I was quite interested in finding out how far the naked eye could see. At that time, in my mind, all I could really picture was a person or a building or an object walking or somehow being further and further away until a point where i could no longer see them with binoculars or other aids.

Eventually I got motivated enough to actually google for the answer. Most of the pages that turned up were about astronomy, which referenced things like biggest star you could see with your naked eye, or furthest celestial object visible and things like that.

My entire frame of mind changed as I read more and more into it.

While I was more interested in finding out a particular distance to which a person disappeared from my sight, I had failed to take into account any other factor at all. Granted I did think about sizes like buildings and such but they were always more of an afterthought. Seeing astronomy pages turn up in my "research" was eye opening because it introduced the possibility of other more important factor to a simple question like brightness, size and  clouds or fogs.

I don't really know why I wanted to share this particular story. I couldn't pick out a moral of the story, at least not one that is not vague. Maybe you learnt more from it than I did.

Excerpts from my iPhone: Affecting Others

When I was a kid, I couldn't really comprehend how my own decisions affected others close to me, particularly my family. It made no sense at that time that when I chose to stay at home and play my computer instead of going out with them would cause them to be easily infuriated. It still doesn't because i perceive that to be an individual decision that would only affect myself. I wasn't making any kind of statement or proving any point by not doing something in particular. "No, I refuse to be in the company of those who choose to eat lunch on time" I wasn't saying that. But people would somehow twist and turn my perceived intentions until i, for some reason became the bad guy.

I still struggle to catch many of these really subtle implications of my actions these days. But its' easier now when i see my own brother making the same decisions i made 5 years ago. Then, i wanted to stay at home as often as possible to play because that was the only thing in my mind. He does the same except he has a choice of skating or playing video games. But the general implications are the same. My mum would get frustrated at trying to talk to an adolescent son and my dad gets frustrated but quiet, when my mum does. Now, at least seeing it from a third person perspective, you get to see what went wrong in the communication. Sometimes it's the tone of voice that gets people jumpy, sometimes the fact that people are rushing for time or that the activity in question has been pushed back for a long enough time. Of course i still miss many of the cues that arise with this and my dad is hardly useful at all (in that regard). He just keeps quiet. I wonder if he's figured it out yet.

Excerpts from my iPhone: Beliefs And Such

16 Oct 2011

For the longest time since i became "atheist", one belief that i held very religiously was the fact that with as much potential for evil that men is capable of, we are also capable of great good. And that is a good enough justification for one to be good as an individual, because sometimes we all need that glimmer of hope to know that mankind is not a forsaken race. I call it a religious belief because it was something i believed in because i had faith in the humanity of all people, and because if we were to really take a look closely, it would be quite hard to find any reason or logic to do so. But i persisted, and believed that man was good for the better part of 4 years.

Now, I am having what some would call a spiritual crisis or religious crisis. That the one fundamental belief that you held which kept you grounded to the world was so shaken it almost feels like nothing is true. Something akin to God is not real or perhaps not as dramatic, more like there is a fourth holy book after the bible, a new New Testament.

I can never truly process how people can remain persistently selfish. It always feels like a major flaw in one's moral code when helping others is replaced by self-preservation. Perhaps I'm the weird person. Perhaps this world really does run on greed and self-preservation. Perhaps altruism really does not have a place in our culture. Perhaps I was really really wrong for those 4 years.

I'm not sure. But all I know is that if the people surrounding me (in this tent) represent the greater demographic of how Singaporeans and the Singapore Society is like, then there really is no good reason to defend these sons of bitches.

Excerpts From My iPhone: About Adults

This is a series about some of the notes i have written in my iphone. Most of the time i type away at my phone when i have no access to a computer and yet something comes to my mind that i have to write down. They generally are written much more quickly than regular blog posts and tend to be more emotionally charged, so expect grammar errors.

At 18 or 19, i figured out that adults were also growing and capable of making mistakes and not as infallible as i thought they were. They used to have this high and mighty place in my mind where they were always right and if you chose not to listen to them, you were either trying to be deliberately wrong or just alternative and rebellious. There was usually a consequence associated with no listening to adults. Like going to detention or failing grades.

But at some point, I figured out that they were as clueless about most things as I was, perhaps just slightly less. This realization changed many things. I became more understanding of adults as one capable of making mistakes and yet i also held this reverse view of them not "supposed" to be wrong"

Ultimately, the biggest change was that it allowed truly pointless people to exist as adults. There are remarkably  lazy, greedy, evil or otherwise pointless people who exist. And as a kid, i couldn't really comprehend them other than being this one-dimensional creature who exists solely to make life miserable for other people. Much like the boogieman, or in my context, Ah Bu Neh Neh (Indian) who would come and catch us if we disobeyed our elders by wandering outside a safe place like our homes or the 5 meter zone around our parents. Eventually i grew up and while i still had to cross paths with pointless people, i had the mental capacity to equate them as either born flawed or poor childhood. There literally was no other explanation i could give to explain why they are or who they are.

Being another adult who makes mistakes, it becomes easier to comprehend these people as people who kept continuing to make those same mistakes throughout their 20s and 30s, never really having grown up, much like myself now. And the justification i can give when someone like my father makes an irrational decision, is the same as when that asshole cuts my path and flips my off when i've done nothing.

Eventually, i will reach another milestone in my life which explain another mystery of humanity that i never knew existed. Perhaps one day i will figure out why humanity is capable of so much greed and justify it as self-preservation.