Religious furniture

“that’s like. tomorrow 0.o sorry I can’t make it, vesak day”
“oh you’re buddhist? it’s ok, np”

–Snippet of a Facebook conversation between Xiang Yeow and I

You ever get those survey forms where they ask for your religion? Do you, like me, hover over it for a while before deciding whatever answer you put down doesn’t matter, and that all hesitance is out of some innate need to bare your truthful soul to anyone who asks?

Right now I am thinking: why should this question even be asked?

I don’t mean that in a cynical, disrespectful way. I mean that in a puzzled, I-feel-like-I-am-being-forced-in-a-corner way, because when this question is asked it inherently assumes something: that you have a stand. A stand on religion. Whatever you put down, whether it is some religion or atheism or agnosticism or freethought, you automatically indicate that such a sphere regarding some sort of faith exists in your life.

But why should we accept these questions?

I’m asking this because I think that questions like this require that you have cared enough to do some research on at least your own belief system and have felt some form of connection to it. Not only that, this connection has to reasonably strong in order for you to actually answer something. It forces you to make space for religion in your life, even when the truth is– you don’t have that space.

Let me try to give you an analogy. Replace religion with philosophical system. Are you an existentialist, a fatalist, an objectivist, a nihilist, a positivist,…? Do you even know what those mean? Truth is, I don’t. I could probably give you a one-liner description of each, but that’s about it, and that hardly makes me qualified to say I am any of those, even as I feel like I hold some beliefs common to the one-liner description I give of the systems. That’s my attitude towards religion. To sum it up in four succinct words: I don’t really care. And how this survey question irks me is that it assumes I do.

I understand, of course, the major role that religion plays in some people’s lives. Personally, I don’t need a religious guiding force to find meaning in my life; perhaps at some point in time I will, but not now. I grew up in a Buddhist family, but I don’t think my parents really even know the core teachings of Buddhism, and it’s okay because they believe they are Buddhists, they believe in Buddha and other gods, they carry out rituals that to them are part and parcel of being Buddhist. They shush me when I question anything, for fear of disrespect to the gods. Some of it has carried over; it requires thought and some value placed upon the issue of religion in order to repudiate beliefs. Notice I said the issue of religion, as opposed to religion itself; the difference is that issue deals with where it is in your life, while religion itself goes inside the belief system, and it is uncomfortable– and untrue– to say that I don’t place any value on religion, Buddhism in this case.

To me, these beliefs are kind of like furniture– it’s comfortable having them around, I make use of them sometimes, there’s no impetus to throw perfectly functional furniture away, and also no need to devote thought to them. Asking me what my religion is is like asking me to bring my chair with me wherever I go and believe that it comes alive at night.

Unless, of course, you imply that the possession of these furniture in itself is indicative of my religion, then I think it’s time for you to think about your own faith, because surely there is more to religion than this. Surely.

Or I just think too much and I should just put Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as my answer.

It believes it can fly, it believes it can touch the sky

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May 7, 2012

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“Of course, the experience of it was… somewhat different.”

I love Titanic. I really do. I don’t care how cheesy it might be to some people, or how mainstream it is, or how many internet memes have been made about it:

I treat all memes and all parody videos of “I’m flying Jack, I’m flying!” as affectionate. Like telling the boy you like “You’re so annoying!” or the girl you’re in love with “You’re so stupid, Rose, you’re so stupid!” because she got off the lifeboat for you. NOTHING CAN SINK MY LOVE FOR TITANIC. NOT EVEN AN ICEBERG.

Now that we have established that, let us move on.

After this I-can’t-really-remember-what-number-it-is-but-I-think-fourth rewatch of Titanic, this time in the cinema, the thing that was apparent to me was: Titanic sets out to show how “the experience of it was somewhat different”. As dude-in-charge-of-submarine (or Brock Lovett, according to Google) says,

“Three years, I’ve thought of nothing except Titanic; but I never got it… I never let it in.”

You have all these facts about its dimensions, the number of people it carried, the lifeboats and their capacity, and of course how many people died from the shipwreck. You know roughly the stories that might be in there: lost relations, deaths because of the grief from these losses, basically a lot of sob-filled sad stories. Titanic has that, but it doesn’t only have that. It has the responsibility carried by the ship captains, it has the courage of the crew and passengers, it has a very human panic (although, according to the Titanic exhibition I went to (yes I am a total Titanic fan. Shut up.), the evacuation was very orderly, but just because it might not have been the case in this situation, doesn’t make it any less real), it has the tensions and contradictions inherent in every relationship, and I speak of course not only of romantic, but of familial and class.

But you don’t ignore the romantic part of Titanic– you can’t, because the whole story is centred on that. Why? Because, I like to think, the best way of making Titanic, or any other traumatic incident, “an experience”– an experience being something you live through, open your heart to– is through love.

Forgive me for sounding, if I did, cheesy. I can’t help it. I try not to let that somewhat laughable romantic in me peek out in public. It’s like having white granny underpants or something– comfortable but not exactly something you let people see. At least I presume they are comfortable. BUT: I insist it should not sound cheesy. I said it in all sincerity, and if you just let go of that tight hold you keep on yourself, I invite you to feel what I am saying.

Titanic might be centred on love, but that does not make it one of those sixty thousand romances/romantic-comedies/chick-flicks/whatever Hollywood churns out every year. Well at least I don’t think so because I told you I am in love with Titanic and they say love is blind. This is why I think so: more than the romance, I think the point it emphasises is– life is worth living. It ties in nicely with what it sets out to do (re: the experience). What makes Rose a terrific character is the appetite she has for life– that even if the man she loves dies next to her, dies because of her, she will go on. She will deal with it and go on, not without the sadness that comes from it, but with a wisdom that takes it in, and grows because of it.

If you don’t feel Titanic, you might brush it off and accuse it of having one of those anti-feminist storylines where guy saves girl. But here I will quote another thing from the movie:

Rose: It’s not up to you to save me, Jack.
Jack: You’re right. Only you can do that.

Rose is not passive. In fact she is so forward, she initiates most of the interactions between her and Jack. Jack gives her an opportunity, yes. What distinguishes Rose is that she doesn’t just absorb what Jack gives, she steps forward to take it. In the movie you never get the feeling that Rose is just going along with it; what you do get is she recognises the preciousness of this chance, and rises to the occasion.

Perhaps you might demand more: why can’t she do it without Jack? Maybe she could have. But perhaps you would do better if you take another lesson away from it: the depth of that impact of reaching out and caring, of a belief in a person. It is generally accepted that one’s life will inevitably intersect with many others’, and is constitutive of some of these influences. It is not something to be ashamed of to have received someone’s offering and become a better person by it.

And of course, finally, Rose is not ungrateful. She acknowledges Jack’s impact, she loves him for it, and, ultimately, repeatedly gives as much as she can back. And I don’t mean just emotionally. How many people, after all, can wade through knee-length level of freezing water, braving flickering lights (one of the scariest thing about the collision is the loss of light that accentuates the fear), after rejecting the opportunity of being safe on a lifeboat just to go back to save the person you love, instead of psyching yourself that hey, he must be safe somewhere, he can take care of himself? And then, after doing that and getting onto a lifeboat with all the blessing and assurance of said person, jumping back into the ship again as the lifeboat is being lowered, because you know that his assurances are just for your benefit?

Rose is utterly a character worthy of being loved, for her generosity, her unreserved feeling, her ability to take in and learn, and, definitely not least, her courage.

A couple more minor things about the movie: I love how Cameron thinks of all those little details, like the crashing of the plates, the floating porcelain, the people sliding down the tilted and later perfectly vertical ship and brutally colliding with the ship’s propeller. I love the magnificence and power of the furiously spinning turbines and the grittiness of the work of shoveling coal into the boilers. I feel sorry for the disregard of lives when, at the time of the collision, those men who are operating the boilers are not informed that the watertight compartments were going to be shut, and of course I feel for the men, the third class people, the captain and designer of the ship with the full responsibility of all these 2200 lives. I love that Cameron shows a sympathy to everyone, even Rose’s mother, even Cal Hockley– I came away from this rewatch with a realisation that he must have felt something for Rose, even as what he felt was distorted by his ego, his warped view of the world. I mean of course you could always say that he thought of Rose as his property, that his rage was because he can’t stand losing. I don’t have anything strong against that. But I don’t know, he puts the coat on Rose, he tries to look for her on Carpathia. He doesn’t respect her, because he can’t respect anyone with his mercenary world view, but in his own way maybe he did feel for her. That, in no way, excuses his behaviour; I am saying that Cameron lets you understand his motivations, even as you don’t forgive him.

And finally, THE LAST SCENE: what it could have been. This one I have no excuses; I am an absolute sucker for this. Take any sad-ish thing, show me a different possibility had people made other decisions, and I am more than half likely to love it.

TITANIC: MY HEART WILL GO ON.

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April 15, 2012

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In the time before Whatsapp

I’m going to do one of those Remember When (“Remember when a bowl of mee was five cents?” Yeah, at the time when everyone was earning like fifty bucks a month, and no I don’t.) posts, just a short one.

REMEMBER WHEN the number of free SMSes you had with your phone plan actually mattered? And that if you had someone you SMSed regularly, you had to set a quota for each day, so that your free SMSes won’t run out before the end of the month? Not only that, but because you had a quota, you thought every SMS was goddamn precious and you had to squeeze out full usage of its 160 characters, kind of like writing a poem with a word limit?

Having a quota makes you do funny things, like trying to spread that quota out throughout the day, which means 24-8=16hours with maybe 20 SMSes? Which means  an average of 1.25 SMS per hour, which is rather pathetic. And you would wait for the reply which presumably suffers from the same constraints, so depending on when the other person set his clock, you’ll get your reply about 40 minutes later. It makes you intensely aware of time– “I’ll do work, and when a reply comes, I know I’ve done work for the past 40 minutes, and I can take a break,” “It’s only been ten minutes and I have a reply– something is different, be it emotional state or schedule”– and sometimes you build your rituals around this regular receive and reply process. It’s strange, thinking of it now– how neurotic! How significant you made it out to be! How, even, artificial, and tiring to maintain this!

Somewhat irrelevantly, REMEMBER WHEN your phone actually had a memory limit for SMSes? (and also REMEMBER WHEN lousy phones forced you to go into each message, select options and select delete before you could acutally delete a message)

Yeah, that sucked.

Not complaining about whatsapp, it’s one of the best things about smartphones. But as with any elimination of restrictions, a certain meaning you used to imbue on something has been displaced elsewhere. Restrictions are funny like that, forcing meaning just from their sheer limitation.

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March 30, 2012

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Psychological experiment #2

“If you ever had twins to take care of, how would you identify them?” — Hai Wei

Some background knowledge

This is Zhi Xin, mother of, for the good of the world, hopefully no kids but all solutions. Conceptualising psychological experiments since 1999, she ensures that her experiments, if carried through, will go a long way towards proving psychoanalysis theories and helping humanity in general. She realises that these experiments, due to their radically brilliant nature, will never be approved by any conservative and un-curious ethics committee, hence she recommends that either you
a) abduct some orphans, or
b) use your own kids
to eliminate the ultimately fruitless red tape. Of course, along the course of these psychological experiments, social workers might come knocking on your door, but I assure you that as long as you carry out these experiments faithfully, nobody will be able to accuse you of anything. I’ll need to ask my more knowledgeable law friends about this though.

Experiment #2 (experiment #1 will be briefly talked about later)

You are now the mother/father of a pair of twins. What better opportunity than this to try out what happens when you treat them as a singular entity?

This is how it goes: you pretend one of them is merely an external self of the other. The corollary is, the latter is the internal self. We’ll name the twins A and B and take A as the original and B as the projected image. In actuality, A and B have the same name, the only way you can treat them as a singular entity. Give them only one of anything– one plate of food, one set of clothes, one toy. Whenever B does something good (eats his veggies, tidies up the place, doesn’t wail all night long), praise A. When B does something bad (kicks the house pet, swears, shits outside the toilet) punish A. Whatever A does, ignore. In any form of interaction between A and B, act appropriately to A– if A and B get into a fight, ask A concernedly why B (in second-person pronoun, of course) is apparently stumbling back and forth and fighting with air. If they talk, ask A who B is talking to, and wait until you get an answer from B; if A responds, pretend you never heard it. When talking to A, reply to A only when B answers.

Purpose of this experiment: What will happen if you are constantly visible, but you never suffer the consequences? Or if you are invisible, but whatever someone else does, you are responsible?

Once again, breaking new frontiers of psychology knowledge, and proving what we thought could not be proven.

FYI, psychology experiment #1 had to do with Lacan’s mirror stage– in a house full of mirrors, engineer the mirrors so that every time your kid walks in front of them, he sees a cat instead of his own reflection.

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March 26, 2012

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Trust my impeccable taste

The biggest problem you’ll find with reviews is, inevitably, ~spoilers~, as a certain lady from Doctor Who likes to say. However, I’ll like to take this opportunity to recommend a movie you should most definitely watch (without spoiling it):

This movie would never have been watched by the humble author if it wasn’t for the imbecility of our cinemas with regards to releasing A Dangerous Method. In fact, it almost wasn’t watched, because on the date when we checked for available movies, it wasn’t there.

Yes, you got it; a movie which won 5 Oscars this year couldn’t hold a match next to, I don’t know, The Lorax, or, to quote jx, “man on a fucking ledge”.

A few suggestions were considered:
“Hugo or Iron Lady choose one”
“I’ll prefer Hugo if it comes down to that”
“What about A Separation?”
-does a Google check-
“Uhhhh, looks damn emo” -hurries to look for another movie to get out of this one-
“OMG THE ARTIST IS SHOWING”

Why you should watch this film:
1. Seriously, how many chances will you get of watching a silent black-and-white movie in the cinema?
2. A non-emo one at that?
3. With a fabulous score?
4. And nifty use of camera shooting and certain effects we take for granted in movies nowadays?
5. Not to mention those heartbreaking facial expressions
6. It’s totally a French movie in English
7. Seriously, are you even still considering after the above reasons

I shall attempt to be a little more serious. Some spoilers here.

The movie starts off promisingly; it steps out of itself, metafiction style, to show a movie inside a movie– this should be an early clue that this movie won’t be trying to pretend that technology hasn’t advanced past the silent era. Indeed, as the movie progresses, you are surprised when foley effects (otherwise just sound you’re supposed to believe is from the scene, for the uninitiated) come on– this, I felt, was quite a stroke of genius– to surprise us with what is natural in movies nowadays, and use it for a purpose.

I love this movie so much.

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March 24, 2012

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The turn of the day

You never know how much you like company until you get it :D

So yesterday was horrible; my body was waging some sort of holy war and a copious amount of blood was spilled. Literally.

“That’s TMI!” you tell me.

Fine, let us go back two sentences. Let me start again. So yesterday was horrible; my nose was wrecking a storm. Literally.

“That’s better,” you tell me.

Today it got off to a ringing start, literally, at the godly hour of I suspect 8am. The thing about PGP fire alarms is that they are overly concerned about the prospect of you being so deep in sleep that you cannot hear it, so they decide that by prolonging the duration of their shrilling there will not be a single soul who will fail to evacuate due to ignorance. They are right. Souls like me fail to evacuate due to pure certainty that nothing is going on.

Given that it was raining, I call that a reasonable assumption. Given also that nothing has ever happened, I call that a wise assumption as well.

Guess what? Nothing happened. Omg bet you didn’t see that coming.

I spent forever on my breakfast (did I mention my appetite has taken a nosedive too? Not literally. Although I don’t see how this can ever be literal), so much that I didn’t have time to go through what I wanted to ask the prof before my consultation. While I was waiting outside the prof’s office, a lady with the most unfortunate of voices called.

Picture a stick of Wrigley’s chewing gum. Put it in your mouth. Chew it. Now take it out. Now stretch it. And stretch it some more. And some more.

“Stop!” you tell me. “Any further and it will break!”

I promise you, her voice doesn’t. It goes on and on. At a very unfortunate, constant, draggy rate.

I saw my prof arriving back at his office. “I’ve got to go!” I tell the unfortunate lady.

The gum is still stretching.

“I’m sorry, I really got to go!”

I will insert some tildes to symbolise the rest of what happened. ~~~

Anyway after that the day went swimmingly well. Wait, let us cut out any metaphors of liquids. The day was solid.

Some nice things of the day:
Lester gave me some tissue for my cold and Adam asked me if I needed some more. And then we sat down for our usual weekly meal and I was feeling quite talkative so we crapped for two hours, disregarding my midterm tomorrow (although Rachel had a midterm right at six); Adam and I got tea and Rachel and Lester got apple yoghurt. I asked Adam how much it was and he said it was on him, which was nice; Lester asked how Rachel was going to pay him back, Rachel gave him a smile and told him that’s her payment. That made Lester go “That makes me feel like charging you more,” to which Rachel responded by bringing out her wallet while remarking that it’s probably redundant to do so. Which it was.

And we peppered each other with tales of nefarious schoolboy pranks, friend-zoned girls and smelly boys.

IT NEVER GETS OLD, SMELLY BOYS.

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March 14, 2012

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Penumbra? Specular image?

20120220-160910.jpg

That awkward feeling when you read your Literature and Psychoanalysis text and all you can think about is your graphics rendering course.

(Also, that probably nobody who reads this blog knows what you’re talking about)

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February 20, 2012

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Welcome to Chinese 101

Educating Chinese-ignorant kids and adults alike since 2012.


The picture cuts out the 人 beside the 也, but do take note that it is there.


Commissioned by famous Tang poet Lee White to do creative translations of his poems, and change the Chinese characters if necessary.


Not very sure who this poem is by, but rest assured he approves.

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February 5, 2012

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UNLIMITED JUBEAT CREDITS

The gods have answered poor people’s pleas– there is Jubeat on the iPad.

“But it’s been there since forever!” you might say. This, I do not know. What I know, however, is that my dear friends have only recently been loaned iPads as they are doing Prof Ben’s iPad module, have graciously downloaded that delectable app, and have atrociously underused their iPads by not playing that app like a maniac (although, to put a word in for them, they are busy working their knees (knees. yes, knees. asses are so comfortable. knees are not.) off for Prof Ben). Thus, being the concerned friend that I am, I have taken it upon myself to utilise their iPads properly.

I know, I know. All that sacrifice. The time which might have gone to work, or building social relations, or smelling the roses.

You should be honoured, Benedict.

—

Are you one of those people who think Hearts is a game based on luck?

That you can mindlessly throw out cards?

That you win some, lose some with the AI you have on your Windows computer?

Then you have not played Hearts with Bridge people.

Just ask Victor, who shot the moon thrice in one and a fifth games (the other four-fifth I have no idea since I left).

Also ask LCY who says happily, “Counting is second nature to me!”

“HOW’S THAT POSSIBLE?” you, the skeptical noob, do not believe me. Just imagine. You are happily discarding all your hearts and the queen of spade on some other random suit you have run out of, gleefully thinking of the zero points that you are going to have at the end of the round. Suddenly you realise that you have run out of cards of the suit that the dude is going to switch to, and there is no way you can get control back from him. “OH F–” you have not even managed to finish that when you get slapped with 26 points.

On the bright side, so do two other people. Shooting the moon’s kinda socialist like that. Or maybe it’s still capitalist in the 1% 99% sense. Or 25% 75% in this case.

Alternatively, imagine the great Savanna and you suntanning under the toasty African sun. Suddenly a zombie eats your brain, but it’s ok because what need you a brain when you are under the toasty Africa sun?

—

Word of the week: biologistically.

Challenge of the semester: slip in as many more-than-four-syllabic, non-existent words as you can into your Literature presentation without getting caught.

Lil’ Less than Gangsta MacBeth

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February 2, 2012

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Perhaps sharks might find more use with this word

The human mind’s need for metaphors and comparisons is a well-documented fact, but sometimes the metaphors chosen are, to put it mildly, not exactly the most appropriate. Today, in yet another episode of Entertainment Erratically, I shall draw your attention to this particular word:

swimmingly
(adv) smoothly and satisfactorily, eg Things are going swimmingly

Now seriously, humanity. Of all the words you can coin for a synonym for “smoothly and satisfactorily”, you use swimming. You use swimming. WHY.

Well admittedly, runningly won’t do the trick– we all know how disgusting that panting, heaving sport is. Not exactly an ideal word for conveying a certain sense of lubrication when after about fifty steps into the activity you feel like lying down to watch the clouds float backwards would be a better illusion of movement. While walkingly is a much more enjoyable activity, things aren’t normally satisfactory if you’re proceeding at the rate at which you walk. There are exceptions, of course, but we need a word that caters to the general case. Flyingly would be a good idea if we could actually do it without a machine. And we mustn’t be so exclusive as to forget about people with a fear of heights– things sure aren’t going smoothly or satisfactorily if the contents of your stomach are about to be emptied onto unsuspecting passers-by below.

But come on, swimming?

Alright, I can see where the appeal lies. You proceed at a pace faster than walking, but with less effort than running. You can actually do it without an external aid. And I suppose that living in an environment which is about to get owned by floods from global warming makes swimming a word with overwhelming foresight from our carefree ancestors.

We actually didn’t swim, we used an ark.

Unfortunately, the likelihood that swimming will not go on smoothy and satisfactorily is, sadly, much higher than it proceeding so.

1. Swimming is more dangerous than sharks

We define danger as the probability of being forever extinguished when carrying out the activity. Because we think that being alive is the first prerequisite for a smooth and satisfactory, uh, conclusion.

If you are 3306 times more likely to be terminated by this activity than by sharks, surely it isn’t the best means for the purposes of this description.

Now I know you want to protest: “One drowns because one doesn’t swim!” While that might be true, let me present the second reason why this is such a lousy choice of a word:

2. You can’t swim.

“What!!” you exclaim. “What is this blatant falsehood! This utter piece of bullshit! I am never visiting your blog again!” I’m sorry the truth hurts you so. But let me tell you what can swim. Sharks can swim. Sea snakes can swim. Even amoebas can swim. You know what can’t swim? Humans. Contrary to popular belief, the mere ability to move through water is not swimming.

Even though I can swim, it is still a dangerous activity.

So what can we use instead? I’ll propose cyclingly. It enables you to travel vast distances at a faster rate with a higher chance that you’ll still be alive to enjoy your success at the end of the metaphorical journey.

Unless you get owned by a car.

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December 11, 2011

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