long service

according to the certificate they give these things for loyalty and dedication in public service. i suppose that's one way of saying the selfless don't need financial recompense.

fifteen years. it isn't for the money that'll make me see another fifteen more. but then, how many important things in life are?

relativism 1

what gets my goat also are the moral relativists - it seems a cop out to resort to "it's depends on one's perspective", or "what's wrong to you may be right to me" because it often indicates an unwillingness (or maybe inability) to take the issue to its logical conclusion in preference for leaving it in the safety of an indeterminate miasma.

surely relativist positions suit opinion, not morality best. an act that is wrong but has extenuating circumstances, for example, is not right under such circumstances and wrong under others - it is still wrong but understandable, or permissible, or forgiveable. the morality of the fact does not alter, only the adequacy of response to it. non-moral issues need no such finesse.

carpentry

generated much point-blank surprise from my conversation answer to how last week's precious few days off were used, where i avoided both cerebral taxation and the occupational hazard of letting work spillover into freed time. i restored old furniture.

the quizzical reactions: why bother fixing the old and broken when one can buy the utilitarianly new and perfect? what yield, worth or value came out of the time spent doing so, since it was neither recreation nor profession, neither art nor chore? why engage in the bygone craft of carpentry and handiwork in an era of colour-by-numbers ikea assembly (or why add longhand when a calculator is available)?

work-life harmony

as part of a larger socio-political agenda of the state (stress levels affecting healthcare budget, work demands detracting from family life and correspondingly population growth, etc), this new initiative filters down once again in the most legislated, most panacean of ways. case in point: staff can opt to go for a walk in the nearby gardens together - the option being a choice of dates, not a choice to walk or not.

and so personal life has been made more harmonious with work life through the implementation of additional work-organised activities which take away more personal time. maybe the implementers-that-be further intend that we transfer our daily-life activities into a work context - in which case we ought to spend more hours in the workplace running our errands from workstation portals, dating our colleagues at in-house restaurants, raising our kids in office creches, and living in en-suite serviced apartments.

we'd never have to leave work.

yin and yang

now, for something completely quotidian: i drink only cold beverages; the woman is more normal in her variety. in any order of one hot and one cold drink, regardless of type or volume of beverage, swankiness or relative crowdedness of establishment, or age, experience, distractedness or sexual disposition of the waiter, the hot invariably is placed before me, the cold in front of her. even for the most astute of service personnel, who bother to ask 'who's having the coffee?', their hand actions by their serving tray already belie their inclination.

so far, this gender construction is batting a hundred.

ant and grasshopper

no fireworks this time in the results, even with the significant improvement over last year. interesting is a comparative statistic, the weakest class did better overall compared to the strongest. this is not a new trend, but has surfaced in certain years. my theory is that hard work trumps intelligence and flair most of the time: an accurate assessment of one's capabilities followed by an earnest effort to remedy one's weaknesses will always succeed more than a comfortable banking on one's ease at grasping concepts and appreciating nuance.

such a truism - but it works for scenarios at this level of challenge.

self-nomination

is it defeating to nominate oneself for a award? does it demean said award if the organisers open it to application rather than nomination? on the one hand, self-nomination smacks of self-aggrandisement, and calls into question one's motive for doing whatever it was one was doing in order to deserve the award. on the other hand, going by the truism that no one owes you a living, it is surely imperative to avail oneself of the best possible opportunities - participation might get one some recognition, non-involvement gets one nothing.

is it any wonder that the third option might include those who are deserving of such award and recognition, but steadfastly refuse to have anything to do with it?

fan tai sui

this newer trend of observing an additional animist, astrological, pseudo-religious practice seems to have gotten people under its charm (pun intended). the grand duke of jupiter influences an entire quadrant of the 12 earthly branches, determining the auspiciousness of your chinese horoscope sign for any given year. prayers and charms are the usual palliative for such infringements which one would not have any power to affect otherwise.

apart from its suspect origins and composition (being leery of neither tradition, custom, religion nor even superstition, but objecting to the vague mish-mash of beliefs arbitrarily lumped together such as the layman cannot but fail to understand what exactly it is that he is suppose to observe), the lemming-like approach to such trends to jump on the bandwagon and do the little that is necessary to ward off the impending negative karma of the coming year is exactly the sort of thing that will continue to perpetuate the snake-oil scepticism of animist religious belief, occlude further the simplicity of faith practices of those who do believe in what they believe, and exacerbate the gap between the two.

post-lupercalia

it's hard to find a middle ground between those who believe in a more dramatic expression of such a day of celebration, who necessitate the whole machinery of florid display and gastronomic assistance, and those who steadfastly dismiss all claims of import attributed to such a date, preferring to pretend that their erstwhile lives regularly exhibit such dedicated joyous fervour.

i'd much prefer it if people remembered to at least intend to express love first, both ostentation and pragmatism be damned.

chores

by definition and implication already pejorative - something that one does not want to do but has to do. which means that in some people's opinion, tasks such as cleaning house, or cooking, or changing nappies, are much maligned when labelled such, since clearly some are very happy to, for example, cook, not just when fancy strikes, but every day. the notion of tedium and unwillingness does not seem to plague their concerns.

likewise other activities, say driving one's car, exercise, even sex, can certainly qualify as, and for some, will decidedly be regarded as, chores of a much odious nature.

any task can be an encumbrance, i suppose.

indecisiveness

i've said my piece on choice (nov 2005) but it strikes me again how difficult it is for anyone to make a decision confronted with a future that is necessarily uncertain by nature (it is logically impossible to know whether one has made the right choice until one actually makes it - and even then the wait is often interminable), an absence of assurance or approval from appropriate agencies (sometimes we are desperate enough to require such affirmation from any source, however irrelevant - 'does this dress make me look fat' - ad nauseum), and perhaps a hard-to-read or unwilling-to-use moral compass (shoulda woulda coulda).

it is inexorable that a choice must necessarily come from a self. that's what i suspect people either try most to avoid, or fail to find.

retreat

i suppose that what holidays can also mean - a hiatus from judgement, comment and opinion. one refrains, one gives benefit of doubt, one is charitable, to the extent that one can be. a sanctuary from the ideas of others, from signal to noise.

best of all, a dialling down of the loudest, sometimes most strident and critical voice - a retreat from oneself.

elite uncaring face

haven't heard it said that way before, preceded by "get out of my...", and from an elite 18-year old from naturally an elite jc with an elite mp father who defends her point of view (but mitigates her harsh tone by way of concession). glad to hear that the insufferables haven't skipped any generation at all, quick to pass unthinking judgement, an intolerance for alternative viewpoints, a brash tone stemming from the unshakeable assumption that one's opinion must be indisputably correct, and a clear disdain for the hoi polloi.

some bloodlines should be left to peter out ingloriously.

(the straits times, 24 october 2006 for the article - it's a must read)

atherosclerosis

in this day and age everyone's been pretty well-warned as to the dangers of LDL and cholesterol deposits in arteries at what not. once again ironic that something necessary for survival (manufacture of hormones, cell membranes, vitamin metabolism) we either accumulate too much of, are unable to process effectively, or hoard in ways that hinder other areas of life.

the starkness of this irony in materialistic pursuits, emotional pursuits, achievement pursuits is too obvious: too much of a good thing - up to and not including workaholism, dotage, affluence, obsession et al. it's a fifty-fifty chance of not dying from a heart attack or stroke, fifty-fifty all these pursuits will bring us happiness and contentment.

this has made us soft on the outside, and hard on the inside.

codes 3 - doing your own thing

on the other hand, minding-your-own-business-ness; the trope of individuation in the face of norms and mores; testing and renegotiating social and cultural boundaries; the blurring of private taste and public self-expression; all leading to the expectation that the accept-me-for-who-i-am actualisation (maslow's to blame) justifies itself as more central than anything else: the self-definition paradigm.

codes 2 - adherence

motivated by some underwritten idea of fairness (which i admit from c s lewis' principle of moral objectivity), sometimes manifesting itself as not letting someone get away with what everyone else lawfully abides by, or permitting no exception, because of some abstract notion of maintaining a form of cohesiveness of outloook, or the impetus for an overarching structure of order to scaffold all behaviours interconnectedly so that all actions have their place, or even a harmony of sentiment driven by the discomfort at the jarring and out-of-place (literally the chinese expression that what is observed does not sit well with the eye): these express the paradigm of adherence.

social codes

granting that there are of course rules of conduct, both codified and unspoken, for workplaces, educational institutions, public venues, etc, it still is surprising, and often annoying, how there'll always be a party which will impose more control than stipulated, and others who will decry any form of rigorous interpretation of such strictures.

at a workplace, some will tut-tut at the slightly bared midriff, the shorter skirt; the student is stereotyped by his or her need to always push boundaries of shoe colour and hairstyle; hugging/kissing/petting in trains/parks/cinemas; private nudity at a heartland hdb home with undrawn curtains: some people get genuinely upset by what they see as a transgession of social and behavioural norms, and some don't care. some want more rules, some fewer.

no point telling one group to be less anal, or the other to buck up. more on this.

the timed exam

the least pleasant part of any educational process, involving extensive and tedious rote preparation, anticipation of an environment and a framework quite unlike anything realistic, acquisition of specific skills of focus, analysis, pace, coherence, among others, held together by a certain mental and emotional disposition. not unlike the actual competition event in a sport - its nearest equivalent.

funny how the artificiality of it all, its ceterus paribus-like quality is desired as a means of most accurately assessing ability. no other condition is more clinical and devoid, more reductive of man as comparative performance engine.

success

barring providence, fortune or whim of fate, most success comes from having put in the requisite effort, time, investment etc in order to produce the desired result. bodybuilder pumps iron 3 hours a day, takes his steroids, sticks to a bland chicken breast diet; top-notch lawyer puts in 16-hour work days, schmoozes with the right set, stabs and connives for opportunities up the ladder; all-distinction student slogs all day, reads only the most arcane of theory textbooks, joins olympiads, and so on and so on.

here's a perspective: looking at success as undesirable because it would entail becoming the kind of person one might loathe to be, or doing the things one might abhor, in order to be in that position of success. so rather than admiring the buff, trim musculature of the erstwhile bodybuilder, one pities how such a major part of his life has gone down the drain in achieving something of such inconsequence.

to have wasted one's life becoming powerful, rich, beautiful, smart, to have wasted it becoming successful, is a horror and a tragedy.

minority report

quite vindicated when i discovered oscaraustin noticed as well that the protesters in town for the world bank / imf conference et al who were deported were traced via their cellphone signals.

remember these aren't local handphones. which means they were on the watchlist even before they arrived. i would have expected such scrupulous security for suspected terrorists, but activists?

remember also they hadn't done anything yet. they were disbarred based on what it was assumed they would do. 'precrime', in the words of philip k dick. four million smiles only for those with agreeable intent.