Friends above fame

What is your destination in life? Life is a journey, the destination is death. That is true for everyone, whether or not you believe in afterlife. It is important that we all live life to the fullest, but hankering after the next big thing before we even finish with the first is a recipe for serial indigestion. Goals after goals, we want to go further and further. But if every step is merely a stepping stone, even in death there will be no fulfilment. To map everything out rationally may land us with the most irrational and undesirable of outcomes, i.e. nothing.

It is not necessary to earn your first million by the age of 30, or get a job with a title longer than this post. But it is important to be happy, with friends who will be honest, even brutally so, when you go wrong because they know you take their comments in good faith, who will do all the ditzy and ridiculous things with you and talk about the weirdest and most retarded things on earth. It does not matter where they came from, which school they are going to and where they may be working next time. These are just irrelevant data of little value. Sometimes it's not the journey, but the company. There is no point reaching whatever pinnacle when there is no one with whom you really want to share it. Paths will inevitably diverge and life gets lonely, but it is the lack of vested interests that makes friendships all the more real. It is the differences in backgrounds, tastes and experiences, that make the times together refreshing.

Be honest with me, if that is the side you want to know of me.

Fireworks

We just had the fireworks festival. The Lebanese had a rather different way of lighting the night sky, involuntarily of course. Meanwhile, some people tried to have the biggest and most destructive fireworks display in US, by flying in 10 planes from the UK. Somehow, temporary euphoric firework displays gave hope. But when we sat down and talked about our friends' and everyone else's problems, fireworks were just not going to provide anything more than temporary reprieve from the darkness. Unfortunate things are happening all over the world, and S'poreans have time and money to do fireworks.

Why blog? I think I found the answer to it in Naipaul's Among the Believers. This English teacher in Pakistan said in the book: "Writing is pain, all the rest is pleasure; but the day will come when writing is pleasure and all the rest is pain." Don't know where we are at this point in time.

Two odd things

Went to Little India today and in a short 3 plus hours, noticed 2 odd things.

Number 1: I took 857 there and back, and saw these hemispherical opaque objects attached to the front, back and somewhere in the middle near one of the aircon vents in the bus. They look like the security cameras near ATMs. Have no idea whether they are some new features I missed in the news and as of now, still don't know what to make of them.

Number 2: This is even more retarded. Was at this coffee shop at Kelantan Lane and this sign outside the toilet stated: "Those who are not customers of the coffee shop have to pay 10 cents." In that half an hour I was there, at least 5 people walked in to the coffee shop to use the toilet, and did not pay a single cent. The best part of it all, the sign was written in all four languages.

The extent of my extreme boredom...

PR = Public/ People/ Personal relations??

People come, and they go.
You ask for name, say nice things and ask for a little more details to help you remember the person. It may even be possible that you have spent substantial amounts of time together. Yet in the end, the person may have left a deep impression on you, but you have been quickly and easily forgotten. Its a bit like how we leave muddy footprints on the school field, but can never trace exactly where we have once set foot.
I hate PR events, with a vengeance. For one, they come across as quite artificial, and my inability to match names and faces usually mean I call the wrong people by the wrong names. :( For all the time I spend out socialising, I have very few friends actually. For the record, I have good friends I have known for a few months and I also know people for many years but know about as much as I would if I have met them yesterday. Sometimes, it is difficult to know if I know someone or the person they make yourself out to be. Insincerity sucks.
But for the few good friends I have, I say thank you for connecting with me, putting up with all my nonsense (awkward moments, bad jokes, weird logic, angsty rubbish, whiny blogposts, etc.) and let's not get disconnected easily like some unreliable stolen wireless connection. :)

P.S: If you actually bother and put up with reading this whiny and ungrammatical post, I most probably like you. :)

ramblings

There is too much angst in this page of late. Too unbalanced and too much bad blood, bad feelings and in the end, bad cryptic blogging. Admittedly, looking on the bright side has never been one of my strengths.
But in a world that is far from clear-cut and increasingly of varying shades, it is difficult to tell right from wrong. Or more like, more right from more wrong. (ok, clearly bad english.) People point in all sorts of directions, some say to relax and be more forgiving, some say to be more driven and hardworking, some say to be social and more outgoing. You can be nothing to everybody, something to each and everyone, but not everything to everyone. Maybe it will be easier to make less judgements and watch the world go by. But the fun part of things is always to look beyond the face value. Sometimes we strike gold, sometimes we see ugly slime. It reminds me of Princess Mononoke, in which those "affected" animals have snake-like evil things squirming under their skins. These things grow and spill out of any open wounds onto others' skins, thus infecting them (a less contagious version of HIV?!)
That is a long side track. Life is a lot easier if we just follow the flow, going down the path of least resistance. Like a rock thrown into a stream, you either go downstream or sit there and be gradually eroded.