Cereal Musings

Something was wrong with all of my colleagues today. We all had this uncanny feeling that it was Friday, despite all our PCs, watches, phones and calendars telling us otherwise. Thursday? No no, it can’t be… it feels like Friday! Well, if everybody around you believes the weekend is here, then what difference does it make if it isn’t really so? With that in mind, the lot of us shot out at lunchtime for shopping and food. Hmm, maybe if we were all convinced Monday was another day, it would affect us less, heheheh.

Sometimes it frustrates me how opaque we are to one another other. I’m not talking about poor communication skills, emotional barriers, etc. I’m talking about the quintessential opacity of all human interaction. But this of course isn’t news to you. We’ve all had to come to terms with the mental alienation that frames our relationships.

Language is the imperfect conduit we use to forge fragile intimacy. Little wonder then that I feel closest to those people I can talk to easily. Unfortunately, it sounds crass when I say that strong English is as important to me as a good heart. It’s nonetheless true though. Actions speak louder than words? Well, not always. If a friend took a bullet for me but we never had the language skills to communicate, then I’d know she/he loved me, but not why and how; not her/his fears, flaws, dreams, demons…

So a special thank you to all of you I can truly talk to. It’s hard enough to find people who mean what they say without worrying about them having the ability to say what they mean.

I just got off the phone with a fellow biker, after a conversation carried out in what he and I both realised was a new language. I picked up his call with a grunt, and after bemoaning the sad state of his current bike, he proceeded to ask me to be his guarantor for a new bike, which elicited anguished moans from me because I’m hungover and in no condition to make important financial decisions.

The conversation was obviously going nowhere so I asked him what language we were speaking. He tentatively suggested Martian, then said no, actually it’s Moanish.

Beware of conversing in Moanish - it means you’re temporarily insane in the membrane.

Someone was complaining to me on Tuesday night about being troubled and unhappy. I pointed out to him that he was actually in the sweet and transient buffer zone between being young and beautiful with no career and no money, and being old and spent with success and riches. That happy buffer zone shouldn’t be wasted on being miserable. Similarly, I pointed out that his troubles were actually happy troubles, since you have to a relationship in the first place before you can worry about it. Happy buffers and happy troubles. The fellow told me the perspective cheered him a wee bit. Does it cheer anyone else, or is it cold comfort?

I was having dinner with an old buddy just now when he mused aloud about some people being addicted to self-defilement. They feel they don’t deserve to be happy, so they rip themselves to shreds. When happiness threatens them, they panic and scuttle their boats. Press them to give happiness a shot and some will say that they know they don’t deserve happiness, so the best they can do is to tentatively explore their level of desert - “We’ll see how much I deserve.” Unfortunately, the exploration is usually stillborn since you can’t really embrace something to see if you deserve it unless you already feel you deserve it.

I must say that this kind of self abuse is all too common, in my experience. Hearts scarred shut by pain and fear. The instinct is to try and shower them with love, but they end up screaming as if the gentle rain were burning their raw skin. Untouchable.

And I wish it weren’t so.

Weekends have been interesting. That’s par for people who don’t go out much during the week, but I do, so why should Friday and Saturday be more colouful? Ah yes, the answer’s fairly obvious: it’s because more people are out on weekends, so there are more potential partners in life’s tableaus.

Take last weekend. If the previous weekend was great for love, this one was great for catching up with old faces.

Friday night, I found myself at Zouk for the Singapore launch of Channel V, alone. I had an invitation that allowed me to bypass the snaking queue and waltz into the club. Once I was inside though, I bored quickly. TV crews were still doing multiple takes of the same staged scene and I found myself wondering what on earth I was doing there.

“That’s it, I’m leaving,” I thought to myself, and slouched my way towards the exit. But then, a familiar face popped up out of the crowd. A totally incongruous face; one I never thought I’d ever bump into at Zouk. It was an old junior college classmate I hadn’t seen in 2 years!

It turned out she was there to meet her colleagues, so I stayed and hung out with them, defying the music volume enough to do some catching up.

The star of the gig was Ryan Star, Rock Star Supernova reject, er, I mean participant, and fan favourite. He was ok. I confess I like his song “Back of my Car”, which he performed unplugged that night.

Saturday night came, and I found myself at a barbeque party. The people were interesting, the conversation was good, and I was in a pretty good mood. La-dee-da-dee-daaa… wham, I met another old classmate! And I hadn’t seen this one in a long time - probably about 9 years.

What were my chances of running into 2 old classmates in consecutive nights? Slim; frighteningly slim. Lightning struck twice, and made a believer out of me. What kind of a believer, you ask? A believer in getting my arse to every mildly interesting event since I’ll never know who I might meet there. Meeting old faces is even better than meeting new ones. I actually didn’t feel much like going out on either Friday or Saturday, and boy am I glad I did. Fortune can’t favour you unless you’re in the right place to receive its favour, so I’m going to keep out of my house as long as most of the rest of Singapore is still awake. Unless, of course, there’s a compelling reason to stay home; I don’t forsee one in the near future.

Maintaining the weekend’s momentum, I met up with another old classmate on Monday, and man it was nice. I’m going to try to keep a nice balance of meeting new and old faces.

Human relationships are the only thing of real substance in this world, so I can’t really go wrong with my gregariousness. Alea iacta est. Let’s see what the coming days bring.

When I’m asked me what I like to read and watch, I rattle off a list of prose and movies, and then include my favourite graphic novels and computer games. Often, that gets me reactions ranging from scandal to incredulity. That in turn makes me either clam up, or shake my head in disgust, depending on how well I know the person.

Graphic novels are a long-established artistic medium. Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Sandman… ’nuff said. A graphic novel is illustrated prose taken to its logical conclusion. You know those old books with woodcut prints? Graphic novels are an evolutionary variation on that theme.

And computer games are non-linear interactive narratives, unparalleled as a medium in human history. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but to deny the technical merits of the medium is a dead giveaway for technophobia. To call computer gamers artistically lowbrow is simply an ad hominem fallacy.

The medium doesn’t determine the depth of content. Authors create content. There are shitty books, and masterful computer game plots. I’m a fan of spellbinding narrative, regardless of medium. Or is that stance too highbrow for you? *chuckle*

Sex Without Love (by Sharon Olds)

How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers,
Gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, facesr ed as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth, whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

I’ve mused over this poem over the last decade, ever since one of my oldest friends introduced it to me. Nothing else I’ve read quite captures the stark opacity of intercourse without any emotional involvement whatsoever. The imagery of a runner running against himself, with the only real yardstick of measure being his own best timing, gives me a cold feeling in my gut.

Yes, I know some people actually have a term for this - sport fucking - but naming an activity doesn’t explain it. Also, I think it’s not so much an activity as it is a perspective on life and human relationships. Often, the implication is the impossibility of two sentient beings ever truly connecting.

Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that the fundamental human relation is conflict. He made a distinction between two fundamental states of being - “for itself” and “in itself”. We are “for ourselves” in the sense of being individuals directed by intentions. And we treat a tool, like a screwdriver or a car, as an “in itself”; a mere object without existential depth. Insofar as those who make love without love treat their partners as sexy treadmills, the relation is that of a “for itself” using an “in itself”. Not a terribly encouraging way of conducting interpersonal relations.

Zionist Martin Buber optimistically proposed a different pair of fundamental relationships - “I-You” and “I-It”. The latter refers to relationships between people and things, while the former refers to relationships between people and people. But I-You goes beyond just two people facing each other blithely. It refers to treating another person as more than merely a means to an end. But the key difference between Sartre and Buber lies in how they treat relationships. Sartre sometimes seems to feel that they’re ultimately a waste of time. Buber feels that they’re all that’s really important.

Speaking of human relationships, this brings me to my favourite notion of the human self, formulated by semiotician Charles Peirce. The long story is… fairly dense, heheh. The short story though is that human beings are infinite, and though we’re physically circumscribed by a lifespan, it’s not a container for what we are. There is no container capable of containing a person. Take this analogy: When you finish reading a novel and close the book, is that all that can be said about that story? What happens after the story ends? What happens elsewhere while the story is happening? And what’s the meaning of it all? The story itself is infinite, and the ending is just a capricious chapter marker. You/me/we are stories. Infinite stories.

Yes yes yes, this is all getting terribly intellectualised and abstract, I know. So, what the fuck’s my point? Well, I find it absurd to treat people as sexy treadmills; to treat sex partners as sport partners. Hello, you’re communing with an embodiment of infinity, and all you can worry about is running against your own best timing? Talk about being a philistine, heh.

Last weekend was great for love.

On Friday night, as the minutes tick towards midnight and the threshold of her birthday, the singer sags at the thought of spending that special day alone, with her boyfriend abroad, far away. Why celebrate bittersweet loneliness? What the hell for? Yet she adjourns to meet his friends, to trumpet her birthday… and emphasise his absence. She walks through the crowded pub, game face on, determined to be strong, and then, out of nowhere, there he is. It’s not possible. It can’t be. Wishful thinking, damn the wishful thinking. But it’s real. Flown back just to be with her. She doesn’t believe it. I don’t believe it. And I cheer - for her, for him, for love. For love.

New scene.

Saturday morning comes, and the bloke paces nervously round the restaurant as the final touches to the Registry of Marriage (ROM) preparations are put in place. This dude who once steeled himself for a life of punctuated loneliness; who once mused that his role in life might be that of the matchmaker, the facilitator of happiness, but never its possessor. This man who somehow managed to show his beautiful wife how his heart beats. This bloke is nervous. Nervous, but needlessly so, because there she is, looking absolutely stunning. To my eyes, she looks even more beautiful because I know she’ll love him like he deserves to be loved. And then, one “I do”. And then another “I do”. And I almost cry, but spare the couple the embarrassment.

What a great weekend for love!

Few will remember my first attempt to get a blog going. I spent more time futzing with CSS than posting. Recently, I decided to give it another shot using Friendster’s neolithic blog system. I figured that the lack of customisation options would force me to focus on writing instead of tinkering. So much for self-knowledge, heh. After a scant few posts, I found myself hankering for an efficient weblog system linked to my old domain name. So, I set up the latest and greatest from Wordpress, only to discover that I couldn’t import my old posts from Friendster. Wordpress’s import tools are actually quite sophisticated, but Friendster just isn’t supported. Ah well, I’ll repost the entries the hard way then.

What, not enough drama? Ok, how’s this: I’m back baybee!!!