Dinner and Dance 2005. Yep, that's right. Thats me in the Stormtrooper helmet. From left: WJ, Diana (definitely looks like she's smooching the helmet. I can't remember), me, devilish Ken and Denise.  

Peter Pan-ism

Went out with some old friends last night. When I was telling a new friend about it earlier in the day, she thought I was hanging out with geriatrics. I clarified that they were friends that went back a long way. But after last night, I was beginning to think that the line between the two definitions of 'old' in the case of these friends was fuzzier than I'd thought.

I was one of only two singles last night. There were ten of us. Four couples. The conversation around the table went from golf to apartment furnishing to wedding planning. I think I was fairly reticent (which is pretty unusual, you'll know if you know me) the whole night. I only spoke at length on a couple of topics that strayed away from the main body of adult-talk (that sounds so wrong). For one, I volunteered an unsolicited sales pitch on the soon-to-be-released Xbox 360—“this machine’s going to revolutionalise gaming and entertainment!!”—to a largely unenthusiastic audience. Oh did I mention we were drinking wine?

Which really led me thinking about my seemingly stunted development. When did I get left behind in the great game of growing up? These were all my peers I had spent the better part of my life with—all the way from secondary school, junior college, army, college and back in army again. Somehow, they had all matured into stable, regular-income lives with predictable weekends and sedentary sports, while I was still frolicking my free time away, usually inebriated, and unconscious if not. The little boy in me never got tucked away. Hell, I bloody look like one.

Where do people of my flock end up? I remember this one line inscribed on the inside of a Pulp album cover: “It’s OK to grow up – Just as long as you don’t grow old. Face it.. You are young.” Sometimes I suspect I might just have taken it a little too seriously. Is it such a bad thing? For now, I shall revel in my perpetual youth.

Did you know...

I was chatting with Ashraf online last night. Through the random twists and turns of conversation, I learnt a curious piece of titbit information: that the word “serendipity” came from Horace Walpole’s Persian fairy tale Three Princes of Serendib and “Serendib” was an old name for what is known today as Sri Lanka.

The trusty Wikipedia tells me:

Serendipity
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

For other uses, see Serendipity (disambiguation).

Serendipity is finding something unexpected and useful while searching for something else entirely. For instance, the discovery of the antibacterial properties of penicillin by Alexander Fleming is said to have been serendipitous, because he was merely cleaning up his laboratory when he discovered that the Penicillium mould had contaminated one of his old experiments.

The word was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip. (Serendip is an old Persian name for Sri Lanka.) The episode in the story involves a case of spectacular abductive reasoning (as used by Sherlock Holmes), which later leads to unsought "serendipitous" rewards from the king.

Origin of the term
The fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip is based upon the life of Persian king Bahram Gur who ruled the Sasanian Empire from ca. 420-440 AD. Stories of his rule are told in epic poetry of the region (Firdausi's Shahnameh 1010 AD, Nizami's Haft Paykar 1197 AD, Khusrau's Hasht Bihisht 1302 AD), parts of which are based upon historical facts with embellishments derived from folklore going back hundreds of years to oral traditions in India and Tales of the Arabian Nights. With the exception of the well-known camel story, English translations are very hard to come by.

In the camel story, the Three Princes use trace clues to precisely identify a camel they have never seen (lame; blind in one eye; missing a tooth; carrying a pregnant maiden; bearing honey on one side and butter on the other). This result of abductive reasoning is not what is meant by serendipity (the discovery of something NOT sought). Because of their cleverness and sagacity, they are accused of stealing the camel and are about to be put to death by Bahram Gur. Suddenly and without anyone seeking him out, a traveler steps forward to say that he has just seen the missing camel wandering in the desert. Bahram spares the lives of the Three Princes, lavishes them with rich rewards and appoints them as advisors. These rewards are the unsought (serendipitous) results of their sagacious insights.

Pretty serendipitous discovery, I think.

This is why you can never tire of the internet. It’s the Serendib of our times. Except we’re never really looking for anything at all. We are all trivia junkies who get high on ‘I’m feeling lucky’. The one thing I liked best about William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition was its open acknowledgement of the place ‘google’ held as a verb in the contemporary lexicon. I suspect ‘wikipedia’ will make it there soon too, though two more syllables makes it a tad more difficult to roll it off the tongue.

Next stop: Did anyone ever wonder how bats poo-poo while hanging upside down? Heheheh.

Crimson Room

The internet's finest (prob unintended) expression of Samuel Beckett. You gotta love the bad English too. There is no strange thing.

www.fasco-csc.com/works/crimson/crimson_e.php

Second Link. Caught in the act: (from left) Tim, Raj and a shameless TH smiling for the camera 

Diplomatic Relief

Best soundbite from KL (aka Project X):

We're driving across Second Link after being caught in the Friday jam for the last hour. While stuck in the traffic, the three clowns who happily are my colleagues TH, Tim and Raj, were chugging beers in the passenger seats, so when we finally get through the Singapore checkpoint, all three are whining like babies about their exploding bladders. So I drop them off at the side of the Second Link expressway for rapid relief.

Back in the car.

Someone: Scarly the Malaysian customs stop us for peeing at the side of the expressway.

TH: Saya orang diplomatik!

Raj: You cock. That just means you're a diplomatic person.

Reality-check

I've got the second Franz Ferdinand album (recently pilfered) playing on the computer. I've got Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections tucked away in the front pocket of my work bag. I drive a Corolla Altis. I get my hair cut at Supercuts. I have two dogs I love and whom hopefully love me back. Every morning, I get up at 7.30am and go to work. It's a job I don't hate but also don't love. Every Tuesday I run. Every Saturday I swim. Every Sunday I play a little tennis.

Have you ever felt a pressing need to make a checklist of everything about yourself, just to make sure you're still there? Think of the cliched pinch on the cheek to check if you were dreaming. Except this is more like digging your nails into your eyes to check if you were awake. Okay I'm being dramatic.

There's this Faye Wong song:
(Blogger wouldn't display my carefully selected Chinese font. argh.)
xing3 bu4 lai2 xing3 lai2 hou4 hai2 shi4 fa1 dai1

Somewhere sometime I think I de-railed. Don't imagine it to be like a massive affairs like one of those Amtrak disasters where the train's fallen over on its side and passengers are desperately climbing out through the windows. The picture I had in mind was more like a constantly turning wheel that's run outside of its groove. It's still running but every day, every second, it just runs a little bit further away from the original groove. Zoom out. The wheel's just one of many, so this little mishap has been allowed to run unnoticed. And it probably will continue surreptitiously so for days, weeks and possibly years to come. For now, the whole engine doesn't just depend on this one wheel anyways. Who cares. But somewhere inside, you can't help but have this nagging suspicion that someday, that wheel is just going to run an inch too far out and everything might just come tumbling down.

Did you see Fight Club? Did you read any Chuck Palahniuk? He thinks its consumerism. Mass culture. Tv. Advertising. Production lines. Newspapers. Perfect replication. Duplication. He think its all of these that makes us numbly awake. I think of Murakami.

Anality now!!

I did it again today. Yet another stupid mistake at work. I actually CHECKED. I did, and I didn't see the mistake. If there's one thing worse than making a careless mistake, it's making one when you consciously tried not to make one.

Self-doubt.

It creeps in when you're not looking. When I woke up this morning, I felt pretty good about myself. An hour later, I'm in a waking nightmare. One stupid mistake, fine. Two, you're careless, you should watch it. Three. Four. Five. Six. I've lost count. I'm pretty sure my boss has too. Credibility lost. I'm an idiot. He thinks I'm an idiot. I think he thinks I'm an idiot. Same difference. It all adds up to the same thing:

Self-doubt.

It's a battle I've fought for the better part of these almost-25 years. Confidence versus doubt. Every conscious deep breath taken to steady the drumming of heart against chest. Every conscious decision to not tear away at my fingernails. Every time I've told myself I could do it and taken a leap of faith. So easily undone, apparently.

What does it take to acquire a meticulous eye? I never thought I'll say this, but what can I do for a little anality? Stuff it up, please, if you know what I mean. If I'm going to survive (let's not even talk about thriving), I'm going to need it.