(torch)light at the end of the tunnel

After what was possibly the Worst Week ever -- screwed by RL and all Bosses down, going home at midnight every day, finding out that Jack stuck a really big bloody spoke from behind, and Oasis Thursday (which I can't even remember exactly, but just woke up knowing that I had messed up AGAIN) --

I get a letter in the mail telling me I've passed my nikyu Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

It's not much, but a hundred dollars more a month means I can now afford a few more pints of beer to help get through my drone-y days. Anyone up for a Heineken? It's on me.

Nine years on

Supper conversation tonight:

End-of-the-world Scenario: You're 35. You're still in the civil service. You make 7 - 8k a month as a Deputy Director. You work unearthly hours - you eat, breath, hell you shit work. You might be married, you might not be. Chances are, you still live with your parents, and if you don't, you live in a crammed rathole. You meet up with your friends. Those guys you knew from school. Those who began just like you did, two feet on the ground and teeth-grit determination. Difference - they're lawyers, they're i-bankers, they're consultants. They took that path you never knew. Never could know because those bastards had you by your balls.

You'll remember that nine years ago, when you first broke into the "late twenties" bracket, you had supper with these guys at that corner coffeeshop that served cheap but good Teochew porridge into the wee hours of the evening. These days, the disparity slaps you in the face. Worse, it's a bitch slap. You didn't realise that nine years ago, they were already making twice what you made every month. Now, they were making thrice or more. Compound interest added, these guys were living the stuff of dreams. Your friends, yes those real people, made it into the tv while you were still on your second-hand couch with coke stains and bits of potato chips tucked deep in its recesses. No point channel-surfing, bozo.

But the clincher is that you know the fight's over. They rung the bell while you were out stone cold on the arena mat. KO. Game over. Go home, loser. You never stood a chance for the first six rounds because you were blindfolded and had your wrists and ankles bound and were told that it was actually good for you. What a load of bull-crap.

Addiction

Do you remember those campaigns against smoking, drugs and glue sniffing when we were kids? We all remember emaciated youths with their ashy insomnia-induced eyeshadow and cosmonaut expressions on tv or even the walking life-size cigarette buds fishing the nicotine-hooked with their well-not-so-subtle literal fish-hooks. Or what about the proverbial ball-and-chain perpetually attached to shadows of real persons for whom escape is but a word that belongs only to Alice in Wonderland and other Adventures. We remember these so well, yet one wonders why no one ever bothered to warn us of addiction (which to some extent, has become an affliction) that affects more people than the usual vices and exercises an effect far greater and more devastating than the rest?

“I wish I knew how to quit you.”

That one line in Brokeback was at once pure popcorn Hollywood cheese at its finest, and also a singular moment of emotional resonance. A friend of mine has fallen recently into these all-so-familiar trappings of person-addiction. Not just any person, but the fearsome ex. Ex-date/gf/benefriends/frenefits/fuck buddy, call it what you want, it’s the ex. Ex-addiction is worst kind of person addiction.

You suffer without reprieve because in this particular person, you re-discover the joys of connecting. Connection. Connectivity. Yep, that’s right. The feeling you have when it’s effortless to converse (not speak) with another. When you don’t necessarily have the same ideas or views, but exchanging them is a source of incomparable pleasure and satisfaction. When you actually feel for the other’s misfortunes and unhappiness as if they were your own. And conversely, you revel in the other’s triumphs and felicitous fortunes without any ostensible benefit to yourself. But you suffer without reprieve because while you think you developed a certain affinity for this other, you cannot and should not expect reciprocity. Because once upon a time, you did so and that expectation consumed you alive. So you fight it. And in doing so, you fight yourself. You refuse to piece together what the individual neurons in your brain and your nerve endings in your skin are processing in fragments. It cannot and should not be. Every brush of the arm is an affront to your sensibility. Every smile must be counter-intuitively rejected.

Why not walk away? We would if we could. But choice is illusory. Most of the time, we’re stuck in a masochistic rut. Just sniffing and sniffing away at our addiction.

Happy

Flippant flubberoos followed by
Manic cackle
hi ho ha ha ha hoo!
Howling in prefab delight
Just like these words
distance, dilute, dissolve
meaning
this not That.

Spherical objects

Revolutions. The idea that life tumbles around like a bowling ball. The finger-holes, two beady eyes across a cherry mouth agape, are apparent for no more than a second before they roll away from sight. Then here they are again starting again from the crest of a rotation. And then gone again. And here again. And back again. Top sinking to Bottom. Repeat. Here turning into There. Repeat. High turning into Low. (The funny thing is, the Bottom-Top, There-Here, Low-High transition is always so abrupt, so sudden. A moment of blurred consciousness, then we are happy once more.)

And so it is. I wake up to find that what had been done unto me I had done upon someone else and done unto me again. We can be such shapeless creatures, dependent on only our relationships with another. One moment, the power is in our hands, and we dictate the terms of what's going on. We make the rules. We control the pace. We have possession of the ball. (Soccer, you fool, you can't kick around a bowling ball. It hurts.) The other can only watch, trying to anticipate, but ultimately falling flat on the arse.

Then with another, we don't even realise we've been backpedalling for the last ten steps. We pander to the other. We read entire generations worth of meaning into the most insignificant of gestures. How pathetic. But yet. Happy. Was this how it was for the one we don't pause to consider (yes the one with the ass on the ground)?

Mars versus Venus

Saw this on TV today:

Women in Taiwan are paying hundreds of dollars to have mashed up swallow droppings smeared all over their faces in the name of beauty. Apparently, swallow-poo face masks are the new cure-all for complexion problems.

Read this on the cover of a book titled "The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Never Grow Up" today:

Women have loved them, married them, left them and survived them... BUT no woman can resist them!

(The first page of the book then quotes the New York Times: "(this book) proposes solutions for what is considered a severe psychological problem amongst men"

Final score: Men - two! Women - ZERO!