August 29, 2004

2 deep and 1 shallow.

Met bionic annie and pervert snow for dinner yesterday. Had a really engaging conversation with my fave iced passion at CC, Holland V after that. We covered much ground.

1. PM Lee. Just so whoever's sitting beside our table may be impressed that some youngsters in Singapore actually follow the news and hey, I can name quite a number of ministers! And their portfolio! Wow!
Bush-Clinton-Bush, Lee-Goh-Lee. And yes, one of the verses in our pledge goes 'To build a democratic society, blahblah...' It's ok. Any Tom, Dick or Harry (hmm.... isn't this MM Lee's English name?) would be fine, just as long as the performance is more than an amusing political game. So, shall wait to, hopefully, applaud. As for Snow's humble opinion that foreign talents are screwing us all the way from top to bottom, I gotta agree it's blowing out of proportion. Pun intended. It's a sync or sink situation. But we can still hope.

2. Religion. We concluded this topic rather quickly, despite it being part of our agenda for meeting up. Readers who might be offended, pls do yourself the favour by skipping to the next point in list.
We are agreed on the possibility that Jesus, Shakyamuni, Mohammed, the many saints and deities are all playing dai-dee and chess, having a cuppa, up there while their followers down here going at each other's throats. And we agreed that churches are becoming more social than spiritual, and some are just venues for funtastic drama (pls refer bionicgirl's blog), like if you really need to save that $8.50 on weekends. Religion is the opium of the masses (thanks Marx!), but to smoke opium is a personal choice, and we respect that. But we do not condone that any one brand is more superior to another. And stop assuming that by dragging your friends (worse, gf or bf) to the opium house with you, you are saving their pathetic lives.

3. Responsibility. Grossly misused term, thought Annie.
We agreed that a sense of responsibility is severely lacking in our society today. Not talking about responsibility towards others (whose other name is obligation), but responsibility for yourself, to acknowledge yourself, to be answerable for your own actions, words and behaviour, to be able to live with the mess you created yourself. (This ties in to religion as an excuse for your lousy behaviour, like instead of saying 'I fucked it up myself', we say 'so-n-so put me through this test and I pray that he will help me clean up this mess'.) All this talk about being socially responsible and responsible towards your family and partners when we shield responsibilty for ourselves. Really meaningless.

4. Comfort zone.
All guilty, some more than others. First we let our papers and ideals to restrict ourselves, when they are actually the things to set us free, give us more choices in life. Then, we set up our own comfort zone and try to tell ourselves (and anyone who would listen) that it's not that bad. And before we know it, 30 years have passed and we still haven't made that career change.

5. A close shave with philosophy.
Snow suggested the possibility that someone bigger than life is overlooking all of us here. Someone called Morpheus. hee.. That our being here is not the result of a big bang, that life is not coincidental. My suggestion was that maybe life is just a random collection of atoms. And the iced mocha vanilla he drank yesterday is really just the product of a few random collisions of atoms, and the fork is not there. So, what we wanna know is what is there to life if it's just a pretty ugly accident?

6. This is Home, truly.
We still love being here. Still wanna come back here, even if we can choose to stay away for good. This is where our friends and family are, where we can share nasi briyani, indian rojak, fish and chips and char kway teow on the same table. This is where I would start from, if one day, I have the means to make any big changes.

7. The one.
Is not Neo. My morbid suggestion was that, if you really want to believe someone is The ONE in your life, you should end your life asap, before any doubts come into the picture. No point waiting until you start asking the 'What if's, then go through divorce. It's not that we don't believe in the other person, it's that we don't believe in ourselves. We ought to believe we are already at our sexiest and most attractive now. Bottom line? We all try to keep finding The ONE cos we don't believe we can commit. Sad.

8. Academia bottlenecks
Is there nothing new we can say in our dissertations, other than building on what has already been said by the classical thinkers? Keep thinking about this.

9. Knowing what you don't want.
Most of us don't know what we want in a career, a relationship, a life. But we usually know what we don't want. We agreed that that's a good start already. Don't be too harsh on yourself. You can't know exactly what you want all the time. 'Cos that will make life too boring and too predictable. Sometimes, you just know what you don't want, stay away from those and try all others that you might want. In the end, elimination method still works. Just don't get into the comfort zone too much, enjoy the process and erm, try to get some fertilizer out of every shit.

Amazing how we covered this much ground. Considering the crowd consisted of shallow pervert snow. I think Snow has found his calling in life - piss taking from Annie and me. Admit it, pervert. You love us.

Posted by 杏 cy （Jancy） at 16:03