I'm listening to: Weezer - Island in the Sun

Something I came across today was this book called Time and the Soul. It's actually a heavily disguised 'self-help book', and I say 'self-help' because I think anything philosophically stimulating is helpful to the self, and this one is particularly pertinent. I only got to finish the first section of it, but there're a couple of ideas which really struck me.

The idea of the human mind/life as the site of conciliation between the eternal and the temporal, infinite and finite, etc., as well as the existence of an unchanging essential form in any person. Of course it'll take quite a bit of substantiation to do this any reasonable amount of justice, but that's what the book is for. You can see how these two go hand in hand. Worldly events governed by superficial measures of time and their transience are often juxtaposed against this unchanging fundamental form, and recognition and acceptance of the latter will provide colossal empowerment to the individual who realises he/she is no longer bound by commonly conceived notions of time. It's definitely not easy to chew on, and I'd be shocked if anyone buys the idea simply from reading what I've said.

Today was incredibly special. Just prior to reading Time and the Soul I'd experienced something that could validate the author's claims in a very personal way. A potent combination of the right people at the right place at the right time transported me back more than three years to revisit a bygone period in my life. The feelings which heralded our arrival back in the past were unmistakably familiar, yet accompanied with surprise at the vibrancy of the moment, pulsating with a life of its own that psychological memory will always fall short of capturing. It wasn't just a shadow of the past. To put it succinctly, such experiences are old but always new; a seeming paradox. Yet it takes as little effort as the shifting of perception to view it from another angle, to see that it can be perfectly congruent. For example, a vintage item you pick up at the flea market is both old and new at the same time if you'll go beyond the physical age of the object alone to also take into account your own experience of it. It's a very rough analogy but I'm hoping just to illustrate how such a paradox is built on mere shortsightedness.

Similarly, this might appear to fly in the face of my agreement with the guy and his famous quote about never stepping into the same river twice. Of course, the river is everchanging, yet its essential river-ness will always remain. So to determine if it is still the same or not, it's just a matter of perspective with regard to the meanings we give to the terms "same" and "different". With the truth being a combination, neither and both are correct or wrong to varying degrees. There isn't an absolute answer.

Time's passage doesn't always go by the clock, in the sense that it sometimes seems to fly or crawl by at completely different rates, and one has to wonder if it can be objectively measured out at all. The illusion of being able to do so is perhaps a result of neglecting the subjectivity of the human experience, though apparently vital to everyday life. I think it's important to understand that's all it really is.




Too early to say goodnight

My Bucket List

Experience all four seasons

Write something beautiful

Discover true love

Grow my own flowers

Make and keep lifelong friends

Visit the different continents

Stay up all night stargazing till sunrise

Find a term for the nostalgia-deja vu-nausea-?? complex

Go on a road trip/backpacking

Feel utterly stunning HAHA

Learn to cycle

Save someone's life

Straddle the line between two realities

Design/furnish the interior of my own home

Make a stranger's day

Hug someone who really needs it

Come to terms with the mysteries of life and death

Tour Europe

Dance in the rain

Find something which never fails to make me smile

Get an Honours degree

Taste food from all over the world

Visit great art museums like the Louvre

Take a ride to nowhere

Discover my life's purpose

Find my signature scent

Feel completely at peace with the world

Experience a distortion of time

Allow my parents to settle down comfortably

Learn to accept people for who they are and aren't

See the northern lights

Get married and have kids

Tell people I love them

Work with job satisfaction

Learn to salsa/other latin dances

Donate blood

Wake up on the beach

Bungee jump/skydive

Learn a foreign language

Find someone to check off bucket lists with

I'm listening to: Iron and Wine - Such Great Heights

I just saw The Bucket List on tv. I think if I had to die soon, I could go quite peacefully. I haven't lived long enough to do all the things I'd like to, but I think I'm keeping good time. I don't believe life is as simple or as complex as people make it out to be; probably somewhere between the two extremes or just a matter of perspective. For that reason, coming to terms with oneself and one's life shouldn't be anything like ramming your head against a brick wall.

I've encountered existential ennui before without realising it. I went to find out a bit more about Lost in Translation, came across this term, and did a spot of research. It's liberating to finally find a name for a feeling I couldn't quite fit in a box - in two words. The entire holiday/break has been a more tangible manifestation or demonstration of this concept in many ways, which accounts for how tired I am of it. I haven't exactly been sitting around at home much and rotting like that, to have been thinking and feeling this way. It's the way in which things have been glinting with their multi-faceted surfaces and projecting their nuances and complexities in loud displays that are just impossible to ignore. And then you realise you've got work to do. You turn down the amps where you can and chuck the rest.

I'll come up with my own list soon =)

I'm listening to: Absinthe Glow - Contradictions

I don't feel like going to sleep yet. It isn't like the day's been great, much less exceptionally so, that I want to prolong it. It's just that I don't feel ready and willing to put conscious experience on hold right now. It sounds so ridiculous, but with so many things happening amidst constant change, I'm more than ever before painfully aware of the ravages of time and I need to take a moment to indulge myself in the illusion of standing outside of all of this mayhem, to entertain the thought of evading the inevitable.

The dead of the night virtually offers us the world in a still-life portrait; a window to temporarily cast aside all practical concerns and immerse the self in microcosmic eternities where second after second melt into each other and seem to run circular against the faded demarcations of the impersonal passing of time.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do or even how long I have to make up my mind, but I'm determined not to think about it at least for the rest of the night. Compartmentalizing our lives like that might be the only way to keep many of us remotely sane, but it's really quite odd considering it defies unity of existence. Possibly it takes place on a superficial level to offer just enough contrast to emphasize the latter instead, which I think is more deeply vital.

I'm quite bothered by the limits of consciousness in comparison with the territory of the subconscious/unconscious, with the idea that there are parts of my identity and knowledge chained to some undiscoverable crevasse of the mind and held completely off limits. At the same time, it's a relief because their emergence may hail the annihilation of everything held dear and in precarious balance with all the other odds and ends in messy reality. There isn't really much to complain about, I guess.

There're so many things I want to but have yet to do, and I've the rest of my life for that. But it's got to start somewhere. I'm craving human experience in its immaculate fullness - something I'm far from attaining at least as of now. Frankly, I have no idea what the missing elements are.




Oh when I look back now,
The summer seemed to last forever.

Oh and when you held my hand,
I knew that it was now or never.

I'm listening to: Our Lady Peace - Somewhere Out There

I wish you didn't have to leave so soon. I miss you so much my heart aches. I'm still expecting you to appear at the door, or to be sitting around at home.

I don't know where you've gone, or if you've simply ceased to exist in the most technical sense of the word. I hope the former is true, so I might get to see you again. All who are born die. It's an axiomatic fact of existence yet it hardly offers any comfort. It doesn't even begin to account for why some have more time than others.

The short time you've been here, I hope you enjoyed yourself. Though I've shown very often, I've never said it directly to you and you probably wouldn't have understood, but you know anyway that I've always loved you very much; we all did. I can never again have the comfort of your companionship but I won't ever forget how much it meant to me. I regret not having the opportunity to bid you one last farewell, although circumstances weren't in my favour to do so.

You've gone, one step ahead of me, into the great unknown. From where I'm left behind, you've opened a window for me to understand it from a different perspective. I've learnt that it isn't as gothically horrific as I'd previously imagined. You turn its mystery into something beautiful, where the sadness finds its source in the premature ability to comprehend all of this.

I'm still writing about you now, and it means the essence of your being is forever immortalized in the hearts and minds of those who loved you, as well as in writing. Your life is a thread in the greater fabric of the universe, like how its end is part of a greater scheme. It's something I may never come to fully understand but will always believe in. I can't say it wasn't a terrible shock, but things fell in place pretty neatly following the terrible accident, and that I'm grateful for.

I will never forget you. Thank you for having been in my life.

Goodnight and goodbye, my dear.




Charity and gratitude
They run to the pines
It's black in here, blot out the sun
And run to the pines
Our misery runs wild and free
And I knew, the fire and the ashes of his grace

I'm listening to: The Temptations - My Girl

Your eyes emanate such a hypnotic lustre. Beneath that, they're unfathomable, like bottomless wells. Not anymore. I knew I would one day unlock their secret. Of epochs past, spent in vain trying to unravel the hieroglyphic messages you left behind, I'd come to realise the answer lay not in them but in the macrocosm of their little worlds intertwined. You love me, and you were afraid of how vulnerable it made you.

My dear, I will stab you in the heart again and again, because your love always heals it over for me. I will indulge your deepest fears. You will weaken but never die, and that's the way I plan to keep you, while constantly hoping you'll never realise how much worse you could hurt me. You could barely stand on your own, and sweetheart, I like it almost as much as I love you.

The blood that courses through our veins has turned from a crisp crimson to the colour of the night sky, and it's a deliciously decadent feeling. Yet, it's starting to sicken me. You've become a pathetic mess. Just one careless slip obliterated forever your former charm, individualism and mystery; you might as well be a faceless mass of gore. I'm sorry for being so clumsy.

Fate delivers its terrible verdict: we're dead, and so we've been for an awfully long time.

We'll say goodbye without words. We're more than that. You taught me how love and hate are separated by only a thread. Your eyes, once onyx, have glazed over with a blossoming of hazel flecks. For feeding off each other's souls, we're monstrosities reared on human flesh, and we're mirror images too.

But at least we now know what'd been inside Pandora's Box.




I've got sunshine on a cloudy day.
When it's cold outside, I've got the month of May.

Well, I guess you'll say, what can make me feel this way?
My girl, talkin' 'bout my girl.

I'm listening to: Alanis Morissette - One Hand in My Pocket

The events that transpired four years and three months ago have come back after a long hibernation to haunt with a vengeance. Exactly the third time I've tempted fate in an attempt to reshape the associations made with such an activity in such a setting and such things leading up to it, I'd already, as always before, scripted and simulated the breakdown over and over again. I think it helps a little. The first time fate finally caves in (could it be expected to hold its own indefinitely?), at least I get to relive the melodramatic horror in the comfort of my own home. Big consolation.

I can't say it caught me by surprise, but I can say that this reconstruction is a mere shadow of the grotesque monolith it found its origin in. Did my efforts, then, pay off? I think they generally did, but I honestly wish I didn't have to find out like this, or at all. It really hits home.

I'm listening to: Liz Phair - Explain It To Me

The music for Danse Russe is stuck in my head. I hope nobody takes offence, but it's awful thinking about it all the time because it sounds so sombre like it's for a funeral.

I had a lovely day. It was nice hanging out with old pals I hadn't seen in about a month and hadn't really gone out with for way longer, and just being comfortable letting out the boy in me. But not literally, it's not like I'm a hermaphrodite. It reminded me of Kuching. I miss being a real kid and all the stupidly fun shit we used to do. I practically grew up with them (since most of my real growing up took place between 15-17) and they'll always have a special place in my heart, partly for contributing to how screwed up I am today, haha, but really for being steadfast companions and a source of strength throughout that tumultuous period. Though in the past, that's something I could never take for granted.

Hahaha, cool shades. I looked so retarded I just had to crop myself out.

I'm listening to: Dashboard Confessional - Remember to Breathe

stop running Juggernaut


There's only so much South Park and (unfrosted) strawberry PopTarts can do to make one feel better. And sometimes, along the lines of Weber's Law, it's practically nothing.

I don't think it's something that's arrived yet. Maybe that's why it hurts so bad. I must be capable of more than that, no? They make it sound so beautiful even for a classic nightmare. I hate thinking there are certain things that perpetually resist conscious control.

Bloody, fucking hell.




I'm writing again,
These letters to you
Aren't much I know.

I'm listening to: Yellowcard - Firewater

Haha, oh look, it's exactly 12.51.

This has been one of my favourite songs for about half a decade, and I doubt it'll ever get old. I'm still grateful to the person who sent me this song, and many other great ones. I don't think I could forget you, and I don't want to.

It's something I'd decided quite a long time back; that you can't really miss a person. People are changing all the time and it's amazing what even a couple of days can do, so the person you used to know has inevitably perished, in a metaphysical sense. That guy whose name I can't remember (I'm quite embarrassed) said you never step in the same river twice; and likewise, you never meet the same person twice.

I think what people really miss when they reminisce about the past is the state of things at a certain point in time. Artfully balanced dynamics at an opportune moment, like a heavily luxuriant blossom in spring, lasts only for the season. To preserve it artificially in its entirety defeats the very nature of its being, though it does lend to fossilizing in the crevasses of memory and leaving such minimal traces. 'To have and to hold' never quite stays the same.

All this, sadly, suggests that longing may be a lot less personal. And I'm hoping it doesn't simply come across as plain cynicism because I hadn't the intent.




You sat me down beside myself
To show me all the reasons I was wrong for you
Was this for real? It's hard to tell
'Cause it was such a beautiful mess we had got into

I'm listening to: Brand New - The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows

I've been listening to plenty of heartbreak songs; this one by Brand New amongst others like the more mainstream Daughtry's No Surprise. I'm not sure what exactly's drawn me, but I made a somewhat startling revelation after immersing myself in all that mass-consumerist sorrow.

I noticed that amidst the intense pain and sadness, there was a sense of closure - the bitter end to a chapter in one's life, but an end nonetheless. With the setting of such parameters, it scaffolds the foundation for healing towards completeness of the self, or at least to a state as complete as it ever was prior to all the events that transpired. Having gone the distance, maybe it isn't that epically disastrous.

Should beauty and happiness not be found in the journey rather than the destination? And why should these entities by bound by linear and single-directional concepts of time; could they not mean as much despite having been experienced in the past? The mind may forget but I believe the heart never does.

Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes goes,

Owner of a lonely heart,
Much better than a
Owner of a broken heart.

But I think it's a little short-sighted. Who's to say that longing doesn't tear at the heart as much as loss does? And regret for letting opportunities slip may become a neverending, labyrinthine nightmare. I'm not at all saying that brokenness is better than loneliness, but that even in practical aspects the latter should not be a clearly more desirable option. However, the former is a route often taken by the thoughtless, and to deliberately, wholeheartedly and wholemindedly tread the same path would easily feel counter-intuitive.

I believe everything I've said but because of that I really can't be sure that it translates into practice.

On a separate note, my heart is again weighted with yet another burden that, though small, burns sharp like hot coals. The discomfort is acute but transient - it comes and goes in waves. This time however, I know exactly what it is and what I'm going to do about it. It will be an arduous test of my patience and I'll hang on as long as I possibly can. But I'm open to changing my mind.




We saw the western coast
I saw the hospital
Nursed the shoreline like a wound
Reports of lover's tryst
Were neither clear nor descript
We kept it safe and slow
The quiet things that no one ever knows

So keep the blood in your head
And keep your feet on the ground
If today's the day it gets tired
Today's the day we drop out
Gave up my body and bed
All for an empty hotel
Wasting words on lower cases and capitals

I'm listening to: Thunder - Love Walked In

I woke up at 7.45 this morning after sleeping for less than 3 hours. It's such a pain. Oddly though, I'm not actually that tired.

I love being out in the middle of the night. It almost feels like the world's momentarily stopped with everything and everyone else and by some twist of fate you're the only ones not frozen in time as well. Nighttime becomes a Polaroid photograph open to closer observation and it's so difficult not to admire the beauty of dusk with its vague outlines and unusually long silences, under an inky velvet sky studded with the nebulous glow of an occasional star/planet. We become an accidental tourist to a single facet of the universe as we know it, and under such circumstances are able to comprehend it fully by actively employing different faculties of mind to engage with it.

Assimilated into that greater web but without being caught in the social fabric, we find ourselves in harmony with the patterns of the universe; and like a ripple in water, the breadth of our human experience broadens laterally to encompass more without us getting sucked in deeper beyond the moment. This delicate state is always broken far too easily, but it will readily return every so often as if in anticipation of our participating in it. Like a living creature.




Come take my pulse, the pace is on a runaway train.
Help, I'm alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer,
Beating like a hammer.

I'm listening to: Sugarcult - Memory

After being away even for such a short while, I'm so glad to be home. My head and heart are in line again and I've returned with new clarity - or have the intricacies been obscured by an subconscious decision to ignore and forget? It doesn't matter either way.

It's frightening how quickly things can spiral out of control beneath immediate consciousness, where the only indication is when we get a sense of things bubbling under and threatening to burst out and devastate everything; that something isn't right, and we can only try to cushion the impact when it finally strikes. I don't often work that way, thank goodness. But when it does happen it's a sobering reminder of the mind as a partitioned entity which we don't often, if at all, have complete, deliberate control over.

Its spectre still haunts me and I wonder if it'll ever stop, but I can live with it. It's never been overwhelmingly difficult to come to terms with myself because if I can't, how could I expect anyone else to? The problem was in excavating the elusive heart of the matter.




This may never start,
We could fall apart
And I'd be your memory.

I'm listening to: Finch - Letters to You (acoustic)

This will come to pass.

I have to believe it.

I'm listening to: The Strokes - Last Night

Apocalypses are so often portrayed with such epic grandiosity, but it'll never get old because the possibility of its conception perpetually gnaws at the human imagination. Perhaps it spawns from some collective guilt as in the Jungian collective consciousness, that we're driven to dwell on the very thing that terrifies us the most: the complete destruction of everything that defines contemporary civilization which we've long assimilated into our characterization of humanity. That which is the basis of such fear may be inaccurate - can humanity in its most essential form evolve simultaneously with its 'phenotypical' developments? Apocalyptic terror may therefore be unfounded.

We might just be feeding the monster that is our awareness of human frailty, to put off upfront acknowledgment which would probably culminate in direct confrontation between that and our great pride; a bloody battle within the coliseum of our psyche. Satiating our thirst for harmony in a partial coming to terms between various warring factions of the mind makes sense, to me at least. By "partial coming to terms" I mean something like Revonsuo's Threat Simulation Theory of dreams, that is, simulating the end of the world so we have somewhat experienced it in a safer kind of proxy where we get the moral of the story without the devastating costs. Also calling to mind the rebirth of hope and faith, its moral lessons are the balancers which pull our thoughts and actions in the right direction. I hope I actually make sense. I'm so sleepy but I had to get something out.

On a separate note, I had a REALLY lovely day. Thanks for sharing it with me =)

I'm listening to: The Beatles - Twist and Shout

I'd finished watching season two of True Blood since yesterday. I didn't care much for the bits with the annoying maenad and psychotic religious fanatics, but I still like it as a whole. Jessica and Hoyt are so sweet, and I really love Godric's character. But who wouldn't? A Gandhi of the vampires AND he's incredibly charming; a killer combination - no wonder he had to die after appearing in just three episodes. Even for fiction, maybe he's just too good to be true.

True Blood just puts Twilight to shame. It came nowhere near trying to cover everything with a saccharine candy shell so it was gritty and plain nasty sometimes because of the way it portrayed human nature. So bloody disgusting and realistic beyond (obviously) the immediate subject matter, the awful aftertaste it left lingering was from the realization that our world comes close to being as messed up and we don't even need vampires to do that. Yet amidst the horror (not to be confused with terror), there's still some room for love, beauty and redemption every now and then like little pieces sandwiched in between.

I can't hardly wait for season three =)





When you came in, the air went out
And every shadow filled up with doubt.