Spatial Survival

I bought a keyboard two weeks ago. For days it sat beside my bed as a temporary location while I thought high and low for a permanent place it can call home. Knowing me, days became a week, and a week became two. It became increasingly difficult to reach certain parts of my room like my closet and toiletries table. Dust started to coat the surface keyboard and then it hit me that my problem isn’t the keyboard, but mathematics.

You see, the size of my living space had remained constant for the past decade, save for the occasional new cupboards which might have added a negligible amount of real estate. Lately, there was a noticeable trend in my household in utilizing high walls by building cupboards against them just so we could “go vertical” and declog the near-full-capacity horizontal spaces.

It did not help that I have hoarding issues, but that is another story altogether.

In light of an almost-constant amount of space available, it is necessarily zero sum – for every item that I buy, some items would have to be displaced. Living in the 21st century in a suburban terrace double-storey house in Asia, with four other adults who’s equally fighting for space, I need a living mantra, which I summed up as follows:

“Don’t just buy stuffs, throw stuffs too.”

The (Not So) Amazing Spiderman

I watched The Amazing Spiderman yesterday, to give you an idea of the level of currentness I live by. I cried on several parts of the movie, which is an increasingly common occurrence. Either the movies that I picked were really touching or I’m becoming a sensitive man. Either way it says good things about me.

The movie was okay. And by that I mean, not amazing, but had adequate production value to keep me watching. As an aspiring screenwriter, I was especially interested in the climax of the story. Resolving the conflicts is what I love to investigate and in the case of The Amazing Spiderman, its resolution is random and miraculous, almost bordering on pulling a deus ex machina.

One should never over-analyzed plots but I did anyway. The best climax I had seen thus far was resolved with adequate precedents, within the setting and/or the character. At the “crucial moment” – my term for that very last moment where the hero appears to have lost it and defeat is eminent, the hero finds a trigger consistent with the precedents.

Presumably the triggers renew his passion, spark new but crucial ideas, and/or boost physical power, anything that tip the balance of power, thereby enabling the hero to achieve his objectives.

National Day

Yesterday was the National Day, which means 55 years ago this country gain independence from the British. It is hard to miss an occasion like this even though I have altogether stopped reading local news. There are many exhibition of patriotism that would ensure your day would not go by like any other day – conspicuous display of national flags, perpetuating media announcements and rotations of patriotic songs, and of course unusual traffic conditions – like empty roads on a Friday evening,

I truly cannot appreciate the significance of National Day. History lessons in school had me believed that it is the day where our forefathers fought, apparently heroically, for independence from the British, so that we don’t have to bow down to white men anymore. So yay, fist in the air, we are self-governed. We are free.

Increasingly, I am now being colonized by my own government, whose incompetency permeates every level society. Freedom, whether it is religion or speech or association, is sporadic at best. Media perpetuate lies, corruption is rampant, education system is mediocre, public infrastructure is deplorable, government services are third world and electoral process is questionable.

I am now caged by my ruling government who firstly brought me freedom.

A Demarcation Post about … Demarcation

I don’t know about you, but since I am living from day to night and night to day, I never knew how to demarcate my own life. It is almost always the externals – external sensory triggers or feedbacks from other people who punctuate my life and drill into me the understanding that I have reached the end of a life chapter going into another.

Like how a friend made a casual remark about my appearance. Or perhaps on ceremonial events like birthdays. Perhaps seeing an old man walking by the road holding a tiffin carrier. Then I draw a line, and acknowledge to myself that beyond that line was something else, a previous chapter that has now came to a finite end. Perhaps I’d seek to understand it or try to spot a pattern and sum it in a conclusive sentence, and gradually, sometimes reluctantly accept it as a fact.

So it was like an anchor sinking gradually into the depths of my heart that I accepted my apparently-drastic weight loss, that I’m now twenty three, and I was rather mischievous to my late grandfather as a kid growing up. I don’t necessary realized these myself living my life as a never ending tapestry.

I was rereading some of my previous blog post after a long absence of logging in, not without the agony of concluding all the way that I had in the past written terribly – or rather untruthfully. My writings appeared to have been heavily edited and self-censored to the point where I feel alienated by the author whom I supposedly know very well.

So I am demarcating this point of my life and hereby pledge that I want to write truthfully and “be myself”. That means, I should write what I want to write and not what I think people expect me to write – that is if I had any readers at all.

I could draw a line here, using the Underline tool of this blog, but that is childish and would insinuate that I do know understand connotations and have to take things literally.

Oh well. The demarcation.
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Blinding white lights

Just last Sunday I bowed before blinding white lights and thought to myself in casual amazement: I just had one of the most overwhelming experiences in my life making a debut in professional theater.

As with all other experiences in my self-declaringly imminent rags-to-riches life, my stint had been fun, beneficial and educational. In retrospect, that is.

During the rehearsal period of close to three months, it was brutal. Each time I walk out of the rehearsal space, I almost always felt a part of me wounded. Sometimes it was my ego or my overused physical muscles, mostly it was my false sense of equilibrium and security that had been left unchecked for years.

There are a few things that I had gradually (and by the last day of show, finally) came to terms with. Firstly, I am an overthinker. Initially I thought I was just an overthinking actor. Soon, I realized I’m an overthinking pianist, songwriter, aspiring screenwriter [and millions of other glamorous professions].

Secondly, I don’t always react “in the moment”, an acting concept that has gradually (and by the last show, finally) came within my grasp. The idea of plunging directly into the unknown or “going with the flow” and reacting truthfully to situation remained a formidable challenge. Also, I am almost always guarded. I erect walls so no one could peek into my deepest feelings. Sometimes, even I couldn’t (wouldn’t?) get pass the wall.

But the bigger idea that gave rise to these inner demons in the first place, upon thinking (overthinking?) is my complex sense of insecurity and occasional and inconsistent lack of confidence. Okay, “I don’t have confidence” (Note to self: stop overthinking!) They are compensations to obtain more confidence. Overthinking, planning and being guarded are my means to self-assurance – they made me feel comfortable and safe. I attempted to psychoanalyze my behavior further, but I’m already overthinking.

So I decided to change. Immediately, I hear the voices. How? What should I do? Could there be a twelve-step program to this? Should I get some books on this? By when should I change? Someone once said to me, just be. I am only beginning to learn to see the comfort in that – the idea of letting go and allowing an unshakable, self-assuring core of being to override the intricacies that I’m obsessive about, can be a little less tiring.

Before walking away from the stage for the last time I remembered the blinding white lights in their diamond shape formation, in technicolor detail. I was flushed with anticipation and positivity for the future and that’s when I resolved to continue acting to be a better person.

2012

It’s been fourteen days since the new year and I haven’t had the time (and will) to embark on the “ritualistic auditing” (I need to stop running my life like a corporation) that I always do for previous years. You know, the reflective, sober and contemplative piece detailing the achievements and missteps of the preceding year, not to mention bringing back last year’s resolution to the table and nervously running through the list to see if any of them accomplished.

Last year has been one of the most accomplished years, and the single most important drive was to be able to leave my current location and go to a “big city where dreams come true”. I remembered sleepless nights, stress, the occasional “falling apart” feeling, the frequent “glass half empty” disposition, tears, fears, depression, car accident, arguments, flaring tempers, insomnia, career burnout, and yawning on the job. In exchange, I won some awards, published a pop song, became a music arranger, acted in a play.

Quantifiable accomplishments aside, I was officially labelled “socially inept” – to quote a certain someone, verbatim, while others used the term “socially awkward”. Usually it didn’t irk me one bit as I’m (thanks to years of reading highly venomous books) convinced that nice guys don’t get corner office, and that the future belongs to controversial, often iconoclastic people. Apparently, Steve Jobs isn’t nice too. Look how he is now posthumously glorified and his products unprecedentedly worshiped.

I must admit that I do care and it is beginning to induce a need-to-do-something -about-it sentiment in me, all because I, by some fateful turn of events, befriended someone, a friend. He showed me what friends are for. Admittedly I have not reciprocated his goodwill in equal magnitude. I haven’t learn how to react to his kindness. I am used to dealing with people who wants something from me and would exploit me for their ends. I’m not going to pretend that the world works on the basis of altruism and genuine goodwill.

I can’t say for sure if this friendship is a blessing, for it completely shook my confidence for my worldview and my justification of my lifestyle. It forces me to review my ambition, my reckless Type A-ness, my priorities, and my alone-but-not-lonely decorum that I had lived by for most of my life. Suddenly I became less confident. I became purposeless and questioning. Eventually I spent a good few months trying to seek (re-seek?) those. Purpose, confidence, answers.

On new years eve, I spent time cleaning my room and throwing away many stuffs that I keep for remembrance. I’m not sure why. Perhaps there was just too many baggage, physical and emotional that I didn’t want to bring into the new year. As I reluctantly drag the trash bags towards the trash outside, I had an inner resoluteness to be a better person. I wanted to start start all over and do it without the baggage of my past.

Moving forward, I haven’t had any yearly plans. Something which I’ve grown wary for I haven’t in full achieved last year’s resolution. Though I have migrated to a more-manageable quarterly system of setting goals (Ok, I really need to stop running my life like a corporation) in which I aspire to continue making headway in music industry and be a confident person by the end of the first quarter of 2012.

Happy new year.