The bitter pill of discontent...

Rancours, bubbles to the surface when you least expect it.

The feeling that you aren't appreciated, that you could do so much better, that you are not achieving everything you are capable of. That you made wrong choices, you heedlessly stepped on a green path and you're not sure if you're ever going to reach the sunlight as you trudge beneath the monotonous canopy of expectations and unfulfilled dreams and the susurrus of time as it flows by - if you listen closely you can hear the grains falling in the hourglass that holds your earthly hours.

You tell assuring stories to yourself about individuality and different definitions of success until you can't be sure where reality ends and your dreams begin. Or were they intertwined from the very beginning?

But there is light, there is meaning, there is hope: lift your eyes from the crunching dead leaves you step on, and with filmy eyes envision the road to come. While your feet have strength, walk straight, walk upright, walk forward.

Maybe we are getting this lifeline thing wrong

Maybe writing should not be so easy. A few dashes on the keyboard, a click of the keypad and instant publishing. Maybe writing should reflect the hard work of thinking and translating that complex inner landscape into a form that everyone can understand. Each word should shine like a diamond in an engagement ring, each phrase as perfectly formed and iridescent as a soap bubble. (I am writing like a thesaurus enthusiast right now, but I assure you I am thesaurus free. I must be unconsciously imitating some stream-of-consciousness author now in my word-drunk, thought-seeped state.)

Lately today I've been wondering about the conflict between our biological and our intellectual imperative. As a biological, evolutionary (or created, depending on your beliefs, I think that they are both true) being, I recognize that I don't have very many years on this planet and I am driven by my body to accomplish certain things: mate, raise children, age and die. So morose, but it is true! I am 20 years old. My body runs well, but from here on everything declines: organ function, sensory apparatus, coordination, memory, brain function, speed, parts of the body that beauty is measured by gradually decreases as cells die and don't regenerate, as hormones decrease, as bone density shrinks. For the rest of my life I will have to reconcile with the fact that I am no longer 20.

And all this knowledge (put into perspective by an excellent holiday-reading book titled "The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead" by David Shields) makes me react with wonderstruck panic: I need to get some living done! Why should I be sitting and studying and enriching my mind when I am at my physical peak of life? Can't sitting and studying and philosophic meditations be done when I'm 60?"

I realize then, how our current way of life in the more-developed parts of the world is so conflicted with our biological timeline. We spend ages 5-24 (for me, due to Malaysia's late-starting and long education system of which material I have retained little) studying up to a degree level, start working, maybe get married at 28-30 (don't want to jeopardize your career, need to get downpayment on house/car/etc) if you find the right person who has roughly the same life goals as you do. Childbirth after age 35 greatly increases the chance of birth defects. For most of history women had their first child by age 20. The anthropologist Suzanne Frayser found from studying 454 traditional cultures that the average age for brides was 12 to 15, and for grooms 18. Growing up I always found this fact (early marriage) terrifying and was so glad I lived in the modern enlightened age of equality. Now, I wonder if this is a lie. I wonder if by prolonging years through medicine and better healthcare and quality of life, by postponing the inevitable; I am just wasting more of my naturally-healthy years preparing for the rituals of adulthood and survival and find out later that either a) it didn't require all that much effort or b) that it wasn't worth it.

So what would I do if I chose to abandon my intellectual-fulfillment, career-ladder goals and seek happiness and a good life through biological means? I would start living a more balanced life, cook my own meals, run and exercise a lot, start looking for a mate to have children (10 more years till 30!), travel. Worry less about saving the world or solving our problems and be more focused on fulfilling evolutionary criteria. Immerse myself in small household tasks like cleaning. Get a cat. Drink and party more (not to the point of destruction, of course) since my liver still has amazing capabilities. Only old people tell you to be cautious, ever notice that? Keep staying in North America by any means, where making a living just seems so much easier. The middle-class enjoy a standard of living comparable to the upper-middle class at home, and with more security. Spend a lot more time with friends (while doing sports of course) - we can sit around and drink tea when we're 40 and have bad backs.

Things I would not worry/spend so much time laboring over: whether I will get a good job. World problems. Exams. Facebook. Wondering if I am intelligent. Trying to be intelligent. (I can be intelligent when I'm old. Old age=wisdom. Wisdom at young age = too much time sitting around on butt)

You may notice I am fusing traditional ways of living with the modern world to make a melange of what I consider the perfect young life. My earlier years should be about making experiences and making friends, my later years about reminiscing about said experiences with said friends. And enjoying this God-given body and capabilities, not overtaxing the mind at the expense of the body. Eating badly, sleeping spottily, not exercising enough, too much sitting around without enough action - that is the condition of college students. Where is the spirit of revolution, the passion that burns stronger than the urge to get wasted on a Saturday night, the joy of discovery and falling in love with ideas and people and ideas of people?

"Fight, fight, against the dying of the light..." but if noonday sun does not shine with life, what else is there to fight for at sunset?

The problem of learning

Through reading I gained the ability to immerse myself in a different world or see my own through different lenses. So much wisdom and wonder has been gained through this activity, and yet...

at times I wonder whether knowledge is all that worth it.

I've been reading Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse".

You can tell the mark of a great writer when, hours or days afterwards, her voice is still speaking to you and echoing in the chambers of your brain, affecting your moods, weaving its patterns into your dreams and waking time. That's how I feel about Woolf.

Her subject matter, human relationships and time and thwarted desires and ultimately, the purpose of life, cannot be ignored. The piercing clarity by which she indicts the very human, very flawed (yet beautiful) characters she creates nudges me uncomfortably. Yet by her speaking the truth, I begin to believe her. And when she writes, towards the end, about middle-age life - when Lily Briscoe (aged 44) is amazed at how even then, she cannot piece together a coherent philosophy of life and discern its meaning, but only see it as glimpses, still moments in time, the present - it filled me with despair. Like a vision shattered. Maybe, no one has found a satisfactory answer because there isn't one that stands up to close examination, that resonates with all of humanity.

I don't want to end on this morose note. I have a moral obligation to you, the reader. So now let me tell you how I feel: I feel like one thread in a large tapestry, a thread intricately connected to others that form patterns and weaves and bundles, but I am only one. I am only one and I am weak. I can be cut off easily from my path and obliterated by sickness, by loss, by mental impairment, by poor life decisions, by death - so many ways you can cut a thin thread. And yet - when I am connected to others, I am no longer just myself but am connected to all the rest. I will feel the pain when others for one reason or another are cut off. But I can support them as well. And they in tug and pull and stretch, will do the same for me. And when I fray, and eventually become dissolute...the pattern will go on. And it was not for nothing that I was there.

Word of the Moment : Melange

All I feel now is...a swirly mess, a rainbow shake-down, knock-out blended mix of proteins and sugars and other good stuff and maybe some bad stuff and a little bit of the stuff that's about to blow.

Randomly, I realise that when we eat any processed food or even drink a milkshake, what we say in in it: say a banana and strawberry milkshake - isn't really bananas or strawberries anymore. They've been transformed into a shadow of their true fruitiness and mixed in with other things and you may get a hint of it, but its not, truly, a banana.

I also realised that being with people that I dislike/annoy me drains me of energy. Trying to ignore them, trying not to be visibly annoyed with them, being upset with myself for not liking them when they're not bad people (but annoying, which sometimes feels much worse - give me a charming rogue over an annoying goody-two-shoes prat for company any day) slowly saps me of any ability to treat the other people around me nicely as well. I guess this is part of growing up as well. As an adult everyone has to face people they dislike and hide it. Perhaps its their boss, or their co-worker, or their employees, or their other acquaintances - either way, there's no way to avoid them. I don't want to spend my time hating people. But it seems impossible to be neutral about it - some people annoy you just by inhabiting the same space as you.

Or maybe I'm just grouchy due to hormonal imbalances. But this makes me tired and unable to treat the people I love and respect the way I want to. I guess there is a flip side to being really emotionally affected by my interactions with people. They can give you lows as well as highs.

Clothes

Watching Yasmin Ahmad commercials always makes me nostalgic for a country and a people far away. One important aspect of me is how people dress - the old t-shirts, the hand-me-down shorts, the faded skirts...in all that there is an assumption that dress really isn't that important. The most beautiful, courageous, eloquent people in her movies are often sloppily dressed most of the time. They do dress up, but it is for an occasion, a special enough reason so that even the meticulous preparation is a joyous task. A first date. A performance. A wedding. A raya celebration. These are the milestones that call for the best representation of oneself, and one obligingly steps up to task.

Contrast to American private colleges. Every season requires a new wardrobe. People say "the most important thing to me is closet space! Thank God there's enough here to fit all my clothes!" My three suitcases of stuff, which to me seemed like too much already, only half-filled my expansive closet. My roommate's is bursting with cute dresses and shorts and jeans and pretty tops. There are so many "extra things" - make-up, lip gloss, hair bands, hats, tights, bags, shoes (don't even start)...that need to be diversified for different occassions - and those mornings when you wake up and you "feel" a certain way and need to dress how you feel.

Clothes become an extension of your personality, a declaration of yourself to the world in the commercial choices that you put on your body. It becomes a barometer of taste and standards, a discreet unspoken measure of economic position.

Oh these first-world consumers who buy and throw as if the price you paid in that shop means you have absolved all responsibility to the rest of us. I wish I could walk around in my faded t-shirts, my big unflattering shorts, my grey trackpants, my kind-of worn out pretty tops and my perennial 365-days-a-year slippers as I would at home. You have made me ashamed of what I wear because I am reduced only to that in your minds. I wish you would understand that 1 US dollar is 3.4 ringgit and a relatively cheap 16 dollar sweater that you'd buy in a second costs 55 ringgit which is what I used to earn working 14 hours in my more-than-minimum-wage job after high school. I know you have people struggling with economic problems too. But that is all swept away in the mania for new clothes and cuteness and fashion sensibilities.

I asked for this, in a way. I have intruded your modest upper-middle class enclaves with the rise of affirmative action and need-based scholarship. I do not belong here and maybe I show it. But look beyond that and see my struggle every day, in every outfit I pore long and hard over, balancing budget constraints and the desire to look as beautiful and put-together as everyone else. My ultimately-purposeless labor to fit in with the rest of you.

I'm not the only one.

Love

Tears you apart, it really does. Maybe what I have isn't love, because how can love hurt you so much?
The main task now is not to think, not to think of what happened or how messy and horrible everything seems because we squish and squash our hearts together and didn't handle them gently. Like flowers here today and wilted tomorrow. That's what hearts are like, so handle gently, hold tenderly.

Grueling

I remember when I first encountered that word. It was in a CD-ROM game where you sailed up the Amazon river and could choose to set your own pace - I choose mine to be "grueling", even though I didn't know what that meant at the time. It sounded like food - probably because of the "gruel" part.

I feel a bit like that ship sometimes, pressed on towards a goal which I can only dimly see, into deep and dark waters - mysterious, hinting of danger and wonders. Sometimes, the scenery is dull and energy-sapping: mosquitoes whining in my ear, a starless night, swampy trees overhanging in the still, moist air...

I wonder why I left my shallow bay where the sun shined always and I knew every path and clearing. Why I have this terrible faculty to be bored, to long for new things and new places, because new things only seem to bring loneliness and heartache.

And yet, there's a voice in me reminding me that my brain is active and alert, my hands and legs are strong to carry my burdens (and help others carry theirs) and walk this long path to someplace I don't know yet. I'll know when I get there.

And so, while the night is long, the light within me never dims nor fails, and I sail on.