i'm feeling creatively barren right now. i don't have any single idea to pursue, no spark to light flames... sigh.
listening to Pastor Prince's sermon. reminds me of Pastor Khong. aiyah, they're all equally powerful lar. there's really no difference, they are all of the spirit. i guess some people just don't trust me enough to tell. dots.
i was at this wonderful church yesterday. New Creation Church. It was a wonderful place. But there were a few moments that made me think about stuff.
One of these things was that some young bright people might think that ONLY what their church says is correct, meaning that their pastors preach the Word better than other pastors from other church. this might be a form of pride about their church, but it could mean equally be a form of bigotry. Ironically, i was told to have an open mind - duh-. I can't help but think about the slightly parochial mindsets that young people have.
I thought about the emtional manipulation criticism heaped upon by Hillsong. and i thought if some churches might be overdoing certain stuff. I remember the phrase now, it was 'switch off your mind', and immediately, alarm bells rang inside my head. As much as i try to live in the 'spirit' , i'm reminded that i have a body, a mind, and a soul. While the developing science of consciousness is leading to the conclusion that there might be no mind, i'll still treat the body and mind as distinct qualities. But i'm digressing. I'm saying that in reaching heights of spiritual awareness, we should still be aware and not be led away to some 'place'. it even rings of hypnotism to me. I will always remember the lessons of germany as hitler came to power. his ability to manipulate the minds of people and cause their minds to be led astray... those are powerful lessons.
i ask that young people know entirely what the things they do mean.
today was fun, though busy. saw JJ, got the new creation church stuff. fun church. fun people, nice people. all the people introduced to me looks all like a blur now.
then i went to have dinner with marc, ooh - he went OCS, haha. talk all about army stuff, as guys would do. was at acjc already, so went to ravenahl, where they were having bbq. so i went there, talked a little. fun fun. its been a while since i got home so late already. 'late'. of course, being subjective.
and then i met james. nice decent fella, but reminds me of the 'practical singaporean', who considers the money and the easiness of jobs. says he took law because of that. arh well. i'm a really lucky fella, who found passions and stayed at it. arh well. thank God.
i'm thinking of my reading pursuits again, but this time in comparison to the pursuits of playing games, reading comics, gambling, clubbing, etc... i suppose there's nothing wrong with these other things, i remind myself again that there is no moral high ground for me to stand on, that its perfectly fine to indulge in these things, just as i indulge in my reading. people have fun playing games, its just that i have fun too, reading books. all in all, i remind myself again, that i am actually no different from the rest of them, but its just that i will have more opportunities to explore in the future with regards to academics and jobs. i suppose warcraft trains the mind for strategies, i guess, gambling trains market intuition, comics trains the graphic mind, clubbing - socialising skills - all important attributes. so yeah... whats with this thing that i have that other people are wasting their time? not everyone reads books, i know. God take out this puffed-up stupid thing, because i know that other than reading and writing, i'm an incredibly idiot at many others.
i'm thinking of something which shows the passion that i have for reading up on stuff esoteric, abstract. for reading up on stuff that few others will bother to read, for having an attitude of life that few others have.
why do i read?
i can't say i can fully answer myself. like a drive, an impulse that keeps me going on and on, hardly ceasing, the urge to just know more. but for what? i don't know where these readings will take me. its not simply so that i can appear smart in front of others - that was never the point. i still can't answer myself. but i was never totally 'knowledge for its own sake'. ultimately, i want to be able to do something with the things that i have inside my head, exactly what i still don't know. to change the world? something like that - to do some good - to inform people, to ask them to do the right things. i want to have arguments prepared, so that when it comes to showdowns, i know that i have the arsenal of ideas...
truth for its own sake? something like that, to show people the gospel of truth, so that they know what they should do...
aigh... finally, i'm at home sitting comfortably on the chair, typing out this entry. the big shot standby is over, and though it wasn't the best standby, it was pretty decent, being only our second time, twice in a week, despite being away from camp in course, with really, less preparation than we wanted, but still, everything turned out well, so thank God. absolutely. everything-to-Him, that kind of thankfulness. No one need sign any extras, i suppose, and... whoopee!
i am glad, jubilated! finally, today is coming to an end, if not before inuyasha? haha. but i need rest. dreadful, dreadful sore throat, though i think its actually me BMTC-POP-bronchitis acting up again. aigh... those days. being made a flag-bearer despite mild fever, 24km route march despite mild fever, then doing a decent job of a flag-bearer, doing the parade amidst the falling rain, all the moments spent in the agony of a throbbing headache. And then the day after the parade - a high fever, and spending 2 days at home almost bed rest. sigh. arh well. i hope those days won't come back, and i badly need healing. So God, i ask that You give me healingand i ask, knowing that it will be given. In Jesus' name amen.
woah man. cool friday.
Father, i know that things like these will more often turn out to be anti-climaxes, indeed, that first standby had been one. there are a lot of things i do not know, but what i know is that You will be there for me, for all of us. You will not give me something i am not capable of handling - in all things You have set the way beforehand already. everything is already in Your sure safe hands, there is nothing i need to worry about. so Lord i pray for peace to be in all of us, that You'll watch over us. in Jesus' name i pray, amen.
yep. i can't wait for tomorrow to end, so that the weekend can come, so to breathe freedom once again, and remove the shackles of army life. haha. arh well.
i wonder why i'm blogging again. oh well. i wanted to say what would happen if i were to wrote about the books i read, which i've thought of many times but never done. i wonder how it would look like - about the topics i read, about what other people around my age do, about what i WILL be doing in the future. there are a few other things - what makes me, me? what makes an individual different, heck, what makes an individual an individual? arh well. a question to delve deeper into at some other time...
2005...2006...2007
the years come and go, the events come and go, and the events are back again, though always different. its like what heraclitus said, a man doesn't step into the same river twice, because the man has changed - its a different man, or the river has changed - its a different river.
and so the same events are here again, though always a little different, different enough from last year. its Davos time again, and soon, we'll hear about Porto Alegre again, (yawn), and people who are suckered enough to follow it through will surely think that 'oh! its a year of new happenings!'. yes, there will be new happenings, but these new happenings are sometimes nothing but rehashed versions of things last year, and the year before, and the year before...
after a while, things die down, and patterns emerge, patterns which will show itself to be the scheme of things for past, present and future, and its enough to make you a little tired of the world that is, that was and that will be. because after a while, you become aware of the possibilities, and you can just skim through the big pictures... though the details may change, the big pictures will still remain the same.
and another thing. i have to remind myself that climate change will not happen overnight. it will go like this. year after year, there might be more storms, more dreadful weather, more heatwaves, more people dying from natural disasters, insurance companies collapsing, more extreme weather. year after year, this will happen, and things will change a little. the increments go on for a few decades until..... well... until these 'freak weather' become the norm.
what happens for extended period of time might just be this: as the freak weather prolongs, technologies will start to adapt and people's lives will settle down to this new equilibrium in climate. agriculture will change, and might not even become landbased, even the nature of agriculture will change. maybe food might be manufactured or even grown in new ways never before seen, but will still be feasible with current technology.
so, what might really happen? who knows? maybe climate change will happen, but it might not, at least not in the way we imagined to be. maybe its already too late to do anything already. but what might happen, is that humanity might JUST survive, barring some straw which might break all of our backs... oh well.
arh well. thanks weiyang, for your always wonderful insight. it helps to have another observer. haha. oh well. just going to keep on reading anyway. sometimes it gets a little lonely, but its ok. sometimes it gets a little sad, but its ok. sometimes you get mocked, but its ok. 'why you want to read so much?' though not a very often remark is still heard often enough. aiyah, why bother answering them? haha. arh well. doesn't matter at all...
sian. its a major standby on friday, and it just happens to be the platoon i'm in. oh well. God will be with us. Friday would be just another day, gone and gone after we leave the camp. and i can look forward to saturday, with JJ at new creation, with marc eating beef fried rice! hee! happy days ahead...
this feeling of mine has been with me for a while.. its the feeling that i'm the only idiot to still read, and to bother to read deep profound stuff... awww well...
had a lousy activation. arrh well. nothing matters. seriously. just want to get the 26th over and done with, and get back to a normal life. but a truly 'normal' life is still far away... sigh..
another slobbering day passed by. looked up past references of my globalisation packages. since i considered myself graduated on the topic of globalisation, i've since left that. and now to come back and revisit seems an uphill task. sigh. arh well....
sigh.. nothing much. guess the morning run with 3kg on my back was really tiring. didn't feel like going out tho the book itch is getting to me again, this time over Life of the Cosmos by lee smolin. i thought i had it, but apparently i don't. sigh. i could go to gopher's church but din feel like it, since i already had dinner outside.. not to mention watching a movie pan's labyrinth, which is really a brilliant movie. and i wanted to get started on writing GP topic packages, but I CAN'T GET STARTED!! aargh. listlessly flipping through richard dawkin (yet again) the ancestor's tale. yawn... and those tiresome arguments on young republic are sapping my energy.. feel like just closing the argument... arh well...
watched pan's labyrinth yesterday. cool show. though a lot of the people died, but its really nice how the girl really seemed to be alive sort of, in her own world... arh well...
its been an ordinary day. nothing really happened. though i did finish road to serfdom by but i'll have to read it again. i got the general concept it was about the risk that of central planning by government and how that would lead to socialism and totalitarianism, about distorting 'truth' as propaganda instead of the genuine truth. about the extent to which government should have control over the economy.
i keep thinking about blank slate by steven pinker, about how you can't have equality both ways. you can't have equality of people because the system will distort the equality, and you can't have equality of system because people are unequal anyway, so either way, you end up with an unequal system...
arh well... still thinking about melvin's question - what i want written on my tombstone...
doing carpentry today at that construction industry institute. met up with zhujia today. had fun talking. run ~5k last night in within 20min, i'm sure, felt like flying. everything's cool, and i'm finally having fun at young republic, well sort of. pretty good stuff, at least there are people who know.. hee..!
cool! me not that alone after all in endeavour. wish i could meet some of these people face to face. hee! have brains to think beyond present circumstance, bring to bear knowledge on difficult issues. it is not enough for one person to know, those who know must tell those who don't. and this is the modern battlefield of ideas, between those who know, and those who cling on to ignorance.
wee! no more brick laying! arh well. anyway, i was expecting intellectual debate at young republic. unfortunately, things aren't shaping up i thot they would. arh well...
today i did a cheap trick... arh well.
anyway, celebrated dad's birthday today and had a nice walk at kallang riverside, eating mushroom pot at the indoor stadium. and suddenly this feeling of loneliness just hits me and i'm caught by surprise at its strength.
i check myself for a mental contact list and see who i can call, and the search comes up - zip - . there's no one i can call without being a nuisance, and it really kinda reflects upon the sorry state of affairs in my life.
knowing so much is such a bitch sometimes, and now i become a know-it-all jackass, a lonely jackass. arh well..
arh well at least in God there is no loneliness....
i wrote 2 essays and i'm flipping my notebooks for fresh writing ideas. the cool thing about notebooks. hee. and i'm writing to young republic, though i don't know what it means... arh well.
i'm listening to hillsongs, and i'm reading Romans.. and i'm so loving the song All for You. its been a long time since i could tear listening to songs. haha. cool..
had a great night with melvin and co. and zhujia and edwin. and david, i guess was there, in a way. arh well. fun talk. john 1. God changes names, He changes lives. and submissiveness. hard lessons, as always. and commitment - to cell members. sigh. all guilty... arh well.
God, thank You, for being always so faithful.
the poem i wrote was kinda well-received, perhaps an affirmation to what i can still do with the words in me head? i still can write, thankfully. arh well. still writing the dead-serious stuff. yawn. can't get out of it, it seems. sigh. or maybe it just happens to be what i'm good at. but anyway, didn't intend to be an environmentalist. arh well. meander...
monday night i was tired, and i was hammering my brain about environment and the stuff i read, and i came up with something...
Welcome to Blackworld, in the first few years of the 21st century.
Yes, humanity is still fighting its own petty civil wars again,
fighting among themselves, about some petty disagreement about the rules and rulers to subject themselves to.
History left its tainted mark all over the world,
with people living for the sins of their fathers,
causing their sons to live in their sins, and so on...
(mid east conflict, wars)
Welcome again, to babies crying louder than the groans of people dying.
Oh, you haven't heard?
Why, the world's crowding up and soon we may have no space to live!
Oh! What should we do?
Move up, of course!
(stupid stuff on population growth, urban growth)
Hear their cries amidst the hail of bullets.
See them, their dark skins on pale parched earth,
a drought conspired by traffic fams across the world.
(war and famine, drought, exhaust emissions causing climate change)
Call of King jr rings sharp in my mind,
oh, have we nothing to care about, or everything to care about?
(thinking about this sentence - 'I have a dream-We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.)
But no, us privileged, nested in comfort,
a tree incongruent in the ocean of desert baked earth
our existence hanging by a hair's breadth and shorter still.
-what will save us from ourselves?
(developed world vs poverty)
Welcome to Deathland,
where death is always near,
lurking behind every turn of street,
where death is the air you breathe.
No, it isn't a vain concoction of an evil chemist blackmailing the world.
All of us are now death, walking upon the Earth, with every bit of gas guzzled.
(greenhouse emissions, kidding, of course. we breathe out co2 and h2o which are greenhouse gases, and we fart ch4 - methane, another greenhouse gas, and like i said, i'm just having fun with words)
But no, we deny our coming death, with our hands stained in blood.
Is it not a mortal sin, the death of unborn and unseen and unheard,
the death of future's echo forever extinguished by our breath, striving and strife?
Has yet future gone?
(not kidding, we are practically doing nothing)
We know ourselves, we know our minds, we know our inmost.
We peer at the wonder of the universe, we gaze at the beauty of Earth,
We look inward at our own desires.
And we know what we've wrought.
When will it be when the spark of our life extinguished,
when no hearts beat,
when the last bit of thought withers,
as we strike ourselves at our own death?
-who will save us from ourselves?
(developing science of neuroscience and human nature, developments in cosmology)
arh well.
=)
had a great day, though i woke up like at ten. but anyway, had lotsa fun talking to andrew, cher, seelan, shafie, martyn, roland, and shaun. and i think with every meeting, the network grows as i connect more nodes. of course, the person with the most nodes is still andrew, and being connected in such a manner is simply, very good fortune on me part. and something is forming, some basis for a social-political stuff. but it has to be in that order, start with social than go into politics (optional). and dreaming of the things to do after ORD. do community work, in asean, further out and in singapore. do lots of it, get experience working as a team, maybe even do some leading, and then make more connections, then grow some more, than head to books. yeah man. some dream, yeah.
i had lunch with jessalyn, and other than the awkward silences, the only stuff i could have fun talking about was about the sexual behaviour of chimps and apes and how they contibute to the power structure of society. haha. nah. that wasn't the only thing. like how she stands on practicality rather than knowledge for its own sake, about future, about growing groans, about how fearful it all is, growing up, becoming an adult, all the responsibility, how everything is so fast... the usual moans. arh well. growing up is so much a fuss...
jessalyn looks different without her glasses now that she's wearing contacts. she wears a turquoise top and short pants, and i guess from some perspective, she's kinda attractive, but there's no attraction... like so many others, i think she's a wonderful person... braided hair. i wonder... the next time i see her, would she cut her hair short and dyed a shocking colour? haha. gonna ask her over email.. haha
i'm slobbering today, though i'm also finishing de soto's mystery of capital.
which reminds me of the times when we were so idealistic, genuinely thinking we could change the world when we had no idea what we wanted to. haha. empty idealism has now been replaced by reality. haha. but the spirit still remains though very much diminished? haha. where did the days go? and now they exist only as vague imageries, fainter than shadows, now in a past so rarely visited.
how do we move on, when we realise that our dreams were just dreams? where once our passions made us apart from others, when we thought our dreams were all-too-real... and for a while, we become like soulless wanderers in the city, drifting with purpose, haunted by the ghost of our dreams. and when its so hard to find a cause to move on with.
i'm a techno-idiot, not a full participant of this world or web 2.0 or whatever phenomena. i just want to get on with my life, my real life in the real world, creating real changes.
okie. saw on my dashboard that i have 99 previous posts, making this the 100th post. not a big deal, just putting this notice for fun. arh well. i learnt something at the countdown i just came back from. a few things... 1. i can't stand loud bass. 2. i can't stand flashing lights. 3. i don't respond to the grooves and vibes of music. 4. all the previous points combine, and you get a party-idiot. yes. i am a party-idiot, someone who would just prefer a nice quiet place, sit down, and read, write and think about something worth thinking and NOT be at a place jumping till the cows come home. yup. and i wonder if there are any other people out there....
and i am really at peace with myself over girls, as i remind myself, and yup. i shall not waste time fantasizing anyway, since it's really more time wasting. and the time spent at countdown really made me think if everything was worth it. yes, some of it was, a reminder of how we should go through years victoriously, and the many testimonials, a reminder of God's power... but i'm wondering....... arh well.
i'm just thinking again, that there is this big gulf between different groups of people. there are the leaders and there are followers. and there are different kinds of followers, those who don't think much, and those who do think.
and maybe they should stop saying the words 'will you...', because it creates a lot of pressure on the person being asked, or maybe the pressure was intended. arh well.
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