29th september 2007

i guess i've led a largely tame, boring, uninteresting life, when compared to others. i guess so because of the lives i've seen others led. haha. their lives sure sounds more fun than mine. all the clubbing, band-ing, canoeing, all their challenges, fun and... relationships... i guess these are the things that make a person genuinely mature - socially. maybe its what makes lives tick - you know, just go astray... but thats precisely where its also most dangerous, unfortunately. a little going off astray and suddenly your life just becomes worse off somehow. or something totally unexpected.

or maybe a boring, uninteresting, dull life is what others think is close to perfection, simple days of mugging and playing... i dunno. i've got hardly a life and space for myself. overprotected and overpampered - spoilt. haha.

i look at my past acquaintances and just cannot believe that life can take such huge turns for some of these people. if you were to guess at our lives plainly from PSLE results, then you would have expected a linear progression for most of these people, that some of them, would have eventually gone on to... say, university and other higher studies. but of course, like i said, life takes huge turns for some of them... some of them fall out along the wayside, while some others managed to hold onto their paths. so the old cliche remains, its not what you are, its the choices you make. this is how the worst sinners can still go to heaven - by a choice.

been reading about gulag. and i'm appalled about the inhumanity of the gulags as it existed in leninist and stalinist times.. so i thank God for the life i've here, thats at least superficially free, that there aren't any arbitrary arrests unless there's genuine evidence, that although sometimes political lawsuits can be exaggerated, but still there those politicians bother to explain despite the genuine stupidity of their claims.

military service and its paranoia of self-image. its plain stupid. if everyone knows the truth about how bad it is, why still bother maintaining an image? it is the truth after all, but guess the truth hurts some more than others, and its just unfortunate that the 'some' happens to be rather important stakeholders in the system. so like an institution where the people begin to bother about their own survival rather than the growth of their own instititution... - rent-seeking behaviour, isn't that what it is, in cheem-sounding economic lingo?