Generational divides

Generational divides There are tremendous differences in the way people born in the 50s and those born in say the 80s. The main difference lie in how they perceive the importance of the extended family. I personally don't care much about the relevance of the extended family because my immediate family is much smaller than the family sizes of my parents and grandparents. I suspect that the increase in education levels have led to increase in career and job opportunities without the need of the clan/extended family connections. The situation of parents and grandparents are vastly different, however. Without education, and without the corresponding opportunities, parents and grandparents have had to rely precisely on those clan/extended family connections. Which explains why I'm stuck attending big family gatherings thrown by ostentatious relatives flaunting their wealth. The other thing that's very different, but less distinct, is the perception of the importance of material values. I suspect that people born in the 1980s are less status conscious than parents. That is however, just s hunch. Or rather, the benefits that come with material abundance are more equal, instead of the relatively scarcity of material accumulation in the past. The material and status consciousness that we inherit is a throwback to the past of needing to prove that we have outdone others, and in an era of relative egalitarian conditions, such differences might matter less; on the other hand, the super rich become the focus of the collective envious.

Liminality - this word I remembered from some module...

Last semester I studied a module that had this cute little term called 'liminality'. Not entirely sure what the term meant, but the term seemed to have this meaning of 'here, not-here' kind of meaning. How strange - that a single word could be used to refer to a condition of contradiction! Being a social scientist/philosopher/thinker, I can't help but be amazed by the human mind to come up with a word, that in itself, is a contradiction. The only fall-back I can hold on to, is the probability function of quantum mechanics, the equations that say that an electron has a x% chance of being here, and a y% chance of being 'there'...

So what does that mean? A very simple application has simply been that the word nicely describes life - the personal lives that we live. Our experiences are experiences of transition; we are constantly in the in-between, not entirely in the present, but never stepping entirely into the future. Hence 'liminal' - we are never quite in the here-and-now, but neither are we in the 'there-and-then'.

Emotional, and intellectual, and the other things we experiences - they are all Janus-faced. The experiences are syntheses of our past and historical experiences, but they also project forward into our own futures.

The lives lived illustrate that we are never quite one thing at a time, but at any given moment, we are multiple things all at once. For some of us, the situation could be us being students but also lover, researchers, thinkers, community-leaders, and all of that, rolled into the same 24hrs that everyone lives through. Here I am, working and studying at the same time, constantly trying to move out of the present, and wanting to leap right in the future, which, as we all know, becomes always, the present.

How weird, to deny the present that always fades away, to want to enter into the future that always fades away too.

An ANT (some fancy sociologically-minded theory) would want to trace the geographical, sociological relationships between people and objects - how the electrons from my batery in my laptop are fluttering away to servers in America and fluttering back to my screen becoming photons that enter my eyes, and back to electrons in the neurotransmitters in my mind. Yet there is also that movement in time - that none of this happens simultaneously, of the onrushing future that fades away immediately into the past. I want to trace too, the movements in time that always accompanies the movements in space. I am in the present, dripping into the future; the flow of time that would be, had just flowed. I trace those associations into the past as soon as the future happens...

Oh well...

my non-fascination with cities

I have books piled high on the left side of my desk. Correction. Notebooks and books. At the top of my pile there are 4 thick books that I got from the NUS library, and they are threatening to topple anytime. I don't really care.

The books that threaten to topple are all about cities and sustainability, and increasingly I ask myself why I am interested, maybe even interested in the topic of cities. Seriously I don't really know why. It happens to be one of those things that I got stuck on to, and since then, haven't really got it out of my system. I guess it started with architecture, with William McDonough and ecologically living, then this whole cradle-to-cradle thing, and now Heather tells me her work in it, and I'm stuck on to it even more, even though I can't find that impulse to be interested in it, or maybe its buried somewhere underneath all the negativity. Maybe that.

Its been a long time since I had some meaningful intellectual exchange about something I care about. I still care about the environment, its just that I realise that I can't really do anything about it as an undergrad doing sociology. The angles are much tougher, since the real hardcore things about the environment are about the hard facts, and the flows, and its difficult to just have words of theories and conceptualisation without some raw data. In that respect, I would have chosen to do geography - but that's out of the question, becomes my funda-funda-fundamental interest is still in how people handle their place in societies, how people know, and think stuff together - and that is still a place of word-ed discussion. There are still areas in communication theories, sociological theories where its all interesting for me. Which then reminds me that I need to learn programming, starting with IT1002 next semester. Getting back to the environment, I find it tiring to have to remind myself that I'm interested in cities, and 'sustainable' is becoming such a bad, bad, bad, overused word. I think I'll just use, green, or eco- cities next time. Sus-tain-a-ble is too much a mouthful. Green, eco, is better, conveys so much more meaning within a shorter space of speech.

I'm living a crazy undergrad life, taking modules all over the place, but I need to do it. Very few people share the same interest, and its difficult when even the same interest starts diverging and you realise that there are different roads to work on, but some roads are more important personally than other words.

My special sem hasn't began, but I'm tired already. Oh Lord, help me.