"There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that... As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer, again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I will not let my spirit be destroyed."
//Banana Yoshimoto; Kitchen
He was only nineteen when he passed away, barely two years younger than I am. Because of an act of horrific, senseless violence that will come back to haunt us all. He had barely grown up, barely began to understand how the living can do such terrifying things to each other before he came to the end of it all. And it makes me determined about two things: one, that life should never be wasted on the living; two, I will never keep quiet about how much I love the people that I love. In a time such as this, how can we begin to understand how difficult it is to say that you are El Shaddai, almighty and all-sufficient?
In quietness and strength we trust. D, go home in peace.
"If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next -- if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions -- you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never dare to."
//Margaret Atwood; Der blinde Mörder (The Blind Assassin)
If I could stand at the finishing point of all things and foresee all possible endings, would I still make the same choices that I made at the beginning? Would I still have allowed myself to feel too much, talk too much, take stupid chances, fall down, pick myself up, love, hate, hurt and get hurt? Why should I say yes? Why should I want to be different from who I could be at the start, if being the same meant never having to see things that you couldn't ever see, because not seeing meant not knowing, not knowing meant not having to believe that there could be more, more than one could ever imagine.
Start, stop. Stop, start. Over and over, we begin again.
"But so far, the invisible line was holding, separating the potential from its realisation. Strange, that invisible lines could be so powerful, thought Maneck --strong as brick walls."
//Rohinton Mistry; A Fine Balance
I think I'm clear out this week. Clear out of strength or energy to do anything. There's just so much to be done, so much to be tied up, so much to be dealt with. I'm just grateful I turned up on Friday to the realisation that this is nothing, that there are people going through so much, so much more and yet still find it in themselves to care.
"...Taking crazy things seriously is-- a serious waste of time." "A very wise conclusion. There's that saying. 'Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all."
//Haruki Murakami; Kafka on the Shore via ayecandy
Hahaha, the first thing that Deming said was, "Omg, I too long never study with girls already! First time in so long I see people doing this during mugging!" Haha, whatever, when you're mugging 7 days a week with no end in sight yet, you're entitled to take a break, see lah Rachel don't want to join in. Still, I love this season of my life (the complaining, the worries, the mugging, the notes, the teas, the late nights, the heart-to-hearts, the joy of just being) and I will probably never experience anything like it once we leave school. It's kinda like I want to grab everything and say, make time slower, make it stop. Take what's good, leave out all the rest.
6 October 2010
;10:10 "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."
//William Shakespeare; The Merchant of Venice
In less than three months, it will be a year. Right now, it's not shaping up to be the year I thought it would be but oh, when do things ever follow what you expect them to be? In all, I know I would have learnt something from this year of my life. Testing can be suffering, but suffering produces perseverance; perseverance moulds character and character, hope. And hope will not disappoint. It feels like I've walked in a circle back to the starting point. But it doesn't matter. Because I'm not the same as I was when I started. As Swadling of eggquity would say, I can't explain why eggquity works this way sometimes, but there's nothing automatic about this process.
WOW. Lomo photography is amazing. That's all I can say, if only I looked like this in every photograph I take haha. Then, I can show off to my grandkids later when I'm old and wrinkly. See, when Ah Ma was young, she was damn happening k.
"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time."
//Margaret Atwood; Cat's Eye
We are persons stultified by fear. Fear of falling, fear of moving, fear of anything that does not come to us easily. And I'm so tired and angry about this fear that pins me down and keeps me waiting. Yet, she is right. In terms of absolute manhours (especially in terms of school hours where days are counted in weeks), why the panic and the unrest? It's way too early, way too short, way too fast to be lurching in any direction. Yet, when the tense is past, probably nothing will ever bring it back. I suppose it's a good and bad thing that we never know the consequences of our actions in the future. Otherwise, it would probably paralyse us all completely into inaction. Or it could jolt us into taking a step in the right direction. Haha, which means I should ask Yippie the equity questions that have been bugging me all week before I explode from all the angst of my law backlog. That is, if she even remembers that I am from her equity class, haha Hong Quan's friend to the left to the left, that's how she probably remembers me.
"There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that... As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer, again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I will not let my spirit be destroyed."
//Banana Yoshimoto; Kitchen
He was only nineteen when he passed away, barely two years younger than I am. Because of an act of horrific, senseless violence that will come back to haunt us all. He had barely grown up, barely began to understand how the living can do such terrifying things to each other before he came to the end of it all. And it makes me determined about two things: one, that life should never be wasted on the living; two, I will never keep quiet about how much I love the people that I love. In a time such as this, how can we begin to understand how difficult it is to say that you are El Shaddai, almighty and all-sufficient?
In quietness and strength we trust. D, go home in peace.
"If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next -- if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions -- you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never dare to."
//Margaret Atwood; Der blinde Mörder (The Blind Assassin)
If I could stand at the finishing point of all things and foresee all possible endings, would I still make the same choices that I made at the beginning? Would I still have allowed myself to feel too much, talk too much, take stupid chances, fall down, pick myself up, love, hate, hurt and get hurt? Why should I say yes? Why should I want to be different from who I could be at the start, if being the same meant never having to see things that you couldn't ever see, because not seeing meant not knowing, not knowing meant not having to believe that there could be more, more than one could ever imagine.
Start, stop. Stop, start. Over and over, we begin again.
"But so far, the invisible line was holding, separating the potential from its realisation. Strange, that invisible lines could be so powerful, thought Maneck --strong as brick walls."
//Rohinton Mistry; A Fine Balance
I think I'm clear out this week. Clear out of strength or energy to do anything. There's just so much to be done, so much to be tied up, so much to be dealt with. I'm just grateful I turned up on Friday to the realisation that this is nothing, that there are people going through so much, so much more and yet still find it in themselves to care.
"...Taking crazy things seriously is-- a serious waste of time." "A very wise conclusion. There's that saying. 'Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all."
//Haruki Murakami; Kafka on the Shore via ayecandy
Hahaha, the first thing that Deming said was, "Omg, I too long never study with girls already! First time in so long I see people doing this during mugging!" Haha, whatever, when you're mugging 7 days a week with no end in sight yet, you're entitled to take a break, see lah Rachel don't want to join in. Still, I love this season of my life (the complaining, the worries, the mugging, the notes, the teas, the late nights, the heart-to-hearts, the joy of just being) and I will probably never experience anything like it once we leave school. It's kinda like I want to grab everything and say, make time slower, make it stop. Take what's good, leave out all the rest.
"If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."
//William Shakespeare; The Merchant of Venice
In less than three months, it will be a year. Right now, it's not shaping up to be the year I thought it would be but oh, when do things ever follow what you expect them to be? In all, I know I would have learnt something from this year of my life. Testing can be suffering, but suffering produces perseverance; perseverance moulds character and character, hope. And hope will not disappoint. It feels like I've walked in a circle back to the starting point. But it doesn't matter. Because I'm not the same as I was when I started. As Swadling of eggquity would say, I can't explain why eggquity works this way sometimes, but there's nothing automatic about this process.
WOW. Lomo photography is amazing. That's all I can say, if only I looked like this in every photograph I take haha. Then, I can show off to my grandkids later when I'm old and wrinkly. See, when Ah Ma was young, she was damn happening k.
"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time."
//Margaret Atwood; Cat's Eye
We are persons stultified by fear. Fear of falling, fear of moving, fear of anything that does not come to us easily. And I'm so tired and angry about this fear that pins me down and keeps me waiting. Yet, she is right. In terms of absolute manhours (especially in terms of school hours where days are counted in weeks), why the panic and the unrest? It's way too early, way too short, way too fast to be lurching in any direction. Yet, when the tense is past, probably nothing will ever bring it back. I suppose it's a good and bad thing that we never know the consequences of our actions in the future. Otherwise, it would probably paralyse us all completely into inaction. Or it could jolt us into taking a step in the right direction. Haha, which means I should ask Yippie the equity questions that have been bugging me all week before I explode from all the angst of my law backlog. That is, if she even remembers that I am from her equity class, haha Hong Quan's friend to the left to the left, that's how she probably remembers me.
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