Who says heaven must be bright?

I do not know if you have experienced a nightmare before, nor can I be certain that the extent of pain and misery you feel in them is equivalent to the feelings I feel in mine; because, after all, are not nightmares one of the most personal experiences you would ever have in your life, they being the very embodiment of your darkest fears, your deepest agonies, and, if you so believe, the truths that would materialize in your life? If the latter is true, perhaps you would like to agree with me that your whole life is but just one big nightmare in which you are the sole victim, and in which the end of it spells the start of another lifeless journey.

Perhaps, too, you would agree with me, that the very instant a nightmare terminates itself, the precise instant where the knife is being plunged into you; the one moment in time and space before you wake up with a start in your bed with the fan humming quietly beside you, that one moment where you feel like your whole life’s agony being plunged into your mind; is, in not in full, then the partial experience of what it feels to die.

And if we agree that our lives are nothing but the most dreadful nightmares, then we must accept too that, just like the nightmares we have every once in a night, we will eventually wake up one day to find ourselves alone in a darkness we can only describe as familiar.

Chapter 7

I went back to school earlier today to collect my A level certificate. Kind of early, I guess, judging from the empty nominal roll, but it hardly matters.

I thought of visiting several tutors. For all my passivity in and outside class I’ve developed an indescribable attachment toward them. Maybe it’s because they had provided guidance for me in one way or the other: what I should do in the future, why it doesn’t matter that life doesn’t matter, the importance of being earnest, why and how I should be more optimistic, how to chase girls, other important stuff which have or would surely contribute to my personal well-being in the years to come. I miss those consultation sessions, and I would have visited those tutors if a sentence hadn’t struck me at the precise moment I was deliberating what to do after I had the cert in my hands. “Kenneth Chong, you’re leaving as quietly as you came?” That was said to me by my secondary 4 history tutor, after I had my O-level cert in my hands, and I recall having it said to me again, with some syntactical variation, by a classmate when…I forgot. So I thought, hey yea, since when did Kenneth Chong leave things with a farewell and goodbye?

I wonder how Mrs Ho’s doing. I wonder if my tutors would remember me years down the road, because, prominent as they are in some of our lives, they’d probably had and would take many more batches of students under their influence. On a large scale, we’d all look the same.

As I headed for the main gate (as quietly as possible) I noticed, for perhaps the last time, how beautiful the front driveway of the school as well as the adjacent neighborhood outside it is. There are plants and it’s quiet. I miss those times I’d travel down the driveway, sometimes with a friend or two but mostly alone, to have a quiet lunch outside the school’s premises, at the coffeeshops in the neighbourhood. I never did understand why people liked eating in the canteen so much when it was so dark and noisy. I never did understand the people there, but that’s beside the topic. The topic is the beauty of the driveway and the adjacent neighbourhood and how I like walking out the school alone.

There are many gaps which should be filled. There are many memories I can use to fill them. There are many shades of color I can pick out and paint, many words I can string together in an effort to represent the threads of the life I led in the past 2 years, but not so now because Im closing the chapter. It had, in a sense, never been opened, and if it had, never well-written.

How.

Mum wants to do some investing and offered me a place to ride behind her. Unlike my insurance deal I concluded a few weeks ago this one has the real risk of losing part or all of your capital, but it's still very tempting because, according to my mother's research, it boasts a potential 60% return rate, as opposed to the 5-9% interest per annum Im getting for my investment-linked product.

The key motivation behind me building my investment portfolio is simple: I've got savings and Im not going to spend them. The opportunity cost of current investment is future consumption; getting more capital goods for myself can only mean getting less consumer ones. But that isnt much of a cost, as it is, to me, because you would never see me carrying an i-pod nor would you ever see me driving a car, and lodging is more or less taken care of for 2 to 3 decades at least. Instead of letting those excess savings lumber along at the bank with its pitiful interest rate why not book a cruise to nowhere?

I am holding back nonetheless. Apart from the fact that I might lose part of my savings doing more investments would also mean spending less in the short-term future--coffee, restaurants, even the periodic indulgence in old chang kee may have to be sacrificed. Holiday trips too, and thats a major minus.

But we'll see how it goes lah hor, in the meantime I feel like trying out orchard hotel's international cuisine buffet.

It's hard to escape from nothing

Blogs these days appear to be the culmination of one's own sadness, or detatchment, with life. While it's frequently enjoyable to revel in that deluge of nihilistic expressions, always beautifully crafted with dark, sarcastic, cynical sentences, allow me to suggest that having a bunch of friends to fool around with in a context of a life free from struggles has actually its own quality of pleasure too. It is, indeed, quite pleasurable to waste the time in your lives together.

Lost

Sayeed, to Anna-Lucia: I see no good in killing you. We are both already dead.

Haiku

A rusty bucket
Of water: Art to some, Life
To many others.

Tehehe

Mission Impossible 3: Same old bang-bang-boom, though notably it contained much less kiss-hug-sex. Worth a watch, if not for tom cruise then for its slightly better grade of action rubbish. For that genre of movies you can watch-and-forget, though, Ocean's Eleven and Twelve and some of the james bond movies still rank high above.

Anyway, I think 7 guys walking around in town in army uniform damn gay. In a rare display of optimism, I think Ive found a bunch of very good friends.

Spoiler alert..........

You are my Sunshine is a film of two halves. It wasnt an impressive build-up in the first half, as all build-ups to tragedies are, especially when you're in the knowledge that the plot is trying to reach a high point so as to fall irrevocably from it. What differentiates such melodramas, hence, is not the creation of a relationship but the destruction of it, and in this film the destruction is intolerably despairing.

At the same time, it seems apparent that, mandatory and banal as build-ups are, the value of particular instances in the first half increases to a level of overwhelming poignancy after disaster strikes. In particular, after Eun-Ha got herself into jail. Separately, and yet collectively, they both remember the time spent walking through the blossom trail one (or many) night, when Seok-Joong told her he would love her even after death. And, though the show did not feature it as a flashback, the past act of Seok-Joong periodically dropping off unsterilized milk--a representation of pure affection, perhaps?-- at his counterpart's door transforms itself as an act of romantic pursuit to a resurrected memory of plain, simple love when the couple are physically seperated from each other. The relation between past and present is at its greatest at such points, when the viewer is able to transcend the linearity of the plot and see the whole picture at its mellow best, and it is precisely this liberation that gives the quasi-climatic encounter between the two partners in prison, and indeed, many of the strikes of tragedies that came upon them, their poignant quality.

(On a side note, I find it quite sad that everything we do now, in the present, can only find its holistic value, and hence our full appreciation, when viewed as a past)

The last few moments of the show are worth recollecting. The scene where Seok-Joong tore open the fan compartment to hold hands with his beloved through the prison glass is beautiful, that very act a representation of his desire to be with her, and the act of them holding on to each other despite the prison guards attempting to pull them away a representation of their desire to stay together. Snow was featured when Eun-Ha is finally released from prison, and we now understand why Seok-Joong was seen tumbling blissfully into snow at the show's start.

The decision to give the couple a happy ending might serve as a consolation to many a teared-eye viewer in the end, but to me it serves as an optimistic perspective. Eun-Ha has AIDS, she's going to die, and meanwhile they would be shunned by society, as the film showed in various instances before. The ending ignores any such speculations, and in so doing creates the ultimate case for romance: that it is simple and free, and should remain as that.