Languages and communities

I was at a talk where a friend was sharing his coding experience in coding simulations for a board game we play, this project of his a result of my suggestion that actually, not much skill is involved in this particular game - you can think all you want but that will do you no better than making a decision at random. So he set out to test this hypothesis out. Anyone could join this monthly meetup for programming enthusiasts, 30-40 people showed up, and there was free food provided for everyone.

I couldn't follow much of the talk, since this was a meetup geared towards programming, not board gaming. But it was inspiring to see the lines and lines of hard work put in by my friend, 6 months in total, and it's still a work in progress. People listened, people offered some suggestions with regard to the code at the end, and we moved on to the next talk.

There're so many things to do in life. I've always wanted to learn programming, but I don't think I should because I want to dedicate myself to games and the piano now I've wanted to learn the piano since 15 years ago, perhaps. It took me that long to start, so I reckon programming is a journey I'll take in 15 years time. There's no hurry. We'll get there sooner or later.

Future, Present

I worked with some of my colleagues on a project that had nothing to do with the work we were engaged for today. Thereafter at night I attended a free screening of a movie at an air-conditioned auditorium nearby. It felt like a fulfilling day to me, to work on something I'm interested in with a group of amiable people, and then to part ways with them, to unwind over a free movie alone. I would be perfectly content to pass the rest of my days like this.

I'm enjoying my current job. There's freedom - no boss breathing down my neck - and flexibility of time. Due to the contractual nature of it, my colleagues are also young individuals who're aspiring to accomplish something in their own fields of interest. We're all just using our current job as a stepping stone to something else (even as all of us are generally pretty committed to our current work as well). We're not a large group, and we come and go, but when chance has us meet in the office, or during a day all of us have to attend a common meeting, there's this sense of lively chatter and spontaneity as we head off for a meal or some tea. And because we're all aspiring individuals in our own fields, I can't help but feel that some of us are going to achieve significant things in the future, and the genesis of those significant things might very well have come from our spontaneous tea sessions together.

This is not a new sentiment I'm having. I've felt this way before when I went to Kyoto 4 years ago for a short exchange programme at Kyoto University, a programme which was led by one of the leading philosophers in the world. Only time will be able to tell the true story; but regardless, I would think this is a warm sentiment to hold.

In spite of all my fears/ I can see it all so clear (Crystals by Monsters and Men)

I've been playing more and more board games of late, and this has overtaken computer gaming for me. There's nothing good or bad in this - it's just another turning point in my life I suppose.

I've come to learn that designing a board game, which I've been trying to do the past few months, is not as easy as I thought it'd be. Things work out well in my head but don't work so well in reality. And this is already given the fact that I know from experience that things generally don't work out so smoothly in practice than on paper. That is to say, I'd already tried to compensate for the discrepancy between theory and practice, and yet still fell short. I'd thought that I've learnt this lesson well enough from other areas of life, but I think while the general lesson has been learnt, boardgame design is still a relatively new field for me. I just need to keep on trying.

On the brighter side, I've been given an unexpected job offer for a job which fits my current pursuits well. It just fell out of the sky and landed in my email box from a professor I've once tutored for. I guess it's always good to keep good relations with people, effortful as that might be.

And so I've been engaged with that the past few weeks. Apparently another name for a group interview is a "small chat", and I was quite surprised, not to mention comparatively underdressed, for the small chat. All worked out well in the end though. The boss I report to is a stately lady academic working on the university management side of things. These high-ranking administrators have large and brightly lit offices, switch effortlessly between good English and Singlish, and provide well-heeled snacks for meetings. There's a unique mannerism belonging to upper-middle class Singaporeans, come to think of it. I suspect it's most likely the result of an intelligent and diligent personality, and a certain light-heartedness owing to the fact that they lead comfortable material lives. In any case, I always find it pleasurable to be privy to this sample of society, in large part because I must appear calm, intelligent, and subtly playful in such company. I like playing this game.

 I recently met a school principal in a board games meetup. I was quite surprised by this because, amongst other reasons, it's simply statistically improbable to meet such a person in any context outside of education. The interesting thing is, he lives a few blocks away from me - and has an exactly same-sounding name as another middle aged female board gamer I know...who also lives in the exact same stretch of blocks he lives in. Yuki. When this dawned on me I felt like I was in a Murakami novel, like I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or awake: could I have, through some perturbation of my memory, met only one person but felt like I'd met two?    

Words without music

In the last episode of The Genius Season 1, a Korean reality show pitting participants in games with one player being eliminated every episode, a skilled gamer faced off against a middle-aged television personality. The latter was somewhat weaker in games requiring much thought but had enough savvy skills to survive to the finals.

Each of them had a pool of supporters comprising of the eliminated participants, who chose one of them to side with. It became evident too that the supporters supporting the TV hostess were weaker in games requiring much thought too, and the gamer obtained a lot more help from his team. But there was this one moment in which the hostess' supporters out-thought the other team. The television personality was suitably touched, and pulled herself together. From that point on it felt as though she was playing to win not for herself, but for her team members, who were trying their best to help her. I was suitably touched too.

I ended my full-time but work-from-home so perhaps not-really-full-time job a month ago. Wow it has already been a month! I've been working on my projects, doing various administrative stuff, and relaxing since then. I like this newfound freedom; I wake up every day invigorated, thinking of all the possible things I can do, all the things I can accomplish. I spend a lot of energy seating at my desk and lying on my bed alternately, thinking and thinking. I said energy, not time. That's what it is - I think of things, I rethink them through, and I write them out. And I do feel expended after those short sessions, in which case I go relax by, for example, watching The Genius. And then I return to the work at a different part of the day.  I feel satisfied with this so far, but I'm also wondering if I can improve my mental capacity to work for longer periods at a stretch.

I'm reading Phillip Glass' autobiographical book now, amongst other things. I do like some of his pieces, though I also dislike some others. I'm not close to finishing it yet, but one thing that does strike me is how much interaction he'd achieved in his younger years, with people in his field and intellectuals from others. This is probably nothing out of the ordinary when you go to specialized schools and live in artists' colonies.

Perhaps it is an enviable opportunity. Perhaps not. Myself, I eat my dinners alone at coffeeshops around my neighborhood, and sometimes have supper too. I look at other people, tap my fingers on the table, and sometimes think of something and sometimes think of nothing. I'm really not sure if I'd like to be in the living presence of other striving and accomplished individuals in my area and from related fields. I would feel both stifled and bored by 75% of their conversation. On the other hand, I can imagine being immersed in a hive of potentially interesting characters as exciting. Having such interaction have their own benefits too, perhaps the greatest of which is the increased drive to work on one's own project.

It's been this way for me for a very long time now; the university environment brought this into sharper focus. That is: I'm perfectly capable of and content with occupying myself with thoughts, so both my need for and the benefits I gain from interaction with individuals similar to myself are not so strong. Lest you think this haughty of me, this doesn't imply that the quality of my thoughts are  superior to others; I could still be entertained with myself even if that were not the case.

To destruction

I believe I might have posted some time ago, that I lost a piece of paper listing ideas for stories or plays I've accumulated for years. I now also believe I've lost a piece of paper containing a list of books I've read but do not own. Strange thing these disappearances, as I would think my room is pretty self-contained.

These are disturbing losses. It's as though you're holding your favorite book in your hands, but a huge number of pages are missing.

I attended a wake for one of my ex-students two weeks ago. He'd drowned. I went alone and didn't speak to anyone there, though I was wondering if it was proper etiquette to do so. He'd been with me for two modules. Silent during class, but he'd come find me a few times after. He was combative in a subtle way those times, as he tried to argue for one point or another.

I must admit his death struck me in large part because he reminded me of myself. Argumentative and inquisitive but also diffident. More importantly, though, that he might have had his own troubling thoughts too, as I had mine when I was younger. I tend to think the path we're on are very tenuously derived, and any number of factors big or small could have easily caused a wide deviation.

There was not much to be done at the wake. I looked at his portrait and tried to burn the way he looked as well as our interaction together into my memory.

I went on a one-night trip to Malaysia with my postgraduate peers a week ago. We stayed in a villa at a golf resort and ate durians and longans. I went for a walk during the night. There were at least 30 other villas in the neighborhood; we were the only occupants. As I walked past the empty houses I was reminded of a safe zone in The Walking Dead series, a gated community relatively self-contained and secluded. I was thinking the place would be one of the last few standing refuges in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Under the starlit sky I was also imagining zombies walking toward me from the end of the street because there was a breach somewhere, as there'd always be.

Our Times (II)

Not too long ago I attended a stay-cation with some friends at a hotel. There was this one evening where we spontaneously decided to go for a swim after dinner. It was close to 8pm and there were only 2 others at the pool. The pool had parts of darkness interspersed with some night lighting. Under an early night sky with some stars visible, the four of us played in the water in a way which made me think we were otters.

The previous night we had also played a card game in which the loser of each round had to have their feet tickled for 5 seconds.

I'm currently working as a research assistant to the research arm of a primary school. Yes, I was a little surprised a primary school would have such a division, but apparently some primary schools are richer than others.

I do like the job. I manage my own time, and there are a nice variety of tasks to keep me occupied. There's the research component which takes up the bulk of my workload, and here I'm quite glad I'm given a lot of freedom to write what I want. And on occasion I'm called to do some 'field work' - to write minutes for meetings, to help out in certain activities, to record data from students and teachers. As much as I like theoretical work, I enjoy being deployed to the field too. I guess it's partly because I like observing things, and also because being out there where the action is helps me see how I'm making a real contribution to the programme I'm supporting.

I still remember on my first trip down to the school, a student not too much taller than my waist level bowed and greeted me and asked if there was anything he could do to help me (I was wearing a visitor pass then). He wasn't wearing a tie. Later on in the day, I witnessed a male teacher hauling two students up onto a small stage in the canteen. He had the rest of the class gathered around the stage (the class, I think, was doing some cleaning activity in the area). And then he began viciously scolding the two students. "Why are you sweating so much? Tell me why? Do you see the rest of your classmates sweating? TELL ME!" Perhaps the two kids were indeed fooling around, but the amount of vitriol I sensed in his voice (the entire canteen had become silent by then) made me feel like he was venting all his life's frustration on the kids, and adding a dose of maliciousness to boot. These are the times we live in.

In other news, AlphaGo just went 2-0 up over Lee Sedol, presumably a great Go player. I'm all for AlphaGo winning; or rather, I don't see anything bad with that. It can only be a good thing.

Our Times (I)

I finished the very last thing I had to do for my department at the university this evening. I invigilated a special needs student, who was taking her final exam for the module I've tutored for the last seven semesters. This isn't anything new to me. I've done special needs exam duty before. I suspect the department or the university has a policy of giving such duties to graduate students or non-perm staff, in part to keep the confidentiality of the students; but I think more because they don't want to make professors feel they're wasting their time looking over just 1 student (they get assigned normal exam duties instead).

I enjoyed my time there this evening. There was just me and the student. The room was deathly quiet and deathly cold, just the way I like my rooms to be. I felt a deep sense of peacefulness there. It started first from my gut and spread upwards to my chest. I could feel my heart being tugged downwards, as though it too wanted to curl up and lie down.

I'm going to miss working at NUS. It has been a fulfilling job. I don't use words like 'fulfilling' lightly. But how else to describe that feeling I feel when students write in their emails thanking me for my guidance, the insights I've shared; that it was a great pleasure to be in my class; and how their interest in philosophy has increased. How else to describe that feeling when students I've had conversations with tell me they wish they had majored, or could major, in philosophy; that so-and-so class they took was a wonderful module and, more importantly to me, how that module has caused them to change their perspective in life.

I've had students laugh appreciatively at my jokes in class; some go on to try to be cheeky themselves, either in graded assignments or in person. I've has students challenge my views too, probing, on occasion forcing me to concede some ground, and then nodding appreciatively as I reconsolidate my position. I've had a fair number of students put forth intelligent, insightful points, points I've never thought of, points which are sharp in nature yet so gently, thoughtfully expressed. To these I usually convey my appreciation, and then push them even further.

The bottom line is, this has been an engaging job. I've been pushed at times to my intellectual limits and have generally been kept on my toes. In return I push them to theirs. I would like to think I've made a direct, real and substantive impact on some of their lives on a topic I'm comfortable, adept, and passionate in. I can't see how else to describe this other than using the word 'fulfilling'.

Of course, things are not as rosy as it might seem. I've had students playing on their handphones for the entire duration of class; students who disappear after the first tutorial; students who plagiarized or cheated in some other way; students who've tried to be subtly dismissive of class; students who insist on their views dogmatically while refusing to engage with arguments proper. I've had many awkward moments in class, especially in the morning ones when I'm usually sleep-deprived. Many a time I take things too fast and don't express myself clearly and succinctly enough.

Standing up to speak to a room of people is always draining for me. I remember having 4 hours of lessons in the same classroom one semester, from 10am to 2pm. Thankfully the classroom was located in a remote corner on the highest floor, so it had a relatively decent and thus soothing view; I always drew back the blinds to allow daylight in. I usually bought my lunch before 10am, because I knew that I would be too drained to go to a canteen full of people after the lessons to purchase my lunch. And as I ate my lunch in the empty classroom at 2pm I tended to imagine violent people storming the classroom pointing their guns at me, and I tended to think that if that were to happen I would not have moved or felt anything at all, because I was just so emotionally exhausted.

I suppose, though, that there are much worse pitfalls in any other job, much worse low points. The amount of autonomy I have - everything from creating my own lessons to grading assignments to where and how long I can take my lunch - along with the minimal bureaucracy I've had to deal with already outweighs the low points of the job. I doubt I'd be able to find this level of autonomy in any other job I take.

I'll talk a little about my next job (and consequently my next phase of life) in the next post, which likely won't come anytime soon. For now I want to note a few further things I'm going to miss. These are my times.

1) Napping at the exact same spot in the school library for the past 7 years, since I was an undergraduate; the quiet I could find in the library in the night and during the school holidays too.

2) Hanging out in the spacious, air-conditioned graduate room, by myself or otherwise; having spontaneous talks with whoever was in the room. I feel comfortable speaking and joking with many of my peers and seniors; many a time we would head to the canteen for a drink or a snack.

3) The good-natured, relaxed atmosphere of the department in general. Many a time the teaching staff (both graduate students and professors alike) would haggle with the admin staff over any number of things - getting a new printer, getting preferential module timings, pushing back deadlines. In return the admin staff would push the teaching staff to keep everything orderly - documents must be submitted on time, stuff on the respective module portals must be set up in a certain way, bell-curving must be done this way. There's a healthy level of banter between the 2 groups (and within each group too), not least because there's no clear hierarchy here.

 I remember many a time sauntering up to the admin office. "Yes what you want?"
"Can I do this anot, I forgot to do it your way"
"Arghhhh how many times I tell you must do it that way...Oh my god I want to die already"
"This way also seems fine leh, there's no real difference"
"Let me see. In the meantime you wanted paper isit? Come sign here"
"You got pen?"
"There"
"Ok I sign"
"Also your pay form remember to submit soon hor"
"Huh? How come must submit soon?"
"So you can get the pay by end of the month lah, you do this so long already still don't know?"
"Not important leh as long as I see got the money can already"
"K lah whatever. You sign already?"
"Yah"
"Next time do this thing properly okay?"