pieces of a broken mirror

There exists an innate desire in every single one of us, to possess a certain trait of someone else who is sitting right next to us, be it a boy or girl. It can be his/her charming personality, his/her extroverted nature, or even his/her good looks. We are never self-satisfied. We always compare ourselves with others, and our faces fall whenever we realise that we can never be as good as someone else in a certain aspect. It's an irony; we grumble about our parents constantly comparing us with a better student in class, and yet we constantly compare ourselves with others all the time.

It's true, everyone is probably superior over everyone else around us in a certain aspect, but we don't have the belief nor the mindset to find out what it is. We dwell in our self-pity, of realising that we are always losing to someone else, to find out our world is a complex one in which we can never find solace in others nor ourselves, where a broken mirror is an apt reflection of our individual wholeness. We laugh when others tell jokes, we cry when watching a sad movie, but innately, we want to be the one who tells the joke, we want to be the one in the sad movie, the prince charming or beautiful princess who will eventually attain the perfect ever-after ending in the movie. We are all weak, but some choose to hide it and some don't. Either way, I respect both decisions. Choosing to hide your weakness to portray a happy demeanour is a show of strength, no matter how superficial it may be, and I respect you for it. Choose not to hide it, and you're being truthful to yourself, but the next stage is to overcome it so that you can move forward in your life. Otherwise, you will stay in the shadow all your life, and never achieve where your potential could have brought you.

People create a reality, and then become victims of that reality. We look to someone else, a teacher, someone who we believe can alter our state of mind and pass us knowledge. We trust blindly in those who guide us, believing that they know more than we do. They don't. We just don't want to know what we already know.

The Witch of Portobello is a great read, really.

Too bad I don't practise anything i preach.

belief, to believe

I quote this post from Nazri:

"One day, we'll all take a step back and laugh at how we're taking ourselves too seriously.

It's the same complex that drives our elitist mindsets. We're all trapped in a cycle of tossing away the immature and replacing it with the latest BETA version of what we deem as "higher-order thinking". Out with the old and in with the new. It's the chronic disease of our plasticized generation. We need something that can make all of us realize that who we are, then and now, are essentially different constructions from the same box of Lego. We're only cheating ourselves by not realizing that our derived thoughts are nothing but the same words rephrased in pretentious and obscure structures. Just like how different companies try to market products from the same factory.

We need to realize this, and we need to start laughing at ourselves. Fast."

Quality post, gets my full sincere applause.

But I beg to differ.

It's not our elitist mindsets. We are not trapped in a cycle of tossing away the immature and moving on to a level of higher order thinking. Rather, we are trapping ourselves in our innate need to see something creative, to pretend we can be something that some other person never was before. We need to convince ourselves that our self-entrapment is unconsciously self-voluntary. We do not want to step out of our comfort zone, we do not want to venture anywhere in places and spaces where no one has ever gone, in fear that we will go up against the unknown that will cripple our minds. We are paralyzing ourselves, in order to want to belong, in order to want to know we exist, in order to tell ourselves we are doing something meaningful in life, when the idea of the meaning in life is a severe irony in itself in the first place.

Yes, we can all come from the same box of Lego. But the choice of what you want to be, is infinite. You can choose to use up all the pieces in the Lego set, or you can choose to use only those pieces that you believe would help in the construction of what you dub "identity". Let me tell you what I think, there's no such thing.

But there's one thing I agree with. We need to start laughing at ourselves, fast. But for different reasons from what Nazri had in mind. We need to laugh at ourselves, at our foolishness for ever believing in things that we thought we couldn't achieve, when it was in us all along. We need to laugh at ourselves, that we're idiots that want to trap ourselves in a status quo enclosure and yet blame it on social factors when our innate reluctance to change is the deciding factor in the end.

And we need to laugh at ourselves, because we really do need a laugh.

you run away but you ain't moving at all

Parent-teacher meeting as well as the further education talks on Saturday was kind of like a complete waste of time to me, since none of my family members was interested in going and I didn't feel any need to attend any crappy and useless university talks, I was just reading the book Jas lent me, 'The Witch of Portobello', most of the time. Mainly, my aim of going was merely to collect my result slip which I couldn't receive, of course, till I met up with Mr Lim.

Lol the talk with Mr Lim didn't turn out as expected. Instead of talking to us about our results, he turned round the tables and asked how he could be a better teacher instead since he was relatively new to teaching. He said he was disappointed that Weiliang and I did not speak out more often in class to stimulate everyone to think so I reckon Weiliang and I would have to speak out more often in future eh? So that everyone would be more interested in the lesson and their intellect will be stimulated. (:

Well he did talk to us a bit about our results, and I told him my poor grades were a result of not studying since I had zero motivation during the holidays, which is true of course. Being stuck in the JC system for 3 years, I am definitely growing weary, and sometimes I really wonder if I made the right choice. Nevertheless, I will be glad to see the back of this year, even though it means I would have to face the terrifying prospect of collecting my A' level results. The last time I had such a fear was when I was collecting my PSLE, but I wouldn't really say I was scared then because frankly, no one gives a damn about PSLE scores. But A's is an entirely different story altogether.

Being caught in a world where you are held steadfast to expectations from society, your parents, your teachers and your friends, it is inevitable that you can feel suffocated at times, when you seem unable to meet any of the expectations from everyone. There is this innate desire to escape, to establish yourself as who you want to be, but of course, you can't. That's definitely what some of us are feeling right now. Mr Lim was right on one point though, I desperately need to rejuvenate myself, and experience something new to spark my life again. Maybe a trip overseas in the June holidays.. Hm...

Mid years? SHUCKS!

when the world finally gets to you

The monotony of the world and everyone's daily routine is perhaps the very thing that every human being on earth dwells in. When we fail to break away from our dull monotone of futility, we merely internalise it. Humans, or should i say all living things, have the miraculous ability to make things acceptable, and thus making the absolute conformity uniformity. It's sad, to see one struggle in a sea where the waves are made up of fellow poor lost souls who drowned in that sea itself.

And it's amazing how much humans can internalise, from a teacher who tries not to be too insensitive or a potent needle that's supposed to be a phallic symbol.

and you pretend to be high and mighty

Nazri recently got me hooked on Motion City Soundtrack. Unsurprising, since their songs are all rather emo (about shitty life) and well, you know me. Talking about shitty lives, you know, Mr Sas just about summed everyone's lives up when he talked about existentialism during Lit lecture on Friday. You are born, become a teenager, enter adulthood, start a family, grow old and die. About 6 stages of your life pretty much summarised. One never knows when their life would fast forward to the last stage, and one would also never know when they are getting to the last stage when they so desperately seek for it (aka Plath-esque style)

Looking back at the past 18+ years of my life, soon to be 19 in less than 5 months, I think I have accomplished nothing. Everything just went through my life as it should be, finishing my education (soon), friends coming and going, some relatives passing away, etc. I guess it's the same for everyone, just that it hasn't struck a lot of people yet. Now I know why there are existentialists. Simply put, we are born to die, and whatever we do in the process in between birth and death is what defines us, but why the hell should you care. You can get 4 A's for your A' levels, get knocked down by a car, and off to heaven you go(hell for most of us). I can get 4 U's for A's, get Bill Gates as my godfather, and then outlive you by 50 years, beat that dude. What I am putting across is, the meaning and essence in our lives are ultimately dependent on what we do, yes, but what's paradoxical is that what we do does not matter at all. Not one single bit. Ultimately, how happy your life is is how happy you want it to be. One can never achieve perfection, nor be liked by everyone in the world. To try to achieve either (or both for some) is a fundamentally flawed dream that not only leads most people to achieve the opposite, they often self destruct in the process. Talk about Lear please.

But of course, you can argue that how happy you can get is dependent on how many people in the world like you. Geez. So the point of our existence is to please people so that we ourselves can be happy. Lol, talk about extreme irony. So the essence of your life lies in how much you're doing to increase your popularity in the world for your own happiness. Talk about hypocrisy and self-centredness and superficiality kthx.

I can't deny I myself am living such a life as well (haha thus making all that I said above possibly irrelevant) but oh dude, don't give me the crap that you aren't. Therefore, after making such a pointless speech as the one above, I consider myself a philosophical existentialist.

// sq the philosophical existentialist signing off to do pointless homework //

Have to say I am really tired. Everything's getting drained out of me so fast I barely know how to react. A drilled routine that fails to superimpose itself upon me. I barely know half of what's going on in physical geog nowadays, and I don't have the energy to go to Ms Lee for consultation. So again, here's my outlet to let myself go. My confidence is draining, my inferiority complex is getting the better of me.

So what's there left but to trudge on.