This too shall pass

I think I really started 2012 with a BANG! I did something so liberating, I almost said in my boss’ face – you suck and good riddance to bad rubbish. Well, I wished I knew how to do this explicitly yet diplomatically. Nonetheless, I hope somewhere, somehow, someone will be wise enough to pick that up.

Though I learnt much, I wished the entire ordeal didn’t happen to me. Thankfully, I am glad that this too shall pass and this is something that I can change and not be stuck with it. Thank God for that!

Adieus and hello, all in the same breath

“It’s the most, most wonderful time of the year…”

New year is always the best. I love it how we all start the ticker tape fresh, all scoreboards resetted, enemies forgotten (cos you purposely omit them from your season’s greetings list). It’s just nice, when you get to start everything anew and on a clean slate. There’s just this fresh and crisp tinge in the air.

Spent my last couple of days in 2011 reflecting. I haven’t been reflecting a lot. I just realized how I stopped thinking in the last 3 months of 2011 and I hate it. Everyday is a mad rush, pre-empting and second-guessing. It’s horrible. Guess you know what is going on the resolutions list for 2012.

This year, I won’t do a stock take of the year, what went wrong and what went well. Instead, this year I will just focus on what I want and how I will get there. I won’t focus on what I can improve since this year I have decided that my life needs a radical revamp so that I won’t be stuck in the rut. I remember in 2011, in a post, I said stay tuned because 2011 is going to be a year of change.

Guess 2011 is the year of sparking Change, 2012 is going to be the year of making Change. This time, I won’t aspire to change the world. All I aspire to do is to change my life, change my destiny. I can’t change fate but I can change my destiny. Yes, I am still very (very) sore about many things. Yes it sucks. But I read this quote five minutes ago that just sums up what I should do from this point on: It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live (J K Rowling).

Watched Adele’s concert last night. As she explained the meaning behind  Someone Like You, it hit me that somewhere, sometime everyone experiences pain somehow somewhat. (There are more sad people around than you can imagine!) The key is how each of us deal with pain. As I complain and whinge about how some people have it easier, I guess these pain toughened the spirit and stiffened the resolute. It’s hard (no one says it’s easy) but you have to realize the lessons yourself. No one will be there to teach you the lessons. You just got to figure it out yourself. The cookbook of life doesn’t exist.

We are masters of our own destiny. If someone tries to alter your destiny, make sure that person doesn’t get a chance. Stay on track, focused on the target and live life happy. You owe yourself your happiness. Hello 2012, let’s have the best together!

Good riddance to bad luck!

Every year, this time, I will look back and look at the new year ahead with excitement and yell – good riddance to all bad luck!

Sent an email to an ex-boss of mine. Think she sounded sincerely happy to hear from me, not like her usual off-the-cuff type of greeting. Guess that’s a nice way to end the year and start a new one. 

2012 brings fresh promises. Though this year, I feel age catching up. I feel less excited about many things, having seen the darker side of life this year. Keep wondering if all my mis-steps were worth it because I cannot see light at the end of the tunnel. I find myself stuck at the same spot, not progressing, not learning. Just feel trapped and all I can tell myself is – C’est la vie, c’est votre vie.

I started 2011 excited and fresh-faced. 2011 has been a particularly challenging year for me on all fronts. It is a year I made such a major decision to say hell no to my dreams of 7 years. I just wanted to close the chapter, end all the disappointments so that I can move on. 2 years on and 7 years of dreaming, I decided that dreaming will just make me sadder and I just have to move on. The hurt lingers, the envy starts when I hear something. The “it could have been me” voice gets softer and muffled over time.

I want to start 2012 optimistic, and pray that God will be kind to me. I have a job now that pays the bills but I guess I also need to have that spiritual fulfillment in work. Not getting that now but I hope to get that soon. The key difference between then and now, I guess, is I actually have a choice now and I am the master of my own fate, not like before. Some people still make me mad and sad, all together. I try to forget these pain and focus only on the good things that make me smile. 2012 will be different, it has to be. It’s the first time, I am being flushed out of the system and am out there in the real world. The real world can be extremely unforgiving. I am still in search of the kindred souls out there.

Come 2012, my mantra will be – live life, open your heart and mind. (yeah, and I just have that couple more days to mope! )

Went to the Witch Doctor

I don’t understand why I’m still so mad – is it because someone dear to me was a victim of workplace bully, or is it because I see all the wrongs not righted?

Reform and change are often the lofty ideals sold to youths to inspire them to revolutionise ideas, actions and systems. Not just for the youths, this prescription for a better world and a better life has been peddled over and over again to young and old alike.

Guess I fell prey to this “sexy” concoction. If anything is too good to be true, it probably is.

I look around me and realise nothing changes. There is no such medicine in the prescription sold to me. Change is talk and talk is cheap. I’m stopping short of saying change is cheap, cos I know deep down that it is not. I don’t have an alternative prescription but I wish witch doctors will stop peddling this prescription. The least we can do is not to treat life like a farce, kidding ourselves and convincing others to follow suit.

It’s funny how you know you were right and in this midst feel angry that you were right. Such is the complexity of human emotions. I know I have recovered. Wounds have healed over time but the scars remain. I wish never to look back and for the road ahead to be less turbulent. I hope I will find joy in the little things everyday and be less affected by the witch doctors around me.

Run Forrest, Run!

The rudeness displayed today shocked me. The thou-higher-than-thee attitude leaves me beyond words. Look in the mirror before you preach. Talk is cheap and title is cheaper. Ugliness knows no boundaries, especially for those who have been welled up far too long. The world is really far, far bigger than you think.

Again, I’m reminded why I had to turn my back – they will destroy me faster than I can change them.

Me and the World

Been busy with nothing really, just been worrying mostly. I guess the emptiness and the loneliness sometimes hits me hard, especially in the day when everyone is so busy. And I try to hide my un-busyness in the broad daylight by trying to do something to feel useful. I wonder about my existence as I wonder about what I am really good at. Thinking you are good at something is not really useful. Cos someone out there must think the same, then you are really usefully happy.

I like night time best cos that’s when everyone is winding down, makes me feel like I’m part of the group again. Night times are quiet and no one expects you to be doing anything. I love the bit about not having to worry because nothing happens at night. That’s the beauty of nightfall – the darkness just hides everything away. The artificial light just illuminates what you want to see. And more importantly, there is always tomorrow to look forward to – hoping that something will change. When disappointment hits you, there is always another day to look forward to.

My wish for this week – have a more fruitful week than the last. Hopefully I get the all important call. Just one will do.

Good wholesome fun

Unfortunately, good wholesome fun is something I wish for, not have at my whims anymore. Gone are the times when you can get so much fun from playing card games and silly pretend play. Fun when you have grown up must be an activity – something hip, cool and expensive – or holiday at an exotic destination. And in today’s context, something you can post on Facebook to self-advertise your cool factor. Not to mention, your buying power. Enjoying the high-life means having expensive things, not having a good wholesome life. Recreational activities must be a talking point pictorial or activity. Something that others can only envy when they see you having it. It must be mediaworthy. No one seem to enjoy the simple joys of life anymore. Even enjoying a cuppa must be done at a haute coute place, not at home, the coffeeshop and not Starbucks anymore. When you exercise, it must be at the gym or taking classes. Whatever happened to having a nice quiet moment to ourselves? What have we done to ourselves? Have we become such strangers to ourselves that we crave constant attention from others?

Age and the thirst for material needs really takes the fun out of a hell lot of stuff. The constant thirst for approval makes me sick.

Logic vs Emotion

A year later, I find myself revisiting logic vs emotion. Everyone expects everyone else to behave rationally based on logic, but is life always logical devoid of emotions? That’s the question I find myself asking.

Our actions must be substantiated by reasons, and good reasons to boot. If I decline a request based on inexplicable intuition that cannot be described in words, I am a wonky fool. Does reason always win emotion? In my world, I am taught that decisions need to follow principles. Here comes the grey area – when principles are utility based, they are generally good and accepted; but when principles are based on the intangible intuition, they are generally bad and rejected.

I find myself being served on the silver platter waiting to be judged, as I find myself waiting for the next best thing. There are reasons why I do certain things, unfortunately, I do not always make my decisions based on a tangible benchmark. No doubt, some benchmarks are more tangible than others but tangibility does not always possess a quality of usefulness. For example, why do people eat caviar? It’s expensive, it doesn’t fill the tummy. The rational hungry person won’t eat that as a meal. Compare that to someone who left his well-paying job in exchange for his happiness and his values. Who’s the fool? The dude who pays for the cavier or the dude who left his well-paying job? Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear answer. That’s the warped values system we have. Everything is utility based – it’s all about how well we can afford things, not how well we live. Sometimes, I feel that even God has to prove his existence to us because we need to have a measure of His greatness.

Once again, I find myself defending emotion, the forgotten cousin of logic. Logic is important but emotion is what differentiates us from the robots. Yet, we find ourselves suppressing that side of the human capability just so we can quantify things and explain things more easily. Why can’t there exist a healthy co-existence? The reason why the world is so warped is because human beings have such insatiable appetites and everything has to be measurable. Measuring takes the joy out of existence.

F for Communication

In this day and age, people are always so busy, though I’m no longer sure with what. Somedays I think people just enjoy looking busy because it makes them feel important, when really they are just going over and over things that do not matter and the busy-ness is just a cluttered state of mind, not the physical state.

When people communicate through the various media, it’s hard to scratch beyond the surface because of the bombardment of information. There are simply too many information sources and we are not trained to deal with it.

Yet, clutteredness and ease of communication are just the perfect partners in crime for miscommunication. For example, people send emails without really mulling over whether their intended messages will be transmitted “as is”. Articles must be posted quickly so that the writer is first-to-post and readers are first-to-receive. It’s so easy to hit send, publish or post!

On the other hand, people sometimes read messages “as is” that they don’t delve deeper into the innuendos. Again because of the lack of training to deal with information bombardment and maybe time to process the messages carefully. I guess we stopped appreciating the beauty of languages.

I miss the wordplay of communication. Everything today just reeks of efficiency and getting-things-done. It’s about “are you in or out?”, not “let’s try to sort things out”. Because it’s so easy to get published, it feels like people have gotten into the mode of saying “get my point?” and no longer the discussive mode of “let’s broaden the view”. People are quick to defend their “publications” and less quick to broaden their definitions to consider other alternatives, simply because sometimes it’s hard to retract one’s publications. But why should it be so? Human emotions, ego, the need to be right / superior?

I find people stopped communicating to share ideas, people communicate to feel superior. I don’t think I’m having a bout of low self-esteem. Let me know if you think I am. Any friendly discussion on the topic of new-age communication is greatly welcomed!

Facebookless in Social Media Era

Decided to quit Facebook for good, stopped short of deleting the account cos I still treasure the link I have with friends from the yesteryears who swear by FB.

Anyways, i’m trying out the 21-day rule to kicking a bad habit. So far Week 1 past without a hitch. Removed the mobile app on my phone and deleted all web history stored on my computer (since the auto complete function is so pervasive nowadays). Revived the simplicity in my life. There was this senseless craving to catch up on the minutest and most trivial matter people post on FB. I was just so caught up in this whirlwind romannce with FB to know LOADS. Then there are all these retailers and agencies cashing in on the popularity of FB such that they offer you freebies when you click “like” on their page.

I guess it finally hit me when one day I asked myself – so what if you knew who met whom at the shopping mall, who is dining at the coolest restaurant in town or who just swiped their credit card? It just didn’t matter to me. I didn’t need to know what these guys are up to. The point was, I’m not there socialising with them. I can profile their up-and-abouts but I just wasn’t connected with them.

Move on to the second level of communication where we actually discuss ideas on FB – ah, this is a function I sure didn’t mind. Afterall, your friends are sometimes the best people whom you can have a friendly war of words with, to broaden one’s outlook. Uh oh, boy was I wrong. FB is the place where birds of the same feather flocked. People only liked to hear things they wanted to hear. Offer a different opinion, get ready to be ignored forever or flamed, especially if you are in the minority. To say the least, I found myself self-censoring how I really feel about many things. I’m just passive consumer of FB updates. So my FB page looked pretty much like classifieds where people posted about the cool things they have done. Nothing much on ideas or opinions. Communication – epic fail. Well-placed self-ads – high distinction.

Coming to self-ads, we have the different agencies using FB as a tool to market their wares or to share news updates. The latter is fine by me cos FB is really a wonderful RSS feeder. You get videos, photos, stories, podcasts, all under one roof. I miss my integrated media news tool. (I really do!) But it gets a point of abuse when the agencies measure their functionality based on popularity votes. FB is viral and you want to cash in, sure. But it remains as a social media tool – it is a space for people to socialise, not for you to measure how good your “product” is. And worse, people don’t realise how FB profiles us with our likes and generate advertisement revenue from our likes. Essentially we are providing FB with somewhat of a free lunch. There are so many functions that work on the opt-out basis. Noobs won’t realise how they can set their privacy settings unless prompted by. More changes to FB are to come with the introduction of Timeline and more. Well, while I’m not using FB, I’m curious to find out how this function will evolve with mass consumption by FB fans. I’m sure I’ll be surprised (and won’t be disappointed )!