Past. Present. Future: October 2006

Sunday, October 29, 2006

oh hello

i'm not ready for the As. but think again, i will never ever b ready for any exam. was hoping to accomplish much more but i guess i started too late. think again, its never too late. but trying to tackle microecons from scratch a 2 wks b4 the As? its madness. everytime i flip thru my file n i see those skimpy essay outlines, swiggly handwriting on my dd n ss essay, that convulsive image of sublime beauty n distorted elegance of a teacher comes to mind. n dats enuff to turn u off from mugging anymore, wad not wif all the other distractions around my house. n the biggest distraction of all, my mind dat has a natural propensity to daydream when u most need it to work.

go blog surfing n u find that all ur friends r probably mugging harder than u. but think again, they probably thinking dat ur probably mugging harder than them. so yar its spirals both to an upward surge in an academic pursuit of competition for hegemony, rivalry n progandistic self interest. so who's playing mind games wif whom. i guess we're all playing mind games wif ourselves huh. -says in a morosely jonathan fashion- "its all in the mind. The mind....." wif the As, its no longer an issue of MAD deterrence theories but more of SAD. self-assured destruction. an all-or-nothing strategy in which the adversary that strikes first, dies first.

it all begins next week. gp, my greatest nightmare. yesterday walking around in town, saw the christmas decorations going up. tis abit early isn't it. when christmas comes, it will all b said n done. jc life over. the As over. n the army beckons n we'll all b leading very diff lives there-or so i think. but then again, if i happen to screw my As, there'll b no christmas for me.

until then -

Friday, October 20, 2006

tsar bomba

compellingly beautiful. the ussr’s tsar bomba tested in oct 1961 boasted a yield of 50,00 kt. remaining the largest thermonuclear weapon ever tested. never expected the soviets to b so powerful huh...little boy n fat man that exploded over hiroshima n nagasaki only had a power of 15 n 21 kilotons. imagine the damage this bomb wd unleash...

“The fireball touched the ground, reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane, and was seen 1,000 km away. The heat could have caused third degree burns at a distance of 100 km. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 60 km high and 30–40 km wide. The explosion could be seen and felt in Finland, even breaking windows there. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage up to 1,000 km away. The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the earth”.

the awesome majesty n power of human achievement n destruction. we humans realli r assholes.

farewell assembly was a waste of time n a huge disappointment. buffet was disappointing. actually felt dat it was just like any other normal sch day, an extended civics period. ct reps had to so some admin stuff somemore. they were last min, as usual. actually, graduation day actually taught me one thing. this sch doesn’t realli cares 2 hoots abt u although they tell u upfront dat they do. graduation ceremony turned out to b analysis of j2 prelim results, a shitass talk by principal n a ppt presentation dats supposed to b our graduation video montage. n for the record, dat last item screwed up real bad too. a poorly planned affair, rather haphazardly put together at the last min. i’m glad to b finally outta this sch.

i’m not so sure bout ns, i wonder how i wd go from here. how much will i change? how much will pple change? i'll just haf to stick around to find out.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Reflections on a Mote of Dust, by Carl Sagan

These r one of the most humbling n inspiring passages i ever stumbled upon. when i was younger i cdn't help drawing the 9 planets again n again -n wif childlike innocence, i placed the moon after pluto! my interest in space n anything science-related had died out long ago, but when u get thru a day feeling utterly spent, wasted, n guilty of ur progress, reading these words r so soothing, they're almost cathartic.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

When the dawn comes, tonight will be a memory, too

supposed to b mugging, but m not. a lvl revision off to a very slow start. heard some pple got some of their enlistment letters for police n commando. i do hope i go in by end of this yr n not april. i want to haf my 3 mths waiting for uni admission after ns totally free wif absofuckinglutely no commitments at all to make. in the academic sense. maybe in the 3 mths can go backpacking wif sean in europe or some exotic place like nepal or tibet. experience a different lifestyle n culture. well dats after ns. n after the As.

planning to do some business selling paintings after the As. test the mkt, see how things go. on another note, prelims haf a numbing effect. the results r so bad i just don’t really feel anything, except that sickening feeling dat i’ll haf to work hard. it’ll b over in 2 mths time i suppose. then army will take over. but meanwhile..

dat day chanced upon n opportunity to visit sji. by some amazing coincidence bumped into mrs tan outside the hall. she brought me to see my paintings hanging temporarily in the sch library. n as usual, i had to explain the meanings behind the paintings to sec 4s she brought along. sec 4s had the graduation day last sat. standing there n looking at my o level painting, it all came back. walked around the sch, chapel, the sec 4 block, past the canteen. suddenly, it didn’t feel strange realizing that it was not all too long ago that i had graduated as one of them. time does fly. soon, njc and 05ao3 and aep will be a memory too.

in t s eliot’s burnt norton, he talks abt how all the possible ways people might walk across a courtyard add up to a vast dance we can't see; children who aren't there are hiding in the bushes. so wad does it mean to consider things dat might have been? is it possible that our lives consist of multiple realities playing out together at the same time, only invisible to us? wad kind of ‘invisible’ life wd we be leading if we had chosen an alternate path? or can it b, tt everything that happened was meant to happen, n there was ultimately no alternate path? though we plan n live out our daily lifes according to a 24h schedule, somehow, i find that there’s a seamlessness n interconectivity in life that makes it, i dono...timeless?

Past. Present. Future