“When you take apart a lego house and mix the pieces into the bin, where does the house go to?”

“It’s in the bin.”

“No, those are just pieces. They could become spaceships or trains. The house was an arrangement. The arrangement doesn’t stay with the pieces and it doesn’t go anywhere else. It’s just gone.”

- xkcd.com

I’m at the cyclical low of self-esteem, brought upon by the discovery of having messed up at work.

When it comes to stupidity and inadequacy, I’m an all-rounder. I’m ignorant, careless, useless, fussy, critical, hypocritical, mean, paranoid, lazy and dorky. I’m so lousy I have to resort to a clumsy string of words that can barely express how lousy I am. I used the same word twice in a sentence, and the argument was possibly circular. Ugh.

Appreciating Convexity

The best thing about working life, it seems, is that it has given me a lot of time of my own. When I put down my work for the night and the weekends, I can explore, discover and pursue my interests. Strangely, it is when I sell my physical hours that I really gain free rein of my thoughts and the liberty to live in my mind. In contrast, schooling was always about filling my head with the thoughts I was supposed to have and knowledge I must remember. It was repressive despite the amount of “free time” I had.

Life has been good. I like my job because it gives me the autonomy to do what I think needs to be done, and choose how to do it, despite my junior position. Outside of work, I’ve been able to catch up on my book-reading, music-listening and movie-watching. I’ve even been able to pick up the piano again. I can take a walk outside whenever I felt like doing so, without feeling guilty about taking time away from some readings I’m not even remotely interested in.

Now, I have the liberty to reflect, to day dream and to read up on any nonsense that happen to pique my interest. Absolute time has less meaning. If I need to take a long time to finish a difficult book, so be it – I don’t need to find something straightforward to read just to feel the gratification of having completed a book. I watched Gone With The Wind in one continuous sitting. I’ve even survived the 7.5 hour extreme art house film Satantango. I  can listen to Eric Clapton’s extended 9 mins Wonderful Tonight 10 times a night, or to the full Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 twice in a row. On Saturday, I can practise the piano for 7 hours. On Sunday, I can spend an afternoon wandering around.

Instead of being told and assessed constantly about things I should/need to understand, I am learning to appreciate what I cannot yet understand. At work, I explain away convexity. After work, I embark on a search for non-linearity in life. That’s when I can fully enjoy the second, third, or even fourth order effects of spending my time.

A lot of my time is sold to my full-time work, but in my head I’m living more vivaciously than ever before.

Real Competition

Today, I learned of someone who deliberately went to a worse school despite qualifying for better ones just so that he could emerge top and win scholarships. After getting into a prestigious university overseas, he continued to enroll in courses he thought he could beat everyone else at. That was supposed to be the smart method.

A clever way to get the credentials, maybe. But where is the thrill in winning people obviously weaker than you?

I thought life is enjoyable only when you live and work with people smarter, more experienced and more knowledgeable than you. With people better than you as role models, you will be able to set a higher benchmark to better yourself with. Only when you realize that your best is not good enough, will you become better than your best. Besides, winning is fun only when you beat someone at least as good, if not better than you.

Although many things in life is relative, it is also relative depending on what you choose to compare yourself against. After all, just because you are smarter than idiots doesn’t make you smart.

Ultimately, what matters is giving yourself the opportunity to be better than yourself, not better than others.

All my love

Chopin is beauty epitomized.

All you hear in his music is beauty, all the loveliness that music is. His pieces are not simple. They are intricate and delicate, but they remain accessible, and personal. It’s the sort of music you play alone at home for your personal enjoyment. Yet, it has the level of sophistication for a grand performance in a large concert hall that will leave its audience touched, captivated and spellbound by his ingenuity.

Where on earth did someone find inspiration for music like that?

—

Beethoven is fascinating.

It doesn’t take a lot to realize that he puts his heart and soul into his music. His music is original, because it is him – his thoughts, his emotions, his life. You hear him being angry, or sad, or mischievous. The music changes from moment to moment, exactly like the thoughts in someone’s head. It’s almost as though he thinks in music.

If someone could write a diary in music, it would be Beethoven.

—

Mostly, I love Chopin and Beethoven for their honesty. Their pieces are not elaborately constructed show pieces (like Liszt), arrogantly masterful definitions of music (like Mozart), or hopelessly romantic cliches (like Mendelssohn).

They are brilliant, yet natural, works of art.

High and Dry

I’m amused and slightly disturbed by how much the phrase “high and dry” is misunderstood, especially since it’s been popularized in the Radiohead song where its meaning is evident.

In fact, it is so commonly misunderstood in my office, that people understood each other perfectly, leaving me bewildered.

“Hey! I realized if we do this we’ll be high and dry!” I frowned and thought, Oh no… but why does he sound so excited? That was when the person who was directed the phrase responded with an enthusiastic, “WOW! Really, that’s great!”

Huh?

A while later I realized they both happened to misunderstand the phrase in exactly the same manner. The good news was then related to a third person, “Actually, if we do this, we’ll be high and dry!”. And the response?

“Really, that’s great!”

What are the chances?

See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sun rise on a tropic isle
Just remember, darling, all the while
You belong to me.

See the marketplace in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
But remember when a dream appears
You belong to me.

I’ll be so alone without you
Maybe you’ll be lonesome too—and blue

Fly the ocean in a silver plane
Watch the jungle when it’s wet with rain
Just remember till you’re home again
You belong to me

- You Belong To Me, by The Duprees

Creative Betrayal

Music is larger than life. It is captivating to the point of bewitchery, beautifully wicked, unattainably grand, but in all its grandeur, oddly humbling.

Music humbles the performer, for however superb his technique, he is merely a servant to the composer, an interpreter of another’s ideals and emotions. As he only interprets, he may often find himself awestruck by the ingenuity of its creator. After all, it is the composer who defines music.

Yet, music is also humbling to the composer for despite him writing the most sophisticated passages and beautiful melodies, only a good performer can breathe life into them.

That is probably why music becomes more interesting, albeit frustrating, when the composer and performer is not the same person.

I firmly believe that the integrity of a piece of music must be retained by the performer. A performer must seek first and foremost to showcase the composer’s art, upon which he demonstrates his own virtuosity, in contrast to showcasing his technique by making use of the composer’s art.

Granted, some performers can, while retaining the integrity of the original music, revitalise it by injecting it with his own personality and charm (something like Bruno Pelletier’s jazz rendition of Billy Joel’s Just the Way You Are). Unfortunately, most tries at creative interpretations of the original music defaces it, robbing the composer of his craft.

Recently, I’ve been hunting down versions of Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor on Youtube. I’ve listened to performers from 8-year old kids to acclaimed musicians and even  many amateur exhibitionists. Many of them, including renowned musicians, performed this piece substantially different from the score, playing it in the way they want to hear it (Chopin must have made several turns in his grave). My favorites though, are those who played the piece superbly while keeping to the original score.

I guess we sometimes quickly jump into the trap of making changes for the better simply because it’s easier to do things the way we prefer than to step into another’s shoes and attempt to understand exactly why the music was written in a certain way, and what the composer really wants to express. Sadly, whenever we do that, we deny ourselves of a chance to be awestruck by the ingenuity of the composer and be humbled by music.

Swimming blind

It’s amazing how being blind seems to immediately make you feel self-conscious.

I left my goggles at home while going for a swim. What spooked me the most wasn’t the crashing into walls and people, and not even that disturbing feeling that came with imagining chlorine eating away at my retinas (munch munch munch). What’s really freaky is this terrible feeling of being ignorant to what everyone else sees, something like me fumbling in the water, and generally everything that others can see while I can’t.

The inconvenience of being blind seems so small compared to this constant sense of insecurity, self-consciousness and helplessness. It’s almost as though, being blind is perfectly fine… so long as everyone else is too.

Studying for fun

“You see, if you have an education, you have many sources of pleasure and intellectual stimulation. Ways of using your time.”

- Burjor Randeria, in Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

This is the perfect reason for working hard on learning – you learn so that you can have more fun!

Certainly, nothing can interest (or sustain your interest) unless you have sufficient knowledge on the subject to appreciate and enjoy it. Everything that you don’t know about or don’t understand is one less source of entertainment. An illiterate man is a bored one.

So, life is dull not because there aren’t sufficient forms of entertainment. You have no hobbies not because nothing interests you. If all you know about is your mundane life, then your life will certainly be mundane because you enjoy little more than unimaginative dramas about lives like yours.

Considering that dance escapes me, and that I have two right feet (which I argue to be worse than having two left feet), I’m missing out on the whole field of dance – all that elegant prancing and sensuous movement. Every language and culture that I do not know is one that prevents me from fully appreciating the nuances and witticisms of a film in that language.

Yet, this begs the question: breadth or depth? There seems to be a tradeoff between enjoying many things a bit and enjoying some things a lot. Now, even figuring out how to enjoy life sounds challenging. We have no excuse to be bored.