- You Belong To Me, by The Duprees

Then I talked about literature. “People will tell you, ‘What’s the use? What’s the point of reading novels and poetry?’ They’ll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized.”

- Paul Theroux, in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The graduation post is long overdue. Mostly because there wasn’t a transition period, no time for me to reflect, panic or prepare for a life ahead in corporate slavery. I practically went straight out of school to the airport for the grad trip, and was then shoved into full-time permanent work – my email correspondence with the boss began when I was in the middle of the red light district of Sydney.

So that was it, my graduation.

Before graduation, I spent four years in a business school struggling to master some academics admist learning how to please bosses, smoke clients and get a high-paying job. I learned a lot, but I forgot even more. “It’s just a way of thinking”, some would say that’s what you take away from a tertiary education. I agree that it does seem like that, although the more cynical of us might ask if it’s a way of thinking you know better than others who haven’t got that piece of thick paper, perhaps?

I like to think of it as a change in perspective. Compared to the rote learning back at JC where the amount I learned was measured by what I could remember at the exams, this feeling of not having learned much, and not knowing a lot is rather refreshing. On one hand, you could say my university education lacked the depth and rigor of technical studies. On the other hand, my university education has also led me to realize the great amount of great things that I do not know. The possibilities are endless, my interests are diverse, but there are just so many things I don’t know and probably won’t ever learn in my lifetime.

I would think the most you will ever be able to learn, is the extent of your ignorance. I would be most knowledgeable and wise indeed, if I could just accurately measure how much I don’t know, instead of how much I do know.

University has also exposed me to the academic ideal (or intellectual snobbery), in which I surprisingly found myself interested in learning something simply for the sake of knowing it. Back in JC, I was adamantly opposed to the A’level syllabus which didn’t seem to include anything practical. “Why do I need to memorize the Krebs Cycle and all its byproducts?”, I would whine. But that familiar question, “how could you be interested in learning something you can’t apply?”, became the response of a friend who couldn’t understand why I say I want to study finance theory when I had zero interest in investment and trading.

“Doesn’t being able to apply the knowledge make studying something interesting?” One thing I know for sure, is that the application of accounting in the real world made me lose all interest (whatever little I had) in accounting.

In these few years, I’ve also changed my outlook on my career. Sure, I still want a career that would make going to work bearable and the hard work meaningful. But no, I won’t search for a job that is exactly in line with my passions in life. What came together in a package with intellectual snobbery, was this bit of artistic stubbornness, naive romanticism… whatever. It’s a plain refusal to violate intellectual and artistic pursues with the dirty, ugly business of commerce and the filth of money which seems to be too big a focus in business schools.

Perhaps it’s the rhectoric of getting rich and being commercially successful that eventually sickened me. I love money, and I’ve nothing against capitalism, but I feel a need to separate my money making tools from my interests. It’s a fervent need to protect them because using what you love to make money feels too much like selling your wife and daughter into prostitution. I guess, you could be the most unscrupulous businessman selling something you don’t believe in, but what’s important is to be able to return home to do whatever you love, spending money on your interests instead of tainting them by selling them for money.

And certainly, no graduation reflection is complete without a mention of friends. University is about making friends, and I made good ones. It’s a wonderful thing, but a tad too often, personal success becomes measured by the popularity of a person. Before having good friends and the good opinions of friends go to my head, I guess I have to remind myself that everyone has friends, even the biggest bastards and bitches, and some may even have more than I do. If you think that someone who doesn’t like you is mistaken, what about those who do like you?

In two days, I will be wearing an old fashioned, oversized black robe and ridiculous looking square sort-of-hat in the middle of town. It is supposed to be a meaningful day, a proud moment. I hope the speeches will be good.

Steve Lopez, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times writes about Nathaniel Ayers, a talented musician suffering from paranoid schizophrenia who lives and plays his 2-string violin on the harsh streets of Skid Row amongst drug addicts, murderers, pimps and prostitutes. Haunted by his mental illness, he left Julliard, one of the world’s most exclusive music schools, 30 years ago and is now living in his own world on the streets of LA near a statue of Beethoven.

Nathaniel doesn’t have to worry about a daughter who will be just fifteen when he hits retirement age. His computer doesn’t crash. He doesn’t have to call his HMO six hundred times to scream about a doctor bill it refuses to cover. He doesn’t have to call a bank and threaten to strangle someone over a “thorough investigation” that has determined I was lying when I reported a case of identity theft and the loss of $3,000. Nathaniel is 100 percent off the books. No Social Security card, no driver’s license, no address, no living will, no job, no lawn to mow, no phone call to return, no retirement to plan for and no rules except his own.

The day of the Beethoven rehearsal, we walked one block down from Disney Hall and he told me he had to go to the bathroom.

“Just hold on,” I said. “My office is only a block away and you can go there.”

“Mr. Lopez,” he said, looking at me like a six-year-old, “I can’t wait.”

“Well, why didn’t you go back at Disney Hall?” I asked.

“I didn’t think of it,” he said. “But I really have to go bad.”

Across the street was the Los Angeles County Courthouse. In the garden was a tree. Nathaniel made a dash for it, returning a minute later with a look of great relief.

How can I ever reel him back to the world of rules and regulations, of protocol and privies? He is tied to nothing but his passion and the world it delivers him into, a world in which the city is his orchestra and the conductor is a statue. He sees a swaying palm and hears violins. A bus roars by and gives him a bass line. He hears footsteps and imagines Beethoven and Brahms out for a stroll.

“I can’t survive,” he once told me of his refusal to come indoors, “if I can’t hear the orchestra the way I like to hear it.”

- The Soloist, by Steve Lopez

Tonight was spent catching up with friend and in the process, had some insightful revelations and peeped into the “Blind” quadrant of the Johari window.

Friend: “Caucasian bosses really know how to enjoy. They work hard, but to them it’s also very important to enjoy. They tell me, ‘The weekend is here! Go, go out and enjoy your weekend!’. Unlike Chinese bosses who’ll work late into Friday nights.”

Me: “Sure, Caucasian bosses enjoy their weekends while you work hard for them.”

Friend: “Yeah, that’s true too.”

…

Me: “This song is not supposed to be played with the guitar. The piano should be the lead.”

Friend: “Can you not be so square and think out of the box?!”

…

Friend: “You look like the sort who sits in a bar and drink milk.”

I promptly let her in on some of the benefits that come with being perceived as the goody-two-shoes.

“Cerebral Snapshot” was a name I came out with on that late April night when I decided to begin blogging again. I had intended the name of my blog to be original, but apparently, there was at least one person who beat me to it, 43 years ago.

Paul Theroux wrote a charming essay entitled “The Cerebral Snapshot” in 1965.

“What I have told, may not always have been the pictorial truth – a camera may easily have seen something different. But when you see a sunset, or a giraffe, or a child eating a melting ice-cream cone there is a chemical reaction inside you. If you really stand as innocent as you can, something of the movement, entering through your eyes, gets into your body where it continues to rearrange your senses. Also – and for a writer this bit of information is priceless - a picture is worth only a thousand words or so.”

What might have appeared, to a science-trained mind, as simply a difference between the objective truth and the perception of a person was put across by him in an entirely romantic manner. I suppose that is the role of writers, to share his experience of an event in the way he perceived it and the way it affected him. A picture is a mere pictorial documentation of the (often boring) objective truth that diminishes human experience. Then again, everyone experiences a picture differently, too.

Now at http://cerebralsnapshot.wordpress.com

New beginning.

Decided to move to WordPress because I’ve just noticed how much better the graphics look here. I’m superficial, I know. What do you expect from someone who argued 3 hours on the thickness of the line to use in a presentation? Anyway, the old blog http://oiying.blogspot.com will remain as it is, I will not delete it. It has moved in a direction that I don’t like, but I guess I should leave it as a memento of a phrase in my life.

Before I start, I think it’ll be good to set out some objectives of this blog (that’s a tad too long in business school!). This will be a blog about experiences, thoughts and opinions generally about places and other people. I aim to make writing and reading this blog enjoyable, which means I will consciously exclude rantings and chronological reportings of the happenings in a day. This is meant to be a non-pretentious and honest blog that will hopefully be witty and thoughtful - I will keep this aim in mind as I write.

Cheers to a blog that, as a friend commented on my oldest blog, will once again warrant the comment “Your blog has nothing about you!”. Only this time, I hope it’ll be better. This blog should have nothing about me, yet speak honestly about who I am.

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…

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(Call it illness-induced-philosophical-comtemplation or fever-fried-brain-crap. Here’s something I thought of writing yesterday, while the flesh was weak.)

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot of that. “There’s more to life…” Feels good to hear, doesn’t it? It kinds of signals some unknown wonderful higher purpose in life compared to the current mundane, boring lifestyle.

But I really do not understand. What more? Over what?

Long time ago (which actually isn’t all that long), when I was still a joyful little girl with the naïve notion that life was all about the A’levels, my form teacher came along and gave us a most touching and enlightening speech. “There’s more to life than studies! Think of your family, your friends…” How inspiring.

But it leads me to wonder, one day when I have developed all that social capital (bonding and bridging and what not), is it the day when I have attained the higher meaning in life? I’m afraid not. Because a little rubbing at the crystal ball will show someone, somewhere along the way who’ll tell me, “You know, everyone’s gotta settle down someday.” The tired me inside will find that inspiring again, and I’ll find someone and start a family. Then of course, I must not neglect the “more in life” such that I must not only provide for my family, I must also spent some quality time with them.

But I’m sure, somehow again, someone will come along and this time he’ll say, “But all you’re enjoying now are but earthly pursuits! Think divine. Think celestial. Think spiritual. There’s more to life…” So I’ll abandon my family, give away my worldly goods and take to a life searching for the ultimate meaning of life in some unowned woods somewhere. I’ll live a life of “four big all empty” and (I hate to use this), “see through red dust”. Somehow, these things are kind of “IN” now, with people putting a lot of cash into renovating their houses to look “zen-like” and “back to nature”. (But I digress.)

Cool, isn’t it? There’s more to life. And there’s always more, it doesn’t seem to stop.

Some time ago, I had this lofty dream of wishing I could travel the world owning nothing but whatever I had on me, doing odd jobs, making friends from all over the world, seeing the world as it really is. I thought, THAT would be the life! But really, I ask myself again, how will I feel to leave all my family and friends, uproot myself from the place and culture I belong to, to travel the world, make friends I’ll probably see only once in my life, visit places I do not belong to and understand cultures that are not mine? Will I be happy? Then again, is the pursuit of happiness the ultimate “more” in life?

Wow.

Now this little phrase “There’s more to life” isn’t all that simple, is it? It looks quite profound for my little brain to comprehend. And I wonder. Do all those people who say it with an air of knowing really do understand what they are trying to say? Are they all in some kind of conspiracy to keep this wonderful knowledge away from me?

I really do not understand and I shall not pretend to.