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

Of Decaying Time Value

“At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T.D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their expiration.”

- My Life as a Quant, by Emanuel Derman

That, is eerily and very unfortunately true.

Expressed in a different way, is how in Pixar’s movie Up, the pages for “Stuff I’m going to do” in Ellie’s adventure book were intentionally left empty and full of promise when she was a child, but were later filled in (probably when she approached death) with pictures from her wedding and snapshots from day-to-day activities. The movie romanticised her simple life, but it too made the point of how promises of grand adventure eventually degenerate to naught as we realize our mediocre, non-high performance lives.

About a month after tossing the mortarboard, I’m facing it too – I too am a stock option losing time value. I enter the working world as an enthusiastic fresh graduate, a greenhorn in the field but eager to discover and correct every imperfection in the current systems and operations. I dream about making radical contributions and going to graduate school. Yet I can’t help but see myself, in years to come, as another one of my jaded seniors, shunning responsibility, being contented with the status quo and seeking only to complete assigned tasks even if it means cutting corners. Maybe, I won’t make it to graduate school.

In the culture I was brought up in, envy was taught to be avoided like a vice, while contentedness is  wise. We were also taught to respect traditions and our seniors, and that humility is a well-liked virtue. Should I then, settle into a life of contentedness and simplicity, and abandon the exhilaration that comes with greater purposes and accomplishments? If the answer is no, how then do I go about seeking purpose and making a change?

Thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing

Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty

What would life be?

Without a song or a dance what are we?

So I say thank you for the music

For giving it to me

- “Thank you for the music”, by ABBA

Thank you for the music

A supposedly good concert with a world renowned pianist in a state of the art concert hall: expectedly the best birthday gift I’ve ever received, was disappointing to say the least. But the great people I sat with and spent the rest of the night with made the concert worthwhile, and the birthday special.

Thank you everyone for coming, especially the last VIP surprise guest Liu Xi: it was great having you around tonight. Tonight really made me feel special.

“LC” or not, I think it was a great decision to drink simple wines in styrofoam cups at our usual spot on the rooftop terrace; it was better than the best ambiance that any bar can provide. Thank you for staying out late with me, I enjoyed the school stories, reminiscing the lab mishaps, “apparently annihilation” and all that jazz, ahem* classical, about Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Handel and Hadyn.

You may think I’m drunk to say this, but who cares about the bad acoustics and prickly grass, it really is the company that counts, and I’m glad no, ecstatic, that I have you.

Before tossing the mortarboard

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.

Gracious downpour

Today, a really sweet girl offered to lend me her umbrella, as though she read my mind as I was planning a dash to the bus stop, fretting about not having an umbrella and not being able to go swimming because of the downpour. 

Incidentally, my friend and I were just discussing about how Singaporeans can behave more like citizens of a first world country if we could learn to be more gracious and helpful towards strangers. We agreed too, that this would also require us to drop our over zealous self-reliance to humbly accept help and show appreciation and encouragement to the person who offered help.

But today, I rejected her help, opting instead for a long detour to avoid the rain. So much for graciousness.

Moreover, I could neither, for the life of me, remember her name nor how I knew her. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I realized I actually did pack my umbrella this morning when I looked into my bag after I got onto the bus.

I’m atrocious, and possibly senile too.

In a mess

The mind is kind of jumbled up now, which is evident from the 3 completely unrelated and very random facebook status updates today.

It has been like that since after the exams – a serious inability to focus. There are many things on my mind now. There’s that great anticipation of the long holiday in Australia, a great many half-read books lying around that I am dying to complete and my silly interest in classical music which has suddenly resurfaced twice as hard. All these while being in the deepest, boring-est accounting hole.

What’s worse, every time I do something I feel like I’m depriving the other. In this way I have effectively not done much of all the things I need to do. I’m in desperate need of a systematic way to organize my life right now. What do you do when you want to do 2 million things at once?

Happiness is

An (almost) empty pool on a sunny weekday afternoon. The only way to survive the current heat and enjoy the sun in Singapore is to soak yourself in a pool the whole day. Swimming felt so good – the water was soothing, and the sun was so energising. Actually, today was supposed to be catching-up-on-advanced-financial-accounting day, but knowing the day’s plans made it all the more impossible to get out of the pool. 

What made my day after swimming was to come to school and receive a package from the Embassy of Angola. The good people who made attending a party worthwhile sent me a beautiful picture book on their country. I see sea, sand, palm trees, elephants, zebras, sunsets, diamonds and happy, friendly people. I am so going to Angola!

Plus, I coincidentally met D whom I haven’t seen in a long while. =)

Guess it’s not that bad a thing that I have to come to school to retrieve the AFA book.

On Community Service

Now that we are leaving the school, friends and I have been talking about the ways to contribute back to the alma mater, i.e. “class gift” and such. Having received much financial support from the school, I am happy to discuss this, but there is at least one cause I find very difficult to support - I’ve always had issues with the overseas “community service project”.

I have many friends who have organized and participated in these, and have even, sort of, participated in one (a one day home-building in Batam “community service project” not really worth mentioning). My experience led me to think that I won’t participate in such projects for community service, at least definitely not in the way the particular one I went to was organized. I applaud my friends’ courage, determination and commitment to these projects, but really have trouble coming to terms with calling such overseas stints “community service projects” particularly because of the over-publicised manner such initiatives are usually carried out, and the blatant inefficient use of charity money. 

Would you give me $500 if I told you it was going to a fund to pay for the building of schools in a third world country? You might, but I doubt such people are as abundant as those who would pay $500 for an air ticket that will take them to a third world country to personally participate in the building of a school. The reason is obvious – the money is not an altruistic contribution to the well-being of people faraway (whom they probably never really cared about anyway) and their efforts is not plain voluntary goodness. Instead, it is a learning, humbling and self-gratifying experience that they are paying for.

I’m not saying that all community service projects must be altruistic in nature. But for one where altruism is clearly not key – people who have gone for these rave about how it was a humbling experience to see the villagers’ living conditions and know how blessed they are, and the meaningfulness of what they do, how the simple folks showered them with gratitude – why not call it what it really is? It is an “overseas learning experience”, much like “business study missions”, and less of “community service projects”.

More important than the name, why do overseas what you can do at home? Have you exhausted all avenues you could use to help your less fortunate countrymen? Why organize lavish overseas “community service projects” to rural Yunnan and ignore the old lady collecting cardboard boxes and aluminum cans at your local hawker center? What about the kids in Singapore who had to drop out of school to support their families – are their education less important than those living in third world countries?

I concede that such overseas outreach programmes have their merits. After all, we should look beyond our shores when helping. Building a school in a rural area may not be a lot to us, but it could be all that they have. The same amount of money means much more to them than to us. 

Even so, aren’t there better, more efficient ways of managing such outreach projects? Instead of using the charity money to fly 20 undergrads over, house and feed them, while allowing for the higher amount of wastage cause by these inexperienced builders, why not use the money to buy construction materials and hire the locals to build it? Being more suited to the conditions in the area and manual labor, they could build better schools and complete the construction faster – and it pays them! The amount of money used to fly 20 students over instead of just 2 to organize the project may even have allowed more than 1 school to be build. There are plenty of better ways to organize it – say, send an engineer or experienced construction supervisor over to teach them the skills involved in construction, and that would help the villagers in fixing up their houses and may even get them a better job.

Besides, isn’t there a requirement that not more than 30% of charity money be spent on administrative costs for non-profit organizations in Singapore? Do overseas “community service projects” observe such requirements? If the administrative costs of such overseas “community service projects” were spent in Singapore, it could have supplied rice to a block of needy old folks for a year! 

The way I see it, there are plenty of avenues locally for students to participate in community service if they are so keen to do so. Organizing and participating in a lavish overseas “community service project” seems to me to be more like a game for well to do students where they organize a high-profile, sexy and small talk worthy “community service project” to benefit their own learning more so than to benefit the villagers in the rural locations they visit. Of course, the villagers do benefit and I am sure they are sincerely grateful to them. But before these “volunteers” indulge themselves in the warm fuzzy feelings of having helped, they should be aware that the villagers have also paid an opportunity cost in order for the volunteers to benefit from the experience.

Indeed, it can be argued that such projects are well, better than nothing. (At least, better than me sitting in a comfy room making harsh remarks about it.)  Yet it just seems very wrong to me to set out organizing such a project, work hard, complete it successfully and congratulate yourself for doing such good work when if you take a step back, you could have realized how much more you could achieve if you had the welfare of your beneficiaries as top priority.

What time is it?

I am currently reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, as part of my Accounting Theory readings. Ironically, it is the only Accounting Theory reading I care to read because it has practically zero relevance to Accounting Theory – that’s why it’s so darn interesting.

I had to put it down after 3 chapters because it has given me an immense headache, and I was dizzy with excitement, like a child who first learned that plants photosynthesize. Why, in Stephen Hawking’s name, didn’t any Physics teacher recommend this book to us? I would probably have done a Physics degree instead. It’s like, why didn’t I listen to Isaac Stern’s recordings of Mozart when I was learning music? Well, too late. Now I can only hope to find a book that explains Ito’s Lemma as clearly as Stephen Hawking discusses Einstein’s general theory of relativity. (Or maybe, I should aim to write one! )

I was reading in Coffee Bean. As I put down my book with a spinning head and looked around at people walking around in the commercialized man-made heaven, I began feeling extremely extremely small. I felt like an ant, no, smaller, like the bacteria that lives in the guts of an ant. And the expensive coffee I was sipping is merely digested bread crumbs.

Watching the mundaneness of people shopping around feels like watching ants shift bread crumbs. The humanities and social sciences (which I’m usually more inclined to read than the hard sciences) may be interesting, but now they seem little more significant than the most intricate organization of ant colonies.

Like humans as “higher beings” take little interest in the crumbling of ant hills, actually, who gives a damn if AIG and Citigroup fall? It’s like, minuscule in the greater scheme of things. However big, they are merely two of the many companies on Earth, and Earth is only one of the planets in the solar system, and the solar system is one of many in the galaxy, and Milky Way is just one of the many galaxies in the universe, and the observable universe is probably just a small part of god knows what. So yeah, AIG may fall, the economy may collapse, men may go into extinction after destroying Earth, but the universe will still exist, and it doesn’t even matter if the expanding universe eventually collapses on itself because man will most likely not live to see it happen.

While most people were fretting over World War One, Einstein published his theory of relativity and showed that there is no such thing as absolute time, which means identical clocks in different locations measure time differently! Then what does it mean to discount expected returns to obtain option price when no objective measure of time is possible? At seemingly the same point in time, my option price can be higher than yours! What time value of money?

Apparently, bodies like Earth aren’t actually moving in curved orbits. They are moving in straight lines in the four-dimensional space-time, but appear to be moving in curved lines in our three-dimensional view of the world because space-time is curved. That means light doesn’t actually appear to travel in a straight line in space. Now which science teacher made me memorize the fact that light always travels in a straight line? Oh yeah, the same one who told me Pluto’s a planet.

Conversely, of course, I can maintain my worldly belief that whatever happens to the universe doesn’t matter also precisely because man will never live to see its collapse (if it ever does). What’s of immediate concern to us, is of course whether or not we can cling onto the guts of the ant to prevent being passed out, not whether the ant hill crumbles. After all, if AIG does collapse, my world (as I know it) would probably end and it doesn’t matter anymore whether space-time is warped or not.

I enjoy books that screw with my mind.