Hello, once again. Currently, the holidays have allowed me to work on many pet projects, and now I've shifted my attention to Wikipedia. I'm working on stubs in some of my areas of interest and/or expertise and the first of which is the Singapore Biennale stub, under my pen name, the ever familiar "cyazhar". So, if you are interested to see what I have written so far, just check out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_Biennale). The exhibition venue section is mostly a clean-up by myself, and the final section on the curatorial team in the intro. Just to let you know, my next project may be clean up the article on Seremban, which is rather messy as this point of time. Just a short entry for now, I've got my oral presentation to prepare for.
P.S. I did edit a little on the wikipedia entry on SAJC, too.
Part 2 of the random shots series, on the way back from Toa Payoh...
"And in this episode of the Singapore Book of Records, an unidentified man will attempt to lift the largest number of NTUC Fairprice grocery bags in a single lift. Amazing!"
"This, of course, is the other Orchard Road. It's for Malays, of course"
"In the world of great lighting, someone has definitely achieved illumination in the study of lightology"
Who builds these buildings? It is so "square" and boring.
I went to Toa Payoh today to take a few nice shots of the place for my Oral Presentation and here are some leftover shots worth looking at. Best viewed with the captions...
Sometimes, the haze just ruins everything. Sheesh!
"Hey! That's my parking spot! I got here first and you had to park there!"
"Do you see that guy over there? I wonder what he's doing with the camera."
"After this stretch, it's your turn to push me, it's just not fair!"
What is found is sometimes already lost before you find it
-Anonymous-
This could possibly be one of the paradoxes and also the tragedy of life. A lot of people find reading such entries about statements like this so exhilarating and complex that the meaning of it is sometimes lost in translation. So, this time I’ll try to be simple and succinct as we look at what this quote actually means.
Life is indeed a long and winding road and we do search for many things in life, such as health, happiness, prosperity, and even simplicity. But, as we strive to look for this sort of things in the many crevices and cracks along the way, we sometimes miss it as it can sometimes be right below our noses. Strange, we are sometimes too engrossed with doing things our own way that we overlook less painful and complicated ways to get there. While we all love and devote ourselves to individuality, we must understand that there is indeed common sense and layman methods to achieve what we love, not necessarily Machiavellian, just straight-to-the-point. But, ist this all important? Not directly, but surely.
The problem is sometimes you just don't find it in the way you choose to achieve it, and in turn sacrificing other luxuries of life, an investment, you might say, but it just doesn't pay off in the end. The problem is humans are so diverse in nature that the way to avert this sort of tragedy is impossible to prescribe on a universal basis. So we lose everything. And, when we actually noticed that we have found what or part of what we wanted, in retrospect, we have already lost too much along the way to make up for the gain. Hence, the quote. Get it?
Now, the inspiration for such an entry actually comes from the most unlikely of places, i.e. a movie meant to be a comedy. "Click" is what I'm talking about and from the main character who wants to achieve something in life, impatience gets the better of him and he practically fast-forwards life. He loses the essence of life and loses everything along the way, eventhough he hoped the promotion would lead to happiness in his personal and family life, in the process, he loses everything and it becomes less worth it getting there. You see, he loses the object before even achieving it, and when he finally realises his dreams, he had lost most parts of it already. *Sigh* That's it for now. Life is just too cruel sometimes...
There is this problem with weekends, there isn't even enough time for someone to call it a holiday. 48 hours. What's the matter with this people? Anyway, other then the common lamentations of seriously overworked people, we are also faced with the dilemma with too long weekends, i.e. school holidays or also known as the time when schools are more than happy to be closed. And the governments complain there are too many holidays. Yikes. But, since this argument is in fact going nowhere at all, let's just change the topic.
Thank God is Friday,..... or Saturday,..... or Sunday. Three days. Let's see where the time goes. Assume work/school finishes at 5 pm. Typical... we all agree. Roughly 48 hours plus what's left of Friday.that would be about 55 hours. 3 nights and ideally 8 times 3 minus 5 or 6 for Mondays. Say 25 hours, leaving 30 hours, including extra catch-up-on-lost-sleep time, not a luxury, I must say, but a need. 30 hours.... let's see. 7 meals to eat, we eat slowly on weekends so about .... 4 hours maybe, this is not counting suppers, which are longer then average meals, include it, maybe 5 hours. 25 hours left. Then there is of course the essentials like self-grooming. Minus, I say, 2 hours. Completing work brought back home - another 5 hours maybe. What about grocery shopping. Barely fun and 3 hours and a lot of $$$ later, we are left with 15 hours. Cleaning the room/house up after a long and dirty week, 3 hours. Doing laundry, effectively 2 hours. Checking e-mails, reading newspapers, paying bills and other "official" weekend stuff... 3 hours. Wathching weekend regular television shows, which easily takes up 4 to 5 hours.
Now for the less important stuff. But wait! How many hours left? Let's see. Oh dear! We are left with only 2-3 hours which is meant for....
-going out with friends
-giving your wife/[girl/boy]friend/partner due attention
-simply lazing around doing nothing
-exercise to keep fit so that you can live through more weekends like this
-looking for/trying to continue a hobby
-finding ways to reduce stress on your own life
-shopping for things other than groceries
-meditating, yoga, or any type of relaxation activities
-have babies (for married couples)
-socialising with other human beings who are also looking for more time
-finding out exactly how much time you have to do all of the above
-noticing that it is nearly impossible to do all of the above
Also, that would actually imply that the neccesities, which I have given due consideration by not listing them in the list above but in the original calculations, have to be rushed through. Sounds intelligent but not neccesarily so. You see, doing those would man that there is more stress and less quality, which in turn makes the correction time longer, and reducing the remaining 2 -3 hours. Viscious cycle, eh? Life is painful.
Also, for a select few, there is also time for blogging and thinking of what to blog, which usually eat into times of sleeping and eating. Some call it multitasking, I just call it being too efficient. Who needs to do all that at the same time anyway? And it's distracting if anyone didn't notice. Besides this overly satirical remark, I believe people do purposely reduce sleeping hours and other essentials just to have more time being happy, which is good but if overdone detrimental. People here are learning to sleep at the wee hours in the morning here and skip breakfast which is rather intellient on hindsight. No breakfast, add an hour or two to the schedule. But, mainly it's because it's the school holidays. So no one really cares about the timing because it's a long weekend, which leads back to the start of the entry. The problem of too long holidays. People might get resourceful and turn the biological clock upside down. Strange but true and effective, albeit a little disturbing.
While we leave the debate of too many holidays alone, the idea of holidays is however good for the mental health of the people in general. We need a little variety in life sometimes, a little late night activities won't kill anyone, in fact, it's good to destress and unwind after painfully routine weekdays and even, unfortunately, weekends. I'll close for now, because it's getting rather late and this particular entry is rather long already. So bye, and have a good and hopefully interesting weekend.
