stuff that needed saying
I think there comes a time in everyone's life when you look at your life and wonder why you have it. Wondering whether there's a reason or a pre-ordained destiny governing your actions. You begin to ask yourself, what is the reason you are here. What purpose are you on Earth to fulfil. Is it divine? Is there a calling greater than everything else? Or are you just here merely because logic declares you think and therefore am. These are hard questions to answer and nothing in this world will answer them satisfactorily.
Anyway, getting out of the philosophical stuff, I leave for Nepal next week on saturday morning. Those of you who care should pray that no insurgents or terrorists capture me or blow me up or do anything particularly nasty to me. Alternatively, praying that I don't get bird flu or hepatitis A/B or anything like that would be really great too. We'll be painting a school and giving the students some lessons over there so you can pray that those will go well too. If all goes well I'll be back a week after I leave or so, hopefully in one, healthy piece.
Cheers guys
Reality Check
I saw this T-shirt in the yesterday, it said, "Universal Studios! Escape From Reality!". This kinda brought to mind this whole idea of escapeism that has been around for a pretty long time but has become fairly prominent in recent years, though not glaringly so.
Take the whole anime/manga cosplaying craze that just popped out of nowhere and swept up hordes of teenagers. Its entire point is in emulating supposedly perfect people who by-and-large can and will never exist in the real world (even ignoring the fact that most of them have blue/red/white hair despite being ancient chinese/japanese or having impossibly good physiques, especially in the cases of teenage anime girls). Yet people still invest loads of time and money to turn themselves into physically facsimile replicas of their favourite characters.
A cosplayer and the character he's cosplaying.
Look again to the craze over the American and Singapore Idols even if there are plenty of other artists who are better singers or for that matter better looking, and also the related and established lifestyle of band-chasing and fandom that so many teenagers these days are enamoured with. For many of them, the highest attainable point in life is to say meet or touch these famous celebrities who to them embody perfection and all that is good in this world. People spend their days caught up in the world of their favourite celebrities, devouring scandalous gossip about them from tabloids and magazines and talking incessantly about the same things regardless of their credibility or importance.
Another big example I think would be computer games. Especially in Singapore and Korea, gaming has become a really big hit among people my age. For some, the highlight of their week is that 5 or 6 hours spent with their buddies battling it out in cyberspace every saturday afternoon. A more important example is the brand of gaming defined as the massive-online multiplayer role playing game or MMORPG. These games consume a huge amounts of time due to their highly addictive and repetetive nature. Many people spend whole days immersed in these games, ignoring their real friends for virtual ones and real life for their game.
A screenshot from Guild Wars, a popular MMORPG
I'm not saying that any of these activities are inherently bad or anything. I'm a fan of manga's and anime's and i think they're really great areas of artistic endeavour and are really good entertainment. I'm a fan of science-fiction and fantasy books and used to read very little outside those genre's which both usually take place in fantastic places which cannot possibly exist with characters that are victim to impossibly perfect plots. I watch American Idol (though i avoid Singapore Idol cos I think they suck) and admire the singing of the showcased contestants though I think they have nothing on other musicians and singers, especially afew people I know (although i'm alot lousier than they are). I also like gaming alot, to the extent that some people at school call me gamerbean. But the thing about all these activities is not so much the activities themselves but the degree to which people get enamoured of and immersed in them. I enjoy a good game of DOTA and a good anime like Cowboy Bebop, but I don't live for them. They're really fun and all, but there are much more important things to do aside from them, like actually living.
Anyway i've wasted tons of time writing this already, time to do homework.
Good Writing
"She knocked me out. I mean it. I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know
where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can."
J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye
Fool not with the hearts of men, for they are foolish, and fall in love easily.
A Day of Reckoning has come and gone
My hectic and gruelling week has finally come to a close, roughly. Me and my team have slogged our guts out, coping with sec 4 mountains of homework, a few tests and tons of debate practice (actually we only really did stuff on today, tuesday and wednesday, but hey we did stuff) and all of it culimnated in a debate that ended slightly over 4 hours ago. Basically, I still have mountains of homework, tests to study for and debates to prepare for but something did happen tonight. The moment of reckoning came and we screwed up and lost to VJC's IP program.
I guess we should have seen it coming. The motion we got was a reall b****. This House Believes That Schools should Prohibit students from creating their own Blogs. I mean what kinda retarded motion is that. Not only is it a nightmare to define, it contradicts a whole ton of my own beliefs and I have (or rather had) to defend it as my team was given the proposition side of the debate. As the opposition said, blogs are just avenues for people to express themselves and there isn't really any compelling reason to prohibit them. But grumbles and gripes aside, VJC put up a good debate (even if they didn't have the guts to debate with us on our terms properly and used a gutless definitional challenge to shift the motion into their favour while leaving us in the cold. As if the motion wasn't unfair enough.), I guess after nearly a year without serious debating, my team and I have really gotten rusty. Oh well, theres always a next time, hopefully.
Later
Plenty better to do
The Julia Gabriels begin next week with the first preliminary round and with them starts what will probably be the last debate competition of my secondary school life. In roughly 4 months, i'm supposed to have completed my revisions of just about everything and will take my midyear examinations. In march, i leave for Nepal on a 'service learning trip' to go and help out at an orphanage. 2 months after that, i should be handing over my role as cca president and team captain to my capable juniors (so i hope). After that I have maybe 3 months until my O'levels, potentially the biggest exam of my life. By that time, i should have studied my guts out and will officially be schooless.
Dammit time flies.
