---
always plan
for the worst
and hope for the best
---
The past few weeks have been more or less good to me. If I'm honest, they've gone by in a blur. I can't really recall anything particularly memorable happening to me. A friend came up from London to stay for the weekend, which was fun - we went over to a friend's house to celebrate a different friend's farewell. She had graduated and was going back to Malaysia to look for a job. Incidentally, I got to spend time and catch up with a couple of Malaysian friends I hadn't seen in ages, which was nice. We stayed over at their house till way too late, drank their soft drinks and played Just Dance 4 till we were exhausted and sweating. I'll admit, it was definitely a fun weekend - but it wasn't ground-breaking news. Just sort of came and went without consequence. Nothing to write home about. All I can really remember about last week is going into wards, doing groceries, trying to wake up early. waking up late. trying to study. spending too much time on youtube. It's all been very ordinary, nothing really major has happened - if my life were a tv show, the past three weeks would've been filler episodes - which is a little bit depressing. Not to mention that I'm using tv programming as an analogy to describe the trajectory of my life. That's also pretty depressing.
I'm right now in my 5th week of my Obs & Gynae rotation - and I can't shake this feeling that I should possess more o+g knowledge in my brain than I actually do, which causes a lot of anxiety for me during tutorials and on the wards, but the problem isn't that I haven't read up on a topic or subject, it's that I haven't studied it properly, which is to say that I haven't made it a part of me, or integrated it into my long term memory. Anyway, that's the problem - now I just have to marshal up the willpower and time and self-discipline to do something about it. Then at least I can stop worrying about how little I know all the time. (I've only recently noticed how much grief it's giving me. I worry about it even at home - there's always a gloomy cloud looming over every activity, a constant gnawing sense of - man, I've got to study. I really do need to study - which detracts from its enjoyment.)
On another note. It's already the last week of January. Four more days and the first month of 2015 will be over. One down, eleven more to go. In clinics they have these big calendars which show you the year at a glance, with the 12 months spread out in a grid. Today I looked at one and imagined a big red X over the square which contained January and gave myself a small panic attack. It's not merely the passage of time which shocks me. I've sort of gotten used to the velocity by now - it's mostly that this month has passed in a way less spectacularly than I had hoped it would. I honestly had high hopes for 2015. I told myself I was going to study more, study harder, be more efficient, join a lot of clubs, text my mom regularly, wake up early, start going to the gym etc. In hindsight I might have been a little too ambitious, but still - I envisioned January going differently. It's a bit disheartening to have reached the end of the first month of a new year and find that none of your good intentions have made an ounce of difference.
Speaking of which, I decided to chart a graph (instead of studying), plotting levels of happiness against how much faith I had between 2009 and 2015. And as you may have guessed, it was a tremendous waste of time. So many things were wrong with it, including but not limited to the scale. The distance between points on the x axis were so ridiculously small that you couldn't make sense of it at all - there were just all fluctuations wild and all over the place - there was hardly any space between 2009 and 2010. All you get are two or three crosses floating in the air, and the lines connecting them just bulldoze over and disregard any nuance or meaningful data that might have existed in between. These are points that may have provided some actual insight as to the relationship between spiritual growth and peace of mind. But in that amount of space it's impossible to represent those milestone moments and the impact that they had, and the aftermath, the resultant effects, graphically - as in I literally had no space on the paper to plot those points.
I was hoping that an ultra-macroscopic view would provide some new insight as to the overall trajectory of my life - a bird's eye perspective on life pre and post-uni - how far I've come, that sort of thing. But really it just looks like a mess of lines. (the fact that I decided to add in 'interest in kpop' as one of the lines1 probably didn't help.)
I think if I had scaled down a bit - allocating one separate graph for each individual year and charted the x axis month by month, that would've made it more coherent and comprehensible. Also, I should have done it on excel, rather than drawing it out with coloured pens on a sheet of left-over paper. (I think I must have been going for the quirky 'home-made experiment look how indie i am' factor.) And instead of charting 'happiness', I should have used a more quantifiable measure, like number of smiles / genuine laughs a day. And instead of faith - hours spent praying / reading bible / doing devotions. I also should have labelled the y axis accordingly using numbers instead of using a scale from 'loads' to 'barely any'. Anyway, at least I know where I've gone wrong, so I suppose it wasn't a totally useless experiment. On the one hand I wasted a lot of time trying to plot those points, but on the other hand I'm making new mistakes and learning from them, which was one of the things I said I'd try to do this year.
Another thing I guess to take away from the experiment is that life is too complicated - contains too many uncontrolled / uncontrollable variables to simply step back and wait for the answer to jump out at you and surrender itself willingly. I was plotting my chart thinking - okay so let's see how my happiness year to year has been affected by how close I (arbitrarily) deemed I was to God at that point in time, making the assumption that all other factors were remaining constant. That is to say, without accounting for weather, bad things happening, good things happening, meeting new people, saying goodbye to those people. Forgetting that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I suppose I just thought that faith would produce in me something more durable and unwavering, something steadfast that would last and keep growing throughout the storms and changing seasons of my life. Something everlasting. My biggest mistake was assuming that that 'something' could be directly correlated to 'happiness'. Now I see that happiness is too flimsy and frail a thing to be used as a surrogate indicator for the performance/wealth/presence of that putative 'something'. It kind of stops you in your tracks and makes you wonder - maybe I've been making assumptions and conducting my day to day business based on a conclusion derived from measuring the wrong element. i.e. 'have I been chasing people's approval when all I wanted was genuine emotional intimacy'.
One possible explanation for the lack of consistency in results could be that there is, in fact, no pattern. Because there is no 'something' that faith produces. Perhaps some people would claim that 'all that religious mumbo jumbo is just feel-good self-help nonsense. It doesn't change a person. Because people can't change.'
Well, that's certainly not impossible. But that sounds a bit like giving up too easily to me. From what I remember from doing Biology in 6th form, you can't accept the null hypothesis until you've done absolutely everything you can - until you've exhausted the rigours of science itself - to try and prove the hypothesis. Which means if you can think of a reason why your experiment failed - it's time to make a new one, with the addition of improvements that address the flaws of the preceding experiment.
If you ask me, I don't think that the pattern can't be found - I think if faith truly does produce anything in a person, it should have an external, discernible, measurable effect. And if we can figure out in what shape or form this effect manifests itself, then we can grade it along an axis and put it on a graph and investigate whether any association between it and things like happiness exists. But I think it probably will take a lot more work to untangle and distinguish which elements faith exclusively manifests and which things a man's circumstances or his temperament or the natural physiological fluctuation of his moods produces. I think that anything worth pursuing will inevitably require some form of sacrifice. Which is to say that the more worthwhile a pursuit is, the more difficult and torturous the process of achieving success in it will be. So if we really do want to get to the bottom of it, it's probably going to take a lot more than two axes and some coloured pens. (whether or not I actually choose to pursue it to its end is a matter of its perceived difficulty versus how lazy i am.)
One other thing I was doing with the chart is that I was looking through old posts from this and my previous blog to try and gauge what was going on in my life at the time, and from there, extrapolate a rough estimate of how i good or bad i was feeling that day/week/month. This was met with very limited success. I quickly noticed that it was difficult to divine any sort of external life from the things I wrote back in 2009 and 2010, and even up till now. Most of the posts were completely removed, detached, separate from reality. No temporal landmarks to aid understanding - no clues to inform you of what was going on behind the scenes that made me write those words. Often it would just be a statement, or a poem or a story - no reference to any events in my life or any of the circumstances - no context whatsoever. At times it seemed almost as though my goal was to write and explain as much as possible while simultaneously concealing as much about myself as possible.
That's not to say I couldn't relate to the posts at all. I could occasionally remember things and certain details about my past by reading through old posts. But it was difficult. For instance, I only remember that I was in London at the time when I wrote a certain story because of certain elements in the story that I picked up while I was in London. From there I extrapolate the general feeling from that episode in London. But otherwise there were very few actual clues in the text as to whether I was happy or miserable at the time of publishing. They tended to be very emotionally vague and ambiguous - not uncommonly underpinned by a sense of melancholy or poignancy. But since they were all like that, they all blended into the same shade of lifeless-gray. But I know I must've been happy then. I remember it. episodes, incidents, entire weeks of being in bliss and whistling to myself and playing the guitar - not to soothe some spiritual ache but simply because it brought me joy. I vividly remember my happiness, but it was strange that they left no mark or indication of their existence on this private digital portrait of me. If you had just read my blog and never met me you would guess (and be perfectly justified in doing so) that I was a perpetually mopey, very sad, never-smiling kind of guy. But that's only part of the truth. The real me likes Stephen Chow movies and listens to kpop.
So therefore hence vis a vis consequently I have made it a mission for this year to lay out plainly things that are going on in my life and things I'm going through - not just make obscure references to them in a poem - but to tell, as prosaic and objectively as possible what my day or week has been like. As well as - this is the more difficult part - how I feel about it. The reason for this is that when I look back on this blog in 5 years, I don't want a string of fancy, intricate vignettes and cleverly disguised, fragmented snippets of pseudo-wisdom. I'd want to relive my youth. I'd want to know how many steps it took to get to university, what the weather was like at the time, what I had for lunch, the jokes I heard at lunchtime. So toward that end, I hereby announce that for the first time in goodness knows how many years, I'm actually going to blog about my life. (Gosh, I hate the word blog.)
One of the first things I want to blog (ugh) about is how I've rediscovered rock music - more specifically, alternative rock. By the way - don't worry I'll come back to rock music - one thing that's always bothered me about this blog is how there's almost no exuberance, or joy or any sort of positive emotion in any of the posts. Of course, I'm not saying it's a fault in the posts, but it rather reflects my state of mind, and how it's rather preoccupied with thoughts - or at least chooses to only share thoughts stained by sentiments of a certain (and by certain I mean, an almost-exclusively melancholy) kind. The only clear exception to this pattern I can call to mind is the first post of last year, which was kind of a first for this blog - in that it was actually hopeful, and that reading it actually inspired hope and imparted to me throughout the year a readiness to adopt a more sanguine disposition, regardless of circumstance.2
Anyway, back to rock music. I've always been kind of drawn to rock music, particularly alternative rock. I was inducted via punk rock / pop, I think, back when Switchfoot and Relient K songs were popular in church (2003 was it? i honestly can't remember). Back then though anything that had a fast beat and decent melody was good enough for me. But I was really into this one band, Asian Kung Fu Generation, partly because - how cool is that name? But mostly because I really liked their sound. Okay, confession time: The first time I heard one of their songs was from an anime's opening theme. It was Bleach. Judge me all you want, I'm not ashamed. (okay maybe a little bit.) Anyway, I downloaded all of their albums, listened to them on repeat etc. but then my interest in J-rock kind of fizzled. I moved on, went through the infamous kpop phase, got into hip hop and jazz, went through a electronic phase - and then just recently in the past 3 or 4 weeks have returned to alt-rock. Since then I've chanced upon bands like Tokyo Jihen, Shishamo and Sakanamon, which in a pinch can all be loosely defined as 'Japanese rock'. But you have to understand - when people say J-rock, the first thing that tends to come to mind are bands like One Ok Rock, L'arc-enciel (too lazy too look up the spelling sorry), Gackt (lol), and Scandal maybe. As far as I'm aware, these tend to be visual-kei bands, which play a very different kind of rock. I've never gotten into them to be honest. They're just not for me.
What I like about these bands, Asian Kung Fu Generation (Ajikan for short) especially, is that their music is loud but it's not about being loud. It's about raising your voice, but it's not about yelling. It's the kind of music that gets your soul to dance. Above all, it's a hopeful tune. It offers something that hip hop, jazz, chillwave and glitchpop can't. These forms of music are fine to groove to - they're great for a long drive or just relaxing at home, but they don't get me emotional the way a good alt-rock song does. The high I get from an ultra smooth beat or a flawlessly atmospheric, haunting tune is distinctly, enormously different. If those songs were drugs they'd be narcotics. They make you relax, lull you into comfort. If alt-rock were a drug it'd be a stimulant - an analeptic. A jolt to the system. Whereas in the former category, emphasis is placed on the sound. The beats, the rhythm - what music does to the chemicals in your brain. It affects me on that level, via that pathway - and that's not to say it is a lesser effect. Depending on the song, they can have quite a lasting and potent influence on a person.3
But alt-rock is different. Alt-rock isn't about hitting the right notes to make your brain release chemicals. Alt-rock is about matching the intensity of feeling with sheer intensity of sound and yelling at the top of your lungs anything left over that couldn't be translated into chords. It's about power and weakness at the same time, strumming as if your life depended on each note. It's not about perfection - not about sounding pretty - it invites the messiness, welcomes with open arms the distortion and dirt and noise that surrounds us. It thrives on live performance. It's a celebration of vitality and the struggle that comes with it. Every song is a tribute to staying alive - truly alive and awake, not just existing, and simultaneously a reminder to rage, rage against the dying of the light. (I realise I'm being imprecise but it's not on purpose. I think we don't have the right words yet to properly talk about these things - or maybe I just haven't learnt them.)
How else can I explain it? The best rock songs are in the first instance crushing, deeply melancholy but are in the end sublimely uplifting. Just take a few choice Ajikan songs for example: Korogaru Iwa, Kimi ni Asa ga Furu and Solanin. I could go into the technicalities of how they each achieve that specific grandly universal yet deeply tender and personal perceptual phenomenon - from lyrical connotations and how they reflect the minor chord sequences embedded within the verse to the sudden crescendo of the chorus, and that final steadily ascending chord progression at the end - but I won't. I don't think I'm capable of any form of description that will convey to you even half as much understanding as actually listening to the songs themselves will do. Suffice it to say that these songs manage to do something that other kinds of music can't or don't even aspire to do. If you ask me, they offer a reconciliation between a deep inner frustration / angst and hope - these songs are the sound of wrestling. Defiance in the face of despair.4 That, I think, is their most shining, most precious quality.
Anyway, that's the way I feel currently about alt-rock. My kind of alt-rock anyway. It's funny how they're the exact same songs, but they mean so much more to me now, four years down the line. After devoting myself to kpop, hip hop, jazz etc. It kind of reminds me of that story about the boy who left his home, renounced his familiar comforts to explore the world and taste what it had to offer him. And once the world had completely exhausted him - once it had exploited him, then betrayed and abused him - he started to make his way for home, penniless and ashamed. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. The son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' But the father said to his servants, 'Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.' And they began to celebrate.
But even more than being clothed in fine robes and having a super fancy banquet held in his honour - the greatest blessing he received, in my opinion, was the capacity to enjoy without reservation everything that he had previously taken for granted.
He had left home with his share of the inheritance and wasted it on vanities but in return earned the experience of loss - his soul dug out deeper than it had ever been before, sunk lower than he had previously known possible - but it was precisely that process of deep mortification, that abject emptiness, the hollowed out cavity of his heart, that allowed enough room upon his return to take in - to contain what he had left behind. Blessings that previously meant nothing to him - heavenly voices he heard as unintelligible sounds - came rushing in to fill the vacuum, and they became his. Letting go of the things he needed most enabled him to see the things in his life that weren't needed at all. Upon losing what was most important, the relative unimportance of everything else was revealed. And after that he understood the truth of what he had left behind, and what he was missing, and what he had been searching for. And what is cherished more than something precious which once had been lost but was now restored? And joy overtook him, and he sang songs proclaiming he would never again trade the joy of being in his father's house for any promise of pleasure or sum of inheritance. And with eyes finally open to the splendour of his father's house, he spent the rest of his days there attended forever by goodness and mercy.
On a related note, I recently decided to get involved in alt-rock - because that's what you do with things you love right? It's not enough to sit back and watch - you have to be a part of it. You have to get up and make a fool of yourself. So I've opted to attend Jam Night this Sunday, hosted by BandSoc, where anybody can turn up and sing or play any instrument onstage. Me and three people I've never met before are planning to do a cover of Long Distance Call by Phoenix and Stars and Sons by Broken Social Scene. (I'm playing drums for both) And I am fully aware that this could end up going one of two ways - unexpectedly well or horrendously, crushingly, drastically wrong, but either way - whatever happens - I think I made the right decision.
I hope.
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^ can't get enough of this song
1. partly as a cheeky nod of acknowledgement to that very distinct and deeply influential portion of my past and also partly out of curiosity - to see how and when I unknowingly emerged from being immersed so deeply in all things kpop - from being so firmly entrenched in cultural obsession and glittery makeup-laden bubblegum flavoured pop-fandom ↩
2. I think if I had to assign a theme that defined last year - that made it different from the rest - I think the overarching theme would be the struggle to keep my mood uncoupled from circumstance by improving spiritual hygiene - fighting for a more balanced outlook on life, a challenge to start looking again for the brighter side of things and to readjust my personality accordingly. Trying to outgrow my cynicism and put on a new coat of paint. A kind of renovation I guess. But here's the thing - that post was very intentional. It's not something that would just come out if I didn't try to write it that way. It's just not my default setting, so the rest of last year was done the same way as that first post. It set the tone for the rest to follow - a precedent - and it seems to have worked. At least, I think I've made progress. For what it's worth, I feel different compared to how I felt years ago. Whether that's because I've tried to change or simply because the world keeps spinning is anyone's guess, (but I choose to believe it's the former. (( I mean, if there's an equal lack of evidence for either, why on earth would you choose to back the bleakest possible hypothesis?))) ↩
3. I'm sure there are certain exceptions to this. And I realise that trying to make accurate generalisations about music is a fool's errand. There are enough problems as it is in attempting to categorise music into different genres - which is why I'd like to clarify here that I don't honestly believe that if a song relies heavily on synthesisers and sequencers, it necessarily lacks soul. No, of course not. Just as it is possible to have meaningless, insipid songs featuring heavily distorted guitars and melodic riffs. The songs out there which fit that description number in the thousands, if not more. And of course rock musicians care about their sound as well - they probably spend as much time, if not more, crafting their songs to perfection - testing each note to see if it sounds right. Experimenting with levels of distortion and different effects. But I submit that in the best songs, the main priority is elsewhere - the value of the song is not only in its sound. So which songs exactly am I accusing of possessing nothing but aesthetic charm? And who am I anyway to decide which songs are authentic, greater than the sum of their parts and which are merely pretty sounds? I wonder if it's fair to say that some songs are objectively 'better' than others. Would it be fair to compare Debussy's Claire de Lune with Rebecca Black's 'Friday'? Or would it be like comparing a carrot to a head of cabbage to see which is the better vegetable? (carrot obviously - duh) Is music simply a matter of taste or is there an objective standard by which it can be measured? In any case I don't mean to claim that my selected songs are objectively better than other genres of music, only that they affect me, personally, on a different, deeper level. Maybe what Ajikan songs do to me - that experience - is what listening to Avicii or Billie Holiday does for someone else. Maybe there are as many different kinds of music as there are minds to appreciate it. But since this is a personal blog, I'm going to be selfish and talk exclusively about my favourite kind of music and what it means to me - this was probably an unnecessary disclaimer. ↩
4. One of Zadie Smith's essays offers a definition of 'soulfulness' which seems to agree remarkably with the particular aspect of alt-rock I have been trying to describe. It goes, 'soulfulness is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful, creative and self-renewing, and - as it reaches a pitch - ecstatic. It is an alchemy of pain. [...] to be soulful is to follow and fall in line with a feeling, to go where it takes you and not to go against its grain. At its most common and banal: catching a beat, following a rhythm. [...] A final shade: the word soulful, like its Jewish cousin, schmaltz, has its roots in the digestive tract. 'Soul food' is simple, flavoursome, hearty, unfussy, with spice.' ↩
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