white girls in love / 私の明石

“I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all.” 

“Wow,” I said. “Did the search pay off?” 

“That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.” 

“Waiting for the perfect love?” 

“No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.” 

“I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement. 

“It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.” 

“Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?” 

“Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?” 

“So then what?” 

“So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.” 

“Sounds crazy to me.” 

“Well, to me, that’s what love is…”

- Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood 

in tune and out of tone / sweaty teens with too many dreams

my baby sounds so good
when she screams ¹

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now all i need is a hundred effects pedals and i'll be complete

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Gideon arrived just in time to hear a man tell his friend a dream. He said, “I had this dream: A loaf of barley bread tumbled into the Midianite camp. It came to the tent and hit it so hard it collapsed. The tent fell!” 

His friend said, “This has to be the sword of Gideon son of Joash, the Israelite! God has turned Midian—the whole camp!—over to him.” When Gideon heard the telling of the dream and its interpretation, he went to his knees before God in prayer. Then he went back to the Israelite camp and said, “Get up and get going! God has just given us the Midianite army!”

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Back when dreams used to mean something

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^{1. context: i bought an electric guitar ↩}

how to get home part II

busybody aunty

the rapid elimination/eradication/obliteration of distance and its consequences^{1 2 3}

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Her father was a doctor called out on Christmas Eve when she was a little girl and shot by communists. that's why she doesn't celebrate Christmas.

In those days, being sent to the UK in a plane took 7 days to reach. They'd stop over in Cyprus and Rome and the co pilot at the time fancied her and took her round in a cheongsam, she told me looking quite pleased with herself - back then, she said, a boat took 21 days - "nowadays where got people got time for that!"

---

But all the same," insisted the Savage, "it is natural to believe in God when you’re alone–quite alone, in the night, thinking about death …"  

 “But people never are alone now,” said Mustapha Mond. “We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it."

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buffering



---

Remember when we used to be sad and lonely and the only way to get it off our chests was to interrupt the busy life of a friend and talk about it / nothing for an hour or two or if that didn't work to arrange to meet up and back then we genuinely enjoyed meeting up and being around each other - we appreciated the time spent together as a welcome distraction from the everyday miseries of living. We didn't regard the appointment with anxiety, weren't constantly eyeing the quickest route of escape in case things got uncomfortable, checking our phones to see what was going on elsewhere without us. An element of greed perhaps. We used to be able to live in the moment. We used to fill each others' empty cups with happiness. Now we hide them from each other.

We're so busy and focussed on ourselves, our own lives and pursuits. Everything else is a hindrance. Outside involvement is a synonym for something that gets in the way of us getting our own way. We don't have time anymore to call each other up for an hour. Why would anyone bother with that when instant gratification is available for a pittance. When the solution is always within reach, immediately relieved at the swipe of a fingertip. We don't have time anymore to be sad. to be lonely. to be bored. We have no time for bad things. We have no time for good things either. Nowadays where got people got time for that

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As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" 

"Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed-or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her." 

-Luke 10:38-42

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<sup>1. Maybe we take for granted each other the same way we grow accustomed to flying a billion miles high in the air and arriving halfway round the world in the time it takes you to sleep and wake up ↩
2. "There is more to life than increasing its speed." - Mahatma Gandhi ↩
3. "Are you really crazybusy or are you just a stressed out fear based a-hole" ↩</sup>

俺のバカ

take me to church

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. 

- Bertrand Russell 

---

the principle behind lent and fasting in general is that the power of will that enables someone to abstain from vice / an indulgence is the same energy that enables someone to engage in virtue / a discipline

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1. what you do in private is more important than how you behave in public

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When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him to eat with him; so he went in and reclined at the table. But the Pharisee, noticing that Jesus did not first wash before the meal, was surprised. Then the Lord said to him, "Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But give what is inside the dish to the poor, and everything will be clean for you. 

Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practised the latter without leaving the former undone. 

Woe to you Pharisees, because you love the most important seats in the synagogues and greetings in the market-places. 

Woe to you, because you are like unmarked graves, which men walk over without knowing it. 

One of the experts in the law answered him, "Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also." 

Jesus replied, "And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them. Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them. 

[...]

Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering."

[...] 

Meanwhile, when a crowd of many thousands had gathered, so that they were trampling on one another, Jesus began to speak first to his disciples, saying: "Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs."

---

One thing that really struck me this week is how the poor and diseased, downtrodden and undesirable members of society got kind and compassionate Jesus. but how the wealthy and powerful Pharisees got angry and indignant Jesus. It's interesting to note as well that his main gripe with them was how they treated, or mistreated rather, the outcasts of society - the untouchables. If you think about it, in every recorded interaction between Jesus and someone who on the outside was 'evil', unclean or unacceptable, he treats them with a kindness and respect normally reserved for acquaintances and respectable looking strangers - but when he talks to the Pharisees, who are supposedly the most learned and influential members of society, he talks to them like a gang of young punks who go around bullying and extorting money from his friends. It's almost personal, the way and intensity with which he rebukes the Pharisees.

His second charge against them is hypocrisy. He curses them for having the outward appearance of cleanliness while actually being rotten inside. Of being obsessed with rule-keeping and the appearance of righteousness, instead of actually seeking justice and showing love to those who need it most. I think it was the pretence that got him so wound up - that really ticked him off. Not the sin. Throughout Jesus's ministry he comes face to face with people who, by lawful definition, which is to say, by the Pharisees' reckoning, are labelled 'sinners' i.e. Levi the tax collector, the Samaritan woman at the well. And yet you don't see him condemning or berating any of them.

I think it's partly 1. because they don't claim to be righteous when they aren't - as in they aren't trying to trick others and delude themselves into thinking they aren't sinners - but also 2. because they aren't the ones responsible for keeping the law and therefore carry a bigger obligation to help the poor and the sick and the needy. It's like how you'd be harsher on a policeman or a judge committing a felony than if it was a 'regular' person who did it. Their civic duty, so much higher and heavier than the rest of ours, is therefore all the more appalling when it is neglected. With great power comes great responsibility etc. (Who am I? I am a cliche)

I feel like in Jesus' economy of mercy, the only thing worse than a sinner is a sinner who doesn't admit to being one and pretends to be good instead. And a small subset of them even go so far as to claim themselves experts of the law - and worse still - feel no guilt or shame at brandishing their status like a trophy and quietly lording it over others in the synagogue and marketplace. A man so spiritually dead he doesn't even feel the prick of his conscience.

So it got me thinking - who are the Pharisees of today? People who claim to know the law and keep it. People who are morally obligated to be righteous and show love to all members of society. Do the new Pharisees go to church on Sundays? Do they turn up for bible study on Fridays and quote scripture during small group discussion? Do they sometimes post bible verses as their fb statuses? Do they study medicine at university? Do they think of themselves as good people, morally upstanding, maybe even better than most?

I wonder if I were to invite Jesus in for a meal - welcome him into my house, cook him some spaghetti bolognaise - I wonder if I'd get kind and compassionate Jesus, or if maybe I'd warrant a good scolding instead

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Peter said to him, "Even if everyone else abandons you, I never will."

Otaku Homecoming

You know it’s hard to say. I know a certain amount of it parallels my own experience, which was that I got real lucky early on in my twenties and had some career success and got a lot of the stuff that I thought, “If only I could get that then I would be all right,” and then discovering that I wasn’t. This sounds kind of embarrassing. I was raised in an academic environment and in a pretty middle-class one. I’d never really seen how a lot of other people lived. My chance to see that was here in Boston, and a lot of it was in the halfway houses for this book. I didn’t really understand emotionally that there are people around who didn’t have enough to eat, who weren’t warm enough, who didn’t have a place to live, whose parents beat the hell out of them regularly. And again when you say it it sounds really clichéd and blah blah blah blah. We read about it in newspapers, but to get to look into the eyes of people like this… 

- Lost Interview with David Foster Wallace

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After I became a waiter, I always treated waiters very nicely

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Imagine a homeless person. Someone poor, sick, crippled, needy. Now imagine yourself as that person. Imagine that this was your life, and that you would wake up every day to the unfair consequences of your misfortune, and that life is so much harsher to you than it is to other people, and they, the other people, walk around completely focussed on their own pains and pleasures, oblivious to your own monumental struggles, when they with their blessings of excess could so easily alleviate your suffering, even momentarily, at minimal cost to themselves. But strangely none of them are willing. Imagine yourself in their shoes, and consider what a different reality they experience. What horrors and indignities they face that we couldn't even begin to imagine. How much each waking moment of their lives differs so vastly from ours, and how uncanny the thought - that these are real people - not characters in a book or anonymous caricatures in the news - but people as real and alive and respiring as yourself - literally starving, essentially drowning, physically dying. That they inhabit the same planet, the same country, the same city as you, and how it hardly ever occurs to you to think of how much and the way they suffer. (and even if it does, how our imaginings barely scratch the surface.)

Ok good, now that you've imagined being in their shoes, next imagine that you died and came back to earth as yourself, just as you are right now. And ask yourself, would I choose to live any differently? I wonder if I would

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“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ 

- Matthew 25:31-40

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For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 

- Galatians 5:14

super intellectual

medical students are so annoying

how to get home

come from Mont Kiara

passing the palace on your right

and take the exit that leads you

onto Jalan Semantan

or come from Damansara Heights

and head South

along the Damansara Link

towards SS2 and PJ

before you join the Sprint Highway

take the exit left onto

Jalan Maarof and drive up the hill

heading towards BSC

stopping at the four way intersection

if you need to

then keep going straight

past the expensive air

conditioned glass

and steel establishment

I don’t frequent anymore



on your left

continue along Jalan Maarof



following the slight bend in the road

and take the next left turning

and you'll come to a T junction

facing a sudden thicket of tropical undergrowth

and there used to be a rectangular sign with

horizontal arrows pointing in either direction

which isn't there now

(turn left and follow it down

back towards BSC for about two meters

and you'll soon reach a small bump

in the road where I fell off my bike

for the first time and scraped my knee

badly and had to go home and get it

cleaned and I cried all the way home

till I got the bandage on and mom

and dad said I was very brave

and the scar is now gone but I



still think of it fondly)

turn right onto Lorong Maarof



continue down the road

watching as the jungle on your

left grows more and more formidable

and on your right a parade of terrace

houses of all shapes and sizes, all looking

a little bit battered and a little bit old

on your left you will pass by

some private housing slash industrial estate

its wide and inviting boulevard

guarded by a barrier gate

and if you go in on foot or on bike

you'll find it leads up a single long

and winding path up the hill

with walls of lush leafy greenery

surrounding you left and right and at the



very top a dead end

keep going straight on Lorong Maarof



you will pass on your left

a street called Jalan Limau Purut

which makes two right 90 degree turns

to form a box by intersecting

again with Lorong Maarof

and circumscribes

the small suburban community

with rows of terrace houses

and nameless perpendicular alleys

cutting through and

connecting the parallel streets

to produce a kind of reticulum

liberally kinked, a grid designed

by an astigmatic

if you take the first turning left

into Jalan Limau Purut

and follow the bend right

you'll come to Emma Rozario's house

just immediately on the left

where Evan, Nirvan and I celebrated

New Year's Eve in 2011 (or was it

2012?) (incidentally, her road happens to run

parallel to a road just on the other side

of the undergrowth named

Jalan Negeri Sembilan

which is where my dad is from

(the state, that is



not the road))

(keep going straight along Lorong Maarof



and take the second turning right

past the petrol station and along Lorong Maarof 5

to trace our journey from Emma's house

to Telawi where we loitered in front of

a 7-11 for half an hour to watch the fireworks



at midnight)

don't take the first turning left


instead bypass the first turning into Jalan Limau Purut

and keep going

past Jalan Limau Besar

till you get to Jalan Limau Purut again

on your left

go up the steepish slope

where my dad taught me

how to ride a bike on my own

go slow so you don't miss it

on your left somewhere

between halfway and three quarters up

is my childhood home

a terrace house with a white gate

and next to us lived a boy whose hobby

was to climb the roof of his house everyday

when he invited me to join him

on his rooftop escapades

my mom and dad said 'no thanks'



I think I was about eight

keep going up the hill



and you'll see that the road ends in a

cute little cul-de-sac that juts out

of the corner intersection

like the neighbourhood's appendix

you'll see at the very tip

there's a clearing where the

asphalt stops and the concrete is covered

by clumps of rough and familiar cowgrass

and all around you'll see an array of

gaunt and cheerless trees towering

over you in a semicircle and if you stare

straight ahead

you see a forest

a deep and forbidding place

possibly no one has ever explored

before

and you are momentarily struck with the same fear

and wonder as you were standing in that place

over sixteen years ago

but what really bothers you is

how small and feeble

the reality is compared to that place in your mind

and you find yourself wondering if that was

really the spot

or if it might have been some other clearing

at the end of a street with the woods

tall and impenetrable as the ones

that swallow up young children in story books

and you stand there staring into the bark

scrutinising the vegetation

trying to see if the place has changed

or if it's exactly the same

was this fence always here?

and that sign there

isn't that new?

the scene before you looks

both increasingly familiar and

increasingly unrecognisable

as the landmarks of your youth

fail to correspond with what you see

image and experience dissolve

into anecdotes

and standing there alone

you begin to worry

because you can't tell anymore

where you've been

or where you are

or how to get home

song for summer / this too shall pass

---

you were
seventeen when I last saw you,
oh - how I've changed
so little since

---

what do you do about unrequited affection

---

let's run away and wear gaudy couple t-shirts in public

reflections on being good

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." 

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

---

the symmetry of the bible - generations of foreshadowing and mirrored perspective

a father willing to sacrifice his son for God, a God willing to give up His son for us

David, the king from humble beginnings, willing to die for the son who raised an army against him

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The main exception to this lack of interest in applied ethics comes in religion. Whatever disagreements one might have with their definitions of goodness or the practical implementations of their own creeds, religions do not stop trying to encourage their followers to be good. They give them commandments and rituals, they deliver them sermons and ask them to rehearse lessons in prayers and in songs. 

Even for a life-long atheist, there is something interesting about these efforts. Might we learn something from them? The standard answer is that we can’t, because religious morality comes from God, which by definition atheists have no time for. Yet the origins of religious ethics couldn’t of course (for an atheist) have come from God, they lay in the pragmatic need of our earliest communities to control their members’ tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were projected into the sky and reflected back to earth in disembodied and majestic forms. Injunctions to be sympathetic or patient stemmed from an awareness that these were the qualities which could draw societies back from fragmentation and self-destruction. So vital were these rules to our survival that for thousands of years we did not dare to admit that we ourselves had formulated them, lest this expose them to critical scrutiny and irreverent handling. We had to pretend that morality came from the heavens in order to insulate it from our own laziness and disregard. 

- Alain de Botton, On Being Good

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We are obsessed with trying to be good, with trying to cure ourselves - we're constantly taught to cultivate virtue - to keep morality, or at least the appearance of it, to check in on ourselves regularly to make sure we don't break the internal law that tells us at all times what we ought to do, but anyone who has ever tried very hard to be good can tell you that it's an endeavour destined for failure, an exercise in futility.

What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, "YOU SHALL NOT COVET." But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. and this commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me; for sin, taking occasion by the commandment, seduced me, and by it killed me. 

- Romans 7:7-11:

It is an experiential truth that the harder you try not to eat junk food the more you want to eat it. Before you started thinking about trying to abstain, the desire was but a flicker, non-existent. Upon deciding to eat healthy however, it becomes suddenly ever-present. You succumb and then give in to shame and feel really bad about yourself, which causes you to eat even more to try and numb the pain. (I mean, not that I've ever done that before... ok, maybe once in my life. or twice. or more.)

But if you read carefully, Jesus doesn't command us to 'be good'. He doesn't say, keep these rules and you'll be alright. If you floss ten times and stand on your head you'll be holy and God will bless you.

"Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus said to him, "'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' "This is the first and great commandment. "And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' "On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."  

- Matthew 22:36-40

Jesus commands us to love God, which requires us to know Him intimately through His word and through prayer, and to obey Him by acting in faith, which train us in the right ways to eventually enable us (with some a lot of help from the Holy Spirit) to love our neighbours as ourselves.

In Romans 12:9-21, Paul paints a picture of what this would look like - Paul isn't saying 'these are the steps, the tricks, the keys to success, how to please God for dummies - we aren't expected to genuinely possess these sentiments he's listed by sheer incredible force of will. We should, of course, encourage such sentiments wherever possible, but we find that they arise much more naturally and unsolicited if we only commit ourselves to follow that first commandment.

It is much easier to love someone than it is to give up smoking, which is why most ex-smokers tend to give up smoking when they have their first child. They don't do it for themselves, but for someone else. We find that if we try to be patient and polite for our own sake, we don't get very far at all - but if our motivation is elsewhere, if the thing that compels us is the person we love the most, then at last we have a chance at success - not to mention that this person will provide divine assistance. But the aim is never to 'be good'. The ones who manage to be very good aren't thinking of being good at all. They're too busy loving others.

But how do we go about loving others? Some of the others aren't very lovable. The answer is, we're going to need 1. a lot of practise and 2. a lot of help. In fact, a lot of what we believe is ourselves being charitable toward others is actually God being charitable through us.

Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing. 

- Ephesians 2:8-10 (MSG)

So although we can't take credit for any of the goodness we achieve, through Him we can now accomplish what was previously impossible.

Jesus says, "Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."

He's offering to go the whole nine yards with us, carrying our burdens and baggage on his back, if we will take but one step towards him and hitch our wagon to his cart, and press on as hard as we can. What matters to him is our attitude, not results. He is pleased even with our failures, so long as our aim is to please Him - for if we truly obey Him then we shall get perfection thrown in. Through Him we are no longer dead and susceptible to sin. We no longer have to wrestle with the guilt and condemnation of trying to keep the law - of discovering again and again despite desperate measures and repeated denials that we are afflicted by endless recrudescence of self-loathing and pride and other hideous forms of internal conflict. At last, our demons may be evicted. At last, our weary souls may find peace.

the winter of our discontent

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,  

To entertain these fair well-spoken days, 

I am determined to prove a villain 

And hate the idle pleasures of these days. 

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, 

By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams

---

signs of summer on
the horizon. skies are blue
afternoons, golden

---

1. be grateful for what you have
2. don't focus on trying to be good
3. focus on trying to be kind
4. focus on encouraging and bringing out the good in others
5. do not rely on your own strength alone
6. but say, 'Lord, in my weakness may Your glory be seen'

---

be independent vs never rely on anyone else

---

"So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross."

さよならの季節

Winter's breath hung low in the air, swaying branches and brushing past us with its fitful ebb and flow. The hoarse, gray sky turned away from the earth, disinterested. The bony branches and ragged grass looked as if they had been living and then forgot to continue. Artificial, as if encased in glass, in a sleep as deep as death. As if hollowed out and fixed with formaldehyde. Lifelike but still - choreographed, almost. The fields were a handsome place, laboured and waning composedly. The restless wind that possessed neither warmth nor bite. Everything stiff and quiet. The hush of anticipation. Winter was gone, but the memory of it lingered on. It felt as if death's reign had come to an end, had reached the end of its lease, like it had run out of things to destroy and ended up consuming itself to the bone. But it had left behind an aberrant nothingness, a strange absence, a void - pleading with muted hues, the trees held their leafless limbs up to heaven. The ache of creation rang through the emptiness - it echoed through the waste land, pining for something new

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*shakes head* too many adjectives and abstract nouns