왜 계속 불만족 / more more more

Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it.

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Dear 25 year old me,

In case you haven't noticed, trying to make yourself happy is the thing that leaves you feeling the most unhappy.

Best wishes,
Yourself

dope tunes vol I

the order of time

"Einstein understood this slowing down of time a century before we had clocks precise enough to measure it. He imagined that the sun and the Earth each modified the space and time that surrounded them, just as a body immersed in water displaces the water around it. This modification of the structure of time influences in turn the movement of bodies, causing them to “fall” towards each other. What does it mean, this “modification of the structure of time”? It means precisely the slowing down of time described above: a mass slows down time around itself. The Earth is a large mass and slows down time in its vicinity. It does so more in the plains and less in the mountains, because the plains are closer to it. This is why the friend who stays at sea level ages more slowly."

Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time


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A mass slows down time around itself. What does this mean for us. When time passes differently for us, is this a perceived or a real change? Are we simply moving faster than before and therefore sensing the world relative to us decrease in pace? Or are we gaining mass in these moments? Becoming suddenly denser than ever before. When you are grieving - when the night seems eternal - at the point of death when life stretches behind and before you, do your future selves, all the years you should have had, all the people you could've been, collapse into the present and instantaneously concentrate the self into a single, immensely dense, vanishing point. The big bang but in reverse.

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So much of our world is built around this concept of time, directed by it, informed by it, regulated, deadlines, shift patterns. In A&E seconds are precious. We have a four hour target, because we understand that when it comes to acute medicine, time is a deciding factor in patient outcomes. Troponins have to be done six hours after chest pain or they won't be reliable diagnostically. Everything / everyone in the department, as soon as you step onto the shop floor, the clock starts ticking. Time to triage. Time to be seen. All of these outcomes are measured, audited, presented. Our time to act is short, our minutes are precious - this is more true in A&E than elsewhere in the hospital. We treat it not as a resource but rather as a force of nature, we see a side of it people rarely confront, a cruel, impersonal tidal wave of change, unstoppable, unrelenting. Not something to be weathered or outlasted but something to keep ahead of, to try and stave off, something you actively battle, something you keep trying to outrun, snatching babies from its path, shoving elderly folk just beyond reach of its endless rampage.

We understand that giving antibiotics within an hour and giving it four hours later can decide life or death, or at least we have convinced ourselves this is so. It's what is revealed when we interrogate our little history of medicine.

Time is so important to us. Time to water the crops. Time to cook food. Time to get to know someone. Timing, it seems, really is everything.

Even now I'm counting down the minutes to my next shift. How this job makes you focus on time, makes you think and obsess over it, how you allow it to rule you, to dictate your every decision. And is this really the way it should be? Is this an accurate representation of reality? If time is really so important in these next 8 hours, always on our minds, knowing that every moment exists in the context of a countdown, then why do we still make time for small talk? Why do we allow ourselves to slow down? Why don't we act like this all the time?

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There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account.

And I saw something else under the sun:
In the place of judgment—wickedness was there,
in the place of justice—wickedness was there.

I said to myself, “God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed.”

I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?” So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. For who can bring them to see what will happen after them?

- Ecclesiastes 3

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No time is passing outside you at all. It is amazing. The late ballet below is slow motion, the overbroad movements of mimes in blue jelly. If you wanted you could really stay here forever, vibrating inside so fast you float motionless in time, like a bee over something sweet.

But they should clean the board. Anybody who thought about it for even a second would see that they should clean the end of the board of people's skin, of two black collections of what's left of before, spots that from back here look like eyes, like blind and cross-eyed eyes.

Where you are now is still and quiet. Wind radio shouting splashing not here. No time and no real sound but your blood squeaking in your head.

Overhead here means sight and smell. The smells are intimate, newly clear. The smell of bleach's special flower, but out of it other things rise to you like a weed's seeded snow. You smell deep yellow popcorn. Sweet tan oil like hot coconut. Either hot dogs or corn dogs. A thin cruel hint of very dark Pepsi in paper cups. And the special smell of tons of water coming off tons of skin, rising like steam off a new bath. Animal heat. From overhead it is more real than anything.

Look at it. You can see the whole complicated thing, blue and white and brown and white, soaked in a watery spangle of deepening red. Everybody. This is what people call a view. And you knew that from below you wouldn't look nearly so high overhead. You see now how high overhead you are. You knew from down there no one could tell.

He says it behind you, his eyes on your ankles, the solid bald man, Hey kid. They want to know. do your plans up here involve the whole day or what exactly is the story. Hey kid are you okay.

There's been time this whole time. You can't kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

- David Foster Wallace, Forever Overhead

주고 받기 / comes and goes

a broken heart is one that dared to hope

dog days are over

caveat emptor

Having visited KL gateway mall, from the outside they inspire awe, and on the inside I find they all have a quality in common, they all look identical in their opulence, in their hollowness and vacancy. In they way they all leave me feeling empty. Or maybe disappointed is the right word. The fact that they are all smaller on the inside than they appear, that they offer far less than is advertised. Trying to connect, palpate or interrogate its identity but coming away with nothing, only surface, trying to love a pretty girl who never lets you see under her makeup, whose answers are all superficial and reveal nothing. Trying to love the shopping malls as an extension of the city, it doesn't feel authentic or genuine.

it's tiring, as tiring as trying to hold a conversation and connect with someone who has resolved to only show you their sparkly, shiny, scintillating side. Who thinks they have to perform to earn your attention. Who never dares to put forward their fears, to acknowledge their shortcomings, to ask you to love them, someone who never lets down their facade of being appealing, who is consumed by appearance, who is trying all the time to make you like them.

all tell no show