~The Road Less Taken~

Saturday, December 6, 2008

(sorry if i sound unlike me and all emo and sad and disillusioned with the world like an emo bloke who slashes his wrist. i really am right now, believe me, and it's not a valid excuse to transfer this to you, the blog-reader, but if i don't do it here and now, i'll probably continue down this dark path my life seems to be funneling into. and so i'm sorry for being so selfish, for putting myself first before you.)

i take that previous post back.

i will be posting today after all.

only that today as i know it (and as i have known it for the last 3 years), it's 1am, i am defying my parents' order to sleep (what's new?) and i just feel the pressing need to get things off my chest, move on with life and then i can be the happy person i've always wanted to be.

and at this point it's best for you to ignore this post if you didn't like the previous one. alternatively, if you would like to poke your nose around and understand my affairs, please do go on lapping this up like a thirsty dog drinking water. please don't offer me any sympathy either - that would just make me play up to you and secure even more assurance and condolences from you, and i definitely know that that would just make me worse than i already am.

ok, so no big deal, there was a rather nasty tiff at home, my parents will probably step onto this blog in the next 24 hours, read my post and dismiss it as greenspan would the subprime crisis, then lecture me about how inappropriate it is to air one's dirty linen in public view for all to point fingers at and say, "oh, i'm so glad i'm not as screwed up as him.".

it's all so predictable. yes, i know the consequences of what i'm going to do, so you can save your saliva on that lecture. i know people will know about us now, but hey, they deserve to know what i'm really like, don't they? then they can be forewarned, and avoid talking to me next time because i'm not worthy of their time.

and so before you jump out of your skins reading this particular post (i can almost hear your blood boiling upstairs! drink some liangcha, won't you. you seem to need it more often than i do!), and hurl some random accusation at me which is likely to be true anyway, let me just say something rational.

that is, if my self-acclaimed reputation (on this blog) for being a composed and rational being hasn't been irreversibly compromised by the above paragraphs.

the more i look at my word usage, the more this reminds me of the subprime crisis. yay for america and how it has royally screwed itself up its haughty haunches, and deja vu to us, ain't it sweet how the parallels fall into place so neatly.

but to the something rational.

sometimes i think we all need to be a little bit more:

understanding.
rational.
accepting.
sensitive.

and be a little bit less:

dismissive.
unstable.
stubborn.
impositional.

i say "we" because i'm guilty of it, as you may well know and have tried to impress upon me (yes, although i grunt and talk in a tone that rick astley would be proud of, my brain is actually switched on, only that if you wanted to see it, you might have to crack my skull first, and we all know the implications of that), but it's more than a little bit inaccurate to say that i'm the only one prone to all this.

i'm a highly willful character, as you may know. i just like doing things myself, my way, and if it isn't done that way, then we're all in for a bit of a ride - i believe my willfulness extends to a sort of fierce independence which i have absolutely no idea at all why i feel it being suppressed.

in addition, i tend to be fairly unstable emotionally. you should know, since i came back at the start of 2008 rarely early, sometimes unhappy and always tired. i know we all have long days at work, and that's perfectly fine, except if you want that work-life-family balance we all so often crow about like it's a personal mantra but yet crow about it is all we do.

but just because we have had long days at work and are feeling tired doesn't mean we can pass on the frustration to others by talking loudly or forcing them to do something their body just doesn't feel like doing.

and i know people always say that it's best to go to your limit, and beyond if at all possible, but my limit is usually reached fairly early in school, because i need to give my everything in school, and then i come home and i need to give some more. what, i didn't tell you of the day i slept in 5 of 6 academic periods?

yes, maybe i did put too much emphasis on school, but there are reasons as to why we're even arguing about all this in the first place (and i daresay at this point the catalyst for our incredible turnaround from "happy" to "dangerous" has been ri), which i, in my attempt to be rational, will talk about later. this academic paper is far from over, folks.

and we tend to override logic a lot, don't we? "what i say is final, so that's that." and then we all clam up into our little personal shells (consisting mainly of computers), with the little overlapping area being the car or the living room.

that's a pity, since all of our brains are going to waste.

for a family so inclined towards the mathematics and sciences, isn't it sad that we don't make use of our greatest asset - an ability to think logically?

gosh, i even presented on it in a little something called the "showcase portfolio" in august! under multiple intelligences, where i touched on something called "logical-mathematical" and "naturalist" intelligences.

an ability to reason is a common distinguishing factor between animals and the so-called superior echelon of organisms we tend to call "humans". and so a logical extension would be that if we aren't using our reason, then we are animals butting horns!

oh wait, there's a contradiction here, isn't there. it's too simple to not point out. if i'm accusing us of not having reason, yet i use reason to show all this, i'm reasoning on shaky ground, aren't i? it's a fallacy of reasoning, thank you to the sec 4s who chime in.

well having come so far in my little rant, let's just say the last thing we should be doing is to get all defensive about it and search for a convincing enough counter-argument to knock me down, shut me up and get me all emo and frustrated that despite my best efforts to patch up the ever-widening cracks which then break us up into little islands of thought and reduce us to a shouting match across the room in which all our words stop and drop dead abruptly within a 5-meter radius of the other parties.

like my year head 1 mrs lim always said (and she still does say), have an open mind.

take this as it is, accept what's going on over here, and work on it, rather than call me out to the living room, shoot my points down methodically and send me back in a messy heap of lost words, and enough tears to boil you a soothing cup of tea, minus the minerals and plus some tannins.

as it is, we're just building walls around ourselves to shield ourselves from the truth which everyone can see but ourselves. not just me, us.

so couldn't we just be nice for a while and say "mr tiong, tear down this wall.", and then i will, because i don't exactly want to come back to a place i don't necessarily enjoy every day?

and then maybe when we say "let's go out on the weekend", we might actually go out, enjoy ourselves, think that things really do stand a chance of getting better (as if they could get any worse!) and have a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

that's the kind of feeling i want to be at home and sensing.

not going to school to get it.

because that's what seems to be happening increasingly often.

yes, school is a big point of contention, isn't it?

maybe if you cut me open, i might not bleed love, but green, black and white.

you know, maybe that's what's wrong after all.

the whole idea as to why school seems like such a lovely place, a nice "home" to be in.

because at least in school, i'm treated like an adult. it's different from all those other schools (this has been told to me personally before, and i would like to believe it's true) - we may be the same age, but we do things in a different, more grown-up style.

in school, i make decisions, and i'm expected to bear the full consequences of everything and anything which might happen as a result.

being a PSL underscored that point perfectly.

in school, i learn how to fend for myself, and then based on the power of myself and my incredible friends, peers and teachers, i do things i could never have dreamed of doing 4 years ago.

and then what happens when i leave school?

i don't know, to be honest. the thought process seems to be the same but everything else is different.

and so that's my weakness, one among the many.

when i look at myself (figuratively), and really cross-examine myself and make sense of me, i see so many gaping flaws and weaknesses.

i don't like hypocrites, yet i'm one myself. the irony.

and so it's these flaws i really want to change, and i want to start where i need to change most - when i'm the "real" me and not a facade you see in school.

yes, i walk around under a guise of everything moral and nice. how sad i don't reveal myself more often, it gets a little bit tiring to put it up sometimes.

and after all that, and losing my thought process millions of times, we're at the end of this revelatory blog post, and i have said i know the repurcussions of this particular entry.

i may lose my friends.
i may distance myself more from my family. (the classic "when you do too much of something, the opposite of the intended effect happens" case)

but i guess when you consider that i'm really starting to find myself, i guess it's not too bad.

and i will consider myself incredibly lucky if neither of the above happens, or even if one of the two doesn't.

like i said, if you don't want to ruin your (perhaps) pristine impression of me, you should never had read this far.

but now that you have, and you know who i really am, i think that's a more stable foundation to rebuild everything about myself on.

on to happier things next time. yes ryan, i remember.

(selective) memory is definitely one of my strong suits.

I stopped to rest at 1:19 AM

Two roads diverged,and I-
took the one less taken...