Non-week

Where have I been for the past ten days? I’m trying to break out of this state of limbo I seem to be trapped in, a dark space with an entry but no exit. What is this? It’s not depression, it’s definitely not a mood swing, so where am I?

It’s strange – how I know that this year is critical, a fork in the path where I must choose the right way leading out of the dark forest, and yet I can’t move. This is the beginning of the end, the first moments of the home stretch, and I’m stumbling at the sound of the gunshot. No! I’ve come too far to just stumble halfway on the road…So I resort to this space on the internet again; I turn to the written (or typed, whatever) word. Let’s hope that these pixels on the screen will give me a visual representation of the impasse I’ve reached, a user interface, if you will, in the game of life.

Let’s talk about feeling unproductive – the idea of not producing anything useful. This is so uncharacteristic of me that it’s nearly certain that there’s something at the back of my mind occupying this particular chunk of processing power. A metal rod lodged in the carburetor. I’ve been thinking about a few things: 

1. Piano and the violin. I get upset just thinking about this, because it epitomizes how the last three years of my life has practically been a waste, assuming you see it through the correct set of lenses. Which is more important, school exams, or math? I’ve been agonizing over this question for the last week, but in retrospect, I probably haven’t – I’ve already known the answer for a long long time, and what is worrying me is the idea of delaying it once again.

And that’s it, actually, I can’t think of anything else. And since the deadline is tomorrow, this will be over come midnight. Thus logically, my life will be back in shape in 24 hours. So let’s think about the rest of the year:

(And this is where I transitioned into a .doc file. Plans are private!)

2013: Post-camp thoughts

On the way home last Friday I slept. I felt completely exhausted, less so mentally but definitely physically; perhaps it was because I spent the last night tossing and turning in my bed while trying to keep my mind from running wild, but still. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten really accustomed to, but the exhaustion really brings me to my current state of mind.

I’ve spent two full seasons in the training program – one in the junior team, one in the senior team, and this time, I went into camp feeling like somewhat of a visitor rather than a student.

I like the junior team this year. Every year I get somewhat attached to a few campers – people I enjoy being with, people who I can see have genuine enthusiasm, people who are humble, and various other little traits and quirks that make me feel like I have something to gain from interacting with them. But for the past two years, these people have been companions, people who are taking the journey together with me. They were people hiking the same mountain as I was, people feeling their way around the same labyrinths I was trying to get out of, people at the same stage of their supposed ‘evolution’ as I was.

This time, however, I felt more like a guardian to these people. There’s something inexplicably beautiful about this: seeing people discover the things that made you fall in love with an object, a subject, a person, anything. It’s a window for me into two years ago, when I was taking the first wobbly steps upon this strange path in the dark forest. I see so many things that remind me of myself – the nascent wonder, the shared happiness upon meeting other campers, the struggle to prove yourself, the feeling of being a young cub among roaring lions, and ultimately, the liberation from normal life.

So perhaps this explains why I felt like an outsider peering into another world, a stranger taking a foray into a new land. It’s not until now that I’m starting to realize that perhaps I’m tired. Camp homework sits in my email untouched for two days, and I’ve not touched any math since I came home. Seeing the junior campers made me:

1. remember the fun I used to have with math – because of the neverending sense of discovery, of finding new things, of stepping into unfamiliar territory, of exploring;

2. remember that there is fun to be had everywhere.

I am by nature an anxious person. I cannot bear the feeling of being unproductive, and every wasted second overflows me with guilt and keeps me up at night. Throughout the past year though, these thoughts of ‘being productive’ – ie. ‘improving’ – have gradually shifted off myself to the general community, as in ‘improving others’.

There is a bigger picture, at least on the conceptual level, but I’m going to make it happen on a physical, very real level. I have many ideas, but none of them are truly ‘original’. The difference is that I now have the resources, the ability, and the support of  the parties involved to pull these things off, from every aspect: monetary, logistics, legal things.

2013 will be different. I’m breaking out of the monotony that I now see I’ve molded my life into – after Lyon, where a small part of me still resides.

So

It’s now 1 in the morning. I haven’t met a particularly hard problem in a while, and it seems like this is going to be one of those nights – the ones where I go, I’m not sleeping until I solve this. I used to do this nearly every night, but it feels rather foreign to me right now, but I think I like how familiar this all feels.

edit: It is now 3:14, which is a rather fitting time to finally crack this problem, no? Time for bed.

Some thoughts

1. I have a rather large collection of photographs documenting these past few years, and all of these serve to evoke an often very specific memory during a particular time, at a particular place. It’s perhaps naive to think that all of these evocations would be of the positive sort, and it is true that there are many places down memory lane for which I would not want to revisit. The only purpose these pixels serve is to act as portals into the continuum of time, and so there are a few photos which I’ve grown very fond of, because of the snapshot of time it reminds me of. When I make compilations for the accessible public , my first instinct is always to include these special ones right away. But then I think, and I realize that very little of these will hold any significance to anyone else, and the palette of emotions that a picture presents is ultimately not determined by the pixels themselves, but by the observer. And so I arrive at the incredibly selfish thought that the pictures only hold meaning for me, and people, those ones whose faces are not in the picture, will experience different emotions altogether, if any. Words and pixels can only transmit but a tiny fraction of human experience, and isn’t it really sad how being, in the simplest sense of the word, can never truly be shared?

2. I was reading an interesting debate on Reddit about the importance of money, compared to loving your job. I have just one thought on this – it seems to be true that passion is asymptotically equal to skill. In the general sense, of course, this is not always true, but I think that it holds true often enough to be able to grant people the confidence that being passionate about something nearly always correlates to good ability. I think that making money off something you’re passionate about isn’t just possible, it’s highly probable for the majority of people.

Post-

I’m in the midst of exams right now, and all that’s left between me and breathing space are the three science papers. I usually love studying for the science subjects because they are rooted in logic and common sense, unlike humanities; but from the same perspective, they lake spontaneity and finesse. But this time I’m quite ready for the exams to end, to end this continuous race I’ve been running for the last few months to stop, rest, and think; perhaps I will watch some Korean dramas, play some video games, or maybe, find time to finish watching Avatar Aang take down the fire nation. There is a place inside me that holds a reverence towards fantasy and parallel universes, but that’s a topic I’ll leave for some other time. Time to study; I’m looking forward to running past the last few metres of this race, and that probably doesn’t involve wasting time on the internet.

Lost ground

At the back of my mind there is a list of things I want to do. If I added dates on them or arranged them on a calendar some would date back a couple years, and most would congregate around halfway through 2011. I’ve suddenly realized how much I’ve pushed out of my life recently. It’s scary how easy it is to lose focus of the pretty picture in your imagination as you wave your first stroke with your paintbrush. It’s scary how shocking it is to devote part of you to a small fraction of the canvas and step back and realize that the paints around that small patch has gathered dust and turned crusty. What I just wrote is bullshit btw.

Because dammit, there are so many things I was supposed to be. And I’m not sure why it seems like I’m running late, late for everything. I’ve been sitting in my room, stationary on a blue chair while time and space swirled around me and I didn’t give a damn. It somehow slipped my eyes how the old acoustic in the corner and my sister’s violin was gathering dust, and the once-warm bench of the piano seemed to turn cold. I’m not sure how I ever unconsciously slipped into this metaphorical limbo, but if I was ever in it I am awake now, and I don’t like this place. snap snap snap, wake up dear. Time is such a jealous shapeshifter; it acts behind a foolishly turned back, so that when the deception finally dawns upon you it is far too late, too late for everything. But perhaps now is not the time for poems or metaphors; it is the time for a steady head and ready hands.

A short note

In the real world I don’t write like I do on the blog. Why I started this blog: to improve my English, which explains the overabundance of bombastic vocabulary in my writing. I reserve this melancholic style for writing here. But over time it has metamorphosed into a place I come to write when I’m sad. Does sadness, regardless of whether it only resides in your imagination or otherwise, breed a desire for the melancholy? Which explains why this thinking space on the net seems to be so full of angst, tragedy and drama; but the only reason I haven’t been posting much is because, well, I simply haven’t been feeling sad all that much.

How can I be sad when I find myself hopping all over the atlas as a sixteen year old teenager, talking and laughing with amazing people? For the past two years I seem to have cheated the system, bypassed it, to some extent. But today I am, and it is on mornings like this that I can’t shake the thought that: who am I kidding? I’m just a random teenager from a unknown town tucked neatly into the middle of nowhere, and all I have is a head full of dreams. I hate the KL/Penang dominance of everything. I hate how so many opportunities are given to the kids who have the luck to be placed in a big town. I hate asking my parents for a 300km car ride up to the city for a seminar or a camp, or the countless ones I have missed.

Oh this dream of mine, can you see how much trouble you’ve brought? I seem to be unable to go through a day without thinking of what comes after I fail, but still I often think about how crazy it is that I’ve gotten this far. Is it the saying that if you ever feel like giving up, think about why you held on so far in the first place? But no, this is different, this is when you can’t stop thinking about why, and you really can’t let go.

edited once.