You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2005.
pleh. am feeling a lot better past the weekend, and am trying to procrastinate reading j.s. mill’s on liberty so was fiddling with my tablet. a 45-minute experiment turned 2hr thingy… it turned out pretty well. i was trying for a sketchy sort of result…
i love full-metal alchemist~! it’s honestly one of the best overall series i’ve seen in a recent years and all the characters are just so. damned. likeable. if any of em really died i’d be really really devastated.
(except maybe for envy. NO ONE WHO HURTS HUGHES DESERVES LOVE.)
why do you go to church? do you feel that bad experiences make you a better person? is depression entirely self-determined? what is love?
today has been a day of introspection and mending and tearing apart and pensive silences and questions more than answers. jason asked me most of those today, and kelvin asked me the last.
why do i go to church? “because there are some things i have to deal with.”
i think a lot of people who know me might be surprised by the fact i willingly go to church every week now, even when there’s no guilt trip lording over me that the mass is dedicated to my brother and i should go because it’s meant to help salvage his soul and ensure that he gets to heaven. and i think it all boils back to that. i never really talked to anyone about this, but when my brother died, they took his body and forced a smile onto his face and forced his hands together and clasped them. and then family friends came and brought bibles which were shoved under his arms and a rosary was twisted round his hands and i always hated hated hated that. i don’t think it was what he wanted, and i don’t think it was him and i always hated it and i hated how they treated him like a wax figure and how they painted his face and made him into something he wasn’t. i don’t pretend to be the person who knew my brother the best, and i know he made statements about wanting to go into the catholic church and once (i think this really happened, but it has been so long ago i cannot remember if i dreamt it or if it was real) i think he asked me if i ever thought about getting a religion and he thought maybe it was necessary, but i don’t want to sound callous but that was the way my brother was, sometimes he’d be into things and he’d read up everything about that thing and talk about it like he was an expert, and i don’t deny perhaps he did think of becoming a catholic but i hated how everything about that was turned into a big thing and how they made him some sort of martyr. some poor boy who was granted special permission to have a catholic burial even though he was never baptised because before the end, he had seen the light. and i don’t want to deny that that was not happening, but i… i just didn’t believe that and i didn’t want him to become some anecdote to promote the conversion to christianity.
and it just made me so angry. why why why was this happening? if you really loved us why would people die and leave people behind? why would you take my brother away just as (if what was said was true) he was going to believe in you? i hated you so so much and i was mad and so angry and how this became one huge emotional blackmail to getting my parents to believe in you too and go to church and i wanted you to know that no, i didn’t believe in you one bit and it was all for my brother and if you really did care so much you’d better take care of him because fine i’m, giving in to you now and i’m going to your church. so stop punishing me for not believing because you took away my brother already and i think that that’s enough.
and i just don’t understand why this was happening, and all this about you caring and loving us all and saving us, then why did you make us languish on this earth in the first place? and i don’t know but i needed to get an answer and it took a while and then i came here, and i met en qi who’s really devout and i’ll admit the first time i went to church here it was more out of peer pressure than anything, but after a while i realised that if i was to be angry with it i ought to get to know more and try to find some balance and there are so many things that i cannot reconcile with religion.
and i think church gives me a time for serious thinking about why we are here and what is our purpose. i’m still deeply sceptical about the power of prayer and i think it’s cathartic and it’s needed but i do not believe that it will change anything, and i do not think that you really care.
but today’s service made me think a bit more, and something about having to open ourselves up and accept the grace and mercy and love or something (i do not profess proficience in the teachings of christ) and somehow along the way i realised that a lot of anger is at myself as well as at him. i always felt that god took my brother to force me to believe in him and to recognize his existence and i think if i had been in some way a better human being this wouldn’t have happened. and i’m so mad sometimes that i don’t know my brother. and that i had no clue, and that i didn’t see my brother at all or talk to him or get to know him or even consciously love him or cherish him and i’m just really mad sometimes that we weren’t even like the brothers and sisters in story books and that there is no poetic sort of experience where i could feel something was wrong the minute something happened to him or that our life together flashed in front of my eyes, because we didn’t. we didn’t have that special relationship. why am i numb? why do i not dream of you? why do i not think of you constantly? why do you not play a large part in my life? there is no history of hugs or long conversations or verbal expressions of affection and we wasted it all, our 17 years together.
somehow i feel distantly, i need to forgive myself for this. yet i know that part of me doesn’t want to because if i forgive myself i will forget you. i need that reminder just like how i need to be miserable. and it is perverse and sick but somehow i know that i need your death to be miserable. but now we venture to thoughts that are too dark to be confessed uncryptically on a public blog.
do i feel that your death has made me a better person? maybe, or maybe not. i am neglecting friends and taking people for granted far too easily and you’d think that i should know better but i don’t. and that is something i have to work with and improve (but she does not move).
is misery self-inflicted? i think cui asked me a similar question once, “do you think that we can choose to not be depressed?” and yes, i still think we can. i think depression is a state of mind and we can choose to not be depressed just by not thinking too deeply and seeing too much, but i think that that is a terrible way of living your life (superficial) and you do not gain any insight whatsoever into existence and that is why i know what makes me miserable but i will never stop thinking about it because i cannot live my life like this. i think therefore i am. if i cannot think and judge this life for myself then i have no better existence than that of a beast. maybe things really do not have a deeper meaning, but if you think that way then nothing has any meaning inherent. i prefer to see the world as symbols and metaphors and even if they tend to the dark side it is still a world view unique to myself and it may be dark and desolate but it is mine and it is different.
what is love? kelvin says that it is doing anything for someone even if it makes you miserable. but i think that is a one-sided view of love. i think reciprocal love is being together even when it makes both of you miserable. love is sadness and imperfection and pain, but it is all the more beautiful for it.
i remain a cynical romantic.
typing this post made me cry more than once, but it is cathartic and i believe i will make it past the weekend safely after all.
how do you ever learn to let go of someone?
how do you accept that someone just isn’t going to be there anymore. how can you separate the anecdotes, the in jokes, the hate, the yelling, the sudden gifts that popped up and were special because they had no precedence, from what you are now? it occured to me i might never have gotten over you because of the slips i make sometimes, how ‘i’ll make you pay’ and how ‘you’d like this’ and it occurs to me that i’ll never ever get that chance.
i can’t imagine your room and not think somehow you’d be back there. i don’t think we were ever especially close, but it’s the kind of thing you take for granted, when you don’t need someone they can conveniently just disappear from your life but if you ever needed them they would always just be there in the next room waiting? but somehow now after not seeing you for such a long time i realise i really do, i really want to have you there. i have all these memories of you but they were always such selfish things that were more about me, and happened to feature you, and i realise that eerily i never knew you. sometimes i hear jiehan or yvette mention something about you that i never ever knew and now i wish i did, i wish i knew you and i think this is a regret i will have to carry for the rest of my life.
how do you answer the question, “are you the only child?” i have a brother? i had a brother? i don’t want to deny your existence, but i don’t want to tell people you’re dead.
and there are just some times when i wish i could tell you all the stuff that’s being happening, how i like ‘the royal tenenbaums’ now, and i listen to belle and sebastian and how there are all sorts of gigs in england and i think that you and i might be so much more similar now than before and how much i’d actually have benefited if i had you around to introduce me to all sorts of things eclectic.
i see that jiawen is born in the year 1981 and i think of possibly how old you might be now (24) and where you’d be in university and what you’d be studying, and where i’d be now.
how do you cut out someone from your life entirely? there are no ways to forget, no ways to remember, no ways to create what could have been, and no ways to preserve what was. absence permeates our lives completely and there is no decision, no action, no speech that you can take or make that can exclude you entirely from it. your presence made me who i was and your absence has made me what i have become. and i don’t think it’s a good or bad thing, just a sad thing.
i just, wish.
am really sorry for the long absence, just haven’t felt anything worth blogging that was fit for public comsumption. yes, i’m back in york, but the warm and fuzzies only last so long, and it’s back to the obstinate silences and work work work. i felt my first seminar was an absolute disaster because i just wasn’t mentally there and i had absolutely nothing of interest to say about the works we were studying.
on the up side, i got back my first pol A procedural essay and it got a bizarrely good mark. which is strange because i’m really really not trying to be modest, i really really hated it. if i handed in an essay like that to mrs lee she’d probably massacre me. so this boosted my confidence a bit for pol, am feeling vaguely more ready to face my supervisor and hear the horrible report on my seminar performance (i can imagine it now… oral performance: 0) SIGH. must try try harder this term.
and on the neutral side, i realise i have the emotional capacity of a man when it comes to certain matters. conflict? avoid it. pretend it isn’t there. JUST KEEP QUIET (the mantra of all men when it comes to dealing with women.)
it’s just sometimes i wonder, if the mere thought makes something real. if you’ve thought something nasty about someone, but you’ve never acted on it, or never said it out, does that make you a hypocrite? does it make you a pacifist? does it make the feeling real?
i think i have a lot of growing up to do in the world of social interaction. either that, or run away, becoming a hermit in an isolated tunnel and die of hunger. and strangely, neither seem appealing.
this blog will be updated more sporadically than usual, will move to somewhere else where thoughts can be more private. if i do update, it’ll only be if i’m supremely happy about something, or if i need to communicate to my friends back home, or just to plain assure people that i’m still alive. and maybe the odd philosophical musing. but other than that… it’ll be pretty quiet until i learn to deal with whatever is happening now.
i think i’ve lost all emotional capacity for extreme emotion other than anger and grief and maybe despair. do i have a dark side, yes, yes i do. it was in motion even then but i didn’t see it and all i said was no, no i haven’t been evil in a long time, but i have. (you didn’t see it either.) i think deep down i’m a horrible self-centred needy prat and i can’t stop questioning my actions now. raining asked me why i never went to such lengths for her and i think (realise?) it’s because i didn’t feel like i had to continually impress her with my niceness because i was assured of a friendship anyway. and i’m just so mad that while i know some of the nicest, most open and caring people in the world i cannot be like them and all my actions are steeped in selfishness and i want to be normal, damn it, but there are no more hostages left that i am willing to give up. there is only a silence and a crackle and internet static and i’m so sorry i cannot be honest with you.
