Friday, June 18, 2004
In No Hurry
I am so bored. The weather is so terribly hot and humid and basically stifling, that I have no great desire to do anything vastly productive. I am supposed to be doing work (for MQ, what else), but my brain cannot function in this weather, so hopefully it rains like mad one of these days and I can finally get something done instead of lounging around all day watching Taiwanese dramas and reading Infinite Jest at the speed of fish swimming in treacle. Or snails.
Speaking of snails, I have been spotting this snail along the path just below my block of flats. Basically the path is lined on both sides by some sort of grass lawn with lots of cassia trees, and it leads from my block to the next block. Not something you see often in HDB estates, what with the current tendency of estate planners to fill the spaces between blocks of flats with a lot of pavement and playgrounds and sheltered walkways, but not much greenery.
Anyway, back to the snail. When I walk along the path at night, I keep seeing the snail somewhere along the side of the path. The interesting thing is, the next night I see the snail along the path, but facing in the opposite direction. Which sort of means this snail is making a crossing of sorts every night, from the grass on one side of the path to the grass on the other. That is really quite cute.
What really bothers me is that someone might actually step on the poor snail one day. The image of a shoe going atop a snail is enough to give me a fit of terrible shudders. But I will admit my horror is not at the destruction of life primarily, but more at the fact that the life you just stepped on is now smeared all over the bottom of your shoe, like some permanent stain on your physical self, added to the emotional guilt you feel at stepping on this poor invertebrate organism. It just disgusts me more than I can ever say.
Which explains why I have this unspoken fear of stepping on other animals. Well, not exactly ants, since they are so small it would be ridiculous keeping your eyes fixated on the ground just to not step on any ants. More like larger organisms, primarily snails and cockroaches and lizards, the kind of thing that might actually be lying in your path late at night when you cannot see them lying there. Urgh, the thought.
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Not that I want to drive every Med student that reads this blog into perhaps-unwarranted panic, but the timetable for our next academic year is out, and by the looks of it we are up for a most unpleasant year ahead. The days that end at four and five, I can accept. But six CAs on two consecutive days? CAs 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 are on Friday (29 Oct) and 1.5 and 1.6 on Saturday (30 Oct). And sometime in March next year CAs 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 are lined up, one CA per day, from Monday to Friday.
So we are technically having only three CAs for our second year, but it will just be like having three final exams or something, the amount of stress we will be subjected to. So what happened to the 20-odd CAs every other week that our seniors had?
Sorry, I really had to gripe there. I hope I did not spoil your holiday mood.
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I am in a bit of a dilemma right now, and I really have no idea how to solve it, other than maybe write it out here and hoping that people who read it understand what kind of a double-bind I find myself stuck in.
The problem could be encapsulated as such: When your friends offer to help you with something, most times you really should not say no, since they really mean well and are willing to take so much effort to help you and all, but what if you really think you really do not desire the help? You possess the thought that what your friends are trying to do for you is a radical change that is not compatible with your character, and yet you find yourself being totally unable to decline their goodwill since it is also incompatible with your character to say no to people who are so obviously going out of their way to help because you know very well that doing so will hurt them, no matter how they might tell you otherwise.
So you cannot say yes because it goes against what you are, and you cannot say no because it also goes against what you are. In another perspective, if you say yes, you are tormenting yourself since you are letting people try to make you into someone you are not, and yet, if you say no, you will cause hurt to your friends at the cost of preserving what you are, and thus also cause hurt to yourself.
What do you do? Do you protect yourself at the cost of your friends' feelings, or make your friends happy by making yourself unhappy? If I had to choose between the two, I would more likely choose the latter, and yet it is terrible to endure. I only wish there were some other alternative.
What I look for in a friend is someone who accepts who I am and not someone who tries to change the parts of me he does not like. Which is - hopefully I can say this and not be wrong - how I treat other people as well.
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Still in the grip of Last Exile fever, I went and wrote out the Mysterion in Japanese. Quite mad. (Use Unicode to read it.)
空の彼方にある物は。 (What lies beyond the furthest reaches of the sky?)
迷い子を母の手に導く物 ー エグザイル。 (That which leads the lost child back into the mother's arms - Exile)
大地を金色に染める波。 (The waves that stain the land in gold)
命をあげて恵みの息吹き ー 麦の大地。 (The breath of blessings that gives life - the fields of wheat)
天使の降りる道。 (The path upon which angels walk)
そうは多いなの風の道 ー グランドスチリーム。 (It is the path of great winds - the Grand Stream)
記憶の彼方にある物は。 (What lies beyond the furthest reaches of memory?)
全てが生まれ全てが帰る場所 ー 青い星。 (That where all was born and all will return to - the blue star)
I am watching Paranoia Agent now, and it is the strangest and most disturbing anime I have ever watched, and I am saying this after watching just two episodes. It is stranger than Evangelion, I think. But I believe it has more of a point behind it than Eva. I hope it lives up to my expectations of it.
Avaris / 6/18/2004 05:47:00 PM
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