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Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.


MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.


OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.


CHAT





Tuesday, August 01, 2006
What is time?

I mean, what exactly is time? I know what it is in its absolute sense: the duration that passes in a linear passage, from now to later, from just now to now. But what is time in a measured sense?

What the hell is an hour? Why is it called an hour and more importantly why is it as long as it currently is? Why isn’t an hour, say, as long as ten minutes or six minutes or six and a half? Who determined it and what gives that person the right to measure something like time? Was it by divine decree? Or was it just something a bunch of fogeys calculated while stargazing?

And what if time isn’t objectively experienced? What makes us think that the same duration can be measured equally by two people who experience that duration on different terms? In a football match, when there are five minutes left to play, five minutes for the team holding the lead is a very long time; five minutes for the team chasing the game is a blink of an eye. How sure are we that an objective notion of “five minutes”, or any other value for that matter, adequately represents the duration between then and the end of the match?

When I was 21 and in uni, I asked these same questions. I riled about it and announced that I henceforth did not live in ‘time’ as it was (and still is) known and measured, but that I lived semi-outside of it, trapped inevitably in its absolute forward progression, but rejecting it in all of its calculated constraints. I went about for a few days without a watch, and decided to show up at classes according to my whim, or perchance. My more educated housemate at the time kindly informed me that what I was saying was in fact not novel at all, and had already been covered by philosophers and writers long before me. At that time, it made my notion seem silly, my thoughts unoriginal and my ideas about a few hundred years out of sync. I put my watch back on and the watch told me it was time to eat. So I ate. I probably wasn’t even hungry.

But five years on, I’m still thinking about it and I can tell you right now, I don’t give a flying fox if the philosophers and writers before me have covered it, they had their temporo-existential journey and now I want to have mine. I think I deserve it and just because they came before me doesn’t make my doubts about the way we measure time any less valid.

I don’t really know what time is. It’s a completely ridiculous construction designed to segmentise what should otherwise be two halves of a day where one featured sunlight and brightness and the other the absence of said sunlight and brightness. I don’t even know if it’s that clear-cut because the sun sets in stages and darkness does not step in, it creeps in. How am I to know that the measurement of time isn’t a massive hatch to lock people into regimented routines under a system of tyrannic order? Because from where I stand, it looks every bit like a man-made mode of time-ing, or ‘timing’ things. Like a desperate bid by man to claim control over every last terrain in their experiential existence. When they ran out of space and matter to dissect, they started dissecting time: arbitrarily, into pockets of 24s, 60s and 60s. Well as far as I’m concerned, it sounds like a big lie.

Give me a second. Fifteen minutes of fame. My finest hour. All of these represent time much more capably than what they literally mean and I prefer it this way. What the hell is an hour? An hour is just an hour until it’s over. And mine ain’t over until I say so.

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Genusfrog [ 2:10 pm ]

2 Comments:

  • Interesting food for thought. Ya, how good it'd feel if we're all not regimented by this thing called Time. But do you remember the saying : Time and Tide waits for no man ? Tide, like the Time, has an unseen hand in its regimented movements. High tide, low tide, high tide, low tide...this goes on and on, and always On Time too. And like Time, it will not stand still and wait for those who will not move on.

    The people who 'founded' Time must have spent (heehee, here, i must use this term 'hours') hours on end watching the sun rise and fall each day and wondering how best to capture the in-between and translate them into regimented, disciplined segments so that human beings can better co-ordinate their lives instead of living incognito. The passage of time is unseen but yet we clock it in. And this 'clock' had to be invented to constrain all of us, like it not.

    Should we thank whoever gave us this human timetable that tells us when to eat even when we're not hungry and when to sleep even when we're not sleepy?! It tells us to "hurry up" when we need a breather and to "slow down" when we have to rush! Wow, how strange this time is. Come to think of it, i'm hungry cos it's been many moons since i last ate a burger! heehee!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10:52 am  

  • Very inspiring belief ;)

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7:34 pm  

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