Back with a Vengeance...

A whimper of a vengeance - there's nothing to be vengeful about, and there's certainly nothing to cause a ruckus about either.

But I'm back nonetheless. I'm sorry (to all 10 of my loyal readers) - after I went to Goa on my grad trip, I just felt a lot of inertia and was not too eager to start sharing thoughts (though I had many). I blame Goa: white sandy beaches and amazing food meant that sloshing myself with food and alcohol at the beach proved more fun than tapping away writing meaningful stuff. I'm kinda regretting it: there's a ton of material during the last two weeks that might not get blogged about as a result (time waits for no man).

So how about a short update on what I've been up to? Then perhaps I can launch into something less mundane and more thoughtful...

1. I think I left my friends dangling with that last post: what was it about??? Well, I wrote this essay for my Ethics professor and decided that I wanted to post it here also. Although it is an academic discourse, I do think it is a pity that only an audience of ONE professor, a certain de Bettignies, is going to read that paper.

2. After that dangling post, I went for my grad trip to Goa - it took almost a week and I came back early morning last Wednesday, for the purpose of... (more on Goa in a separate post, with pics)

3. GRADUATION! I'm now a newly minted MBA. The class of December 2006 graduated last Wednesday (in Singapore) and Thursday (in Fontainebleau) and we never felt happier, nor sadder. In my opinion, the goodbyes started long ago: at the end of P4. However, I think the most poignant farewells were at the graduation ceremony and the subsequent...

4. Graduation party at MOS. Drank, danced, hugged friends and shook hands all night. I can't believe that INSEAD is at an end.

5. Over the last few days, I've been catching up with friends and clubbing rather more often than I wanted to (sloshed with alcohol some nights). Also, I'm having too many late nights, either up with friends chatting or partying. It's a little too much to take: I need to go back to what is probably a lot more important...

6. Which is my job search. Ack - I'm still looking for a job but half the world is busy with their holidays. I guess it will have to be in Jan 2007 when I start in my honest earnest quest for a job (and a paycheck).

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In other news, since I've had a little too much free time, I've updated the look and feel of the blog. Actually, it looks pretty much the same, but the advent of Blogger's new functionalities meant that I can now tag (Blogger calls it 'label') my posts.

For a long time now, I've toyed with the idea of tagging my posts using Technorati's tag feature. It isn't too difficult, but the hassle of tagging old posts as well just turned me off the prospect of playing around with too much HTML (I wanted to avoid that - I may be techy at times, but I'm lazy too).

Then when Blogger introduced Beta, I thought it was a godsend, but they didn't allow bloggers who also do group blogs (alas) to use Beta. Without wanting to relinquish my membership in that particular group blog (guys there hardly blog now), it was only recently when Beta became a full version that I started tagging posts.

So, while happily tagging away, I realised that finding the right tags to use increasingly becomes a problem:

1. First of all, you want your tags to express exactly what you mean in your post. Therefore, you come up with very descriptive tags that encapsulate in one or two words what you're trying to say. Simple tags like 'Photography' will include photos, and 'Travel' will be about your trips.

2. Then, when it comes to posts which consist of more topics, you try using two or more tags to express the idea behind the post.

3. But the problem comes when you started to realise that you're having too many tags (the problem I'm facing now). You need to be economical about your tags: after all, there are some tags that reference only ONE post, and what good is a tag if it only references ONE article? It's like, if each and every article is referenced with its own tag, the tagging system makes no sense.

4. So you start being economical about your tags... and that's another problem because you then start force-fitting your posts into your tags. That's not what blogging is about: you're supposed to write what you feel, and THEN decide what your tags should be.

Yuck. I hate tagging, but I'm doing it nonetheless. Tagging is an afterthought: you write a beautiful novel, with all thoughts and ideas expressed as per your plan, but you've conveniently left out the title of the book and now wrack your brains thinking about a suitable title, something that concisely encapsulates the main thrust of the novel, a short phrase that tells the reader all he needs to know about whether he should be reading the book or not.

So, with those thoughts in my head, I took on the onus of tagging all my old posts (to aid you loyal readers! All 10 of you!). I could only do 50 without collapsing from tag piling - I keep introducing new tags and failed to be economical about them. Sighs - there're guys who're able to be really efficient with tags, but I don't belong to that club.

Anyhow, the tags are there to help YOU. Yes, YOU the reader. I hope you find the reading experience enhanced as a result!

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PS: Will be posting pictures from my Goa trip (not many, but I think they're nice) and the said Ethics essay in due time. I just want this catch-up post to sit around for a day or two before proceeding with more catching up!

All Saints Home, Block 1, Room 2, Niche 194

... is the final resting place for my grandmother.

(until the lease runs out at the place sometime within the next 30 years and pending whatever actions the authorities might take)

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I have never had a close experience with death before. The passing of my grandmother last month brought it home to me, but even then, I was a few thousand miles away when it happened.

There was already a foreboding that it would happen sometime soon - before I left for France at the end of August, I made sure I saw her again at my uncle's place. She was weak and not able to say much to me. I don't even know if she recognised me. And like the numerous occasions on which I had visited her, I said my greetings and my few words of tepid encouragement, then proceeded to chat with my uncle and aunt from whom I could understand her condition better. After a while, grandma got tired, and the maid wheeled her back to her room to get some sleep.

Sleep. She was always sleeping.

That was the last time I saw her alive. That was the last time I saw her in any physical form (I see her in my sleep sometimes - a younger, more sprightly person - the grandmother who brought me shopping for toys as a little boy). That was the last time I said goodbye, and I did not even say it to her because she had gone to her room to rest.

Then I went to France and about 3 weeks into the French immersion at Fontainebleau, dad hit me with the news that my grandmother's condition has gone bad. She was hospitalised, gone into the ICU, and doctors gave the prognosis that she has less than a month to live.

I remember being stunned speechless and unable to respond, the voice wavering and about to break. I forced back tears while talking to dad, and my housemate driving the car seemed to sense something wrong in my demeanour: I was always acting so tough in front of her. I made sure from that point on to always call my dad - every couple of days or so. He was my only link left to grandma. And he was her favourite son: he will feel the loss THE most.

A couple of weeks later, the bad news hit and she passed away. I remember vividly that night. There was a party at some chateau, one of those themed events in INSEAD, and I didn't feel up to going. I came home from a dinner with a friend, and promptly logged onto the internet, doing the usual job application and surfing around that characterised the period of September and October 2006. Then the sms came and I sighed a sigh of relief and anguish: she has died.

Last saturday and it was time to go see her, yet it felt like there is no point anymore. She has died, with a plaque and fake flowers to mark her final resting place, filed away among other remains like in a library. Little was I to know that, when you visit the dead, it is not just about the one dead person you're going to see. It is about much more and I am glad I went.

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So what of visiting the dead?

I learnt about memories we keep as human beings, memories we retain of people we have lost. A lot of emotions get invested in our friends and family when we live, and when one passes, the loss is felt so tangibly by the people around one.

Many people try to retain that memory, and I saw it so much at All Saints Home (in Punggol). Even while this is a place housing urns of ashes, people still managed to build up shrines in memory of their loved ones. Fake flowers adorn every niche; some leave post-it notes behind, cut in the shape of hearts; soft toys for those who died young; little adornments with much love behind them; pictures; tributes - some left behind obituaries pasted up beside the niches. Physical manifestations of their love for the departed, hope perhaps that the dead might see, that the dead might hear their prayers.

There were other things that were visible among the dead: birth dates... and death dates. What is it about the human compulsion to note the two dates, however meaningless to the rest of the world, that bookend our existences?

But I saw patterns... me? I always see the sad ones.

A girl who lived a mere 9 years. The picture showed a young lively person in her school uniform.

A boy, aged 18 when he passed away. The items decorating the niche indicated a girlfriend in his life, and parents who miss him a lot. Him in his army No. 1 uniform. I can't help but think it is an accident while he was serving NS.

A family of 4 occupying an entire bottom row of a column. All died on the same day. Perhaps a suicide pact? Car accident while on holiday? Did the father face financial troubles and decided to end it all? Did it make the news? (a cousin who was with me couldn't help muttering something about it being in the news...)

An old woman, her niche unadorned with fake flowers (the caretakers do not clear away items from the niches and thus discourage real flowers). The plaque is yellow with age and lists simply her birth, death, and the typical "Gone home to be with her Lord". No one has visited it.

Physical retentions... and the pain is very real. But when I depart, what do I want to leave behind?

Ask me again in the morning

So I said.

The question? "What did you say you regretted?"

I shouldn't be telling you perhaps, so my answer in the morning is going to be something else. It doesn't make sense for you to know, and it doesn't help me any to say it. And since you aren't reading this shite anyhow, it doesn't make any difference to say so now.

I regretted laying myself bare to you, like an apple without its skin, protectionless against the biting invasiveness of oxidization (I'm lyrical about primary school biological tidbits, can't help it).

I regretted the long talks, the sit-downs and the conversations. What good any of it did for me I do not know. What good is anything at all which we shared? Like dust in the wind - uttered and forgotten. I don't forget - retention is my biggest problem - and that means you'll be a part of my life forever (I know I'll never take up the same brain space though).

I regretted hearing what I had to hear from you, not that it was painful to the ears, but that it made me see the multifaceted you. I'd much rather prefer my singular version of you, that simple notion of you. The you I'd rather keep in my mind takes little space: I'd probably describe you in 3 sentences. Now, I've a plethora of descriptions and plenty of images, and the multifacted you sits taking up precious space. I hate it because I know what I know of you is very close to the real you. I regret it because it complicates everything and I hate complications such as this because I won't forget.

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Some of what I never forgot:

1. A heartbreak in 2003. Pivotal moment perhaps, and it meant that life changed. Some people will tell you there are certain points in life where you come to a fork in the road and went down one path or the other, thinking that things might have been different down the other way. This was one of those moments where I realised that the 5 years prior to that had been something akin to a series of choices down the wrong side of the fork. This was one of those moments where I would have continued down the wrong side if not for that nail-in-the-coffin heartbreak. A call to say: no more forks, you've reached the dead end.

And what happens at the dead end? Bang your head on the wall and let the physical pain obliterate the senseless wrenching of your heart. Gawd that hurt...

2. A conversation in 2005. Whys. Why nots. Politics. Goals. Religion. Life. Past. Present. Future. Kids. Marriage. Girlfriend. Career. Studies. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Food. Boss. Friend? The importance of being earnest. Network, network, network. In one ear. Out another. Black box. Feelings. Prayer. Farewell.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Never a question I asked right. Never an answer I got in return.

3. Crying in 2000. I thought that there was a death, a passing. I thought I don't have a chance to say goodbye, not that I've ever said anything meaningful before to you. I thought that you will never get sick the way you did - I never thought that, instead of dying, that you will die slowly instead, each day at a time. I thought that all you wanted to was to live more, but you wasted instead, little by little, letting life slip away.

I know that the worst thing was losing your dignity, your once proud bearing and unflagging criticism of your children. I know this well for I live with one of them, he who bears your legacy so proudly that if and when you do leave, you leave us with a part of yourself more than ever. Unsuspectingly, he will be like you, and you will be here.

4. A kiss in 2004. Tentative. Reserved and almost shy. Yet, somehow, there was a hint of a dare. A challenge - kiss me, you know you want to. Approached slowly, like it was the hardest thing to do in the world. When it changes everything in a relationship, you want to be safe rather than sorry. Perhaps what marked the event was the place. Perhaps what marked the place was the time. And unlike life and its set of choices, there was nothing loaded about this one.

So I plunged right in.

A Command Prompt and an Active Imagination

Like most boys, I grew up playing computer games. Never got too obsessed with them though, but the immersiveness of it all did creep into my life sometimes. There were so many times I've gotten myself so deep into a game that neither sleep nor food matters. And games these days follow a somewhat staid formula: you do a whole bunch of shit, mostly repetitively, and with some variation in storyline; at the end of all that shit which you had to do (some shit are more interesting than others), you get a 3D video clip as a reward to nicely tie up the story. After that, credits roll (doesn't it make you wonder why games have to be end like movies?)

Well, back when I was a kid, games were much simpler - technology hadn't introduced us to 3D animation as of yet, and games relied a lot more on your active sense of imagination. Like now, games were immersive - you can seriously get yourself lost in one. But they had less whiz-bang graphics and tinny sound effects (I remember the first time I heard sound coming out of a soundblaster and thought that it was the coolest thing on Earth to hear bloodcurling screams of a banshee getting hacked to death in a D&D game).

The really stripped down game was the text adventure, a very early form of the RPG on a PC. In the text games, the player is typically an avatar, and things are seen through the eyes of the avatar. However, the scene around you is described in text form - it is very much like reading a book of fiction. The difference though is that the avatar tends to go over the same ground while walking around, and repetition does set in when you keep reading descriptions of the same scene.

The interface is really simple - all you're presented with is a command prompt:

>

That's it! How simpler can a game be? The learning curve isn't that steep: all you have to do is type in commands such as "Go north", "Examine door", and "Talk to Edmund". What's more, the commands can usually be shortened, so gameplay is a whole lot easier. And like any RPG, its easy to get stuck: it's really bad to get stuck in a text-based game not knowing what to do, as there's no visual cue, and hardly any option other than to refer to a walkthrough.

It may not sound like much to people these days, but some notable text-based games that I remember playing were The Hobbit (of Lord of the Rings fame) and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I got stuck walking around a spaceship with Marvin the paranoid android).

Oh, on a side note, the text based adventure later took on a more interactive element as MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) in the Internet, but are now long forgotten due to the likes of whiz-bang online games like WoW. Most MUDs played like a D&D game, but with a computer describing the scene for you rather than a dungeon master. Dice rolls were truly randomly generated by the system as well.

Over time though, this kind of games lost its allure. It's not hard to see why: the demand was for more graphic intensive adventures, with sound effects to add to the realism of it. Technology kept up and the result is the plethora of games we get nowadays deluged with moving images and mindblowing sound effects. Hardly anything is left to the imagination anymore: the world of computer games took the same route that movies did, by moving beyond imagination and text to visualising directly for the consumer.

Thus, it was interesting for me then to discover that the text-based game isn't dead though. There is a small pool of enthusiasts keeping it alive via a competition. The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is an annual competition to see who can create the best text-based adventure, with judging entirely done by the public. The best games read like a well-written book, with descriptions that are vivid and characters with distinct personalities (most game characters these days are cardboard cutouts - after all, you can't really delve into their minds like you do in interactive fiction).

Much as these games bring back a sense of nostalgia in me, they aren't likely to ever become mainstream again - the dynamics of the gaming industry have shifted to the ever more visually appealing. Sadly, this means that the text-based game (or interactive fiction) is relegated to the cottage industry that it is, supported only by enthusiasts and individuals with a love for words. Still, I like to think that such games have so much more 'soul' than the whiz-bang stuff I see nowadays. Oh, that and the fact that I can actually play them at work without attracting too much attention - long live the text-based adventure!

A dredged up remembering of mid-1997

A funny thing, the brain. Other than being a CPU capable of processing information, it is also a hard disk, capable of remembering things.

But like a fragmented hard disk, filled with hidden data, some 'rememberings' are lost in the ether of brain cells, awaiting the right moment to be unearthed.

I was in Jurong East Interchange waiting for my bus when this couple walked by wearing matching T-shirts. In Chinese, this is referred to as the 'qing2 lu3 zhuang1', or couple-wear. I was reminded of this time in 1997, when Hong Kong was handed back to China - it was sometime in the middle of the year.

It isn't the handover which I recall though - it was that my father made the family wear matching T-shirts, the T-shirts emblazoned with a design commemorating the Hong Kong handover. Oh, and this memory by itself isn't what got thrown up in my consciousness. The memory that I refused to dredge up, but came rising up all of its own, is this one: I saw the T-shirt I was supposed to wear, some night before we were supposed to wear it. On that Sunday (it was church going day), I stubbornly refused to wear the T-shirt.

I think my father was hurt, or at least somewhat offended that I refused to participate in a family thing. I was old enough to know that I certainly did not look cool in that T-shirt, but not being a part of it was an affront of sorts to my father. It was a culmination of teenage angst and rebellion (of course, by then, I was no teenager already). It was one in a series of incidents which just show how little control parents have over their children as they grow up. It was the kind of pain that, bit by bit, brings about the realisation that your children aren't children anymore - even if you want to continue treating them like they are.

I'm sorry dad. I have not forgotten, and I don't think you did either, though you never speak of your hurts. Perhaps some day, I will come to truly appreciate what being a father means.