Find something that you would do for free for twelve months and then do it for the rest of your life.

(Bear with me, I think I’m going on another one of my rants again. I think that everyone is entitled to rant about something. This is my thing.)

It’s very hard for someone to say – “Hey I want play the didgeridoo for a living”.

Why? Because people start thinking about their houses and their cars and their medical bills and sending their kids to college. We just can’t accept the idea of leading a dangerously happy life. Instead we usually end up halfway between passion and practicality.

For example, countless people have told me that they want to go into business and make it big simply to finance a life-long world tour.  Others have said they wanted to become teachers – not because they like to teach, but because they want to climb up to the ‘rank’ of principal – and then quit and get a job on the executive committee of a company (I’ve always thought that this was a ridiculous plan, but who knows?).

Why don’t these people just become hippies or start their own companies?  Why do people who start out wanting to be aeronautical engineers end up studying business? I guess the fear of failure and starvation is just too great. Maybe it’s too risky or the course was too hard. Maybe people just don’t feel secure with a regular paycheck. It took three generations for us to  crawl out of poverty – you’d have to be crazy to want to jump back in again.

It’s easier therefore, to think of something you would do for a couple of months. If someone told me I had a year to spend on whatever I wanted, I would probably try to put up a drama production, make a movie, try my hand at stand-up comedy. Maybe I would try to get a job as a writer somewhere, but only to as a means to spread my personal brand of subversive content. I’d go all out because it would just be a temporary thing. I would be living off my savings, but I’d be having fun. And who knows, maybe I’ll earn enough money to get by too.

So what would you do?

I’m not the best person to talk to you about music, but I’ll going to try to explain my sudden fascination with jazz piano.

It started when I found myself taking piano lessons again.(This decision was solely motivated by a page out of Rolling Stone magazine showing a young Bob Dylan hunching over a piano.)

I won’t lie to you, it took a while for me to warm up to jazz music, Bill Evans in particular. Maybe the musically inclined find it easier to appreciate histbrillance, but for the longest of time I found it hard to tell the different between this and crappy elevator music.

I had to sit down and really listen before I started to hear things I’ve never heard before in the music. The subtlety of it is simply breathtaking. My only complain is that it incredibly difficult to find any solos. The bass and the drums are wonderful instruments but sometimes you just want to hear just one master at work.

My switch from digital to analog photography has been an interesting journey. I still have a great love for digital stuff – it’s just so much easier to use and share. Nonetheless I  think that buying a second/third/fourth hand Pentax KX was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

The camera itself isn’t exactly in mint condition and my lense has a tiny, tiny scratch but it still rocks. After all, the K-series is generally accepted as a really great group of analog cameras.

Using a camera without an automatic mode or autofocus is tricky. It’s almost impossible to take a photo within 10 seconds. This is great though since a lot of people think one needs at least 30  seconds to figure out whether you really want to take the photo.

This isn’t to say I’ve had a lot of  luck with my photos. Anything that I take when the light isn’t just so tends to fail miserably. As a result I’ve wasted almost two rolls on photos taken in less than perfect conditions. Thankfully, fuzzy, poorly exposed photos still look pretty.

And the developing. Oh I love the developing so.Admittedly I have to pay to see my photos, but I think I can go through about 50+ rolls before I end up spending more than I would have on a DSLR. This is well worth the sheer thrill of actually having someone hand you that orange envelope, taking out the negatives and studying them in the light.

The  feeling is strange, like a realization that you’ve just left a print on the world.

I’m sorry that the Bill  Evans ones are stills. There are some videos up on youtube, but I think these sound a lot better.

And this is Hiromi Uehara, in case you think good jazz died way back when.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time learning to enjoy things. A while back I figured out that nothing is ever really boring – we simply lack knowledge to really appreciate things. Recently I’ve been learning to play the piano and in the process I’ve fallen into a whole new world music.  I think Bill Evans is like my new favorite pianist. ( The last one being Adrian Brody in The Pianist)

But as I was saying – the more we learn, the more beauty we see in the world. It’s like there are these easter eggs just lying around.

For example, a year ago I thought of firewalls and routers as vaguely important objects used to ‘connect the inter-webs’.  Now I know all sorts of silly things about them that I look at the internet with…awe.

The same was true for things like drama, photography, literature and music. I never really valued these things until I actually got invovled in them. It took four years of english literature for me to figure out how incredibly, soul-burningly awesome art is in all it’s forms.  On a side note, I guess thing says alot about literature ( or maybe about me). I mean, I learned analyze literature first… and then suddenly I was seeing movies and comics and plays in whole new ways.

It occurs to me that most of you have realized this a while ago. I did too, I just feel like writing in down now, for some inexplicable reason.

When IB ended I started this blog because I wanted something new to mark this new phase in my life. This is an update. Forgive me for broken english – army does that.

NS is like suddenly falling into icy water. It a different world from school – a very different world from ACS. I’m  suddenly surrounded by people who I find it very difficult to communicate with. People who unintentionally mock some of the ideals that I think I might be living on. The strange thing is , it hasn’t tamed the wildness of my spirit.

I know it’s arrogant to describe myself in this way, but I can’t find any other words to talk about what I’m feeling. I consider myself wild – not in the  decadent drunken adulterer sense of the world but because there’s something in me that wants to revolt, to rebel against the established order of the world. I want to be on the fringe of things rather than just another cog in the system.

I once thought that exposure to the ‘real world‘ would break this aspect of my character, my desire to live dangerously. After all, these ideas of mine are fanciful at best – delusional even. But to be honest with you, I don’t think I can give them up.

Even though I’ve come to understand that the life I’m choosing isn’t going to be a particularly comfortable one, I’m inescapably draw to it. I sink into a depression whenever I try to force myself to be more ‘normal’ – more socially acceptable. I hate conformity, hate sobriety. I’m much rather be animated and electric, even if it means I won’t be taken seriously in the workplace – even if it means some people may not accept me. Besides, it would be a nightmare to work in a place where people aren’t as crazy and as weird as I am.

Ultimately, I’m a English-educated Celyonese Singaporean. I’ll never be accepted by the Tamil community since I can’t speak the language and I’ll certainly never be accepted by the mainstream Chinese community no matter how hard I try.

Hey everybody!

We’re back – and new and improved!

I logged in today and was kinda weirded out by some of the old blogs I still am registered as a contributor to. There’s my own old one, which most people still link to for some reason, and also the Independent Stage blog – which by the way has really developed into something so much more that I ever imagined it could be.

Blogging is such a strange practice.

 noticed today how fast the year is passing. Still one more to go though.

 

There’s something inherently enjoyable about riding around in a tonner.