A Hiatus - Where is my Muse?

Hello all, its been awhile since I last wrote anything here. You probably have stopped bothering to check in on my blog. I shan't bother to ask you to check it out either. This post will be made up entirely of ramblings.

Why haven't I been writing anything here?? I attribute it wholly to the lack of a muse. Yes, they do exist. In whatever form they take, they only creep up on you in quirky ways. And because my life have been oh-so-bland, at this point a horizontal linear graph comes to mind, I haven't been horribly depressed nor terribly happy, I have just been doing alright. As such, I get no inspiration whatsoever to write about anything.

How do you write about a blank, empty space of nothingness? White noise. Vacuum. Void. Oblivion. Abyss.

As a matter of fact, I am so completely bored on this lazy Saturday afternoon that I have taken to blog about nothing - which is what this post is about. At this point, I should be hitting the "backspace" key and erasing everything that I have written thus far. It is possible to write about a blank, empty space of nothingness!

I have done it. My muse is back. Told you it behaves in unfathomable ways.

Cambodia - Siem Reap and Angkor

My trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia, to see the lost temples of Angkor was a multitude of experiences and emotions that I didn't expect. I felt peace and tranquility while traveling along the countryside at the simplicity of rural life. I was awed and amazed at the magnificent temples of Angkor. I was exhausted by the heat, dust and sand, and the large complexes which we explored. I experienced vertigo. I experienced fear. I was disturbed and saddened by the paradoxical realities of poverty and war. And lastly, I'm silently cheering on the resilience of the people.

The temples are truly of such great scale and grandeur that it is quite unfathomable how they were built block by block with bare hands, without any technology whatsoever. Scaling the central temple of Angkor Wat was an arduous undertaking. I trembled and was weak to the knees with vertigo. Those steps were built to signify that ascending to heaven is no easy feat. Point made. The carvings on the walls are equally impressive - they are intricate, vivid and extensive. The quiet contemplation of sunrise at Angkor Wat was also truly memorable. However, as I stood in awe in front of these man-made works of wonder, I was struck by a larger, formidable force - that of nature. These temples were swallowed by the jungle and lost to civilization for hundreds of years. Some of the trees at Ta Prohm whose huge buttress roots have thrust their way through crevices, and enveloped the roofs of the buildings, have been preserved. These commanding acts of nature provide compelling evidence that however impressive the foundations that Man can lay, we will all have to succumb to the whims and fancies of Mother Nature in the end.

I had not thought Cambodia as a country still very much recovering from the bruises of war and the violent rule of the Khmer Rouge. Granted, it is less progressive than its more successful neighbours, however, just driving through the town of Siem Reap will have you realize that that period of unrest isn't so far back in history. You will chance upon a sign warning of landmines - and mind you, it isn't a deserted piece of land, but an open field just next to a main road, and not far from an established hotel is a sign which seeks to provide assurance by informing you that that minefield has been cleared, and yet another signboard paints two extremely different scenes - one of war and another of peace, with the words "We do not need weapons anymore". Whatever the purposes of these signs, they unsettle the mind. There are many people out on the streets, children, women and the victims of landmines. Some of these victims are no older than 20, and all they did was to play or work in the fields near their homes - don't we all seek security in our homes?

In this town of finding a balance between flourishing tourism and living with poverty, a number of poignant paradoxes emerge. There is a children’s hospital with mothers and their children crowding the entrance at all times of the day, and just beside it resides a luxurious resort and spa that is twice its size, with huge banners advertising its breakfast buffet screaming out “Have you had breakfast yet?” Any meal would suffice, thank you. The majesty of Angkor Wat tells of a once prosperous empire in a golden age of abundance, the very descendants of that empire now lives in the forested area just outside the gates of Angkor Wat. There, the homeless pitch their tents and set up their homes. There are no street-lamps in the town, and it gets dark and dangerous to drive and walk at night. But fear not, some roads have the fortune of being lined with lavish hotels, and are lit with the light from those many useless decorative lamps that are found every few centimeters apart.

As much as the scenes of poverty and war were perturbing, the unfaltering spirit of the Cambodians shone through even brighter. The town of Siem Reap is the one place everyone going to Cambodia will hit during their visit, as it is the gateway to the temples of Angkor. For this, I’m glad for the people of Siem Reap, as the tens thousands of tourists mean boundless opportunities for them to get a slice of the tourist dollar. The hotels and restaurants might be owned by the rich, but they provide jobs for the locals. The tenacity with which the Khmers work hard to earn their living in spite of their handicap and the hardships warms the heart and puts many of their fully capable fellow human beings to shame. They sell postcards and tourist gimmicks, offer to show you the wonders of Angkor in English, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, French, ferry you around safely on the rockiest roads in their tuks tuks, and serve you with such excellent service at the restaurants and hotels. Although many might argue that the children should be in school instead of trying to earn money, living with poverty is not something an outsider can fully comprehend. The Khmers are also remarkably warm and friendly. They are always smiling and eager to hone their language skills by speaking to you, and the children will always be waving at you enthusiastically from their homes.

The thoughts and emotions that resulted from the 5 days in Cambodia will stay with me for a long time yet. The Cambodians have showed and taught me much – from the building of Angkor to the building of their lives after war.

 

 

 

Blogging Maniacs and War (absolutely not correlated whatsoever)

In this day and age of obsessive bloggers and podcasters (is there such a word?? you know that this is a strange new world when the dictionary becomes inadequate in shedding light to words rampant in today's society), many psychologists, sociologists, and governments (where blogs become avenues for political outbursts) are concerned with this mania of expressing one's individuality through online posts and videos, and are likewise maniacally seeking to make sense of this phenomenon. Milan Kundera offers an interesting insight in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

He writes (although he is speaking of writing books as opposed to blogging, I believe they are intricately related to one another):

"We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

1) an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel.)"

Alas, the truth is, bloggers are not highly expressive individuals, but desolate individuals who sit comfortably in their air-conditioned rooms in cushioned chairs in front of their swanky Macs, totally removed from the rest of civilisation and ignored by even the closest of kin and their own pets, fortunate enough, however, to enjoy peace, whose lives are so bland that they have to scream out to a world of strangers through blogging, hoping against hope that someone out there hears them (notice that no one actually LISTENS to them, they only HEAR them). I am very well aware that I belong to that community of sad individuals and will hence, seek help immediately after I finish with this post.

War, however, is absolutely nonsensical, and too extreme a solution for preventing blogging lunatics from inflicting pain and trauma to unsuspecting strangers with their equally nonsensical ramblings. Its all about owning land-Milan Kundera also offers this of war:

"During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. ...
From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into their artificial, unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet.

And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise."

Yes, we are focusing on all the wrong things. The earth is slowly dying with the extinction of its plants and animals, the weather becomes horribly hot, terribly cold, in the highest order of the universe, this is the real threat to our survival - by then it wouldn't matter who owns which piece of land.

Likewise, when we focus so much on the pressures at work that we turn grouchy and lash out at our close-ones, we have a misconception on what's important (as you can tell, this is a totally random thought. Ahem, this entire post is made up of random thoughts). If you are still reading this utterly senseless post instead of brushing your teeth or giving your dog a pat, you are clearly focusing on the wrong thing.

Miao's Bookcase

Ever since I started working, I have been buying books - all fiction (nope, not finance textbooks nor self-help on making money on investments).

I love reading, I haven't stopped since that first book which sparked a lifetime of interest. It was back in Primary 2, while I was with my mum at Popular bookstore to get textbooks and assessment books for school, an Enid Blyton book caught my attention. The glossy hardcover and the fact that I never read such a thick book before drew and enticed that little girl. The book was entitled "The Little Brown Bear". Sure, I must have read books before that, but that was my first real book as far as my memory is concerned. It was a book of numerous short stories, and while I was very excited and eager about unravelling the magic that lies within those pages, I didn't want to finish the book too quickly. Very much alike a child who, although would love more than anything to finish all the candies at one go, would rather painfully limit himself to one a day so that the packet of candy would last as long as possible. After that, it has been 16 years of reading and counting.

The Secret Seven, the Famous Five, and the adventures at Malory Towers and St Clare coloured my childhood, Roald Dahl became my favourite author of all time when he enthralled me with a Big Friendly Giant, Chocolate Factories, a girl with the ability to move things with her will-power and have read all the books in the world, and a boy who busted a whole syndicate of witches. I was also embroiled in high-school drama as the Sweet Valley High series filled my head with fantasies of tall, dark and handsome boys.

I devoured whole one book after another with such zeal and jest that my parents wished it was school textbooks. It turned ugly when all I wanted was to read my novels, totally ignoring the fact that I had homework undone or exams around the corner. My reading caused my parents grief and they had to stop me from reading during exam periods - yes, while other kids were being stopped from watching tv and playing computer games. But that didn't stop me. I stayed up till the wee hours of the night when everyone is asleep and would read in the dark - relying only on the moonlight and light from the street lamps that flooded through the window. Those were the days of voracious reading.

As I grew older, school-work and other aspects of life occupied me and I read with less tenacity. I always borrowed the books from the library, as a poor student, books would take up a significant portion of my allowance, and it seemed hardly worthwhile to buy a book that I would most likely read only once.

However, I've been buying books of late. I have a lot more time to read now that I no longer have tons and tons of readings to do for school, but I always end up chalking up fines for overdue books at the library, coupled with the fee for reserving those high-in-demand books. Moreover, the library doesn't stock some of the books that I want to read. With a little more money to spend now, I began buying books.

I still feel its a bit of a waste, hence, please borrow any of them from me if they interest you! Here are some titles that I bought recently, some of which I haven't read yet. I will try to post reviews to help you with your selection, or you can google them. Please also recommend me any good books that you know of, so that I can expand my bookcase with quality reads!

1. Ursula, Under, by Ingrid Hill
2. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
6. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
7. Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier
8. A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth
9. The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad
10. Beneath a Marble Sky, by John Shors
11. The book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera

One Year On...

Come the 4th of July, it would be exactly one year ago where a fresh-faced young ditzy gal (me!) entered the workforce. I always found it extremely ironic that the 4th of July is the Independence Day for the Americans who found their freedom, while half-way around the world, a few decades on, I lost mine.

So how do you feel Miao? Is your work exciting and interesting? Do you love your job? Is it challenging and dynamic? Are you only a breath away from changing the world?

I shall attempt to illustrate my response to such mind-boggling questions:

You are in a vast ocean - only this ocean is not made up of crystal cool waters, but mud, volumes of it. I stand corrected, its not an ocean, its a swamp. You are sunk chest-high in it, i.e 3/4 of your life is spent in it. For some reason, you have to keep moving forward, you see neither shore to turn back on, nor land in the horizon, your body does not have the mechanism to stand still, you just have to keep trudging on. No matter how tired you may be.

As you can imagine, moving through mud, chest-high, isn't the easiest thing. The mud is thick and impenetrable, it is equivalent to pushing against a wall. But you gotta do it, you have to summon all your energy for every inch that you move.

The journey is long and arduous. You do not see your goal and it absolutely does not make sense that you should have to keep moving through impervious mud. Finally, you figured a way to make the plod a little less difficult - if you would to move at a certain angle, you would be able to permeate through the mud a little easier. But before you sigh that breath of relief, the conditions alter. In good times, you are only back to where you started, in bad times, the move is made more impossible. Just when you thought that things cannot possibly be worse, life surprises you.
Some days it rains, and it feels cool against your face, the trudge is a little more pleasant. Some days the sun shines, but it makes the mud hard, and you are walking through rocks. Some days you get a nice cheery companion, you chat and laugh, you forget about the pain for awhile. Some days you find that bit of a challenge in trying to maneuver through the mud, and it is interesting for awhile.

In dark times, its torturous enough that you are attempting such a hazardous task, and your mind and body can take no more, evil persons come along and make the battle a little more painful.

Oh but, there is that reward that you get after a period of time. A bottle of refreshing sweet-tasting water! Oh wait, its not all yours of cos, there are other claimants to it. But you get some of it, and it makes you feel real good because it quenches your thirst. But wait again, you will perhaps not be so thirsty if you are not in this impervious mud in the first place? And its never enough.

Would another ocean be easier to manipulate? Perhaps. But they are most likely to be largely similar. Horror of all horrors, it might be worse. Do I love plodding through mud? What do you think I am, crazy? I haven't quite been driven insane, yet. Do I have to continue even through every cell of my body protests against it? Absolutely.

Lyrics to I Wish I was a Punk Rocker with Flowers in my Hair

Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair,
In 77 and 69 revolution was in the air,
I was born too late to a world that doesn't care,
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair.

When the head of state didn't play guitar,
Not everybody drove a car,
When music really mattered and when radio was king,
When accountants didn't have control,
And the media couldn't buy your soul,
And computers were still scary and we didn't know everything.

Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair,
In 77 and 69 revolution was in the air,
I was born too late to a world that doesn't care,
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair.

When popstars still remained a myth,
And ignorance could still be bliss,
And when God Save the Queen she turned a whiter shade of pale,
When my mom and dad were in their teens,
And anarchy was still a dream,
And the only way to stay in touch was a letter in the mail.

Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair,
In 77 and 69 revolution was in the air,
I was born too late to a world that doesn't care,
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair.

When record shops were on top,and vinyl was all that they stocked,
and the super info-highway was still drifting out in space,
kids were wearing hand-me-downs,
And playing games meant kick arounds,
And footballers who had long hair and dirt across their face.

Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair,
In 77 and 69 revolution was in the air,
I was born too late to a world that doesn't care,
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair.
I was born too late to a world that doesn't care,
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair.

Memories are all that are left

Rekindled memories. My sis is in Vienna right now, she is there for a holiday while on exchange in Switzerland. As I write this, she is probably weaving through the cobbled-stone streets of Stephansplatz, taking in the sights and the sounds, discovering the city as I once did not too long ago.

A couple of days ago, I put my memory to test as I wrote her a list of Must-dos/Must-sees in Vienna. In it, I drew maps, labeled the coffee houses and shops, wrote down the addresses to restaurants, recommended the good eats, educated her on the etiquette of tipping and ordering and directed her along the transport routes. I fared well, and memories of the place where I spent the best time of my life were hauled up from the depths of the memory bank, dusted, polished and revived.

I asked a friend who spent those 6 months with me in Vienna what he would like my sis to bring back for him. And he said this, "Nothing, there is nothing I miss there but the memories". Wise words simply spoken. It's true, for I miss the place very much but regardless of how much I tried to put a finger on what would satisfy this longing for a time long past, nothing that can be bought formulates.

I managed, however, to come up with a list of things that could never be retrieved or materialized.

1. Those freezing moments as we braved the winds and stood out in the cold eating gelatos.
2. Those lunches where we ate out of a wheelbarrow at Centimeter.
3. Those dinner times where we conjured up recipes put together with whatever ingredients the fridge had to offer and came together to share our culinary experiments.
4. Those late nights spent chatting/watching movies/sipping wine.
5. Those times before dawn where we were still awake feasting on cereal and milk.
6. Those idle Sunday afternoons of sitting in Aida savoring cakes, sipping coffees and watching Viennese old men and women with their dogs savoring cakes and sipping coffees.
7. Those days of walking down Mariahilferstrasse and around Stephansplatz.
8. Those domestic moments of grocery shopping and sussing out the bargains.
9. Those times of drinking Melange at Tchibo.
10. Those weekends of discovering Vienna.

and the list goes on...