Sleep As Denial

Things would be easy if I was purely intellect, like a brain in the air. Thanks to training that I’ve been doing in the past year and even longer ago, it would still be easy if I was intellect with just physical limitations, like a brain in a body. Then, maybe, I wouldn’t feel like sleeping just to spare myself the wait for the next item on the schedule.

Music Improves.

This doesn’t exactly match up to Music Heals The Soul, but I guess this is my way of saying that these are the sounds that I’ve been going on in the weeks gone past.

I think Somebody To Love is such an evocative opener, or rather it has an evocative opening. Still, I suspect I think that way mainly because I watched Little DJ – Chiisa Na Monogatari. Moving down the list, there’s lots and lots of acoustic-ish guitar strumming and arpeggios. I guess that’s because there’s lots of Wilco. Most days in these past few weeks, I haven’t really been in the mood for Rock. Not everything’s mellow and comfortably abstract, though. Have I ever mentioned that I think If She Wants Me is one of the most infectiously happy songs ever? Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood is similarly animating. (The song was also mentioned in American Gods by Neil Gaiman, but he was probably referring to the version by The Animals.) I hope you get my drift. These songs have made many days and many hours better.

I am falling into quite a negative pattern of rush posts just before I leave the house to catch the boat. In a way, I guess I had much more I felt I had to write this weekend, but I never found the time, so this is… a compromise.

Still happy.

Shop-house on New Bridge Road, c. 2010

Sergeant Derek, in military dress, has just stepped off the train. He is deciding whether to head northeast or to take the walk home. The iPod goes into the small, useful-looking brown canvas pouch slung at his hip. He slings his black duffel on his other shoulder and sets off in another direction altogether.

He surfaces at one of those other exits, this one near the beginning of Chinatown. He knows there is a bus stop somewhere ahead and veers in that direction, but after a few steps he decides he is quite hungry.

By now, he is a little further down the road, and he sees possibility in the sprawl of tables overflowing onto the already narrow-ish sidewalk. Some of the tables are occupied. Only one of the four shop-houses is open.

With three days of having eaten oily canteen food in mind, he ignores the incongruously offered nasi padang, chicken cutlet and oyster omelet, and orders pei dan chok. There are steamable-looking fish swimming around in the tanks near the entrance of the coffee shop, but Sergeant Derek isn’t feeling quite that adventurous, despite how his feet have carried him to where he is. There is a table by the wall.

As he waits for his porridge, Sergeant Derek wishes he had a camera, or, alternatively, prodigious writing talent. He is trying to put his finger on what strikes him about his surroundings, but he can’t quite manage it, so he starts with the apparent. His table is by the wall, and on the wall there are three rows of framed black-and-white newspaper clippings and photographs. They have captions like ‘South Bridge Road with Elgin Bridge in the background, 1941′ and ‘New Bridge Road, circa 1960′. The wall is browned and watermarked, but the prints are new. The frames are black plastic, like those on Sergeant Derek’s spectacles.

His food arrives. They are generous with the you tiao, and he tries one. It is a bit too soft, and he decides he won’t finish the bowl. On the other hand, the porridge tastes good. He suspects the you tiao would be better earlier in the day.

There is a Channel 8 drama on TV, one of those current ones with young, smiling actors. ‘Channel 8 drama’ used to mean something else, and Sergeant Derek has the strange feeling that the drama on TV is an intruder on the space of the coffee shop, the only thing out of character, or from the wrong era. That was strange as well, because he realizes that everything else in the shop couldn’t exactly be said to match either. The shelf of wooden pigeonholes (eight by eight) for food orders clipped with wooden pegs was next to the Super Cold beer fridge, at -6.1ºC according to the digital readout. The double row of grease-yellowed power sockets were connected to a closed-circuit television system as well as electric altar candles. He is struck by the lack of concept, and struck again by how ridiculous the notion was. What a ridiculous character, this notional Derek in smart No. 4.

He is nearly done with his porridge. They were generous with the century eggs too, and he doesn’t finish the last one. He closes his notebook.

Adventurous

I will be catching a boat soon.

Christianity Revisited (blog) started today. Today’s pilot could have gone a lot better, I suppose, and hopefully we’ll be more prepared next week. There’s also a lot to reconsider before then.

But today was a very good day, mainly due to the fact of us having a band reunion of sorts. In the company of my comrades in music-making (music-making usually accomplished at the same time as merry-making), it was, naturally, a day for adventure. I tried actually playing basketball for the first time and failed quite terribly, but still, ‘Bandies are sporty!’ I had Burmese food for dinner and it was genuinely enjoyable, and cheaper than expected. And there was, of course, the Maragnan at Max Brenner’s; listing the ingredients would be too much of a spoiler, but it was served in a bottle that we could use to contain silver nitrate in the chemistry lab if we so chose, and it was accompanied by a shot glass. Today’s risks definitely produced more hits than misses, and they were all fun to take.

Until next weekend (which will hopefully be longer).

Good Things

My previous post mentioned good things. From Psalm 103:

²Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: ³Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; ⁴Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; ⁵Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

Good things like waking up at 5 a.m. and having time for quiet after seeing to the recruits.

Up To Speed

My previous post paints quite an unhappy picture of life in the past months, but there were definitely good things. I think those genuinely good things were as vital to whatever turnaround I experienced as anything else. Because time is short (I’m booking in soon), I will fall back on the expedient of lists.

Events (Momentous or Marginal):

• Theory Grade 8 Exam (last Saturday).
• All the outfield activities for my current batch.
• Finishing the last page in my awesome black notebook!
• Finally having a clear idea of the colleges I will be applying to this year.

Good Things:

• Toffee nut lattes. (‘Tis the season.)
• Nasi Lemak at Changi Village.
• Music! Lots of Wilco, Metric, Jamiroquai…
• Shrimp and avocado sandwich on freshly baked brown bread! The bread is chewy, the shrimp is fresh, the vegetables are crisp, and there’s avocado!
• YG5, a group of great people I’ve really come to appreciate.
• Finding solitude on duty. I listened to the other COS playing the bagpipes in camp when no one else was around, explored the area on bike, and listened to Radio Lab in the night. Quite wonderful stuff, really.

I think you’ll agree, life’s been going on even if I wasn’t really paying attention.

Before I leave the house, I really should mention something that’s coming up in the next few Sundays, because it’s something I’m excited about. Christianity Revisited is something two of the small groups in my church are organizing for our friends. The blog is really useful reading if you want to know what we have in mind, but what I’m psyched about is that it’s going to be an environment where we’re going to try and assume as little as possible, and be as open to questions and discussion as we can. We have you, our friends, in mind when we were thinking about this, so we didn’t want it to be something uncomfortably ‘churchy’ or sneakily evangelical either. We are Christians, but I guess what we’re hoping for is the opportunity to share about the things we think about the world and listen to what you believe, because beliefs are kind of difficult to bring up sometimes. I hope you’ll consider.

Now, I’ll be putting into effect my change-parade- and everything-in-everything-out-honed skills. I have a boat to catch. Until next week.

To Start

In the past couple of months, I’ve mostly been either immured in work and recovering from it, or distracting myself with the gratifications of life in the city. (The ubiquity of LCD panels, the expense of being an agent of consumerism, the ease of navigating public transport and well-lit roads.) Looking back at the time gone by, I know I’ve set aside too little for quiet, because too much of it seems blurry and inconsequential. I’ve also been fiddling around with project ideas and thinking up plans and programs, but they’ve been idle ones, for the most part; I think this restless scheduling is just a symptom of the fear of spending my time inconsequentially, or of being inconsequential.

Those words didn’t come easily, and I was tempted to dismiss it as neurotic self-abasement, but I asked myself again and found that I knew it was true.

I’ve been letting things slip, basically; having to give a definition of myself under pressure, and with the apprehension of becoming other than I am, makes it easy to lose sight of whatever was authentic to begin with. I haven’t been handling stress very well at all. Too often, I’ve been opting to go along with whatever’s moving, which is all too easy to do where I work because things are always moving, and most people are busy keeping up or running hard in the opposite direction; it’s easy to just follow them, too. Everything’s been worse recently because I haven’t kept up the habit of making time (neither me-time nor slack time nor quiet time, depending on whose language I use). The fear of letting things drop and the fear of being less than up to the task makes it even easier to allow myself to be driven and to get caught up in everything. These fears were a lot less overt and a lot more subversive to my mind, of course, but now I see what was there.

So I asked God to forgive me for being willful and sluggish and fearful. I am praying for faithfulness and focus and humility. I am praying that as I contend with authority as well as the use of it, I will look to my first authority.

I think it was on Friday afternoon that I realized I really didn’t want to feel tired and driven anymore. On Friday afternoon I experienced what it was like to set the tempo again, and I realized I missed the feeling. Experiencing it in the course of work was also decidedly refreshing, after feeling kind of out of tune for a long while.

On

Earlier, I was reading through several of my friends’ blogs, feeling rather nostalgic and wishing I was also somewhere far away.

I was suddenly jarred out of my consciousness by the what may have been my own voice in my own head. It said, with conviction and a touch of sternness, ‘I need to start running.’ It certainly sounded like my voice.

I may be running slightly slower than I was in ASLC, but I still run on a regular basis in the course of my work, and in any case I didn’t think I meant it in such a bluntly literal manner on this occasion. I think it is more of the sense that I’ve let my circumstances keep me a bit too idle on some fronts of my overall development.

I do suddenly feel energized.

Confirming The Ground

It’s been five weeks since I’ve taken up my appointment. My recruits enlisted the day I started work at the company, so I was as new to being a commander as they were to being in the army. As my recruits settled into the army routine, I was busy settling in myself. I found that my routine was more flexible and that most resources were available to me. I found where to get the necessary information for my work, and to what extent I was responsible for acting on information I received.

I have also found that being a commander is very different from experiences I’ve had that I’d thought might be similar. I’ve been a maanger of a system and a manager of resources. I’ve also been a coach and a mentor. I’ve coordinated events and activities and led planning meetings. This means that I’ve had assistants, 徒弟 (not students, and not quite apprentices either), and understudies. I’ve not yet had subordinates who, from the outset, expect me to be better somehow, by virtue of my rank and the fact that they have very little leeway in deciding whether or not to do what they’re told. That they perpetually have to do what I tell them is a constant reinforcement of the deference they first gave me on credit. I should qualify: I do not believe that I am intrinsically superior, and neither do my men believe that they are lower forms of being; respect is still earned, and once the men are settled they see things quite clearly. However, I am unused to accepting the trust implicit in our relationship and situation. What is that situation? My men are prepared (or constrained) to do what I tell them, even when there is no room for clarification or questioning, the fact that I am their commander being sufficient for them to act.

There is a weight of responsibility, and also an imperative to accept that trust; it is not an option for me to refuse it, so, on my part, it becomes imperative for me to do my ‘duty’, which is ultimately what we take on ourselves, even though there are usually woefully inadequate guidelines provided to us.

On the matter of trust, I should note that it is something I give very readily (although as I grew older I increasingly recognized where it was ill-deserved as well). Conversely, I quite actively avoided situations where I would have to assume some implicit trust given. Even in other appointments I’ve held, I’ve earnestly attempted to have my subordinates do only as much as I did, and only because they saw as much of a reason for it as I did. (This approach is unsuited to many ‘leadership’ positions, however; I’ve done well or passably well in the past because I was fortunate with regards to the job scope.) My readiness to invest others with my trust is probably also proportional to my reluctance to be in their position; so much for my nature. (It is also part of my nature to be comforted by putting what is difficult to articulate into words.)

Still, where I stand, there is much cause for thanksgiving. In January I made certain choices to the end of preventing myself from spending my time in the army comfortably, and forcing myself into places or situations I knew I would choose to avoid if I had a choice;  there was a risk, but my commitment would be limited to a set period of time, and I anticipated that I would have room to grow a good deal. I am five weeks into facing many of those situations, and nine months on the course that I started on with much less forethought and clarity than my words may imply.

The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000

From Wondermark (link on side panel):

And the automated version.