for those of us who spend a lot of time online, whether by choice or by necessity, there’s a dual existence that’s created.
think about it for a moment, is the ‘you’ in your emails, in your web postings, really you?
Or is it another you?
I’ve encountered people who wrote long voluminous postings on the net, who go into IRC and type much faster than me (and trust me i type pretty fast) and they’re like the equivalent of a verbal machine gun, firing off opinions and repartees faster than you can say ‘i told you so’.
And yet, at our real world meet ups, you go there and ask, hey, where’s that girl with the machine gun mouth. and someone points to a meek little girl in the corner. standing all alone. staring at her hands or her mobile phone.
you go up to her, chatting up a conversation.
‘hi, nice to finally meet you in person’
‘hi’
‘hey, what’ve you been up to?’
‘nothing’
‘you were writing about wakeboarding and swallowing lots of sea water. ha ha ha. are you still doing it? it sounds quite intense’
‘nope’
‘oh. ok. how was your day?’
‘okay’
almost every question is met with a monosyllabic answer.
gee. and i’m left wondering if this is the person whose online personality fills up every virtual rooms she ‘walks’ into.
hmm…
sociologists say that introverted individuals find the internet liberating. in there they’re the life of the party. they’re the ‘party girl’ or ‘party boy’ of every group chat. they’re the ones that dominate every online discussion, they must have the last word.
but offline, it’s a whole different story.
perhaps it’s something to do with the impersonality of the internet. where you can be anyone you want to be, to adopt an online persona, take up the moniker, Mistress Kat, or Love Goddess and play up that role. while in real life, they might be Mary the Librarian, or Tom the Gardener.
Online can be liberating, but for some who spend almost every waking hour outside of work being ‘online, all the time’. the intangible internet can be yet another illusory world, providing a respite from the rigours of daily life.
Seems like I’m putting up a whole bunch of school-related posts
My colleague, Angie, related an incident while she was knocking on doors to solicit properties to sell in one of the HDB (housing development board) estates.
As she was walking around with her partner, an elderly lady shooed her granddaughter away from the door.
“Hey, if you don’t study, see?” pointing at my colleague, “You will end up having to knock on doors and go begging to people!” she said as she started to close the door.
Angie’s colleague nudged her and said “hey, why don’t you let the lady know you have a college degree?”
Angie looked at her and said ‘never mind, forget it’
It’s strange isn’t it? society’s expectations. Is it an Asian thing? or a societal thing?
Does a high education mean you will necessarily take a white collar position, that you’ll join a corporation and become a suit? Is it ideal for every young boy and girl to aspire to become a doctor, surgeon, dentist, lawyer or banker?
Then who’ll clean our toilets, build our houses, cook the food?
Society is a mix of all type of people. And social status is not merely reflected by one’s paycheck. If that were so, it’d merely mean that one’s self-esteem and self-worth is inextricably tied to one’s income earning ability.
That’s it, our value to society reflected in a string of numbers, preceded by a $ sign.
Unfortunately, many have bought into this idea, setting up a list of ‘things’ they must own and buy.
Recently, in preparation for my daughter’s arrival, i did a round of house cleaning. i sold and gave away a lot of items i accumilated over the years. That set of Nikon SLR camera equipment which i’d spent about $2,000 i gave away to my church. A whole bunch of books which I’d painstakingly starved during break time at school to save enough to buy those books, i’d also given away. For the items I sold, I barely recouped 10% of what I’d originally paid for them. In short, everything went for close to nothing.
But at the end of the day, I believe a better metric to determine one’s value and contribution during the time on this earth is measured by the relationships one has whether with family or friends.
On the deathbed, it’s rare that anyone says, i wish i bought a bigger car, or i wish i spent more hours in the office. Rather the refrain you often hear is ‘I should’ve spent more time with my family’ ‘I wish I was there when my son was growing up’
It may be too late for those who have passed, but for those who are here now, there is still time.
It’s a strange thing. You meet lots of people who say they want to be a millionaire.
“What will you do with a million”, I ask.
“First I’ll buy a car, then the entire collection of movies I’ve always want, then take a year-long vacation to Europe, I’ll eat in the finest restaurants,” they said.
“And then?”
“Then I’ll… I’ll….Hmm” and they look confused.
“Ok, I’ll put the rest in the bank”
“Sounds like you need about $100,000. Why not work towards it then?”
“Well, I would like to. But it’s too much work”.
From what I see there’s two issues.
First, if you don’t know why you’re doing something, then you’re not likely to achieve it.
If my friend only needed $100,000, why’d he wish for $1 million?
On that note, why not wish for $10 million or $100 million.
Second, if you’re not committed to achieving something, and you’re not motivated to achieve it, guess what? If a goal/dream/hope true, it’s only because of:
Luck, in this case, refers to scenarios like winning the lottery, having a distant relative leave you something from their estate, have something truly miraculous happen that makes your wish come true. You’re looking at odds of one in a million, or one in a billion. Not impossible, but highly, highly unlikely.
On the other hand, direct effort leads directly to the goal. However, between what you’re doing and what you plan to achieve, there’s a monster of a time navigating through obstacles, setbacks and disappointment.
Chances are you’ll be push against the wall, and more than once you’ll want to give up. You’ll also question your sanity in wanting to achieve the goal, you’ll also be asking yourself whether it’s worth the sacrifice in your family time, time you could’ve be watching a rerun, gaming on the net, sleeping or simply doing nothing.
the one reason why some people succeed and others don’t is because the ones who succeed sometimes do because they have no choice. They’re dead broke, out of a job, and making that next sale is the key to putting food on the table. That’s the situation, the “World’s Greatest Salesman’ Joe Girard found himself in many years ago. And in relating the story, this strive towards personal excellence has remained with him.
Another way is to make a commitment to someone whom you can trust to be ruthlessly committed to helping you achieve your goals. Give them all your cash and ask them to hold it for you. If you fail to achieve the tasks for the week, they can then donate the entire amount to charity. Rinse and repeat. See how far you are along within 2 months. I guarantee you’ll see a difference.
If you’re left with no choice but to go up, there’s only one direction you can move in.
ok, the unthinkable has happened.
in singapore there is a phenomenon where parents do crazy things to get their kids to school, even to the extent of submitting their resumes to the school in hopes of getting picked…to volunteer of all things, to do free stuff to benefit the school.
so you have high power criminal lawyers going down to primary schools to give talks about the law.
I mean, isn’t this an abuse of the schools authority?
here’s the sad part.
i’ve become one of those parents who is willing to do crazy things to get his kid into a good school.
Since my daughter, bianca, was born, i’ve been thinking through various options to get her into a good school.
should i go with my goal to become a high power internet entrepreneur, hopefully dazzle the school’s administration and get her in on celebrity?
should i enroll her in classes, get her on the math olympiad team, beat everyone else in the asia-pacific and get her in that way? or should i, should i….. darn, there are so many options, so little time.
just as i was about to do something silly, my wife tells me she’s called her alma mater and our daughter qualifies for priority entry into Henry Park Primary School (one of the premier grade schools in Singapore).
Now to figure out how to get those letters out of the mailbox before the mailman comes for the pickup..
the past few days have been a trying time.i’ve switched webhosts, moved about 8 domains over to my new host.
getting the blog up was quite a nightmare.
couldn’t figure out what to do about the SQL databases.
luckily, i got some help from this page.
I’m planning to update this blog regularly, so stay tuned faithful readers!
The Straits Times, Singapore largest English language daily has a ST Ink forum, popular referred to as the Stinky forum.
Just the other day a user, katchykid put up an interesting post
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Relook at the rules
Before sex education even begins, the government should perhaps relook at their laws.
In Singapore, the official age to have sex is 16 years old.
The official age to see RA movies is 21 years old.
So someone can actually have sex at 16 years old but cant watch RA movies at 21 years old. Okie now this is the catch, suppose if 2 teens do a tammy, they cant watch themselves after(provided their handphone dont get stolen).
—
Tammy is the infamous Nanyang Polytechnic student who decided to capture a moment (10 minutes worth) of physical intimacy between herself and her male friend (relationship unknown).
While there will continue to be stalwarts in the island republic who will vehemently protest everything they see on TV, radio, movies, the Internet, it’ll be more challenging for the authorities to mediate between controlling ‘undesirable’ content, while attempting to cultivate an arts and media industry (which traditionally thrives on stretching and sometimes breaking boundaries).
Granted, we could go the way of Iranian filmmakers and produce movies with innuendo and analogies, however, I feel the lack the severely repressed environment to create such expression. and let’s face it, most Singaporeans (myself included) are:
- too lazy (because everything else has been spoonfed to us)
- too tired (because we’ve pulled an extra long overtime shift at work, coming home at midnight, instead of 9pm)
- or too indifferent (bochap) because we feel that things will not change regardless of whether any action is taken.
I’ve always believed in one tenet, that is, if nothing is done, nothing will happen. if something is done, something will happen.
The question is whether we have to wait for the teenage posters of the stink forum to grow up and change the world around them, or if we will do it now.
