Musing over nothing in particular 3 - A fiction: #I #Hate #Hastags #and #Irony

Disclaimer: The title has little to do with the content :/

 

I finally signed up for an Instagram account, after years of resolution not to expand my plethora of social media accounts beyond Facebook and Twitter.

 

Well, around the time when Friendster was still a thing, I also swore to myself not to use Yahoo! Messenger. Of course, you bet on it, I did come to use the chat software. I said to myself, again, ‘At least, I’ll stick to Friendster and not even touch Facebook.’

 

Before I knew it, I had been proficient in Facebook and also managed a Twitter account, although I don’t even remember the last time I tweeted something. Easy come, easy go.

 

Anyway, I downloaded the Instagram app and followed only a number of photography accounts.

Photography has recently fascinated me to the point of me seriously considering grabbing some cash and buying myself a decent camera and starting on a trip somewhere strange just to take pictures of random things.

 

Again, here I contradicted my past self. The past, pretentious me always thought that photography was one of the least artistic form of arts. First, photographers don’t create things the ways, say, a painter or a sculptor brought works of arts from something blank and something virtually shapeless. 

 

The objects of photography, even if natural, existed prior to the click of the shutter. Perhaps, I thought, that’s why photographers ‘capture’ moments or ‘take’ pictures.

 

Moreover, utilizing a device as mechanically sophisticated as a camera seems to render photography more of a technical ability rather than an art. Technical ability is the last thing you would want to describe an art as. If an art were about to do things according to the rule and to precisely follow instructions, everyone would be a chef simply by following recipes.

 

While I’m at it, I have always believed that cooking, though extremely commonplace, is actually the highest form of art. It encompasses the very basic of human needs, which is nourishment by eating and drinking, and transforms it into a meticulous process with endlessly creative end results. If you’re lucky enough, you may happen to pick a episode of MasterChef and watch only that episode your entire life and even then, still find something you’d never think of putting into your mouth, like cockroaches. (Either that, or you somehow get to the right - or wrong - alley in a random Asian city.)

 

Back to the Instagram thing, Facebook, the owner of Instagram, must somehow have sent notifications to my Facebook friends who are also registered Instagram users that I was new to it. I gained a number of followers, most of whom I am friends with on Facebook.

 

Not that I mind being followed (I’d probably be a bit proud of myself too), but I just don’t want to follow them either, since doing so will spoil my initial intention of signing up to this social network (which is by its name ironic, since I don’t wish for any social interactions on a social network). On the other hand, not to follow them back may seem a bit rude here where I live. Well, I just hope my friends either don’t notice that I don’t reciprocally follow their accounts or read this that they can understand my reason.

 

I did follow back a small number of real-life friends whom I consider important in one way or another. I follow present buddies or colleagues (because some friends turned strangers at some points and remain as such). I also follow a few people in my life I’ve had an affinity with.

 

The latter category excludes the one person I have a crush on, rather counter-intuitively. To see her, though only on picture, on a daily basis no longer feels as pleasant. After spending some time together and knowing more about each other, I discovered that we may not be as compatible as I would like it, and so an inherent desire of detachment naturally arises.

 

Worse yet, it recently dawned on me that with most people, I can only establish one kind of relationship or go with the flow of its evolution. I can never be casual with my boss, and I don’t normally let my colleagues take a stance of superiority over me. If someone does a thing or two I deem despicable, no matter how amiable I have been towards him or her in the past, chances are I will look down on him or her. With my fellow tenants and old friends from school, I try to keep the conversation topics of work away, because the relationships we have developed, at least in my view, are ones free from the professional and financial responsibilities the world of work is full with.

 

Concerning my feeling towards this particular woman I have a crush on, since I got broken-hearted, naturally I tried to do away with any romantic feelings I have had for her. And when they started to peel off, there’s no turning back to the happiness I would always be immersed in when seeing her.

 

But I believe that one day these things will be far enough in the past that they no longer hurt. Although, then, they will also refrain from being a source of bliss.

Musing over nothing in particular 2: Going to the zoo - A fiction

I took care of my sister’s 11-year-old son today. A friend from church’s grandfather passed on just the day before, and her husband was out of town for work.

I liked going to her place. Because of Cleo. The pet dog they kept.


My sister was preparing lunch for Evan – the son – when I knocked at her door. The smell of grilled fish. Cleo, his tail wagging excitedly, barked his way to me. The golden retriever was large enough to lick my face all over.

“Jie, what did he die from?” I asked her.

“Diabetes. That’s why you should always keep an eye on your figure.”


She called on Evan to eat his lunch and retreated to her room. When Evan saw what was on the table, he screamed to her mother that he didn’t like fish. Reason number random for me not to like kids.

“If you don’t eat fish, you can’t learn how to swim,” she said from behind the door. I thought to myself, a typical Chinese mother, relying on superstitions like that.

“Uncle, is that true?”

“Why would your mother lie to you?” A win-win answer. I did not lie by affirming it, but he was also persuaded to eat his fish, though sulkily.

However, he complained that his mother ate fish yet couldn’t swim. I kept silent. I myself do not eat fish, yet I can swim. Life is indeed full of contradictions.

All the while, I was playing with the dog.


Before long, my sister came out in black clothing into which her ponytailed hair wavily flowed. “Thanks for coming. I know it’s sudden.” I said it was no problem.

She put the dog’s food into his bowl, and at the first sound of the grains pouring down, the dog ran after it. I felt betrayed. I thought I could understand how Patrick Star must have felt when he found out Gary the Snail had in fact been after the cookie, not him. I watched too much Spongebob.


Evan again refused to obey his mother when she told him to brush his teeth after meal. He reasoned with some weight: “Yesterday my teacher taught us komodo dragons developed their venoms because of all the foods left rotting in their mouths. I’m on my way to develop my own weapon!”

“If you’ve the komodo’s venom, you will also live like them, crawling on the ground and scales growing all over you. You want that?” Typical Chinese uncle.


My sister sat on the couch after finishing everything. It’s chit-chat o’clock now.

“Did you go back home recently?”

“No,” I said, “I would have let you know if I had.”

“When are you getting married?”

When I was still in high school, she asked when I would go to college. When I was in college, she asked when I would graduate. When I had graduated, she asked when I would secure a job. And now this. I wonder that when we’re grey-haired she would ask when I would die.

Dear sister, the question should be who would be willingly married to me.

“Jie, aren’t you sad about the passing? Because you don’t look it.”

“I am, a little. But, you see, even my friend said the family were somehow relieved. He’s been bed-ridden for months, giving everyone a hard time, and she said he would himself be more than happy to go.”

“That’s a morally debatable stance, isn’t it?”

She went out as soon as Evan finished with brushing his teeth. Cleo had been following her to the door.


“Uncle, my teacher said komodo dragons live on their own island. Is that true?”

“Yeah it’s true. It’s called the Komodo Island, somewhere near Bali.”

“So, we can’t see komodo dragons?” His tone sounded like the clash of curiosity crashing with disappointment.

“We can, at the zoo.” I realized the mistake of the day. I felt like relating to Squidward when he asked Patrick whether he wanted to eat in or take out in the Krusty Krab manual episode. I watched too much Spongebob.

“Shall we go to the zoo, please?”

“It’s past noon already. Maybe next time? In the morning?”

“I want to go to the zoo!” There it began, I thought to myself.

“You can go tomorrow, with your parents.”

“III WAAANT TO GOOO TO THE ZOOOOOO!!!”

Can’t argue with that, screaming. The modern-day equivalent would be all-caps words in comment sections.


The last time I went to the zoo was when I visited the Schlossbrunn Palace, in Vienna. It was located on the sprawling ground of the palace, just below the hill on which the Victory Arch stood. When I finished touring the zoo, to reach the nearest metro station, I walked what must have been one of the most exhausting walks I ever undertook, and during such exhaustion I always believed I had traveled too much.

My sister failed to understand how someone could ‘travel too much.’ She had wanted to travel a lot, but school, work, and marriage came without long intervals during which she could freely do what she wanted. I guess I was quite lucky to spend some time abroad studying, though when looked back, it was a rather lonely and intellectually demanding period which I did not quite enjoy as a whole.

Anyway, yes, you can travel too much. Have you ever seen a sincerely happy tour guide? He/she has travelled too much. Of course, it all comes back to the individual, and the place, but here are some of the indications I personally experienced.

You know you have travelled in Australia too much when you have seen two kangaroos fighting in a residential area.

You know you have travelled in Austria too much when you have been able to accept the reality that kangaroos don’t live in this country.

You know you have travelled in Belgium too much when you are familiar with the different fries sauces. Chances are you would rather not to call it ‘French’ fries because it’s from Belgium.

You know you have travelled in Italy too much when you expect less personal space when interacting with people.

You know you have travelled in France too much when you become less enamored with wide boulevards and intricately carved exterior walls of public buildings and grand church naves. Maybe with medieval castles, too. These things you can find throughout the country.

You know you have travelled in Switzerland too much when... Well, you’ll never get enough of this country. Except when you run out of cash. Which you probably will, before long, without even spending on a splurge.

Ultimately, you know you have travelled too much when you begin to think of travelling as having ice cream on a high summer noon. Either you finish your ice cream quickly or it will melt and leave mess on your hand.

The first won’t allow you to enjoy the ice cream at your own pace. It would be great if someone can invent a kind of ice cream that stays iced longer (maybe that’s called nitrogen ice cream, dunno, never tried that before). With the same logic, when I was in junior high school, I said to a classmate I would study physics that I could invent a pen that defies gravity. (I was annoyed when my pen fell from the desk God knows how many times). With that lowly determination in mind, I went on to study English. Because logic, that’s why.

The second is quite self-explanatory: You can’t enjoy the entire ice cream fully with unpleasantly creamy stuff dripping on your fingers.
It’s a lose-lose solution, something the economist would perhaps prefer to call it the ‘sub-optimal’ solution. As Aristotle advised us, everything in moderation.

The opinions expressed here is my own, and do not necessarily apply to everyone. (I copied the previous sentence from a newspaper disclaimer and altered it to suit my own needs, though I wonder who would read all the way down here anyway, if anyone did begin to read this at all.)


But visiting the zoo, watching the animals’ activities, could teach us a lot about life. Not necessarily fundamental lessons, but the practical ones would also be appreciated, right?

We entered the zoo at around 2. The sun was blazing fiercely. What the tigers was in the middle of seemed to be the best idea of what to do around this time: napping.

One of my greatest regrets after is not taking enough naps when I was little, even if I was repeatedly told to. Before I found a job, my mother would scold me for ‘sleeping all the time’ (original exaggeration) when I was napping. Came real life, and naps became restricted to weekends and holidays, but here I was, with my nephew out in the sun to see some lizards.


The zoo also kept wolves. I read somewhere once that it took only four generations of wolves to turn them to pet dogs. When I told a colleague this piece of useless information, he said perhaps it took only four generations for chimps to act like human beings.

Scientists did teach some chimpanzees to use signs to "speak". One was named Nim Chimpsky, after the linguist-turned-politician-turned-linguist-again. The longest recorded "utterance" was 16-word long, by which he was asking for a fruit.


In the primates’ area, one exhibition equipped with trees and a pool showed apes of species unknown to me. But they had fierce looks on their faces, the kind of threatening look you can expect from predators that may swallow your arm whole. I chuckled. Animals of the wild, made to gather foods in jungles, but living in confinement, their foods provided.

My apartment came to mind. And I had to work for food. Who had the last laugh?


The butterfly sanctuary was all humid inside, so humid it felt heavy just to breathe. The insects live their adulthood, that is, as real butterflies, only for less than a week, depending on the species. The days are spent mating. That's quite the definition of carpe diem.

Don't be like mosquitoes, living their adulthood sucking bloods from us.


So, so far: enough sleep and food, live contentedly, and being good to others. One fine life recipe indeed. Dogs do live like that. Cats, on the other hand, too much sleep and food and hating everyone around you. Not an easy choice, eh?


Before we went out, I bought Evan a cone of ice cream. Did he finish it quickly to prevent melting? Or did he ate it without being able to care less about the mess? Neither. He gave it to me that I could finish the ice cream. He just wanted the cone. I finished it in a hurry.


As we were driving home, Evan was sleeping soundly next to me. The sun had been slanting well into the western horizon. It turned into a slightly larger disc of orange, its mild warmth pushing through the windshield to reach me. The relaxed shade of twilight, as should a weekend’s sunset be.

Thoughts in a Saturday Morning - A musing over nothing in particular

I found myself sitting in the balcony of my apartment after the usual routine this morning. Not much of a physical routine, though, except if pulling yourself out of the blanket which magically gained weight overnight and a few clicks on the touchpad counted as ‘physical’. Laptop lid up, Firefox on. The first site I visit will be Facebook, to see that there is no new notifications save for game invitations. Sometimes friend requests too, mostly from people I don’t know. Two or three people usually have a birthday on any given day, whom I rarely wish a happy birthday. Twitter is next. I scroll down to briefly skim some tweets. Then I go to national news website, and next to BBC. Again, I simply skim through the headlines. Except when the news is about North Korea. Or China. I would read them. I somehow feel excited to read the sensational lines they write about those countries. It feels like watching movies; it’s just that the consequence for me may be real, like war and the like. The consequence, I suppose, are what people avoid when watching movies. They want the sensations, developments of events, without really living the consequences. Oh, the villain destroys the city? The apocalypse is happening? Aliens are invading the world, I mean, the US? Woe is the citizens! how are we gonna rebuild civilization? but, hey, that’s just in the movie, no need to feel sad about it. But, imagine, Russia, China, and North Korea ally themselves and go on a campaign to conquer the world. Oh yes, there are a lot to be concerned with. The last will be my email. But today I skipped it. It’s Saturday morning. Firefox off, laptop lid still up.

On working days, it would be around 8.30 after all this routine, after which I would continue the translation from the day before. But on holidays like this, it’s usually around 7.30. Since elementary school, I realized that I have this habit of waking up earlier on holidays, which I attribute to my assumptions that I got to sleep more soundly knowing there would be no pressure to wake up early the morning after. Back when I was still training for badminton, I had for every Sunday a long jog either at a sports center a bit far from my house or an even longer jog around the housing complex. Guess what, I would wake up earlier on the Saturday before, which also became free after my fifth grade, only to be a school day again when I entered junior high.

Speaking of the fifth grade, the Saturday mornings have something in common with it. My apartment is on floor 12A. 13th floor essentially, but the developer perhaps believed in some Western number superstition, which I have always thought is strange, because they also named the 4th floor 3A. They believe the Western and Eastern superstitions. It’s like having multiple religions, which, however absurd, is not that uncommon actually, as in some students, previously non-religious, who are facing exams. But in its advertisements, the developer said only one thing: The price per unit would rise on Monday. That means I will get richer out of nowhere in 48 hours.

Anyway, located at quite some height, I can hear the traffic far less busy than on weekdays, and only rather faint noises reach me. Relatively speaking, the subdued magnitude compares to the subdued class conversations fifth graders have in the last hour before lunch break. That long, boring, drowsy hour they spend thinking of what to have for lunch and talk to their classmates about anything at all to vent off their near rebelling hunger. The normal traffic will be like the noises those students make during the break itself, revolting their ways to the cafeteria as if there is no tomorrow. 'YOLO!' Well, they don't scream it out, but you can see it from their ferociousness.

Around this time, another means of communication one step more sophisticated will have been in use at least from the year before: Writing messages on pieces of paper, rolling them into balls, and throw them to the other interlocutor. It saves you the privacy, because if you pass them from one desk to another, chances are nosy mates in between will read and find some way to make fun of the message. That can be a rumor you don’t want, like that you like the person sitting by the window and such. In high school and college, that kind of rumor can get you into real relationship with said person.

Somehow, having conversations on paper, which now may have been obsolete thanks to smartphones in everyone’s hands, lasted for me until high school years. I remember keeping one piece of paper with a close girl friend’s drawing on it. I passed it back to her, who then happened to sit just behind me, with certain translated Japanese song lyrics I claimed to be my own poetry. I received it back with a smiley face at the end of the lyrics. After the last hour bell rang, I said to her she could keep it. No, she said, I should keep it, implying such romantic and memorable future memento should be kept by someone special. I caught that impression, but this tug of war went on for a period of time longer than it should. The reason was that I wasn’t impressed by the drawing she thought was pretty, so I felt no real urge to keep it. Perhaps she also thought the lyrics were ugly though.
She was personally close to me then, maybe even closer than was she to her boyfriend. She often told me her relationships problem. Of course, like many other single high schoolers, I was a relationship expert, and she seemed to grow closer to me day after day. Once in a while I would ask her out to have some bites near her house. She would be indisposed. Her boyfriend might find out. Of course, what else could it be? But then once I said if only she hadn’t been in a relationship, to which she replied if only she had known she would meet someone like me.

Maybe it’s because of the field I was an expert in that I could respond to the problems she told me. Maybe it’s because back then I was a smartass who spared little thought on what to say, but these days, I often find it difficult to properly respond when people confide to me. A lot has been going on, I guess, in college and books I read that somehow I became too careful perhaps in these things. These days, my responses to situations my friends are in mainly consist of things that sound like hands-off, like just shrug it off and just stay there and it will go away on its own. The latest case happened last night. A friend, it seemed to me, was having existential crisis, asking herself what life was actually for. After some lame, clichéd suggestions, my final advice came to be ‘maybe after a while it will go on its own, just hang in there’. It’s super effective. Fast forward to the casual chit-chats as if the heavier topic had never been brought up at all, she thanked me, saying I would find a sympathetic ear on her too when I am in situations. I thanked her and said I was fine at the moment. Smiley emoticon.  Blue double ticks. End of conversation, beginning of a new thought. I was wondering if she had told her boyfriend about it too? I was wondering if I attract only girls with boyfriends, even though in these cases I was more of being friendzoned?

Like any normal single person my age not desperate to get into a relationship, I couldn’t help but think of her throughout the night, imagining scenarios where we would ride on my car throughout the city talking about random stuff. As the night grew mellow, the conversation would as well get more intimate, and I got to be increasingly tempted to confide to her what really bothers me all this time: That I didn’t make the most of my exchange program in Bangkok few years back when we were still in college. I spent my time surfing the internet, not meeting people, locking myself in the small dorm room within the big campus at the center of the huge city, neglecting my exams, going to the red light district with the scholarship money which came from the Thai taxpayers’ money only to back off when I noticed some random women had well-built shoulders. Heck, maybe I would be too embarrassed to tell the last thing but she would, as in cheesy soap operas, notice it and persuade me to let it all out. I couldn’t. The only woman I would even cry in front of was my first girlfriend, who up until now also happens to be my only girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend, to be exact.

But, if that scenario really did take place at all, I don’t think I would tell her all that anyway. I have recently been telling myself to be a stronger person. To tell anyone at all about past problems like that sounds exactly like whining. ‘Yes, but sometimes people need to let out their emotions too,’ my thought would contradict itself. ‘Maybe, maybe not, maybe fuck yourself,’ it would recite a scene in an American comedy movie, ‘Other people have their problems too, ok? So quit giving others hard time!’ The sequence of thoughts in my mind would go something like this, so I would be happy if friends I consider close to me would voluntarily ask me what’s wrong, which is also why I do not tell off people when they confide to me. Except for that one time when I was facing exam, suddenly living like a church-goer again, and a friend I made when in Bangkok (male, 100%) was complaining about how he had to cook for his sister. Later on I felt rather bad about it, but as one of my favorite columnist advised on regrets, if you make a great mistake, there’s no need for regret, you will make bigger mistakes anyway. Oh, well.

I press my Capri-Sun packaging to extract from it its last drop. It’s only recently that I rediscovered the delicious drink, although it has been some time that I became aware that foods and drinks that sweet could give me diabetes. Cool morning breeze sweeps pleasantly over my face, while the sun has climbed higher out of the city skylines to fill my room with a warmer hue of yellow. A nice weather for a Saturday morning, indeed, although my favorite will always be the cozy cloudy sky with thinly visible drizzle. I am thinking of having instant noodles as breakfast, despite the fact that once I bought a whole box of it and ate it continuously for several days that even the scent of it made me want to throw up. But the fact that there is another box next to several Capri-Sun must say something about my fondness of it. Is that how true love should be? Maybe I’ll muse over it later.