Category Archives: Life

I Walk Free

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Also known in the local colloquial as “ORD loh! ((The term ORD refers to Operationally Ready Deployment, the local mil-speak for “completed mandatory military service and now a reservist”.))”

As of today, I’ve completed my mandatory two years of military service and now walk this earth as a free man. I still have obligations as a reserve in armed forces but I can only hope that I never get called upon.

It seems like a long time had passed since my initial post about being conscripted. While in service, it feels as though I were trapped in a gravity field with its own definition of time with no regard as to what happens in the outside world. In the service, everything is constant, no moment indistinguishable from the next. Once released, it feels as though I’ve been riding on a slingshot, propelled into a world of chaos.

Where do I go from here?

A Recent Aha! Moment

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Preamble: To put this post in context, this is my first post as part of the Post A Week challenge by WordPress.com which I got to discover from Stargrace’s post over at Nomadic Gamer. I’m officially starting today. They also have Post A Day challenge, but I’m starting small. If I can do more than one post a week, that’s great, but I’ll do at least one.

It is past midnight. You’re sitting on a coach in front of your gargantuan plasma TV. The family pet stirs occasionally on your lap. The surrounding floor is littered with food wrappers from the stuff your dietitian explicitly told you to lay off. On the screen, it seems the character is doing the exact same thing. It is a moment of deja-vu, except for one thing. In the movie, the character is watching some old black-and-white film. It always is a black-and-white film that plays in the background of some scene in a movie. You scratch and head and wonder what that particular movie-in-a-movie is.

I was watching Leaving Las Vegas over the weekend, and about three-quarters through, the characters played by Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Sue were by the poolside doing lovey-dovey things, and across from them was a TV playing a black-and-white picture. Just as the head scratching moment was approaching, a subtle but unusual and distinct string instrument started playing, belonging to the background of the black-and-white picture. There was familiar ring to it. As the camera swooped out and then back again to the scene of the picture, I leaned forward in my seat and yelled out.

“The Third Man!”

It was the first time I identified a movie playing in a movie.

Oh, and if you’re curious, the instrument used was a zither. The use of it in the theme of The Third Man gave rise to its use in Western music.

Engaging the collective knowledge of the masses

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Having started school again, the chore of writing term papers have followed. I have one huge gripe that I want to make. In these papers, one is cripplingly limited to using sources from academia. Online sources, such as blogs and Wikipedia articles, are explicitly forbidden.

I am aware of the argument that the web is an open bulletin board that anyone can publish on, and that information maybe at times, unreliable. However, I feel that institutions are living in the past and removed from the modern developments of the information age, refusing to acknowledge the changes that have been taking place. Knowledge and ideas are no longer distributed in the form of a pyramid, with the institutions at the top, and the people at the bottom, but rather, the pyramid has been flatted down to a plateau, where everyone, and anyone, can make an equally useful contribution. Ideas originate less from national research labs and more from the entrepreneur spirit of individuals in their basements, with the web acting as a platform for the exchange of these ideas. In 2006, Time magazine recognized this paradigm shift, acknowledging the contributions of the masses by naming the person of the year, “You”. Refusing to accept the open web as a source is tantamount to alienating a large source of information.

It is precisely the openness of the web itself that makes it such a valuable source. Ideas are published without being held back by funding, and are exposed to an even larger “peer review” process. If you ventured a look at the one of the ‘talk’ pages for a particular Wikipedia article, you’ll realize that there is a lot of meaningful discussion that goes on behind it.

There is nothing that makes Wikipedia less reliable than Encyclopedia Britannica, for example. On the contrary, Encyclopedia Britannica positions itself as an authoritative source on a subject, a bible of information which one has to accept as being ‘true’, when often, there’s room for debate.

As for the matter that only sources from academic papers are considered reliable and accepted, I have this to say. The very idea that knowledge has to come from a certain source, accessible through expensive publications and where opinions are limited only to an exclusive group of people, is repressive.

Then again, quoting Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

Institutionalized?

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“These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.”

– Red, from the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’

Suddenly, it seems that there’s a white and empty boulevard ahead of me, and every tick of the clock resonates loudly.

I’ll be disrupting from my national service the week after, and starting school another week past that. From now until next Thursday, I’m clearing what leave and off I have accumulated over the course of this year.

It’s a strange feeling having so much free time all of a sudden. There’s no one to yell at you about where you’re supposed to be, what is it you’re supposed to do, and what is it you’ve supposedly done wrong. It is as if I’ve been kept in cold store for the past two years, and now I’ve been violently ejected out of it.

I’ve made myself adequately clear in the past how I disliked my period of military service, and the negativity of the experiences I had. Now that I’m outside, or almost outside of the system, I miss it. It is a routine that I’ve initially hated, but gradually grown accustomized to it, to the point where it becomes the norm.

It’s a strange world, isn’t it?

Expectations

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If I were to appear as a messed up individual from the first day I arrived, that would be the expectation of me, and no one would bat an eyelid if I failed to deliver.

However, if I were to perform optimally since day one, but on one day, unable to deliver a particular piece of work, the wrath of the brass above me would be incurred and all their fiery anger and resulting consequences brought to bear upon on me.

Compared the first and second case. The former would be multiple failures with little or no consequences, whereas in the latter, it would be one tiny road hump, but with drastic consequences.

The conclusion drawn is that it would be far more beneficial for one’s well-being to fail consistently rather than occasionally.

Expectations are such a strange thing.

Getting rid of fluff

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I don’t really have a list of things I want to accomplish in this year, nor even a few rough bullet points. This year is turning out to be one of those whereby I’ve to make a number of major decisions regarding my life, but I don’t feel quite ready for it yet. However, one of the directions I’ve been meaning to steer towards is to lead a minimalistic lifestyle.

Previously, I’ve touched a little on topic through my post regarding my varying levels of connectivity. This time, I’m getting rid of things which are more tangible, and physical.

I was greatly inspired by two articles, the first about a family who lives in a Yurt out in the Alaskan wilds, and another, a challenge to declutter by getting rid of non-essentials, leaving only 100 items. I currently already don’t leave too much a footprint, with the most space consuming items being my computers and collection of books at home. Weekdays I spend living on a military base, with only a set of uniform, a towel, a few changes of underwear, toiletries and my ipod. Essentially, that is the baseline of what is the absolute minimum. Everything else is just clutter, and optional.

That being said, I do have a number of ‘leftovers’, such as clothes that I no longer wear, stationary that are no longer relevant (like the rulers that lets you draw all kinds of funny shapes), lots of electronic and computer components that I saved because I imagined that they might come in handy (which didn’t), etcetera, etcetera. Time to nuke all that crap, and what better place to start clearing fluff than with fluff itself?

soft-toys

Goodbye, my collection of random stuffed animals from childhood. May the The Salvation Army find you new homes.

Worst place to have an injury

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I seldom partake in sports, and the one time I did, which was yesterday, I injured my right wrist while bowling. It’s the worst place that I can possibly suffer an injury. It hurts when I type, and it hurts when I use the mouse. Looks like I’m out of action for first-person shooter gaming.

It was an activity I reluctantly took part in only after much persuasion, and I walked away regretful. As Calvin would say, “Every time I’ve built character, I’ve regretted it.”

How Stasi members felt on their last day

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After an individual has completed their mandatory two years of National Service here, most of their personal documents that have accumulated over their period of service gets destroyed. The earlier half of this month saw people many from my unit completing their period of service and leaving behind two years of internment in what is essentially Auschwitz.

Being one of those that still had a long term left in the service, I had to clean up their mess. Most of the afternoon was spent shredding documents after documents of these people who left service in the past month. I could only imagine how the members of the Stasi felt on 15 January 1990, destroying every single document possible as those pesky counter-revolutionaries and capitalist sympathizers marched on the building.

Boy, it was intense work!