The bad things that happen.

Bad things happen to good people. So the saying goes. Although we know that to be true, there are just so many things that happens that makes us ask, "Why? Why me? Why her?"

Amongst the whole repertoire of tragedies and misfortune, one of the most deadly players is surely those which we have no control over. These incidences ranges from family conflicet (we can't choose our family), to genetics, to accidents and of course death.

These problems are those that we have no recourse to a prior action that we can identify and rectify to prevent its occurrence. There's not an issue that we can learn from and so avoid in the future. It renders us powerless in the face of such adversity. We cannot comprehend why we could not prevent or change the incident. It is this sense of powerlessness that is literally crippling. Once we feel that we're out of the control room of our lives, it breaks down our perception that our actions have any effect on life at all.

Here's how I've handled my uncontrollable tragedies. I accept that I've no control over these tragedies. But I know I have absolute control of how I react to it. Of course emotions often overwhelm us on such occasions. My reaction is to let it come, embrace the wave and then let it pass me. There is no general rule to how I react to each tragedy as they are all different, as will be yours.

You will find your own solutions and own rituals that will help you deal with your personal disasters. It is only KEY that you know remember that you can control how you react to it. You really can. You probably can't control your outbreak of emotions, but you can control how you react to those emotions.

Life is what you make of it. You can look back in your life and pick out the tragedies and make it a tragic story. Or you can look for the lovely details of beauty that makes it into a beautiful film. I subscribe to Shakespeare and Buddhism, so I look for and embrace both. What will you make yours to be?

Freedom & Choice

Choice. Something that we ought to have every day, at every juncture, on every issue, every purchase, every emotion even. What about choice is it that we demand so much of? What do we get out of choice? Is it the freedom to choose between options that we hold dear? Or the power we feel when we have the ability to make one?

Or even a power we feel when our choices can decide the fate of others? Let's leave this one out of the equation as we should not enter the heady realm of politics yet.

It usually boils down to freedom, thus the term "freedom of choice". The availability of choice immediately gives you freedom. But how can one measure freedom? Can a measure of freedom be based on the number of choices that one has? By that measure, we might conclude that if you're a mother shopping for milk powder in the UK, you have more freedom than if you were in Iran because there are more choices of milk powder. A mother in China on the other hand might run you closer on this issue and more freedom is deemed to her than you might reckon.

So having more choices is better isn't it? It allows us to choose and compare between multiple options before coming up with our almighty decision. We shall not discuss what affects the decision making process, although it's safe to say the usual brew of culture, advertising of some sort, current status and minimal intelligence is involved. What if we have 50 different milk powder on the shelf but all of them are shite? Are you still free? Do you still have a choice? What if all the milk powders are equally good?

To have a true freedom of choice, or rather the ideal of a true freedom of choice, one would imagine that the shelf be filled with milk powders offering different benefits. Variety then. A variety of choice would give you maximum freedom. But what if each milk powder offers each an unique benefit? And your kid needs the most benefits, doesn't he. Surely you have freedom to have all the benefits in one tin. This doesn't leave you much of a choice then.

The quality of the options matters now. What goes into the different tins of milk powders and their make-up is now directly affecting your freedom of choice. So you want a choice of factories, with a choice of ingredients, a choice of price point and a perhaps a choice of taste. It might sound ludicrous but if upon examination, I'm sure that's the least you have to ask for to have the best choice available to you, distribution networks allowing. It might start to become clear that we can go much deeper into the exploration on the quality of the options available to us and demand to have a choice in them to allude to your freedom of choice. It might boil down to having a choice of a proton or neutron. Or a superstring.

Practically speaking, having freedom of choice means to let us have a chance to choose between options presented to us on the shelf. Often which options get to go on the shelf and what goes into the options are beyond us. We might affect it but there's no real way we can control it. What we're left with is the opportunity to make an intelligent choice while standing before the shelf. That is really what it is and it is not freedom.

I won't say freedom is over-rated because I really rate the ideal. But I will say that freedom is often bandied around as an advertising tool to allow all sorts of mischief and affect all kinds of bad decisions. It happens because people confuse the illusion of freedom with the real thing. I'm not sure if anyone on each ever touched the true ideal of freedom but certainly a lot of folks believe so. And that annoys and disappoints me no end. So choice if choice does not give us freedom, what does it give? Annoying decisions and the responsibility of your decision, that's what. And all with the underlying illusion of freedom which makes the responsibility feels even heavier.

Now, let's go back to the shelf. Imagine you've a choice of 2 supermarkets (OMG lucky you!),one with the variety of milk powders that each has a benefit unique to itself and another one with only one brand of milk powder that has 10 freaking benefits that's almost exactly what you need (barring a death penalty or two). Which supermarket would you rather be in? The one with freedom of choice or the one with nothing but the one milk powder you could use?

How to be nice

How can you be nice to others? Some people think being nice is fake and is hiding your true feelings. I think these people have issues, or they have never met anyone who's genuinely nice to them. It is so simple to smile. And it gets easier when you get one back.

But you get mad when you get a scowl instead. You feel like an idiot. That's what I have been feeling these days. People just are plain irritating alot of times. It puts me off being nice.

I always try to make a point to appreciate the background people around me. Like the cleaners and others who work so hard but doesn't even get noticed. So this morning, on my way out, I nodded and smiled to the security guard at the gate. He just "gyin" me and tilted his head up to look down on me. Lovely. Fucking racist bastards. They are all smiles and ass-kissing to the blondes and the red-haired, and snub the yellow skins.

I had higher hopes for China chinese. I thought they had more pride. They are simply the same as the rest of Asia. Fucking white cock suckers.

Why can people treat everyone as equals first before proven otherwise? You either get white-god worshippers, or white-trash haters. The truth is simply we are all the same. The same averages of idiots, scumbags, poor, rich, talented, unemployed, CEOs, dickheads and geniuses. So stop being racist.

Then it's easier to be nice from inside.

Sunset in Shanghai

That's what it feels like. A long sunset. Seductive dark blue tones eating up the warm red and orange. It gets abit colder. The streetlights and neon come on now, trying feebly to replace the glamour of the sun. Watching the night devouring it's prey tastily, I 'm lured into thinking that I'm not just a spectator. The last sunlight clings on to my cheek and I feel it's warm fingers losing grip. I stretch my hand out. But I can't touch any of it. Then it's gone.

That's what it all feels like. Being part of everything around me, watching everything collide and dance, almost predicting the motion of earthly bodies and feelings, but somehow not being able to touch and affect it. It's not like I'm trying hard to change anything yet. Something inside me is telling me that it's not my scene yet. I'm waiting to be cued in. Anxious to jump into the scene yet calm in the knowledge that the stage will be mine.

How can it not yet be time? I've been behind the curtains for some time now. Looking on at the stage, serving tea for the main acts, pretending to be small. I think I'm pretty good at pretending. Everyone around seems to believe it now. Thankfully, I'm not such a good pretender to convince myself. I'm not great. But not small either. Mediocre? Well, you can decide after my act.

:) love!

:) love!, originally uploaded by addytan.

Ha, all the time during dinner and coffee, the only picture I took that night is of this fish in a banana skin. And nothing of the beautiful girl that I was talking to and having such a great time with. But this is all I need for now to remember that night. I hope we have more to come.

fresh page

it just felt like i was turning a page in my short book. Like I've been stuck in one page for so many years, looking for the same things, running around the same people. When things ended recently, it was sad. but i genuinely felt fresh. The air smell of opportunities and undiscovered paths. It smell of little windy roads, hilly upward climbs and small hidden alleys. There is much to see. I am going to live. then suddenly, i found a waif of sadness in a boutique, hiding, waiting to pounce on my new found senses and smolder them.

i hate waiting

Between a question and an answer, between a job application and the interview, between a SMS and a response, between making a decision and announcing it, between guessing and knowing, between a broken heart and a new love, between expectation and disappointment and between the wrong one and the right one, oh i hate that waiting.