I mean I want to see

OK I admit it. I’m a FB spammer.

A: loves spam…especially if it’s of the spicy variety.

Idiot Korean.

Guy friend on his birthday: A year closer to viagra.

在百花齐放、百家争鸣的唐诗大花园中，桃花独树一帜，占尽风光。文人们往往喜欢拈“花”惹草，兴感抒怀。桃花入诗被赋予了多姿多彩的感情内涵：或崇尚隐逸，或感怀身世，或讴歌友谊，或点示爱情，或流露禅意，或尽显生机……凡引种种，意趣横生，引人入胜。品读“桃花诗”，一朵朵凝结着生命雨露，散发着感情芬芳的奇葩缓缓展现在我们眼前。

（一）、自由隐逸之花。李白的《山中问答》抒发诗人高蹈尘外，醉心山林的隐逸情怀。“问余何意栖碧山，笑而不答心自闲。桃花流水窅然去，别有天地非人间。”一、二两句“问”而“不答”，“笑”含悬念，“闲”显心性，尽见诗人远离尘俗，自由自在的浪漫情怀。第三句特写桃花流水、睿然远逝的景色，渲染一种天然宁静、淡泊幽深的氛围。桃花流水，自自然然，清明亮丽，不汲汲于荣，不寂寂于逝，令人联想到宠辱不惊，淡泊处世的隐士风采。末句对比议论，满蓄真情。山中一溪桃花，一脉流水，一山青翠，一心清闲，别有天地而自得其乐。这份目无杂色，耳无杂音，心无杂念的舒适惬意，哪里是滚滚红尘、碌碌人间所能相比的呢？全诗借“桃花流水”展示诗人潇洒出尘之心和归隐山林之志。李白的另一首诗《访戴天山道土不遇》则讴歌朋友放浪山林，去留无踪的隐逸风采。“犬吠水声中，桃花带露浓。树深时见鹿，溪午不闻钟。野竹分青霭，飞泉挂碧峰。无人知所去，愁倚两三松。”友人生活在一个山青水才、林茂竹修的地方，可以目接飞泉，耳闻钟声；可以与麋鹿为伴，与青松为友；可以浪迹山林，心游道院。后面六句环境兼活动的描写凸显友人淡泊高洁的志趣和逍遥自在的风采。一、二两句展现诗人缘溪而行，穿山进林的景象。泉水淙淙，犬吠隐隐；桃花带露，浓艳耀目。好一派宜人景致，令人联想到友人居住此中，如世外桃源，似人间天堂，超尘拔俗而自由自在。桃花，为环境添色，为人格增辉。张旭的《桃花溪》表达诗人心仪虚无飘渺，神往世外桃源的审美情趣。“隐隐飞桥隔野烟，石矶西畔问渔船：桃花尽日随流水，洞在清溪何处边？”起笔画远景，引人入胜：深山野谷，云烟缭绕；山溪之上，长桥横跨，忽隐忽现，似有似无，似飘浮而动，如临空而飞。意境幽深神秘，朦朦胧胧。发问绘近景，涉“目”成趣：水中岩石，如岛如屿（石矶）；清溪之上，桃花飘流，源源不尽，绵绵不绝，如红霞映水，似赤袖拂风。诗意美妙空灵，恍恍惚惚。天真有趣的一“问”引出一溪桃花流水，激活一份飘渺幻想，不言神往而神往自见，直写桃花而桃花传情。诗歌写得象桃花源一样扑朔迷离，令人神往，张旭是高手！

（二）、悲愁苦恨之花。杜甫的《南征》抒发诗人老迈多病，漂泊天涯的悲苦之情。“春岸桃花水，云帆枫树林。偷生长避地，适远更沾襟。老病南征日，君恩北望心。百年歌自苦，未见有知音。”诗歌后面六句抒悲情，有颠沛流离、远适南国的羁旅悲愁，有年老体衷、疾病缠身的无可奈何，有仕途坎坷、壮志未酬的愤愤不平，还有百年歌苦、知音乏绝的沉痛喟叹。前面两句描乐景。春水方生，桃花夹岸，锦浪浮天；云帆一片，征途千里，极目四眺，枫树成林。好一派美妙迷人的春江景色！如此欢快明朗的色调，如此生意盎然的景色，如此光艳灿烂的桃花，反衬出诗人光景无多，前途渺茫的忧郁愁苦。桃花亮人眼目却伤人魂魄。王建《宫词一百首》（其一）以花喻人，揭示宫女的悲苦命运。“树头树底觅残红，一片西飞一片东。自是桃花贪结子，错教人恨五更风。”一、二句以凄清画面见长。高墙大院之内，一个暮春的早晨，宫女在桃树下徘徊，看看“树头”，花朵越来越少；瞧瞧 “树底”，“残红”越来越多。春风阵阵，桃花飘零，满地狼籍，“惨”不忍睹。这种伤春惜花的描写隐含着宫女对自身年华逝去、命薄桃花的嗟伤。三、四两句以议论取胜。桃花凋谢，可以结出丰硕的果实来，自然自在，不怨风，不怪雨，可是，宫女的命运却远远没有桃花结子那般幸运、自由，滞留深宫，青春不在，幸福无缘，只有老大徒悲的苦叹。纵观全诗，不管是写宫女惜花恨风，还是写宫女羡花妒花，跌宕转换的诗情深深地暗示出宫女凄惨悲苦的命运，也揭露了封建制度剥夺宫女幸福，扼杀宫女青春的罪恶。贾至的《春思二首》（其一）抒写流人之愁和逐客之恨。“草色青青柳色黄，桃花历乱李花香。东风不为吹愁去，春日偏能惹恨长。”贾至在唐肃宗时期曾因事被贬为岳州司马，这首诗大概就是他在贬谪期间所写的。三、四两句说愁言恨，上句怨东风无情，不为遣愁，以见诗愁重难遣；下句怪春日惹恨，把恨拉长，足见诗人度日如年。一、二两句描柳绘花。上句说春草丛生，柳丝飘拂，以显盎然生机；下句说桃李争春，芳香四溢，可见明媚春光。这两句写良辰美景反衬诗人无法消除的深愁苦恨。

（三）、爱恋惆怅之花。崔护《题都城南庄》写诗人寻春遇艳的惊喜和重寻不遇的惆怅。“去年今日此门中，人而桃花相映红。人面不知何处去，桃花依旧笑春风。”先以“桃之夭夭，灼灼其华”来比喻城南女子，言其艳若桃花，光彩照人，可见诗人目注神驰、意乱情迷之态和女子温婉可人、脉脉含情之姿。两句诗文一幅画，人面桃花相映红。再说重寻不遇的失落和遗憾，还是春光烂漫、百花吐艳的季节，还是花木扶疏、桃柯掩映的门户，然而，使这一切都增光添彩的“人面”却不知去往何处，只剩下门前一树桃花临风盛开，笑对诗人。诗人想起了去年今日那位不期而遇的少女，那番凝眸含笑、脉脉含情的风流，而今，桃花依旧，人面杳然，除了惆怅和失落，涌上诗人心头的还能有什么呢？全诗爱恨喜忧全由一树桃花映照而出。刘禹锡的《竹枝词九首》（其二）借桃花易谢痛斥男子的薄情负心，表达女主人公的忧患愁情。“山桃红花满上头，蜀江春水拍山流。花红易衰似郎意，水流无限似侬愁。”诗歌刻画了一个热恋中的农家少女的形象，峦爱给她带来了幸福，也带来了忧愁。一、二句言喜。山上，漫山遍野，桃花盛开，红红火火，春意盎然；山下，一江春水，拍山流过，潺潺流淌，情意绵绵。两句诗文烘托出农家女子陶醉在爱河中的幸福和甜蜜。三、四句说愁，托物起兴，触景生情。艳艳桃花，火红灿烂，但历时不久，易衰易谢，正如男子见异思迁，用情不专的爱心；汩汩春江，清清亮亮，源源不断，愈流愈长，正如女子排遣不尽，挥之不去的忧愁。数对方变心变情，可恨可气；想自己愁忧满腹，无可奈何。全诗写花开花谢，抒爱恨欢愁。

（四）、生意盎然之花。戴叔伦《兰溪棹歌》画兰溪山水之美，抒渔家欢快之情。 “凉月如眉挂柳湾，越中山色镜中看。兰溪三日桃花雨，半夜鲤鱼来上滩。”首句描写月挂柳枝，光泻兰溪，细绦弄影，溪月相映的情景。次句写月下山水，皓月当空，银辉四泻，溪平如镜，倒影清明。两句诗文把兰溪山水写得朦胧飘渺，美仑美奂。然而对于渔人来说，最大的乐趣还在于春潮渔汛：春雨过后，桃花飘零，溪水猛涨，鲤鱼跳滩，拨鳍摆尾，噼里啪啦。看到这种情景，怎能不让人心花怒放呢？全诗写柳写月，写山写水，写花写鱼，描绘出一幅明澈秀丽、生机盎然的山水画，给人以身临其境之感。白居易的《大林寺桃花》写寻春之喜，意境深邃，情趣盎然。“人间四月芳菲尽，山寺桃花始盛开。长恨春归无觅处，不知转入此中来。”时已孟夏，大地春归，芳菲落尽，诗人登山寻春，没想到在深山古寺之中发现了意想不到的春景——一片桃花！“始盛”点明桃花怒放，浓艳欲滴。那一片火红灿烂的桃花在诗人始所未料之时冲入眼帘，扑面而来！这该令人多么惊异，多么欣喜啊。一片桃唤起了诗人美丽的幻想，绽放出浓浓的春意。

此外，桃花入诗，还有李白的“桃花潭水深千尺，不及汪伦送我情”《赠汪伦》，用桃花流水比喻朋友之间的深情厚谊，明丽动人；郎士之的“重门深锁无寻处，疑有碧桃千树花”（《听邻家吹笙》）用繁缛绚丽的王母桃花比喻邻家笙乐的热烈欢快，如梦似仙，引人入胜；王维的“桃红复含宿雨”，“花落家童未扫”（《田园乐》其六），写花开花落，无人过问，无人打扰，自然自在，充满禅意。……这些绚丽缤纷的桃花构成了一个光彩夺目、魅力四射的世界，品读这些“桃花”无意、诗人有心的诗歌，我们其实是走进了一个芳香四溢，深邃迷人的心灵大花园。那么，让我们用心、用情与桃共舞，与古人同歌吧。¹

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I have the most interesting conversations in Borders. Complimented a lady on her batik blouse, realised she was also a former journalist who studied at Indiana University in Bloomington, and ended up talking to her 70-year-old husband, the son of an diplomat, about Hawaii in the 1950s. I love the Indons, they’re really friendly and gracious…just don’t get them too poor or push them too far…or they’ll take to the streets.

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¹ Sorry, hah. I’m not so mo shui one. All koped from here: http://www.chinesejy.com/yuwen/257/280/20070303168153.html.

THIS is the most romantic thing I’ve read in ages. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ★ ★ ★

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Wahlao I’d wanted to abstain from engaging gormless dolts but the Temasek Review is too good to pass up.

The Temasek Review:
Why the present wave of immigration is different from the past : THE TEMASEK REVIEW
www.temasekreview.com
The Straits Times published a total of six articles last Saturday in its “Insight” section on the lives of four successful men in Singapore who hailed from immigrant parents to sway public opinion in favor of the PAP’s liberal immigration and pro-foreigner policies.
57 minutes ago · Comment · LikeUnlike · Share · Report
The Temasek Review:
The Straits Times is busy selling the idea to Singaporeans that because we are descendents of immigrants, we must welcome immigrants with open arms! Please spread the word around to debunk its propaganda!
56 minutes ago · Report
Yvonne Koh
I’d suggested to the PAP that they consider cloning to solve the population problem.
42 minutes ago ·
Bryan Ti
And what is perhaps TR’s objection for Singapore to take in immigrants?…. space constraints, transport limitations, housing shortage, social friction?
25 minutes ago · Report
Russell Teo
There are 250mil orphans worldwide. Maybe PAP can adopt em all
11 minutes ago · Report
Yvonne Koh
Then bring them up like Plato Republic.
2 minutes ago
Russell Teo
Imagine e votes, domestic mart, army, workforce that one can raise with 250mil ppl. Remind me of Star Wars 2: Attack of e Clones. Now where’s the republic battle cruiser? Oops we crashed 2 ships recently didn’t we?
3 hours ago · Report
Bryan Ti
I suppose that is the quality of discussion that TR is trying to generate. Maybe TR can give us some wise (or wiser) words…..
3 hours ago · Report
Yvonne Koh
OK I admit defeat. I must always listen to the Old Man.
3 hours ago ·
The Temasek Review
The PAP’s short-sighted immigration policies will have disastrous consequences for Singapore. We are already seeing and experiencing its negative effects already, aren’t we?
2 hours ago ·
Bryan Ti
I agree that the immigration programme was poorly executed and have stated so publicly before. This screw-up (in more crude terms) has given rise to negative and largely unintended consequences, even if I would hesitate to call them disastrous.

But let’s be clear : a badly executed plan should not be equated with a bad plan. A very simple example : a badly built bridge does not mean the intent to build the bridge was wrong. We might still need a bridge, but a better constructed one.

By all means criticise the execution,eg. lack of coordination between ministries, infrastructure shortfall in supporting a larger population, or that the inflow was too much too fast. Let’s point out where these could have been done better, or needs to be done now. … See more

However, do not be blinded by the shortcomings to impute that the scheme is fallacious in its original intent.

I hope TR is clearer in thought than the commenters it attracts (sometimes).
The Temasek Review
TR has always stated clearly in its articles that the fundamental policy is sound. We need immigrants, but mass immigration itself is not a solution. We need a more comprehensive and targeted approach to ensure that the prospective new citizens will fit well into our society before allowing them to set foot here in the first place. Right now, what … See morethe PAP is doing is to open the floodgates first and after realizing it has screwed up, it is now throwing money at the problem to “integrate” the immigrants. It won’t work this way. We now have a ticking time-bomb on our hands.
Bryan Ti
TR, now you are talking - fundamental policy is sound.

Then let us (constructively) criticise the past execution and current ones if there are still flaws.

If TR does not believe that the floodgate has been reduced as what the government is saying, and is able to show proof, I will support TR’s cause…. See more

I agree that “throwing in ” money is not the solution to integration. The bureaucrats are probably struggling to figure out the ways to “do” integration, which I hope we are not disputing the need for. But when they have finally figured out what to do, I think the money would come in handy.

At least the money is being placed where the mouth is in this instance. How many (overseas) instances have we read of where there is more political talk than dosh, moolah, shekels, wonga or whatever you call it, thrown in.

If anybody’s gonna ask me how to integrate foreigners, I willl admit I have no f…. idea! Does TR?
2 hours ago · Report
The Temasek Review
We do have workable ideas on how to integrate foreigners, but they will not work now because too many unsuitable foreigners are allowed to enter Singapore within too short a period of time. We must understand that we cannot integrate everybody. This is simply impossible. Therefore, the most crucial step of integration lies in the very first step of… See more deciding who to allow into Singapore. You don’t spend money to integrate them only after you discover that the newcomers aren’t really suitable citizens after all. Both our quality and quantity controls have failed. We have no choice but to live with the problem now.
about an hour ago

AT TANAH Merah over the weekend. Probably over financial woes. I’d like to attend a policy meeting over mental health issues and how we are supporting those who are depressed, from employers and insurers to social workers and society.

Political leaders would do well to consider this:

Singapore’s People’s Action Party is confronted with a widening class divide and a creeping political elitism that could drive it from power, if they are allowed to fester.

Inter-related, these problems are shaping up into the ruling party’s biggest challenge in the next election in 2011 – and probably beyond.

They are neither new nor unique in the world, having prevailed in advanced nations like the United States, Britain and even Japan – except in Singapore, the small size and meagre safety net are exacerbating matters.

The General Household Survey revealed that the top 20% of Singapore’s households last year earned 31 times that of the bottom 20%. And the gap is widening.

TODAY online: What’s behind the recent endurance race craze?
Reuben Cheang: Go .. Team Fatbird!
Yvonne Koh: I want to take part…in competitive eating!
Reuben Cheang: eat, sleep and play mahjong? that’s triathlon too.

Wah…”has potential to do better” in English Literature leh. Need more discipline in writing. Not much has changed.

I failed sit-and-reach (surprise, I can’t do yoga now) and still have very weak upper body strength. Detested PE.

James Linares
WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?
9 hours ago · Report
Marlene Garcia
I thought it meant the statement carries more weight. More profound!!!!!!!!
9 hours ago · Report
Jori L. Anderson-Moore
okay then.. ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
9 hours ago · Report
Patrick M. DeWitt
Seconded. Three is the absolute limit, to be used only in extreme circumstances. Announcing the Apocalypse, good. President’s Day sale, not so much.
9 hours ago · Report
Alvin Epstein
:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
9 hours ago · Report
Stacie Paulsen Chandler
perhaps it’s just excitement, an enthusiasm for life!
9 hours ago · Report
Sandy Coutts Sutherland
Point taken.
9 hours ago · Report
Cindy Roller
I believe it is called the Prozac factor!!!!!
9 hours ago · Report
Marc Bourgeois
I thought I’d be the only original one usin multiple exclamation marks in my response. I guess I am not one in a million; but I’m in good company.
8 hours ago · Report
MIchelle Celarier
i only use explanation points on facebook!!
8 hours ago · Report
Lynn Scamahorn
ALL CAPS IS WORSE. LIKE SCREAMING IN YOUR FACE!
8 hours ago · Report
lvin Pang
!!i! !!i i!i! i!i
7 hours ago · Report
Yvonne Koh
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥♥♥ ♥♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥♥♥ ♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥ ♥
In Morse Code.
7 hours ago ·
Ashley Dodd
helloooo—working at a tv station or newpaper is a sign of a diseased mind, we’ve all got it.
7 hours ago · Report
Lyn Jerde
So are quotation marks used for “emphasis.”
7 hours ago · Report
Stephanie Ingersoll
I used to do the pets page and every rescue organization ended every sentence with at least one exclamation point. My editor banned them all.
6 hours ago · Report
Maggie Benson
Bull Sh*t, on that “”"”Newsroom”"”
Practice what u preach while you are doing what ever nothing is you do & get paid for it!
3 hours ago · Report

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(on FB)

A: has the plague.
B: Oh no, please don’t die. I thought I was going to drown in bullshit but I’ve survived.
A: oh B, so funny, I was just laughing hysterically over your work/education info. Somehow, I think we have waded through our share since our visiting magpie days… This time it is just a physical affliction of flu symptoms. Plague of the mind does hover relentlessly, though. WHY are you so far away?

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A: Help me before I drown in bullshit!
B: 映日荷花别样红

STILL, but I just don’t think it’s appropriate for the blogosphere’s leading intellectuals to mock the mentally infirm.

Am glad they’re raising the pay of social workers, though. Wake up and smell the flowers, braying dudes. The social workers are the clean-up operation after all you yocks are done with your rapacious grabbing.

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A: A true friend doesn’t care if your house is untidy, your car makes funny noises, if you only have $5.00 in the bank this week, or that your family is not perfect…they love you for who you are. A true friend can go long periods of time without speaking and never question their friendship. REPOST if you are lucky enough to have at least one true friend!
B: Sounds like a description of a puppy.

YOU have the opportunistic crackpots and the truly slimy users, and on the other hand you have those who can’t see the shades of grey and are sanctimonious.

And really, crass materialism hasn’t made anyone happier or more secure — we’re fundamentally the same at heart: We need a sense of community, to be seen for who we are and loved, and to feel accepted. I try to avoid the megabrandname shops in Ion and Takashimaya, I don’t think they’ve got very much to do with fundamental reality. & why do men & women have to judge themselves by what others have (salaries, houses, possessions)? Come on, be sure of your own calling and play your own game. We all have our roles to play and I think people spend too much time struggling and biting and manoeuvring, trying to establish that they are “alpha” — “alpha” is not your children’s achievements, is not your zipcode, is not your handbag: It’s a core of character and integrity that will not leave you whatever your circumstances. Even if you are starving you will not steal. Even if you’re grouchy on the MRT you will not shove others and will give up your seat willingly. Even if you are unemployed you will not sink into self-pity and shove the blame on others and make life a living hell for those close to you. That’s character (she foams at the mouth and screams, falling to the ground shuddering and quivering :P).

& please, folks, do realise that graduation is not the summit of your career. Who cares if you went to Posh Marbles-In-Mouth University? It’s the beginning of the long hard slog.

GRRR. Time to go acquaint myself with knowledge such as what the hell’s a CCC and what’s a WSQ and what exactly WDA does. All these agencies!

*

:) I notice I have some really predictable trigger words.

- “Justice” (comes with superglowing exclamation marks)
- “Truth” (in big highlighted letters, with halo on top)
- “PAP” — or worse “Young PAP” (Greasy! Self-serving! Bootlickers! Overpaid! Thatcherites!).
- “Abuse” (Oh no, poor baby/kitty — I cry for you Argentina)
- “Luxury car/butter/consumer item” (To be frank it’s because I’ve got a taste for the absurdly beautiful and overcompensate by becoming infuriated “ascetic”)

Just insert a few of them into conversation and watch me go off the charts into auto-rant crazed fanatic mode.

JOINED this group “WE ♥ PASIR RIS” with an ironic sense of humour, but I actually do love this part of town quite a lot. Cycling around and getting out of the house is integral in my self-soothing process.

Self-soothing:

1. Cycling to the beach and reading
2. Good meals with friends
3. Reading sensible stuff eg Rowan Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Timothy Radcliffe
4. Singing aloud to Sound Of Music songs
5. Listening to Bach, schmaltzy pop or gangsta rap
6. Stroking cats and cuddling dogs

What I want to see more of:

1. Mental health techniques taught in schools and offices; better mental health in SG
2. Debate on how much income inequality is acceptable
3. Fewer touchy people everywhere, and people who actually step forward to be part of the solution
4. Less biting and butting and more reasoned debate
5. More wit and non-hurtful sarcasm in discourse
6. Arts students not being made to feel like second-class citizens.

And when it comes down to the crunch, I do love Singapore. It’s provided me with opportunities aplenty, it’s an oasis of peace in a world of communal strife — my Indian professors were very impressed with how we’ve moulded a society with people of different religions living cheek by jowl — and I love my friends and family here. I like that story — if a mother has four children, Muslim, Jew, Christian and Buddhist, which would she love best? She would love the one who took best care of the other three siblings.

If I ever get married I’d not go for the whole white church wedding thing; just get a simple civil ceremony and maybe have a void deck wedding just for the kick of it. :)

Now that I stopped kicking and screaming (notice the pattern? When I first became a Christian I was kicking and screaming too) I’ve accepted that the system isn’t as bad as I thought it was, and we’ve a good team. It really helps to have a sense of humour about it, we’re such a bizarre mix of customs and traditions and beliefs, let’s take pride in being mongrel.

Now it’s just to focus on S-E Asian studies MA and then plans for law school later. And take good care of myself, get sufficient sleep and learn to put up and maintain boundaries.

It’s just so…unfair that the weakest and most vulnerable in our society are often scapegoated, made to feel unworthy, told they’re crazy. There’s that song by Black-Eyed Peas: “Where Is The Love?” The answer to that is within each individual. We have to be willing to step forward, to be part of the solution.

To do today:
1. Sleep (at night)
2. Stop reading Crime And Punishment (it’s too taxing for me now) & read Rowan Williams.
3. Pray

There. That’s not too difficult, is it? And I have lots of time to discover theology and law, so there’s a lot to look forward to. Must be careful not to overburden myself or string myself out with yappy suddenly-startled terrier personality.

*
Thy way, not mine, O Lord,
However dark it may be,
Guide me by Thy right hand,
Choose out the path for me.

Smooth let it be or rough,
It will still be the best,
Winding or straight it leads
Right onward to Thy rest.

*

Rowan Williams’ Address at al-Azhar al-Sharif, Cairo

Saturday 11 September 2004

I am very deeply moved by the honour of being invited to address you in this place, as a guest and, I hope, as a friend. It is some twenty five years since I first visited this great city and al-Azhar mosque; and I can remember my wonder and delight at the quality of its buildings and the atmosphere of dedication and calm reflection expressed in the very stones of the walls.

I am here as a Christian, to speak to you of some of those matters which both unite us and divide us. In the world as it is now developing, it is of the most central importance that we as Christians and Muslims understand one another better. I am delighted at the continuing commitment to this process that has been shown here, a commitment evident in these last few days. And better understanding means understanding our differences as well as our common vision. In these few remarks, I want to meditate a little on the greatest theme of both Muslim and Christian faith, the doctrine of God; and I want to suggest how, despite some of our differences, we can, in the light of our belief about Almighty God, together make certain affirmations to the world about the way to peace and justice for human beings.

If I understand the doctrine of Islam correctly, its most important conviction can be expressed in the word tawhid. God is one. No being is associated with God as a second reality deserving of worship and obedience. God has no need of any being outside his own eternal and self-sufficient life. In these words, I do no more than repeat some of the most luminous and uncompromising words of the Qur’an, which I give in the new translation by Muhammad Abdel Haleem.

‘God:
there is no god but Him,
the Ever Living, the Ever Watchful.’ (al Baqara 255)

‘He is God the One,
God the eternal.
He fathered no one nor was he fathered.
No one is comparable to Him.’ (al ‘Ikhlaas 1-4)

This last text reminds the Christian that this great affirmation of the uniqueness of God is what has always caused Muslims to look with suspicion at Christian doctrines of God. Christian belief about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit appears at once to compromise the belief that God has no other being associated with him. How can we call God al Qayyuum, the Self-sufficient, if he is not alone? So we hear in al Baqara 115-117,

‘The East and the West belong to God:
wherever you turn, there is His Face.
God is all pervading and all knowing.
They have asserted, “God has a child.”
May He be exalted! No!
Everything in the heavens and earth belongs to Him,
everything devoutly obeys His will.
He is the Originator of the heavens and the earth,
and when He decrees something, He says only “Be,” and it is.’

The belief that God could have a son is, for the faithful Muslim, a belief suggesting that God needs something other than himself and is subject to the processes of limited bodies by ‘begetting’ a child. How can such a God be truly free and sovereign? For we know that he is able to bring the world into being by his word alone.

Yet these anxieties do not belong only to Muslims. Egypt was, in the first centuries of the Christian era, the location of great debates on just such matters. Indeed, without the contribution of Egypt, Christian theology would have been infinitely poorer, for many of the greatest minds of that period were natives of Alexandria. And one of the great concerns of these thinkers and their successors was this: if Christians say that the eternal Word and power of God was fully present in Jesus, son of Mary, can we avoid saying this in such a way as to imply that God is subject to a physical process, or that God has a second being alongside him? These Christian sages believed as strongly as any Muslim that God was self-sufficient and free, and that he could not be affected or limited by physical processes and did not act as a physical cause among others. They say quite explicitly that when we speak of the father ‘begetting’ the Son, we must put out of our minds any suggestion that this is a physical thing, a process like the processes of the world.

Those Christian thinkers and their successors developed a doctrine which tried to clarify this: they said that the name ‘God’ is not the name of a person like a human person, a limited being with a father and mother and a place that they inhabit within the world. ‘God’ is the name of a kind of life – eternal and self-sufficient life, always active, needing nothing. And that life is lived eternally in three ways which are made known to us in the history of God’s revelation to the Hebrew people and in the life of Jesus. There is a source of life, an expression of life and a sharing of life. In human language we say, ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, but we do not mean one God with two beings alongside him, or three gods of limited power. Just as we say, ‘Here is my hand, and these are the actions my one hand performs’, but it is not different from the actions of my five fingers, so with God: this is God, the One, the Living and Self-subsistent, but what God does is not different from the life which is eternally at the same time a source and an expression and a sharing of life. Since God’s life is always an intelligent and purposeful life, each of these dimensions of divine life can be thought of as a centre of mind and love; but this does not mean that God ‘contains’ three different individuals, separate from each other as human individuals are.

And Christians believe that this life enters into ours in a limited degree. When God takes away our evildoing and our guilt, when he forgives us and sets us free, he breathes new life into us, as he breathed life into Adam at the first. That breathing into us we call the ‘Spirit’. As we become mature in our new life, we become more and more like the expression of divine life, the Word whom we encounter in Jesus. Because Jesus prayed to the source of his life as ‘Father’, we call the eternal expression of God’s life the ‘Son’. And so too we pray to the source of divine life in the way that Jesus taught us, and we say ‘Father’ to this divine reality.

But in no way does the true Christian say that the life and action of God could be divided into separate parts, as if it were a material thing. In no way does the true Christian say that there is more than one God or that God needs some other in order to act or that God promotes some other being to share his glory. There is one divine action, one divine will; yet (like the fingers of the hand) there are three ways in which that life is real, and it is only in those three ways that the divine life is real – as source and expression and sharing. It is because of those three ways in which divine life exists that Christians speak as they do about what it means to grow in holiness.

And the Christian also says something which may again be a source of disagreement. God is a loving God, as we all agree; but, says the Christian, God does not love simply because he decides to love. He is always, eternally, loving. His very nature, his definition is love. And the interaction and relation between the three ways in which God lives, the source and the expression and the sharing, is eternally the way God exists. The three centres of divine action, which we call Father, Son and Spirit, pour out the divine life to each other for all eternity, a sort of perfect circle of giving and receiving. And the only word we can use for that relationship of pouring out and giving is love. So as we grow in holiness, we become closer and closer in our actions and thoughts to the complete self-giving that always exists perfectly in God’s life. Towards this fullness we are all called to travel and grow.

Now these are difficult matters, and the greatest minds of the Christian Church have always found them hard to put into words. But what I wish to say to you today is simply that the disagreement between Christian and Muslim is not, I believe, a disagreement about the nature of God as One and Living and Self-subsistent. For us as for you, it is essential to think of God as a life that has no limit, as a life that is free. God is never to be listed alongside other beings. All through the centuries that we call the Middle Ages, Christians, Muslims and Jews thought alike about this, and our greatest philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Maimonides and others, all worked to make this clear. They would all have agreed that only if God is alone and needs no other is he worthy of our complete worship and devotion. God is not a being who is like us, only greater and more powerful. If God were like us only much greater, we might worship him out of fear instead of giving him free obedience and love. But the true God’s freedom is infinite and he can never be limited by any definition. When we have used up all the names that human language can find for him, we shall have spoken true things of him, but never expressed the whole truth which is hidden from created minds. And so we adore him in trust and thankfulness but we accept that we shall never have him in our grasp.

Together we can acknowledge these things. And it is sad that sometimes an unfaithful or careless Christian way of speaking has led Muslims and Jews to believe that we have a doctrine of God that does not recognise the oneness and sufficiency of God, or that we worship something less than the One, the Eternal. In our conversations with Muslim friends, we Christians are rightly challenged to think more deeply, to think as our Egyptian Christian fathers did, about the unity of Almighty God.

But there is a practical consequence of this belief about the One Living God. If God is truly not a part of the world, truly self-sufficient, then his will never depends upon how things turn out in the world. We cannot work out what is just and good simply from what seems to work, from what the world finds successful or easy or popular. What is good and just is rooted in eternal truth, in the nature of God, who is what he is quite independently of what the world is and what the world thinks. The world may tell us that we should behave in such and such a way – that we should seek only to make and keep money, that we should break our promises, that we should take revenge and show no mercy, that we should take our pleasures where we like. Sometimes behaviour of this sort seems to bring success in the world. But the believer knows that no amount of worldly success can make bad things good, because nothing in the world can change the will of God, who is beyond all change and cannot be affected or weakened by any other being. So we hold to our calling to virtue and generosity and justice whatever may happen, even if, today and tomorrow, it does not make our life easy and comfortable. We struggle in our interior, spiritual battle, to be faithful to God’s will.

The greatest challenge today for our world is how to react to circumstances in a way that is faithful to God’s will. Undoubtedly, greed and revenge affect all of us. We feel that we want to defend ourselves in the way that a person without faith or hope or love would understand – in anger and bitterness and unforgiving cruelty. But when we act in such a way, we show that we do not really believe in a God who is living and self-sufficient. We do not believe that God’s will is enough; we act as though the circumstances of this world could so change things that cruelty and fear could become the right tools with which to defend ourselves.

So when the Christian, the Muslim or the Jew sees his neighbour of another faith following the ways of this world instead of the peaceful will of God, he must remind his neighbour of the nature of the one God we look to, whose will cannot be changed and who will himself see that justice is done. Once we let go of justice, fairness and respect in our dealings with one another, we have dishonoured God as well as human beings. I am deeply grateful that it was once again in this country that Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders from the Holy Land under the co-chairmanship of the Grand Imam, Dr Tantawy, signed the Alexandria Declaration together, with its commitment to respect for the rights of the peoples of the Holy Land, its call for justice, and its refusal of terror and violence. How much we still need that vision to inspire us today, as the tragedies of this region of the world continue to resist settlement!

There is no doubt that the present violence throws a deep shadow over conversations between the West and the Muslim world. Three years ago today, I was one of those who shared just a little in the terrible experience of the events in New York. I was in a building just a short distance from the World Trade Centre that morning, and for a while I and my colleagues were trapped there; we were among those fortunate enough to be able to get out of the area just as the second tower collapsed, and we saw at first hand something of the nightmare and the suffering of that day.

On the day after, I was asked by a journalist for some of my reactions. I said that when someone spoke to us in the language of hatred or abuse, we had a choice about what language we might use to reply. So when someone ’spoke’ to us in violence and murder, we could choose what we should do. We may rightly want to defend ourselves and one another – our people, our families, the weak and vulnerable among us. But we are not forced to act in revengeful ways, holding up a mirror to the terrible acts done to us. If we do act in the same way as our enemies, we imprison ourselves in their anger, their evil. And we fail to show our belief in the living God who always requires of us justice and goodness.

So whenever a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew refuses to act in violent revenge, creating terror and threatening or killing the innocent, that person bears witness to the true God. They have stepped outside the way the faithless world thinks. A person without faith, hope and love may say, If I do not use indiscriminate violence and terror, there is no safety for me. The believer says, My safety is with God, whose justice can never be defeated. If I defend myself, I seek to do so only in a way that honours God and God’s image in others, and that does not offend against God’s justice. To seek to find reconciliation, to refuse revenge and the killing of the innocent, this is a form of adoration towards the One Living and Almighty God.

This is why it is important to be clear about the God we worship. There is, as you will have seen, a great difference between what I as a Christian must say and what the Muslim will say; but we agree absolutely that God has no need of any other being, and that God is not a mixture or a society of different beings. And if we are committed to this God, we shall be able to do justice and act rightly even when the world around us expects us to follow its own violent ways.

And just as I have said that Christians have sometimes spoken carelessly about God and led others to think they believe less than they truly do, so all of us, Jews, Muslims and Christians, have sometimes spoken carelessly and let people think that we live by the same standards as those who have no faith or love, appearing to encourage violence and terror. If we look back to the Alexandria Declaration, we see how it is possible for all of us, in the light of our conviction about God, to be committed to something different from the world’s ways; there we find a promise to approach each other with respect and patience and to turn away from open battle, even when we feel threatened by each other. There too we find the common commitment not to use the name of God to justify violence and injustice. It has been impressive to hear in recent days the strength and clarity with which so many Muslim nations and Muslim leaders have condemned the unspeakable atrocities in Beslan. The common commitment of Muslims and Christians, as of all people of compassion, hope and intelligence, is not for a moment in doubt in this context.

In our own country, we have recently conducted a process in which Muslims and Christians together have listened to the concerns and hopes of many local communities, and we are now hoping to set up a national forum in which the anxieties of Muslim communities may be expressed and freely discussed. And we have also been discussing how each of the religious communities in Britain should react when any one of them is under threat or open attack – so that we hope a Christian community will give support to local Muslims if a mosque is attacked, and Muslims may do the same for local Jews if a synagogue is attacked or a cemetery desecrated, and Muslims and Jews will stand alongside Christians when they are abused and attacked. We pray that this willingness to stand alongside each other will be shared in other nations.

We believe that in such local ways we can, despite our disagreements, show to the world a different standard of behaviour, one that is worthy of the all-powerful and self-sufficient God we worship, worthy of him in a way that crusades and terrorism and oppression are not. All of us need to be able to repent before God for our errors and for the ways in which we are enslaved by a greedy and fearful world. But as our Christian scriptures say, we must not be conformed to this world but transformed, with our minds renewed (Romans 12.2).

If we truly understand the nature of our God, our minds will be renewed. We do not only teach truths about God, we allow those truths to change our lives. May we all find the strength and the courage from Almighty God to honour him by seeking peace together in fairness and respect and thanksgiving for each other.

‘To be one of those who believe
and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion.’ (al Balad 17).

And as Jesus says in our own Christian Scriptures,

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
For they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
For they will be shown mercy…
Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they will be called children of God (Matthew 5.6-7, 9).

© Rowan Williams 2004

*

From The Economist

Jul 24th 2008

Conversion has been seen as an act whose consequences are as much social and political as spiritual; and it has been assumed that the wider community, in the form of the family, the village or the state, has every right to take an interest in the matter. The biggest reason why conversion is becoming a hot international topic is the Muslim belief that leaving Islam is at best a grave sin, at worst a crime that merits execution (see article). Another factor in a growing global controversy is the belief in some Christian circles that Christianity must retain the right to seek and receive converts, even in parts of the world where this may be viewed as a form of cultural or spiritual aggression.

The idea that religion constitutes a community (where the loss or gain of even one member is a matter of deep, legitimate concern to all other members) is as old as religion itself. Christianity teaches that the recovery of a “lost sheep” causes rejoicing in heaven; for a Muslim, there is no human category more important than the umma, the worldwide community of believers.

But in most human societies the reasons why conversion causes controversy have little do with religious dogma, and much to do with power structures (within the family or the state) and politics. Conversion will never be seen as a purely individual matter when one religiously-defined community is at war or armed standoff with another. During Northern Ireland’s Troubles a move across the Catholic-Protestant divide could be life-threatening, at least in working-class Belfast—and not merely because people felt strongly about papal infallibility.

And in any situation where religion and authority (whether political, economic or personal) are bound up, changes of spiritual allegiance cause shock-waves. In the Ottoman empire, the status of Christians and Jews was at once underpinned and circumscribed by a regime that saw religion as an all-important distinction. Non-Muslims were exempt from the army, but barred from many of the highest offices, and obliged to pay extra taxes. When a village in, say, Crete or Bosnia converted en masse from Christianity to Islam, this was seen as betrayal by those who stayed Christian, in part because it reduced the population from which the Ottomans expected a given amount of tax.

In the days of British rule over the south of Ireland, it was hard for Catholics to hold land, although they were the overwhelming majority. An opportunistic conversion to the rulers’ religion was seen as “letting the side down” by those who kept the faith. Similar inter-communal tensions arose in many European countries where Jews converted to Christianity in order to enter university or public service.

In most modern societies, the elaborate discrimination which made religious allegiance into a public matter is felt to be a thing of the past. But is this so? In almost every post-Ottoman country, traces exist of the mentality that treats religion as a civic category, where entry and exit is a matter of public negotiation, not just private belief. Perhaps Lebanon, where political power is allocated along confessional lines (and boat-rocking changes of religious affiliation are virtually impossible) is the most perfectly post-Ottoman state. But there are other holdovers. In “secular” Turkey, the Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish minorities have certain poorly observed rights that no other religious minority enjoys; isolated Christians, or dissident Muslims, face great social pressure to conform to standard Sunni Islam. In Greece, it is unconstitutional to proselytise; that makes life hard for Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons. In Egypt, the fact that building a Christian church requires leave from the head of state is a direct legacy of a (liberalising) Ottoman decree of 1856.

But the Ottoman empire is by no means the only semi-theocratic realm whose influence is still palpable in the governance of religious affairs, including conversion. In an odd way, the Soviet Union continued the legacy of the tsars by dividing citizens into groups (including Jews or some Muslim ethnicities) where membership had big consequences but was not a matter of individual choice. In post-Soviet Russia, the prevailing Orthodox church rejects the notion of a free market in ideas. It seeks (and often gets) state preference for “traditional” faiths, defined as Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. This implies that other forms of Christianity are “poaching” if they seek to recruit Russians.

But issues of conversion are also painful in some former territories of the British empire, which allowed its subjects to follow their own communal laws. Take India, which once aspired to be a secular state, and whose constitution calls for a uniform civil code for all citizens. That prospect is now remote, and the fact that different religious groups live by different family laws, and are treated unequally by the state and society, has created incentives for “expedient” conversion. A colourful body of jurisprudence, dating from the British Raj, concerns people who changed faith to solve a personal dilemma—like men who switched from Hinduism to Islam so as to annul their marriage and wed somebody else. In 1995, the Supreme Court tried to stop this by saying people could not dodge social obligations, or avoid bigamy charges, by changing faith. What India’s case law shows, says Marco Ventura, a religious-law professor, is the contrast between conversion in rich, liberal societies and traditional ones, where discrimination tempts people to make tactical moves.

And in many ways religious freedom is receding, not advancing, in India. Half a dozen Indian states have introduced laws that make it hard for people to leave Hinduism. These states are mostly ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But last year Himachal Pradesh became the first state led by the more secular Congress party to bring in such legislation: such is the power of Hindu sentiment that even non-religious parties pander to it.

The state’s new law is billed as a “freedom of religion” measure, but it has the opposite effect: anyone wishing to switch faiths must tell the district magistrate 30 days before or risk a fine. If a person converts another “by the use of force or by inducement or by any other fraudulent means”, they can be jailed for up to two years, fined, or both. Local pastors say “inducement” could be taken to mean anything, including giving alms to the poor.

Supporters of such laws say proselytisers, or alleluia wallahs, are converting poor Hindus by force. It is true that Christian evangelism is in full swing in parts of India, especially in its eastern tribal belt, and that it enjoys some success. Officially, fewer than 3% of India’s 1.1 billion people are Christian. But some Christians say the real total may be double that. Christian converts, most of whom are born as dalits at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, often hide their new faith for fear of losing their rights to state jobs and university places kept for the lower castes.

But it is unlikely that many Hindu-to-Christian switches are forced. In states with anti-conversion laws, credible allegations of conversion under duress have very rarely been made.

Anyway, India’s arguments have more to do with politics than theology. Hindutva, the teaching that India is a Hindu nation and that Christians and Muslims are outsiders, has been a vote-winner for the BJP. Even in Himachal Pradesh, voters were unmoved by the Congress party’s attempt to ride the religious bandwagon; the BJP still won the latest elections.

The contest between theocratic politics and a notionally secular state looks even more unequal in another ex-British land, Malaysia, where freedom of choice in religion is enshrined in the federal constitution, but Islamic law is imposed with growing strictness on the Muslim majority.

Until the mid-1990s, say Malaysian civil-rights advocates like Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, the federal authorities enforced religious freedom; the National Registration Department, a federal agency, would comply when anybody asked to record a change of religion. More recently, both that agency and Malaysia’s top judges have deferred to the sharia courts, which enjoy increasing power in all 13 states of the Malaysian federation; and those courts rarely let a registered Muslim quit the fold. A recent exception was an ethnic Chinese woman who was briefly married to an Iranian; a sharia court let her re-embrace Buddhism, but only on the ground that she was never fully Muslim, so the idea of “Once a Muslim, always a Muslim” remained intact.

A more telling sign of the times was the verdict in the case of Lina Joy, a Malay convert from Islam to Christianity who asked a federal court to register the change on her ID card. By two to one the judges rejected her bid, arguing that one “cannot, at one’s whims or fancies, renounce or embrace a religion”. Too bad, then, for any Malaysians who have a moment of truth on the subway, especially if the faith to which they are called happens not to be Islam.

*

Finished reading Moses Tay biography. Interesting. I want to read some Martha Nussbaum on disgust and shame and the law.

From Booklist

A citizen filled with grief or anger may advance the cause of liberal equity, but a citizen filled with disgust never will. So argues an acclaimed legal theorist in this sophisticated exploration of how emotions enlarge or contract the nation’s commitment to equal dignity for all. Nussbaum insists that no strictly intellectual approach to law will ever illuminate the true reasons humans join in self-governing unions. Because they reflect humans’ true vulnerability, the emotions of fear, compassion, and indignation provide guides to sound legal philosophy, but disgust, Nussbaum argues, should never form an emotional basis for law because it springs–in her view–from fantasies of superhuman purity and omnipotence. Too scholarly for most casual readers, Nussbaum’s analysis nonetheless treats topics (such as same-sex marriage and nudity) sure to interest nonspecialists–many of whom will find her theories about disgust and shame too psychoanalytic to justify her support for judges who have frustrated electorates motivated by such passions. Populists and communitarians will lock horns with legal theorists in the debates this book will provoke. — Bryce Christensen

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

FOR the benefit of those who’re not my facebook friends (feel free to add me, comrades) or who are blocked behind the Great Firewall of China. My spying missions have been singularly unlucky. First I got heatstroke on Ubin. Then I get rained on in Pasir Ris just as I take my sensitive electronic equipment out with me. And I’ve also turned into the Crazy Cat Lady in the park. :(

*

Neighbours torturing the rabbit!

Lovely unidentified flowering tree, but with sign of rot.

SG: Only place where you get litter on trees.

Cloud haven spoiled by “no swimming” sign.

For a good time, call this number.

This is how we break their spirit!

Cloud cuckoo land

Strange shores

As lightning to the children eased with explanation kind, the truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.

If you’re not careful we will 抓 you to paint trashcans!

Litterers! We will sentence them to paint/live in trashcans!

Stray cats! We know where you live! We will 抓 you and castrate you!

Looking for the “instant death acupoint”!

什么？! Zombie cat shows sign of life!

Webaba silale maweni
Webaba silale maweni
Webaba silale maweni
We are homeless, homeless
Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake.
Note: colours of national flag.

Wow!

Web of lies!

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly.

Beware! The wind is changing!

The long and winding road…

Rainbow connection is left high and dry.

Cross-strait tension!

Running dog!!

Bwahaha…you can run but you can’t hide!

Confused identity…Mussolini or Kempeitai?!

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

- John 10:10

Et plus la terre est aride, et plus cet amour est grand
Comme un mineur à sa mine, un marin à son océan
Plus la nature est ingrate, avide de sueur et de boue
Parce que l’on a tant besoin que l’on ait besoin de nous
Elle porte les stigmates de leur peine et de leur sang
Comme une mère préfère un peu son plus fragile enfant

- Goldman, Il y a

IT’S okay, I don’t have to please everybody…I just have to know who I am and stand firm in my faith.

From Rowan Williams’ Christmas sermon last year:

“At some level we all recognise this, because we’ve all seen something like it at work in our family lives and even our closest friendships. Depending on each other, receiving and learning, are natural things, natural expression of closeness and trust. Yet we have over the long millennia of human existence created a whole culture in which there is a basic impatience about learning - we want to get to the point where we can say, OK that’s enough, I know what I need to know - and about receiving - we don’t want to be indebted to others, we want to stand on our own two feet. Like many in this congregation, I suspect, I can hear voices from my parents’ and grandparents’ generation saying they don’t want charity, they don’t want to be beholden, they don’t want handouts from the state or anywhere else. There’s something brave and admirable about much of this when what it represents is a generous unwillingness to burden others. But it can also reflect a stubborn hankering after a life that is under my management and doesn’t need support from outside.

One of the worst effects of this culture of impatience and pride is what it does to those who are most obviously dependent - the elderly, those with physical or psychological challenges and disabilities, and, of course, children. We send out the message that if you’re not standing on your own two feet and if you need regular support, you’re an anomaly. We’ll look after you (with a bit of a sigh), but frankly it’s not ideal. And in the case of children, we shall do our level best to turn you into active little consumers and performers as soon as we can. We shall test you relentlessly in schools, we shall bombard you with advertising, often highly sexualised advertising, we shall worry you about your prospects and skills from the word go; we shall do all we can to make childhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the way to the real thing - which is ‘independence’, turning you into a useful cog in the social machine that won’t need too much maintenance.

In the last year, the issues around how we regard childhood in our society have been opened up for discussion with new intensity by a number of important pieces of research like the Children’s Society’s Good Childhood report or the Cambridge Review of primary education. There has at last been a wake-up call about the ways in which we are crushing and narrowing children’s experience; and there is a long and significant agenda there for debate in the months ahead.

But behind the details, there is one central issue. Can we as a society accept and even celebrate the fact that there is a place for proper and mature dependence - that human beings need to receive and learn: not so that they can get to the point where they stop receiving and learning, but so that they can acquire the habits of receiving and learning in ever-new settings? Can we help children enjoy their dependency so that they don’t just leave it behind but get to manage it with freedom and imagination as they grow older?

And that involves two difficult lessons for us adults. One is simply to reconnect ourselves to our own capacity to receive and learn with joy and excitement - to become like little children, as Somebody once said. The other is to be ready to give the nurture and security that children need - to create the safe places where they can learn, where they can make their mistakes. To do this is to show that we treasure dependency and that we shan’t either exploit it or ignore it. Embracing and celebrating our own dependence gives us the vision and energy to make sure that others have the freedom to make the most of their dependence too. And this means working to give all the children of the world the security they need.

In our own society, there are problems enough - children who have never known stability in their family life, who have never known a father or who have been pushed into taking responsibility for a parent or for brothers and sisters, with a mother who is ailing, addicted or otherwise incapacitated; children with workaholic parents, materially well off but deprived of warmth and relaxation with their family; worse still, children and young people who are systematically exploited through sex trafficking, children who are trapped in gang culture. Worldwide, all these problems and more are all too visible; perhaps one of the most appalling phenomena, still affecting hundreds of thousands of children, is the exploiting of children in the meaningless and savage civil wars in places like Congo and Sri Lanka - children who are abducted, brutalised, turned into killers, used as sex slaves. To hear of these experiences is almost unbearable, yet the scandal continues.

These children are created, like all of us, to become fully and consciously children of God, to enjoy that glory we reflected on a few minutes ago. Their suffering is an insult to the purpose of God, a contemptuous refusal of the gift of God on the part of those who keep them in their different kinds of slavery. God’s gift at Christmas is relationship, not just another human relationship but relation to God the Father by standing where Jesus stands, standing in the full torrent of his love and creativity, giving and receiving. To come into that place and to be rooted and grounded there means letting go of our fear of dependence and opening our hearts to be fed and enlarged and transformed. And that in turn means looking at how we handle dependence in ourselves and others, how we accept the positive dependence involved in lifelong learning and growing, and help one another deal with it positively.

So the important thing is not that everyone gets to stand on their own two feet and turns into a reliable ‘independent’ consumer and contributor to the GNP. What we expect from each other in a generous and grown-up society is much more to do with all of us learning how to ask from each other, how to receive from each other, how to depend on the generosity of those who love us and stand alongside us. And that again means a particular care for those who need us most, who need us to secure their place and guarantee that there is nourishment and stability for them. As we learn how to be gratefully dependent, we learn how to attend to and respond to the dependence of others. Perhaps by God’s grace we shall learn in this way how to create a society in which real dependence is celebrated and safeguarded, not regarded with embarrassment or abused by the powerful and greedy.”

READING Born For Blessing by the first Anglican Archbishop of the Province of SE Asia Moses Tay now…someone who’s “deeply spiritual, clear-headed, mentally tough and organisationally highly competent”. I wish there’s more material in English about our Muslim and Buddhist leaders.

Also discovering the strange world that is CC and PA activity…Pasir Ris East CC Adult Catwalk Club, anyone?? I live in a truly strange and bizzare country.

I do like this estate though, we’re close to the beach, there’s Changi Village close by and very nice holiday vibes with the loads of kids and teens who descend like Goths and Vandals upon our town for entertainment as they stay overnight in the chalets, roasting bits of meat and yelling at the top of their voices, terrorising pedestrains as they pedal furiously on their bicycles.

There’s even a mangrove boardwalk where we can gawp at egrets and mudskippers. SG isn’t that bad, lah.

*

I’ve always rooted for the underdog, which is why I’ve always been anti-PAP. I’m also not fond of bullies. But slicing through the bullshit, let’s look at the *real* problems and how to solve them.

WHEN I grow up I want to be just like her. When I have my bitch I’ll name the dog Martha after Martha Nussbaum and Martha Argerich.

MARTHA NUSSBAUM INFO LINKS (from FB group The Spirited Debates Of Martha Nussbaum):

University of Chicago’s Nussbaum page:
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/nussbaum

New York Magazine Profile of Martha Nussbaum:
http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=55

Nussbaum wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Nussbaum

RECENT NEWS:

04-18-08–Martha Nussbaum defends religious liberty on PBS’s Bill Moyers. (Video)
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04182008/watch2.html

06-22-06–Martha Nussbaum’s scorching criticism of conservative scholar Harvey Mansfield’s book, Manliness.
http://www.powells.com/review/2006_06_22.html

05-27-04–Nussbaum slams the anti-intellectualism of President Bush, takes her red pen to Heidegger, and reveals her favorite composers, authors, and philosophers.
http://themorningnews.org/archives/people/martha_nussbaum.php

02-22-99–Martha Nussbaum admonishes feminist Judith Butler and rips her scholarship to shreds.
http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf

06-94–Gerard V. Bradley accuses Nussbaum of perjurious testimony in the case of Colorado’s 2nd Amendment.
http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9406/opinion/opinion.html

11-05-87–The article that launched Martha Nussbaum to fame in her review of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (subsription required)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=4618

11-10-85–Nussbaum trashes Michel Foucault for his “retreat from the principles that defined his career” and calls Volume II of The History of sexuality “mediocre” and “dragged down by vagueness and incompleteness.”
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/specials/foucault-use.html

*

Watching the way the opposition is handling pre-elections is like an anxious mother hoping her retard child won’t crash into the edge of the sharp glass table. And sometimes you just want to slap the retard!

Anyway, I’ve friended Teo Chee Hean on FB.

A: Dear Sir, I’m a resident of Pasir Ris and I remember seeing you campaigning with a broken leg.
B: Dear Yvonne, welcome. My leg is fully recovered now, thanks.
A: Dear Sir,

I’m glad to hear that. I assume you didn’t get treated at Ren Ci Hospital.

http://www.renci.org.sg/Home.aspx

Yours sincerely,
Yvonne.
B: Ren Ci does good work. I am glad that you are rooting for them.

He’s good. May the Force be with him.

Monday, February 20, 2006
Gradgrind

First-hand accounts of being attacked by a crow and funny stories of bizarre calls to news stations about white cockroaches while meeting friends today. I love meals with Sharon, both of us love our food a lot and she’s always been my faithful eating partner — had some really good winter melon with black fungus and century egg at the Holland V Crystal Jade, together with nice clear soups and noodles (which weren’t too impressive), and xiaolongbao, of course.

In any case, was talking of work and interviews. I really do like interviews for good and sharp-eyed interviewers know how to cut down to the heart of the matter, it’s a finely honed art of conversation and exchange.

The index cards are just the tip of the iceberg when it came to what D taught me. There’s a fascinating quality to the way trained minds work. It’s the same with those brilliant bankers or lawyers I’ve come across — there are certain steps and approaches you go through. These are problem-solving skills that I believe everybody should know, and they’ve come in handy when you come across surprise questions during interviews that test how you react and how you think. It’s the same for writing academic papers, for coming up with proposals and business strategies, for knowing how to tackle some silly romance novel trend story, for coming up with a hypothesis, for research of any kind — you’ve to learn how to get a firm grasp of the facts, how to know which ones to tackle, how to manage resources and people and how to sell your product.

I’ve said that I get along swimmingly with type-A consultant types, it’s not just cos they’re cosmopolitan and well-travelled. It’s a certain elegant brand of cool hard logic, I like the way their minds work — like a well-crafted and cared for machine, clean and sharp. There’s a rigorous discipline in analysing things and theories. I like how they make me challenge my assumptions, how you learn as you’re being proved wrong. It’s like an elegant game of chess, a very fine game.

In Gaudy Night, Harriet Vane said that if you learned to tackle a subject well, really well, you’ve the capability to tackle any subject. She’s right. Which is why I’ve no patience with the prejudiced idiots who think liberal arts majors are fuzzy thinkers who lose out to the engineers and the computer scientists. Granted, many literary studies are just a confused mess of current fads and a poor grasp of economics (dude, if you’re going to read Negri and Hardt etc and sprinkle Marxist theories of production in your paper as a show that you’ve waded through Spivak’s jargon please make sure you’ve some grounding in economics at the very least) that give the field a bad name, but hell, I can be as unrelenting as you are in the research hunt and in coming up with creative solutions and elegant arguments. Bleeding heart liberals (sigh, I’m still one of them) could also do with some good training in the capitalist consultant approach.

Okay, dear readers, those of you who’ve the patience will be my teaching guinea pigs as I try to jot down the bones of it all, so I won’t forget. If only my economics teacher in JC had been anything like my ex or like those other economists I’ve come across, sigh. But it’s never too late to learn.

>> How to think about problems

Boils down to careful and high-quality analysis of components of a problem, combined with bold, flexible and aggressive attitude towards fact gathering.

- Keep asking why something is done that way, is it the best way it can be done. Be fundamentally skeptical.

- Solution will be fact-based, structured and hypothesis driven.
- Know how to handle information, be structured about gathering facts, draw up initial hypothesis.
- If you come in totally green, facts facts facts are crucial. I speak as a total generalist as most people in the media start out. They make your research credible, gives it heft. Hunt facts and use them.

- MECE: mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. Structures thinking with maximum clarity and completeness.
- How to start? Draw up initial hypothesis — theory to be proved or disproved. If wrong, proving it wrong will yield info that’ll help point you in the right direction. Digest as much of the literature as possible, use latest publications, absorb jargon and current issues. Seek out people who can crunch down the facts behind the field.
- Grasp different components of issue, lay out in problem-solving map. Is this the best hypothesis you can come up with? Have you covered all important bases? Useful to get feedback at this point from someone who will test and try your thinking — this is where mentors and supervisors come in useful.

>> Approach

- Diagnosis: find the real problem. Get facts, ask questions, dig deeper.
- Make use of templates and approaches others have used before to structure your data. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
- Identify forces at work: elements of the problem. What external and internal changes are affecting your field? Which factors are the most important?
- Framework builds snapshot of environment you’re dealing with.
- Don’t make facts fit your hypothesis: or, academic integrity. Avoid mental inflexibility and the temptation to stick to your original idea.
- Know limits of your operating field: Can it be implemented? A big problem for many of the most beautiful academic papers — elegant and intelligent but naive (eg Marxist literary theory). There’s a difference between being bold and visionary and breaking down walls and happily ignoring the limits within which you have to work.

(I’m a great one for fact-based data — which is why dealing with govt ministries sometimes drove me up the wall when I was reporting. For fuck’s sake we’re not trying to overthrow the govt or undermine society — it’s just that there ARE problems and we can’t talk about them without getting the facts. Just one of the many that came to mind was the problem of what I think could be high drop-out rates for students studying a third language. Darling MOE gave no response to my queries. Thought of printing out surveys and going down to the school to give them out but you met resistance at every level, plus the darling seasoned reporters and supervisors gave no help to this fresh young grad with no formal journalism training. Coupled with having to do bloody filler fluff stories I was too tired and too irate to want to pursue this further.

So then I realised the need to develop another skill — to see the political forces at work and people covering their own asses and how to find or charm your way around such rubbish — what’s in it for them to want to help you? — ie recognise the limits within which you have to work. Hone persuasive skills etc. If being nice doesn’t work try other methods of pressure — if the information is really important and if you’re not doing the devil’s work.)

- Sometimes brick walls are brick walls, dinosaurs are dinosaurs. Learn to know when to back off and conserve resources. Don’t keep pounding, you do your head no good.
- Redefine the problem, or tweak your way instead of instituting change all at one go. If you can charm the charmless bureaucrats, fine. If not, move on.

>>Getting down to action

- 80/20 data arrangement and analysis.
- Resist temptation to analyse everything. Find key drivers, most important factors. Cf engineers’ square law of computation.
- Can you explain the problem and your hypothesis or solution to a reasonably intelligent reader in a newspaper column, or an interested stranger in a cafe? If you can, you understand what you’re doing well enough to sell your work.
- Make a summary, a chart, jot down what new things you’ve learnt each day when you’re trying to craft facts into your argument.
- Look at big picture. *Take step back, look at what you’re trying to achieve and ask if it really matters. Why does it matter?

- If you don’t know, say you don’t know. Admit when you’ve got no clue. (a)Integrity and builds up trust (b)Don’t underestimate those you’re trying to bluff (c)Saves time and effort.

Journos can also take a page out of how the consultants do interviews. There are all these skills drilled into them — when I found out I couldn’t believe SPH set me out on the streets without any training — you are a discredit to yourself and to the company when you waste your interviewee’s time with fluff.

And there should be basic training on how to read annual reports and number crunch. I’m gonna pick you economists’ brains for that.

Then yep, there’re the marketing skills and the charm and the interpersonal factor, the ability to move in different cultures and network in different places, but I’ll leave that for another day.

The problem with some of these consultants/banker sorts who are brill and know it:

- Arrogance. Hidden beneath their manners of course but the signs are there. Plus I think the long hours and stress do put strain on their interactions with others — some are unfailingly polite and courteous at work but turn into snarling monsters with waitstaff and close ones whom they think can/should take their temper. Ugly.

- Too academic. More factors to the problem than computations and numbers crunching. If you can handle the politics of the organisation and have an understanding and ability to negotiate with human frailty and compassion and loyalty and fundamental messiness (why do you think some of these managers give you hell?) you’ll go further. If you work at some Firm, look, we all know you’ve got the brains and the determination and the willingness to slog for your client. But you also need guts and a large dose of heart, I think, or you run the danger of being too calculative and too dry.

- Power hungry. What and who are you working for, my dear slick operator? What do you value and why? Ah well, all the many problems of the clouded human heart. Some are also very insecure, and driven by insecurity.

- One-way communication. I don’t feel comfortable with some people because I’m naturallly garrulous and often unguarded and they just sit there nodding acting like a human sponge. Okay, okay, I know I’m loud and talkative and I like the sound of my own voice. Shut up. But I’m conscious of the ways they try to mine me for information. I’m happy to oblige yet please give me some indication of what you really think instead of squirrelling away information into your capacious accordian-folder file of a brain and nodding away with your beady eyes. It’s about exchange, dammit, that’s the way relationships should work. It’s one of the reasons why I’m uncomfortable with this blog, why I know some people have shut theirs down, but what the hell, compute away my dear walking “Intel Insides”, I can’t police you or tell you what to do or what you think and voicing my thoughts has the benefit of making them clearer to me. But arguments and research always benefit from other people’s input.

(If I were to do a blue book on S’pore it’d be about the flow of information and the inefficiencies of the channels and the price of withholding information. It’s a very fascinating topic — how effective are the shrouded agencies? how effective is clamping down? what are the costs of being a charmless control freak? the problems of being constrained by hierarchy and insecurity.

Look at best practices in other countries, look at management principles in the top firms — how ideas from the youngest consultant to the most seasoned director are debated with equal rigour in some firms — talented youngsters don’t just want to challenge, they want to be challenged, and one way of doing that is to pick their ideas apart and let them learn. Okay, can rant on forever but some of the many things I’ve to learn are to (a) know when to shut up and (b) pitch right tone and vocabulary in different situations.

Another area that sorely needs a blue book — this scholar system. There are a thousand glaring inefficiencies I can see. It costs the scholars and it costs the scholarship boards. Pay me and I’ll get together a team and write you a bloody research report taking apart the problem and sell you a solution.)

And they know their problems and they are satisfied still. *shrug*

Those who are wonderful human beings and generous and forgiving and humble and can dance and laugh often and laugh at themselves — can give up the salary to work for NGOs — know that their successes are not due solely to themselves — can respect difference and respect people and are genuine — those people you look out for, befriend and never let go of. Which is why I miss university so much, all the brightest sparks are concentrated there but you find your own company and those who become true friends are lovely lovely lovely people. Coming back to work was a shock because you’ve to learn to muck around with a strange blend of arrogance and stupidity. But it’s a good lesson in humility, and it shows me how academics in the humanities at least cannot afford to be some jargon-spouting faddish Marxist theorist post everything.

In any case I think the government should send a top few out on attachments to McKinsey or similar, let them come back and train more people. Couple that sort of rigorous training with guts and a sense of social accountability that the best administrators have and I think you’ve a pretty good civil service.

Ah well back to reading my romance novels and flipping through interior design magazines and painting my nails pink. What else can an English major do? *flips hair*

*

Reminded of this because of what my former boss — well he wasn’t my boss but I was doing Review pages for him — wrote:

While in the West, especially Britain and the US, after a prolonged flirtation with soft options in education, is trying to claw its way back to the traditional centre, Singapore, after a prolonged insistence on rigour, seems to be discovering there is something to be said for a “kinder and gentler” approach, after all.

Its new emphasis on the arts and sports is an attempt to recover some of the grace and delight that we may have lost as a result of a narrow insistence on academic rigour. There can hardly be a parent who would object to this.

At the risk of being unpopular, though, let me sound three warnings.

First, contrary to the suggestion in the word “soft”, there is nothing easy about art, music or literature. We can’t insist on uniformly high standards for all students in these areas, but we shouldn’t allow the assupmtion to take root that the “soft” subjects are easy.

Second, contrary to the suggestion in the word “hard”, there is nothing lumpish about the sciences. Again, we can’t insist on uniformly high standards for all in these areas, but we shouldn’t allow the assumption to take root that the “hard” subjects can’t be as full of surprise and delight — as creative and human — as the “soft” ones.

And finally, being “holistic” entails more than adding together the parts — a bit of maths, a bit of art, a bit of civics, a bit of sports, et cetera. The whole is more than the sum of its parts — but only if the parts are actively made whole. If it is easy to be holistic, to reconcile what C.P. Snow once called “the two cultures”, any number of famous programmes — Harvard’s “core curriculum”, Chicago’s “Great Books”, et cetera — would have accomplished the feat. They haven’t.

I’M REREADING Crime And Punishment because I like to torture myself; I’ve also had some hard decisions to make after deciding to stay on in SG.

There are people who are guarded and paranoid, with the wildest of ambitions — there are also people who project their negativity who are draining; I’m steering clear of psychic vampires like that. But keeping all that anger towards bullshit within me wasn’t good at all: I felt like I was dying inside — I’m usually pretty Pollyanna-like but I’ve a very sarcastic, curmudgeonly side when exposed to hypocrisy; caustic commentary like The Flying Rodent kept me afloat.

Was “invited” to join the Tampines Changkat PAP FB group; was afraid of the baying hounds but what the hell, you get tired of the political correctness all the time. Decided to “friend” some politicians too out of curiosity, and also because I sense they are genuine people — I genuinely like Tharman, George Yeo, Teo Chee Hean, for instance. And if you strip it all away they are constructive, they are builders, they contribute.

Of course there are things that are unfair about the SG political system…and we can make our points of view known. But it’s so stupid to engage in black-and-white thinking; to exocet missile the other party — you just learn to read the field as it is and serve. It’s always, always about service. You are lucky enough to be in a position to serve others — once lust for power and money comes into the picture the Devil’s afoot at the door.

Have been reading The People Of The Lie and Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society lately, and learning to say no to energy drains. I do not like people who pour their negativity into an argument: “I am angry about some bullshit. I am always angry about some bullshit or another.” Come on, be part of the solution and stop sniping from behind closed doors. Get out of your house. Hug your neighbour. Volunteer. Truly engage with the issues at hand instead of biting and butting like some rabid England football supporter shoved into a German van.

Some friends are “fair-weather” ones; that’s fine — you just learn to keep your personal boundaries up and your conscience clear. I’ve never been one for anonymous cowardice.

- Cycle
- Calligraphy
- Sleep

A: If you are not providing me with alcohol, I am not interested in talking to you today.
B: If you are not providing me with KFC, I am not interested in talking to you today.

I need to say the Serenity Prayer.

“There are various essential attributes to life — particularly human life — such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may “break” a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head. Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others — to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredictability and originality, to keep them in line….Evil, then, for the moment, is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.”

- M. Scott Peck

SO I’VE been under some stress lately due to various reasons (tend to take on too much in my life, have streak of perfectionism a mile wide, possessor of highly-strung yappy terrier personality), which led me to thinking about relationships — romantic and platonic and familial and political, healthy ones and unhealthy ones…

I think the best ones are built on a foundation of strength — if you can convince yourself to go independent when you disagree with her/him, and let him/her disagree with you, if you can both sometimes go off and do your own thing, you are testing the relationship in the best possible way. There is nothing more intellectually attractive than someone who is constructive, whose every choice benefits not just herself/himself, but others as well.

It’s not a matter of playing mind-games; let’s look at it in terms of the personal boundary, which is an invisible marker of personal space and boundary — an invisible psychological circle around you that marks what you control about life from what you don’t.

When underdeveloped, undeveloped or damaged, the personal boundary is the cause of codependence, abuse, rudeness, prejudice, loneliness — if you develop a strong personal boundary, you hold a secret, invisible vault full of psychological treasure. The personal boundary provides a way to say no to some things and yes to others that lets you budget your resources wisely.

A person with holes in his personal boundary is overly stressed, oversensitive and weak of character. He has a bad day everytime the environment is bad to him and a good day only when conditions are right. If this is the case, that person cannot defend him/herself psychologically — let alone defend you.

When the boundary has holes, stress gets in whenever it wants. People who have buttons to push or are thin-skinned are immature and send potential partners running for their lives.

Suffering is the taking of your own emotional energy and spending it on the uncontrollable in your life. You lose your self-esteem by wasting it on things you don’t control. We *never* have control over other humans. You do control what’s within your boundary: likes, dislikes, attitudes, standards.

When someone says “should” often, what he’s saying is that he wishes he controlled something he does not. The personal boundary is the very thing that lets us have preferences in life. When we can’t say no to things that don’t feel like us, or feel too inhibited to say yes to things that do, we lack a sense of identity. A partner with a solid identity is someone who can be trusted.

People with holes in their boundary are prone to lie. A lie is like putting up a smokescreen over a hole in the boundary, rather than simply saying no or taking rejection gracefully. Holes in the boundary make it unlikely that the partner is able to commit toyou, and if he/she seems to, he/she will be likely to lie or cheat eventually.

We are all being steered in our lives, whether by ourselves or by others. Someone is responsible. If you have every known someone who is easily irritable, easily stressed or overwhelmed, then this person has many holes in the boundary and likely has an external locus of control. This person needs an outside force to help control his/her feelings, and self-control is unpredictable. People will see you as impatient, impulsive and unlikely to follow through on your promises. When this happens, every stress controls you instead of the other way round. The partner senses in you that you can’t take responsibility for your own negativity and emotional management. You are a boat with no oars, a ship with no sails.

An internal locus of control is the opposite. It comes from a strong boundary that lets him/her know you can resist stress. Your partner will know that no matter what happens in the environment, you are capable of keeping your composure and grace. It lets your partner know that you are as strong as he/she is, and you won’t create drama that raises his/her blood pressure, risk her/his health, his/her territory, his/her property, or his/her mission in life.

Strength is the currency of the personal boundary. It is what lets us protect others and defend ourselves in the way that the strong border of a nation does. The other party can’t merge boundaries with you if you are going to be like a sieve that drains his/her energy by sharing your worry, complaints, rage, victimisation and suffering all the time. A committed relationship is meant to give you both a shoulder to occasionally lean on, not a dumpster for either of your negativity or suffering.

I’ve learnt to think of it in terms of a sword or a shield — a shield, a boundary against stress, uses much less energy. Your boundary is a shield, and its most practical use is in the simple ability to say no to time or energy drains, to take no gracefully, and to tolerate rejection without creating drama.

Addictions (to computer games, to perfectionism, to guilt, to serial monogamy etc) are symptomatic of boundary holes and impulsive anxiety management. Codependence is a struggle between a winner and a loser. The bigger bully begins taking emotion, ideas, energy and time to himself, leaving the other person to feel depleted and afraid to break up. Someone with holes in his/her boundary is doomed to codependence as he doesn’t know a more mature way of being.

When two people first meet, they are in a state of independence. People who have just met have unique emotions, ideas, beliefs and preferences in their decisions for themselves. If you meet a passively difficult person who goes along with everything you say and then sabotages when she/he’s agreed to, you are looking at someone with holes in his boundary.

I’ve been in unhealthy partnerships/relationships before, and I think deals should only be struck when we feel full good-energy friendship. Doors only open to win-win deals and close to win-lose deals: I think of it as having a strong customs and immigration service at a national border.

This doesn’t mean I’m perfect; I’m often not. But before we enter into deals or partnerships or marriages or relationships, look out for this in yourself and your partner:

- Strong sense of ID with specific tastes and preferences
- Accountable for own tastes and preferences, but does not force them on others
- Does not suffer much over things he/she cannot control (including you). Instead, he/she works with what he does control to solve problems, accept himself/herself (aiyah I’ll just use her/she from now) and her limitations, and accepts the limitations of those around her.
- She doesn’t let anyone — including you — tell her how to feel, what to believe, or what she should or should not do.
- He doesn’t tell others what to do, be, think, or feel. He accepts them for what they are.
- She keeps her privacy to herself, honours it, and respects that of others.
- He doesn’t take on responsibility for the normal self-care of others, yet is empathetic and caring.
- She wants to grow and see you grow.
- He is good at budgeting time, energy and money.

What you learn to develop is a cool eye, the only human skill that allows change or growth…a relationship is not just about feeding him, having sex with him, and shutting up — it’s about mastering communication and finding shared life goals, beliefs and values.

What you don’t say matters. When you lie within a commitment, you put your partner at risk of failing to achieve those life goals. If you lie, the other party believes he/she has true access to you intimately when he/she really does not. Someone who lies frequently shows he/she’s not capable of truly committing to you due to the holes in his/her boundary.

A woman who lacked a good father may find herself stuck in a perpetual habit of trying to please all men at any cost while remaining helpless enough that she is always dependent on men. It’s as if she’s waiting for a good father to come along and give her an endorsement.

A solid boundary with doors lets you know what your identity and preferences are. Without a boundary that’s strong, you can’t honestly figure out what your personal life goals are. Be honest even if it feels temporarily bad. Communication is vital in a true committed relationship or partnership — it reflects honesty, prudence, balance and patience.

Beliefs are emotion-based opinions. Avoid overly judgmental people as they cannot make good partners in dealing with all of life’s challenges. You can’t afford to stake your time, energy and life on faulty information, sulking, manipulation, passive-aggressiveness or any other kind of subtle dishonesty that destroys your friendship. So learn to open and close doors selectively when it comes to people, situations and deals in your life. Your budgeting of resources is only as good as your boundary.

Allocate time, energy and resources on what’s important. When you have a good, solid boundary, you can set aside what you don’t prefer around you and set goals for the things you do prefer. You’ll buy a house before you set eyes on this partner, you’ll build a career before you know the partner’s name. You’re real, not just a dreamer, and you don’t need to wait for this partner to come along to make things possible for you. If someone comes along who will be by your side, that person is your true partner, with its/her/his health and happiness becoming intertwined with your own destiny. Hopefully, you’ve chosen well in the first place.

Setting and reaching goals is the only way to expand the size of your personal boundary. Shooting for joint goals with the right partners expands the size of your boundary you control together — this means you work together as a team to achieve goals.

When you stay true to yourself and to others about exactly who you are, what you need, and therefore what you must seek out of life, you will be much more likely to form solid partnerships and relationships with those around you. It’s also our responsibility to raise our understanding of instinct and character to the highest level we can imagine and choosing well before you even begin to make a commitment. It comes from getting real about your personal growth and being open to those entering your life who display the same skill. It’s a long series of decisions that we have to make, that we make out of our free will, without resentment or baggage. Passiveness is just waiting for someone else to make decisions for us, which can lead to cancer within a career, a relationship, the ownership of our own life.

Immature ego defences: passive-aggressiveness, denial, projection, black/white thinking, over-intellectualisation, exocet-missiling

Mature ego defences: humour, altruism, sublimation, anticipation

So look out for people with mature ego defences, who are patient and comfortable with delayed gratification, who value others’ opinions, actions and decisions, who have a good ethics of conscience, who utilise their “cool eye” — the self-monitoring ability to see their own behaviour for what it is, those who don’t harm or use others but instead help when they’ve more than enough to give, those who make win-win decisions instead of indulging in silly zero-sum games.

When two people share too much too quickly, they tend to cross into each other’s world so deeply that they can tend to lose all sense of their original, individual stories. But that’s where the simple act of using your “cool eye”, of exercising your courage and assertiveness, kicks in. I don’t believe in magical thinking. But I believe that the Universe/God/Kismet sends little opportunities for us to connect with someone else’s story, and begin a whole new path in life you’ve never thought possible.

Every now and then, we get a gift from the universe; a moment shared with a special other person. You can remain passive, or take the required action the universe is begging us to take. Decisive action is the cure. You can only make sure you’re ready when situations like these happen.

A: “The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming!” Oh I really feel for the poor ass-kicked students of Singapore with all my gibbering mind and bleeding heart. :(

A: “Chinese lessons to be tailored to ability” What’re they gonna do next, sew metal buttons onto the ACS uniform?

OH YEAH, look at me crying — it’s despair event horizon. Dude, where’s my respect? Great big tears! Great big tears! Break the Cutie!

*

The Ballad of the Bleeding Heart Liberal

My life has been a horror,
since I took up the liberal’s art.
But now I don’t feel so guilty
(It’s great to be a “bleeding heart”).

The secret of this art is easy:
just be nice to everyone.
Even to murderers and molesters
(It doesn’t matter what they’ve done).

Every guilt was on my shoulders;
now listen to my tale:
I’m responsible for all evil
(I’m white, middle-class, and male).

Villains robbed my house once,
and my family they did assault.
But this was due to society’s ills
(I knew it was not their fault).

My daughter tried to stop them;
they beat her with boot and fist.
I did not try to save her
(I’m a “born-again” pacifist).

Their actions I could not judge;
other people, I cannot condemn.
Even though my wife was “graped”
(there was a “bunch” of them).

It was the same some years before,
fighting Japs in jungle mud.
I never shot a-one of them
(couldn’t stand to see yellow blood).

In the future, when the Asian hordes
follow their brothers’ call:
They’ll outnumber Aussies ten to one
(”We’re all human”, after all).

My eldest son now condemns me,
and tells me I’m a “nong”,
because I sold my country to the Japs
(now, how could that be wrong?).

My son thinks I’m an idiot,
and he says I’ve got no hope.
But I call myself a “liberal”
(perhaps it should be “dope”?).

The Ballad of the Bleeding-Heart Liberal, 1995

*

Hah.

Trope: Minored in Ass Kicking

Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage amongst his books. For to you kingdoms and armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned by the flicking of a finger …

— Anonymous

Vegeta: Hold on… You went to college?
Nappa: Yeah.
Vegeta: What the hell could someone like you possibly major in?
Nappa: Child Psychology…
Gohan: Wow! That sounds really interesti-
Nappa: WITH A MINOR IN PAIN! *chops of Tien’s arm*

— Dragon Ball Z Abridged (though Abridged Nappa doesn’t quite fit the trope…)

The Big Guy isn’t just tough, but has a tough time of things due to The Worf Effect, being used as a punching bag to prove how dangerous the Monster Of The Week or Villain Of The Week really is. There are some characters who can avoid that trap though. This is a guy who, after displaying his prowess in combat, goes back to being the unassuming Scholar, to the point where we almost forget he’s stronger than the Lightning Bruiser.

A Smart Guy who Minored In Ass Kicking is a characters who, like targets of The Worf Effect, is among the strongest in the cast. The difference being that not only do they rarely get beat up, most anyone challenging them gets their ass handed to them.

Despite this, they probably aren’t a Boring Invincible Hero because they prefer to use their brains and/or diplomacy to solve a problem, and will gladly let the rest of the cast flex their own muscles, only intervening directly when the situation is dire. It’s this emphasis on non-combat that saves the from The Worf Barrage, by keeping their combat skills as a hidden depth they pull out maybe every fourth episode.

Despite their lifesaving combat skills, they may pose a danger to their friends when they aren’t fully in control of themselves. When mind controlled they are unbeatable because they are unrestrained, if angered they are unstoppable, and all this usually comes wrapped up in a Nice Guy package. Beware The Nice Ones, indeed.

(Sometimes, trying to Break The Cutie can have consequences. Sometimes, the nicest person in the story gets pushed to the limit of what they can take and the results… are not pretty.

The sweeter, gentler, more polite, and overall nicer a character is, especially if they’re female, the worse it will be for the planet when they’re subjected to one too many rounds of Break The Cutie, or Dude Wheres My Respect, Rant Inducing Slight, or hitting their Berserk Button. What was once a sweet and nice individual suddenly snaps and becomes something far worse then the Big Bad could have expected.

It’s called Unstoppable Rage for a reason, you know.

Things get even worse if they’re a Technical Pacifist, and worse still if they’re an Actual Pacifist, since outright villains will only kill you. If a sweet, gentle soul snaps, all you can do is pray for a quick death. )

Compare Badass Bookworm. Contrast Dumbass No More. See also Martial Pacifist.

A picture of suffering…WL’s photo of me before I collapsed from heat exhaustion :)

“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.”

– Leon Bloy

REREADING The End Of The Affair, which is one of my favourite Greenes — favourite books — ever. Sometimes I identify so much with Sarah, with that bruised and doubting sort of love, and I’m afraid of the desert too; what I identify with the most is her painful coming to faith. I keep going back to the scene where she’s praying, and realises Maurice is alive, and everything, everything in her life changes.

I find it very hard to believe in heaven; it’s more of the cross that calls to me. Odd how it doesn’t make any sense to live my life without Christianity now. It’s Truth, with a capital T — and the cross stands for integration that helps me with the emotional turbulence and rawness that comes with my sort of nature.

You can’t break off a connection that had a lot going for it without cutting yourself up dreadfully in the process…

I’d never wanted to stay in Singapore — I was in love with other cities and was in love with a man in another place; I’d wanted to go back, go back, go back; I’d planned all along for flight, I was tired of hanging in there despite the boredom and the pain, I was tired of witnessing almost unbearble suffering in some people I love. But I can’t leave now, or more accurately I won’t — I suppose there’s going forward, and I suppose going forward wouldn’t be so grim, though the path isn’t altogether clear.

I’d wanted to study literature; it seems to me that another vocation is calling. It’s — so difficult and so draining — to let go of all these deeply-rooted dreams. If you kill the love, you’ll kill the pain — but I can’t kill the love, or jeer at it as “sentimentality”, or laugh at it as “notions of escape”. Sometimes it feels like my heart’s been broken over, and over, and over again; and so to heal I come back and withdraw and read my Eliot and listen to my Bach and drink my tea and try to pray. I’m tired and I don’t want any more pain. I don’t want any more noble sacrifices; I want ordinary corrupt human love.

What I loved about another ex-boyfriend was his ability to make fun of someone with the driest, most dead-pan wit ever, but with the good sense never to cross the line into deliberate hurtfulness. My instinct when hurt is always to strike out and strike out harder, hurt as I’ve been hurt; Christ’s way of dealing with betrayal and vulnerability seems to me now to be the most sensible way forward.

This blog has been a real oasis; I calm myself down by writing myself through complicated matters, through pain. I suppose I believe in “guilt by omission” — and am tortured by my inability to live up to ideals — which is why I keep myself so busy with work of all kinds & don’t sleep well. But I also shouldn’t indule in guilt, however — guilt harasses and debilitates us, impeding our spiritual journey.

Our bikes in Ketam. I’d collapsed and was lying on the track from near heat-stroke; felt like blacking out but managed to drag self to shelter with help of friends.

Carrying our bikes across the ditch.

 

HAD a wonderful time at Ubin today…some folks backed out as they thought we were insane to go cycling in this heat at 2.30pm (ok granted I nearly blacked out from the heat along an unsheltered uphill stretch), but the five of us who did go had so much fun! I ♥ blog friends.

Ditches and grassy tracks and grassy knolls and pine trees and sea breeze…it’s great to get out of the city and hang out with friends, chat as we cycle, devour young coconuts, discuss scopes that make throats light up. Lovely scenery; great company. Folks, visit Ketam Bike Park if you’ve the time.

It’s been so good to get out and moving; I’d been feeling antsy the whole week…so much change in life recently, from giving up notions of going abroad to do my PhD (like knives in the heart), giving up the idea of doing a PhD in literature (more knives in heart), accepting Christ and thinking of my calling (tortured gibbering mind in agony), deciding the way forward (leaving room for flexibility as well)…not to mention men troubles (exes testing the waters; mistaken notions about some men; too tired to go out for dates with others).

Feel very refreshed. It’s all about good self-care. Can I hold out in the face of a major crisis? Granted I’ve seen illness in the family; helping folks through tough times; but I still don’t think I’m a very resilient creature. I tend to take on too much then burn out — good self care includes rest, exercise, reading and listening to music.

I realised to my horror and shame that I’m an abuser as well. OMG. Shot off unreserved apologies to the recipient of my abusive e-mails today and am repenting. I’d thought I was joking, but what I wanted to do was hurt — evil is that which kills spirit, which makes a person afraid to share his real thoughts and feelings.

“There are various essential attributes to life — particularly human life — such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may “break” a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head. Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others — to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredictability and originality, to keep them in line….Evil, then, for the moment, is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.”¹

Overseas folks, come visit me in SG and we can travel around the region and go cycling in Ubin and hiking near the reservoirs…I miss some of you so darn much.

*

A (on SAP schools): Yes, people are very surprised when I tell them I went to a metal-button school.

B: I think you’re a very good judge of character.
(pause)
B: Maybe it’s because we don’t like the same people.

*

Both were cannibals, Cannetti because of self-importance, her mother because of dependence.²

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