A sword of a different temper...

HOla, long time no see..too busy, i mean serious busy.

Anyways, a friend sent this over, im thinking how apt, im 29 but somehow this does sound like me....is it you?

For those in their twenty-something's...

This puts it all into words perfectly. They call it the "Quarter-life Crisis." It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are a lot of things about yourself that you didn't know and may or may not like.

You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now.

You start realizing that people are selfish and that, maybe, those friends that you thought you were so close to aren't exactly the greatest people you have ever met and the people you have lost touch with are some of the most important ones.

What you do not realize is that they are realizing that too and are not really cold or catty or mean or insincere, but that they are as confused as you.

You look at your job. It is not even close to what you thought you would be doing or maybe you are looking for one and realizing that you are going to have to start at the bottom and are scared.

You miss the comforts of college, of groups, of socializing with the same people on a constant basis. But then you realize that maybe they weren't so great after all.

You are beginning to understand yourself and what you want and do not want.

Your opinions have become stronger. You see what others are doing and find yourself judging a bit more than usual because suddenly you realize that you have certain boundaries in your life and add things to your list of what is acceptable and what is not.

You are insecure and then secure. You laugh and cry with the greatest force of your life.

You feel alone and scared and confused. Suddenly change is the enemy and you try and cling on to the past with dear life but soon realize that the past is drifting further and further away and there is nothing to do but stay where you are or move forward.

You get your heart broken and wonder how someone you loved could do such damage to you or you lay in bed and wonder why you can't meet anyone decent enough to get to know better.

You love someone but maybe love someone else too and cannot figure out why you are doing this because you are not a bad person.

One night stands and random hook ups start to look cheap and getting wasted and acting like an idiot starts to look pathetic.

You go through the same emotions and questions over and over and talk with your friends about the same topics because you cannot seem to make a decision.

You worry about loans and money and the future and making a life for yourself and while winning the race would be great, right now you'd just like to be a contender!

What you may not realize is that everyone reading this relates to it. We are in our best of times and our worst of times, trying as hard as we can to figure this whole thing out.

It takes a minute to find a special person, an hour to appreciate them, a day to love them, but then an entire life to forget them.

This week a ghost reappered in my life....an old comrade from the old gang...from Uni..I've not seen him in maybe 4 years.

We were close once, damn close, my brother and all that but a girl got in the way. His ex to be exact. They were having some problems during that time as couples would and he used to confide in me. She was seeing someone else and there were other brothers in the gang that had seen them together in the wee hours when my friend was out of town. He confided to me this and i gave him my point of view (that he should just call it quits with proof firmly in hand- i was stupid then and naive then see ;) ..but he was still in love with her i guess) Anyway to cut the manouverings short, he did try to break up with her,after one final toss on the bed (sheesh) and lo and behold he mentions my name as the source of this divine inspiration to break up. And he mentions point by point all the sightings of her and the other guy which she assumed i was the one keeping tabs on her. All hell broke loose and she came and confronted me. It was not a pretty sight. I explained that it wasn't me playing the spy game but how can you explain things to an enraged and slighted women (he broke up with her after one final episode of the horizontal lambada , for God's sake). Any one has any ideas how this can be done nicely, do tell me, its one of life's mysteries still for me.
Anyway the same day that his ex confronted me, he got word of it. So he came to see me. Through all his sorries, i just kept my mouth shut. But my glare said it all. The next day he left KL. Dissappered just like that. No goodbyes no more sorries.

Me and his ex dont have anything to do with each other now, all our friends know what transpired and i guess over time she came to know what really happened. She married last year into a prominent political family (the guy she was seeing on the sly while still with my buddy). Last time we met, things were cool enough for us to smile at each other.

Now my compadre is back in KL. Last 3 years he was in JB and he fell in love and got married to a doctor. He's come back to , as he puts it, tie up loose ends and to bury the past. He is resurrecting an old dream of the old gang doing something (business lar) together. A special enough invitation for me that he sent two brothers to come and persuade me to see him.

For me this is a bittersweet thing. i will make my peace . So these 3 days ive been pondering on friends and friendship and truth and honesty and women . hahahaha. Still as muddled up as ever. But when we embraced each other that night , i guess part of the hurt was assuaged. I did make it crystal clear what i thought of him just walking away 3 years ago...but as the night progressed, we all had a good time reliving old times. Remembering all the shit we got into together once upon a time brings a smile to my face even as im typing this.

So mistakes are forgiven and forgotten over time, and lets just get on with it.

To Sting, welcome home

oftentimes in life, things dont turn out the way way you plan it, in fact i think in the great game of life, things that you plan too much never do. I wanted to write when i grew up, now that ive grown up i seldom do. I wanted to be open and free in life and love, but lo and behold, im a conservative now. I used to throw scornful looks on the rich, elite , powerful, an anarchist in my youth definetely socialist leaning (as in the concept not the economic theory), now i find myself playing the great game to be among the wolf packs. Hahahaha the irony of it all

idealism is the right of the young, for the rest of us time marches on, ideals get buried in the dust. When youre 18 and smart, you want to save the world. If you're 28 and still smart, you realise that the world is beyond saving, better look out for numero uno. I know that sucks but its practical. You can only save yourself and if you're lucky maybe those immediately around you. Friends , family.

it wasnt always like that, at 18 i was gungho, convinced in my invincibility and the soundness of my arguments and intellect. I believed in (lost) causes, in heros, in the infallibility of elders and leaders, anti corruption, no racism, food for the poor, education for all, that right was clearly defined from the wrong, the truth just needed to be uncovered, love at first sight...

Now the operative word is practicality. I still do believe in all this things i guess, but tempered with experience and a clearer understanding of what makes humans tick. I still believe in the goodness of the human spirit but i know many lose their way fighting demons both real and imagined. Ive had my share
The world is not meant to be black and white, its grey -accept it. and yet ...

I hope that my hopes in a younger time can be seen still.
Hanya kepadaMu Tuhan aku memomohon kesempatan, tunjukkanlah jalan , permudahkan perhitungan.
-A daily prayer taken from a comic book ..a long time ago (it just struck me as so beautiful that i incorporate it in my prayers now)



An interesting thing, reading Yaser.org, taken from El Fadl's Search for Beauty in Islam.


You remember your short jalabiyya, and patchy beard, your miswak in the upper pocket a reaffirmation of power and triumph. The sparkling white head cover limited your range of vision and provided with such unencumbered clarity. Back then a single book, Riyadh al-Salihin (The Gardens of the Righteous) symbolized all that the world had to say to you and all that you had to say to others. Parts of Hayat al-Sahaba (The Lives of the Companions) would be read in the mosque and visions of a perfectly ordered, perfectly structured society would relieve the stresses of your mind. When you bought a copy of Sahih al-Bukhari, you believed that all the problems and answers of existence were contained therein. Any contradiction was a challenge and any challenge was a negation of your existence. Every time you would assure yourself, "I will commit the whole of Bukhari to memory and then..."

You remember a world streamlined into self-invented categories--simple and yielding to perfect casuality. You believed that if you do your du'aa well on Friday the rest of the week would be perfect, but if you would forget a single verse or phrase, then the order would unfold and collapse. A simple world--an authoritarian world, comfortable with its diversions, submerged in immaturity.

[...]

Music is Haram you declared...but you did not get the point. It took you years to get the point. What a world--a world streamlined and in its dimensions, fed by ignorance and sheltered by arrogance. An authoritarian world where you are the authority. A world where the magnificence of God is represented through through the authoritarian voice of a self-righteous self. A world where the Divine voice becomes imprisoned by a human voice and the human voice ascends to the throne. An essentially God-less world.

[...]

You grew, and your conscience grew. You are no longer as threatened, but you are no longer as confident and secure. You realize that while we seek to discover the Divine Will, we will never come to embody it. While we search for the truth, we are not the truth.


Beautiful aint it?

On my last post, that untermeshen remark got one of my visitors( yay i got a visitor) in a twist. Let me just clarify this. Hitler referred to the slavs (read russian), the jews, the poles, everyone else under the sun as untermeshen- subhumans. Their place was to toil and work while a great Germanic-Aryan master race lorded over them. Thus the Third Great German Empire (Reich) would last 1000 years in all its glory with the foundation built by the conquered peoples. Now i did not mean that we are Nazi's, never in my mind did it cross me that our foreign workers were slaves or untermeshen or whatever. Just thinking out loud that our achievements especially during the boom of the 80's and 90's were in part due to the efforts of foreign workers that the press, the government, us simple folks feel uneasy about.
When i was in Uni, i did a paper on Indonesian workers and their contributions to our economy. My professor said something that i remember till this day: Malaysias borders are artificial, it is porous, people of the malay stock have crossed the straits both ways since time immemorial. The Indonesian foreign workers share much in common with us- culture , religion, race. And thats why they are apt to dissapear into the malaysian malay populace-absorbed and welcomed. We intermarry, we assimilate.
And yet we feel uneasy of their presence. I think this has much to do with our perceptions that they are somehow inferior, in the same vein that singaporeans think of us as country hicks. We shake our heads at the ninja killings, the riots, the restlessness over there and reach a concludsion that we are superior. We are more sophisticated, more educated, more orderly, more rich. In Malaysia, everytime theres a buglary, a robbery , a fight- its the indonesians at it again. Point is we are uneasy.

I take back the untermeshen remark - apologies all around. (My first blog critique - how exciting!)

Today as i was driving to work, i saw a bunch of indonesian workers resting by the roadside. They were probably waiting for a pickup to work. As i drove closer, one of them motioned by pointing to the front of my car. True enough checking the dashboard, the red door open light was on. With a wave and a smile i drove on for about a kilometre, away from them, then got out and set the hood.
The truth is i was afraid. So many horror stories about foreign workers that my first instinct was to get away from them. So an act of kindness on the chaps part, made my heart beat faster. What does this tell about me? What does this tell about my perceptions of them?

Our relationship with our foreign workers is a troubling one. Never really comfortable with their existence here on our soil, yet understanding that without them our industries would grind to a halt. Will all our glories be borne on the shoulders of other nationalities? After all our crowning achivement, the Petronas Twin Towers was designed by Koreans and built by Indonesians. Damn this sounds too much like the 'untermeschen' philosophy of Hitler.

Taken from Bartleby.com

A. E. Housman (1859–1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.

XXX. Others, I am not the first


OTHERS, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, ’tis nothing new.

More than I, if truth were told,
Have stood and sweated hot and cold,
And through their reins in ice and fire
Fear contended with desire.

Agued once like me were they,
But I like them shall win my way
Lastly to the bed of mould
Where there’s neither heat nor cold.

But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.

I read with great interest the writtings of sharizal and najah , the husband and wife team who are in my opinions among the foremost bloggers in Malaysia. The topics are great, opening minds to a greater discourse about myriad topics.