11:03 a.m. - 2007-06-28
Saving up for KL, Tioman, and Slot Cars 22nd July
from http://singaporedreaming.com/blog/?q=node/6
Colin: But living one's dreams is difficult because it is a lone undertaking. There is no such thing as shared dreams; they are personal creatures. And while my peers are making partner and buying cars, I live in rented student accommodation and scatter my work to the ocean of publications, hoping for a bite. Thus far, I have only been published a couple of times, far from being enough to pay the rent. Yet I do not feel despair. Trite as it may sound, I recognize that life is about the journey, and not the destination.
JOYCELN: Consider these 2 stories. Which is closer to yours?
You wake up everyday and work from Monday to Friday, and often, Saturday too. If you finish work early, you and your partner go to your parents� place for dinner and see your child for a few hours. If you work late, you buy a packet of char kway teow from the hawker centre but eat it at home because it�s too warm to eat there. You�re not crazy about the job but you know that if you keep at it, you can afford a car in 3 years� time, and in 5 years� time, buy a condo close to the primary school you want to send your kid to. Your conversations with people are either for the purpose of networking, work, or for familial obligations you cannot avoid. On weekends, you play golf with your friends at your country club or watch a movie with your partner. Once a year, you go on a ten day vacation to New York, London, or Paris, and when your children are big enough, Disneyland.
Alternatively, you wake up and you have no idea what is going to happen today, tomorrow, 6 months or a year later. Ironically, because of this uncertainty, all possibilities exist for you. You can be the Prime Minister of Singapore, you can make a movie, you can cook a meal you have never cooked before, eat at a place you have never eaten before, you can color your hair red, you can skip instead of walk, you can volunteer at the school you have always wanted to volunteer at, you can write a book, or you can have a baby even though you don�t have a maid. You have conversations with people who set your heart palpitating and your mind on fire. Your weekday is not so different from your weekend because everyday you are thinking, creating, and more important, imagining.
Most of us recognize the first story and its pursuit of the 5 Cs of �cash, condo, car, country club, credit card.� It is the Plan, which imposes a conclusion on you, and you work in order to make all the pieces fit. A bus stop advertisement I saw recently said it best: "We spend all our youth chasing money, and when we attain it, we spend all our money chasing youth."
A Dream, on the other hand, carries you on its wings to worlds that your heart and mind have never known.
when i read the above, the phrase, To fuck, or not to fuck retirement, came to mind. is there a middle ground? Anyway, i think i'd better set aside a little money when i get my pay each month and then i dun need to think so much.
From http://www.blurty.com/users/poofterama/
Wong Kar Wai (1958 - )
It has become uncool to profess love for Wong Kar Wai, but the truth is I can never get enough of his films (his is the only oeuvre here that I have sat through). No matter where and when a WKW film is set, it is situated at that midnight junction where the roads of loneliness, solipsism and solitude meet, inhabited by lost wry souls perpetually swinging between giving in to and rejecting their desires � my personal definition of emotional hell.
Emotional hell. So what?
