Sunday, July 29, 2012

Time from My Frame of Reference

Penning this when time is absolutely running short, I know I have to be precise and in fact, I am overwhelmed by emotions.

Yesterday when I was asked by the officer when have I moved to this current address, I was at a lost of words. I thought it was like, what? Years? But then, is it? I can't even remember. I can't even remember that we moved into here in November, and we did go back for CNY in February. I thought those pics I just saw in Facebook was taken during CNY in 2010. Time somehow moves a year faster in my reference frame.

What in the world had happened??

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Balance and Moving

For me the realm of science itself is more about awe, order and the fascinating innate ability of the few people who were able to thread them, sometimes in a web, sometimes a chain and sometimes a fuzzy state of being. Behold the uncertainty principle!

To the contrary of the beliefs of my friends and family, I am seriously very far away from even a modicum of discernment of this mysterious field. My mathematics is definitely mediocre, and I am beginning to pick up Calculus again. I am not particularly crazy about deep and revered passion in one direction, and for which I salvage myself through a pursuit of multiple ideas, fields and inspirations, sometimes crossing fiction to try to register the many psychological responses of human beings. In the light of this, I was and always will be a foot lagged, a step behind my peers in my eyes. I was always an equation short, a tool less. However so, I strive to explain things in my own words. I love to swim around it, or in another word, attack a problem with a sea of knowledge from different angles.

I had been through depression and thus I learned to be humble to myself. The greatest lie in the world is a lie to yourself, that's what I always remind myself. Sometimes I am cocky and stubborn and creasing at words which somehow crossed my line of defense, but these are all arrows pointing outward from my self, while within myself I pierce myself with all sorts of things I need to work on to improve, and this very ritual sometimes seems strikingly similar to the practice of penance. I always have that feeling down there. The feeling to hold on, to go on. It's sort of like jogging. You are hardly catching your breath, your legs are getting squiggly, yet you tell yourself that: lose it now you lose it forever, that sort of catch. 

And perhaps I could borrow a few tokens from Einstein, Larry Underwood (a character in King's "The Stand"), Feynman, Jobs, and whosoever I look up to. I always look up to people who were through a lot before they are who they are, especially mental struggles, ugly soul-searching and squeezed financial state. I do not believe in heroes. I believe in willpower, and I always believe it is that place which every fragment of the soul unites and unfolds unto an infinite opening.

From now on there are only the promises I made to myself, and the path. Tonight the wind is acing, Nature's demonstration at its best. Tonight, the force field is something which you could feel pumping in the air boisterous and merciless. Tonight is the night, the night which I think I have garnered the enough something in me, ether maybe, to move on.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. - Einstein

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Hong Kong Book Fair 2012: What I Got

Years despite my first, I made my second Hong Kong Book Fair trip in 2012 fruitful. I had a book list jotted on my journal and I scavenged the piles of books strewn across the counters, well-prepared before the operation i.e. maps and locations of the places footnoted in my mind.

As expected, I saw no Vikram Seth nor Hilary Mantel nor E. O. Wilson nor Kate Summerscale nor Kurt Anderson. Be damned if I can spot Kurt Vonnegut. My laws. M-O-O-N that spells deprivation. 
              (Please forgive my Tom Cullen impersonation. He is one good soul living in me after I swallowed King's "The Stand")
For God's sake Hong Kong is still Hong Kong, the ever unforgiving malnutrition of the bookstore condition. The rest aside, still, I was sure I could get myself a few pieces of the more classical or critically acclaimed works. And howdy was I not wrong.

That's one thing I reminded myself to do during a book fair. Take a walk, remember the prices, only then purchase. That made damn sure the hole in my pocket does not grow more than its already haggardly state. Well here's what I'd got for myself:


1. Elizabeth Gilbert - Committed for HKD$ 48.00 or RM 19.20.
2. Rebecca Skloot -  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for HKD$ 48.00 or RM 19.20
3. Walter Isaacson - Steve Jobs for HKD$ 150.00 or RM 60.00
4. Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel for HKD$ 117.6 or RM 47.04.
5. Mark Twain - The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn for HKD$ 29 or RM 11.40
6. Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for HKD$ 50 or RM 20.00
7. Stephen King - Under the Dome for HKD$ 76.8 or RM 30.72
8. Walter Isaacson - Einstein for HKD$ 111.79 or RM 44.72
9. Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov for HKD$ 53.2 or RM 21.28.

To be honest the Dostoyevsky find is a surprise. Except for Mark Twain I guess I made all those decisions with clear judgment. To be honest I kind of regretted the purchase of Twain's because I could have just borrowed from the library.

Nonetheless, I think I have stocked up a reading chest for the coming 3 months on the very least. And these babies come at a good price!

p/s: There is a detour that I would like to talk about. PageOne's counter was without EPS service, a handy debit card service which works everywhere in Hong Kong but just not PageOne's counter in that Book Fair. Luckily Ling was working in the Fair and I got her to credit-carded title #4, #6 and #8. Lucky lucky.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

On My Reading History and How to Keep the Passion Burning

The reading frenzy came back to me about a month ago. It came in such an unlikely circumstance which completely caught me off guard, and that had me thinking about reading once more. Things like the growth of character and honesty, and sometimes about how to keep the passion burning instead of having it put out for the past 6 years.

Maybe because I save my own money for my reading list, I always have a tendency to buy only books which are useful in the long run, and not simply for leisure or pleasure. I love reading, always do. I think since Form 3 at an age of fourteen (I was admitted into school a year earlier than my peers) I noticed my parents do not have big money to spend, and to spend thriftily means to spend on things necessary. On that note I started to save the meager pocket money my mum gave to me every school day (RM 3 or USD$ 1.20 ten years ago) for break meal for books and music. Yes I didn't eat for the few years in high school. Occasionally I did. Usually I didn't. Then at the end of Form 5 I started to teach tuition and took up part-time job as a cashier in nearby store to get the burden off my mum's shoulders. Since then I was on my own till now, spending my own money, on textbooks, meals, petrol etc. If there was any money left, you bet you would surely invest it upon something useful. Something which would make you grow instead.

That in fact, is how my adolescent years were. To buy books which were useful, that always meant non-fiction. To save it up even more, I bought pirated chinese books. The quality was always fluctuating. Some of them you could actually spot that few patches of missing ink and also the obvious photo-stating paper. Some of them were very, very original-like. Even today, I seldom see any pirated english books. That's more the reason why I read a lot of translated stuff those days. I hate translated stuff. They always leave those important terms and concept convoluted in the process of translation, and I spent most of my breaks in between reading to think what the author in his native tongue actually meant. Although this experience trained me to think out of the box and also to judge logically along the line of thought laid bare by the text, it was excruciating.

When my passion of reading came back, it was E.O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of Earth". I discovered this title through an out-of-the-blue bookstore browsing, which I haven't done more than 5 times in the past 6 years. I bought it on a whim and I enjoyed it greatly. Then the gripping pleasure of reading is back, and I went on with another non-fiction by a Taiwanese Lung Ying Tai, then to my horror I noticed my pleasure in reading suddenly subsides. I mean, I need to constantly encourage myself to keep reading, and that will definitely transform into boredom later. I thought it was the author or the content, but when I tried another Murakami's collection of serious essays I faced the same feeling again. I think to myself, no way. What had exactly happened?

Like what you read before, I trod the history of my very own reading years and I thought some time after the years of heavy non-fiction, I began to burn out. Even for fiction, it was King Lear by Shakespeare which I was reading. It was too much. The only few joys I had was Jin Yong's books, and also the Harry Potter series, which the Jin Yong I bought mostly from pirated bookstore and Harry Potter series were borrowed from my friends. I didn't realize back then. But I burned out. 6 years of non-fiction everyday was too much for me.

I mused upon this, and I realized that I need to balance the books out. Non-fiction then fiction then history then fiction then biography and so on and so forth seems to be a good. In fact, it's far much better. I quickly purchased Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat Pray Love" and I finished it in 5 days. Then Paulo Coelho's "Aleph". Then Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational". Then Stephen King's "11.22.63", and now on his expanded "The Stand" borrowed from the library, all under a month. And not counting the various Murakami and Lung Ying Tai's serious essays I read occasionally, or Time or Fortune magazines, or The Illiad. It was crazy, a reading frenzy which surpassed my past record with a great lead up front. 

Not only that, I found passion reading scientific papers and reports in my research field now too. Inspirations are coming by the hand and I could formulate thoughts more easily. I have revelations now and then when I saw some news or heard some experience relayed by friends or during reading, because these non-fictions and fictions suddenly draw a good picture in my mind, mapping themselves to the concepts, the events, the stories which happened to explain each other. I realized how important this is, not just to make reading a bearable and fun experience, but too the knowledge which reinforces each other, be it fiction or non-fiction.

I guess now I earn my own bucks and have more than enough to spend, I decided to break myself free of the thought that books have to be educational and useful in the long term. I was so wrong. If you care to select good titles which have a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, you would live a fulfilling life of lifelong learning and interweaving perspectives on the myriad of life itself, instead of having yourself trapped to the boring or narrowed lens of non-fiction.