Can't find the short story collection, The Beast who Shouted Love at the Heart of the World. I is sad.
Last night Zhuang Mao and i were talking about idealism. He said he found it admirable to pursue one's passions after graduation; to defy society and escape the banality of a normal working life. I said it was darn irresponsible, because what we do affect not only ourselves, but others around us too. We should not be thinking only of our own desires; we have to also consider the happiness of those bound to us, like our parents.
I remember in one of the books by Orson Scott Card, Theresa Wiggin was fretting that her son Peter was too busy trying to achieve great things, and neglected his personal life. She hoped that he'd find a girl, settle down, and have children. It may sound awfully petty to you; what is an everyday family life compared to saving the world? But she claimed something along the lines of, there's no lack of great, ambitious people in the world, great things achieved will perish with time, and that you've not truly experienced the cycle of life until you have kids, giving yourself wholely and unconditionally to their welfare. To know what it's like to love someone more than yourself.
It's the kind of theory that appeals to me. Like, a meaningful life is not exclusive to elites alone. You struggle trying to be intellectual and great, but at the end of the day, the value of life lies in the basic and the commonplace. 'Indeed, there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.'
Just finished watching Nobuta wo Produce. It's about two guys trying to turn this painfully shy girl, whom they nicknamed Nobuta, into a popular girl. Along the way they come across obstacles that threaten their friendship and lifetyles, and change their perspectives on life. It's a pretty touching show; have not stopped crying since the 4th episode.
There was one morning Kelly was listening to the radio, and someone from something health-related was talking about H1N1. He was saying that unlike SARS, H1N1 should be encouraged to spread. Kelly said the mentality was that those without immunity would die off, leaving the human race as a whole improved via selection of the fittest. Anyway, the source of humour for her was him saying 'And those without immunity...', realising too late that what he's about to say would not sit well with the audience, and then trying to save himself by continuing, '...would get immunity.' Which she said sounded obviously ridiculous.
It kinda upset me a little though. Would you sacrifice people so that the human race on a whole can develop immunity? Yes, in the long run the entire human race would benefit, being able to step onto a crowded train with confidence, being able to have a fever of over 38 deg celsius without crying in their sleep (something i did once when i had a fever). But in the short term people would be sacrificed, people who are precious to other people, people with souls and emotions and things they cherish.
Zhuang Mao and i were talking about it, and he mentioned this verse that goes something like, what we cannot express in words, the Holy Spirit helps us express in groans. I thought about the word 'groans'. Groaning is not a language; it expresses what we feel like how crying expresses sadness. So i thought, must Tongues necessarily be a language? Must each syllable we utter actually mean something in itself?
So i thought, could it be that Tongues, for some people, are just another form of crying/shrieking/smiling/etc/etc?
Kelly once said that people with overly strict parents tend to be passive aggressive. I guess it's because of all those years of not being able to voice out one's objection, and yet needing some way of dealing with one's reluctance to follow others' will.
The reason i thought about them was because Miss A. Tan was upset that someone killed a lizard, and that someone was christian to boot. I told her that we christians don't believe that animals have souls, and that we eat meat anyway, to which she replied that we eat meat for sustenance, whereas the killing of lizards was unnecessary cruelty.
But i thought, the argument that killing for meat is justifiable is iffy. Afterall, how does one define sustenance? Since humans can survive on vegetables alone, is the killing of poultry still considered necessary? If i only need a pound of meat a day to survive but i eat two, is that still considered sustenance? Besides, isn't killing lizards killing for comfort, which, like killing for meat, comes under the broad category of killing to satisfy the human need?
Plus, whoever said that the human survival justified all actions? Don't we applaud martyrs in history because they were able to put some worthy cause over their own survival?
And then A. went on to talk about how pain is an important factor in deciding whether something is cruel or not. Like squashing a mosquito isn't, but squashing a lizard, with nerves and a beating heart and all, is. But i thought, perhaps pain is meaningless without a soul. Perhaps pain is like beauty or value, which holds meaning only to a sentient mind. While it can be argued that pain has a great physical component to it, but then, so does sadness, when your heart tightens and your tears come out, and emotions are only meaningful to a sentient mind.
And while i was walking to the library, i thought, pain is qualia. That means that pain is private and cannot be communicated directly to other parties. It's like colours, you cannot communicate to a blind person what green is. When teaching little children about colours, you can only refer to these colours via some shared experience, i.e. 'Green is the colour of grass.' But you can never be sure whether they are really experiencing the same thing. They may be getting the blue sensation when they look at grass, only that adults have taught them to put the name 'green' to it.
So it's like, can we can say that pain for a lizard is the same as pain for us? Perhaps when a nerve is stimulated in a lizard, the lizard feels quite something else. Perhaps we are imposing our experiences on the lizard, demanding that what is the case for us must be the case for it. Perhaps it is less unpleasant for a lizard to be squashed, afterall, with a body prone to squashing, they must have something that mitigates the unpleasantness for them.
Should have accepted ABP so that i can choose my timetable early, like Ben and Lixian. Nearly cried this afternoon when my page expired the moment i was supposed to bid for my slots, and i couldn't get into the same lab group as the others.
But oh well, too late for that. Plus XinYi and YingJie are in the same group as me, so it should be okay.
Let me try to end this off with something profound about my timetable: One person's happiness is another's pain. There are so few good things in life, for if there were more, we'd take them for granted and their value would drop, hence rendering them not 'good' anymore. And because there are so few good things and so many people wanting them, someone is bound not to get these things because someone else got them.
Nueve V has ended. Feel a little sad at its ending, for we've been looking forward to and talking about it for a year already.
I've always thought FOCs are more fun for seniors than for freshmen. It's the difference between camping with people one is close to, and camping with people that one is unfamiliar, and therefore awkward with. Besides, as seniors, we are more certain of our position in the community, and are therefore less afraid of what others may think of us. Thus we tend to hold back less.
Though SAs have to hold back a lot, because we don't want to deny our freshmen the chance of participating in the games, and because we don't want to blow our covers. We also don't want to get too close, for fear of hurting the freshmen's feelings when the truth is revealed. Think it's a bit sad for the male freshmen, when the people they've been trying to take care of turned out to need less taking care of than them. And also for the SPs, when they realise the person beside them is someone else completely.
But i think the ones who suffer the most are the female freshmen, who spend more time with us and think of us as future classmates. It's rather sad when they started wondering how much of what we've told them is the truth, and what our true personalities are. Not only that, there are already very little girls to begin with, and now there're even less female friends accompanying them to university.
But oh well.
Anyway, it's rather amazing how freshies each year seem to inherit their seniors' characteristics. Kanza, for many years running, has always refused to join in the competition, and has always decided that fun is in what they say it is, and not in the silly games and activities that others have planned for them. It's not like we know our freshies' characteristics when we choose them, but somehow their personality on a whole reflect our personality as a whole. Maybe it's our bad influence, what with seniors like Ben insisting that it's okay to come in dreadfully last.