Mee Siam Mai Hum

Saturday, March 19, 2011

It's a small (and relatively recent) pre-exam ritual of mine, to look up work that I did a few years back. The better essays or scripts I happened to submit. Just to give myself a bit of confidence in my writing ability. Surely I'll be able to replicate, if not better the quality of the past - that's the logic.

Its probably partially born out of a nostalgia for the past, given the slight dislocation I initially experienced in JC. All this while my work has always been tied to that perennial worry - that I'd peaked early and wouldn't continue holding the lead going into the future. Even worse, that I might regress. That worry translated somehow into this little ritual.

It's a fun thing to do, though. Seeing how I have or haven't grown/changed over the years.

I used to be so much more uninhibited - my grades in the humanities would be an accidental consequence of me doing work I was personally satisfied with. I used to be thorough in my thinking, considering everything. The diligence and thoroughness in thinking was a habit of mind that I've come to substitute with instinct and intuition. Which backfired during KI blocks, quite deservedly. 'Thoroughness undergirding satisfaction' is an ethos that is strangely new at this moment.

Here's something I wrote in Sec3, before my understanding of the word 'knowledge' became irreversibly tainted by KI. It was homework - a free write that was supposed to turn out as 'creative non-fiction'.

"Scientists may sometimes undertake research for curiosity's sake, but the more important overarching reason is to solve problems. In this manner, it is the innate dissatisfaction with the problems in our lives that propel science and technology. Broken from our natural harmonium, we seek to rebalance or rediscover it. At any given point we reside, we are unhappy, and the only means of recourse is change. We could move forward and discover, or backward and forget. Because we remember the cumulative unhappiness and inconvenience of all the ages back to our natural if primitive equilibrium, it is extremely difficult to perform the latter. Hence we move forward and embrace science and technology.

Technological improvement promises change, although we never know just what sort of change it heralds. We take the risk quite willingly though, perhaps motivated by our present unhappiness. Which's a tad like your common drug addict. He attempts to escape depression by taking soft drugs. His depression fails to improve. He increases the dosage, but still the root cause of his depression is unaddressed. He moves to synthetic, hard drugs, because the only hope he perceives to exist comes with changing his drug use patterns, despite the risk involved.

The more we know, the less we really know. Maybe technological advancement's just a wild goose's chase that leads us nowhere near inner peace and fulfillment. But that is how the psyche of modern man operates. Blind faith in science has achieved a religious fervour of its own, amidst growing secularization worldwide. We have an infinite trust in knowledge as something that will solve our problems and allow us to triumph in adversity.

True, we can seek the essence of longevity by improving our medical technology leaps and bounds. Antibiotics, penicillin, and advanced medical surgical techniques all have contributed greatly towards our physical qualities of life. But I'm inclined to think what that really means is our bumbling around on this planet for further decades without any further enlightenment. Which in a warped way is torture for our poor souls.

Contentment may be impossible in the high-octane, hypermodern city environments we're accustomed to today, a condition that might serve as the romantic core from which we're propelled towards spirituality and nature in years to come. Someday, the dissatisfaction that drives our science may then cease."

Sentences that don't flow as well as they should, but I wasss trying to conform to a genre I wasn't quite used to. Point being, I used to think for myself, instead of citing theories and theorists. To structure my own responses, instead of trying to second-guess the examiner and answer script. To actually get the point of learning. Even if it wasn't exceptionally mature thinking, it was my thinking.

Not such a bad waste of an hour I think. Hmm.

2L @ 8:21 PM
"Sorry also must exprain"
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Hello Uncle...Bah Chor Mee one. I want chilli plus tur Kwa plus can I watch your CCTV playback of Jeff Lopez...=D