Tired

I'm tired. So very, very tired. Tired of having to pick up others but nobody out there to pick me up, out of this dark place I'm living in. Tired of the human conditions ; the imperfections, the greed, the utterly indescribable stupidity of people.

I'm tired. Tired of being alive and tired of being afraid. Tired of longing for absolute obilivion. Tired in my mind. Tired of thinking.

I'm tired. I'm very tired indeed...

Friendship

I’m a weirdo...in my own way...because I always talk to myself in English (that’s how I practise my English actually). And I usually have tonnes of really interesting stuffs to tell, but my weakening mind (smoking doesn’t really help that by the way) would usually forgot what I’d concocted inside my brain the day before.

Today’s events made me thinking about friendship. How do we perceive and approach friendship when we started to know a new person? Before getting to that, let me tell about my parents first. My parents are from different worlds apart. Miles apart. My father is a gentle, kind-hearted, trusting and quite a reserved person. My mum on the other hand is a bit pessimistic type kind-of-a-person, a bit leery and outspoken. Not that I’m saying she’s not a kind person, but that’s how she is in nature. So, I’d grown up seeing two different people and how they perceive and treat their friends from a two, very opposite approach.

 Until this point of my life, I’m a bit like my father. When I meet new people, I always try to accept them with an open heart. I’m trying to see the good attributes that they have and try to build a good rapport with them. I mean, isn’t that what we learn from books, from our religion, from common sense? Judge the book not by its cover? See the good inside and not judging them from their past? I would imagine that’s how our prophet would behave.  You befriend somebody with honesty and an open heart, not because you want to gain something from them or getting some sort of benefits from them. That’s just wrong. And my heart just can’t accept that.

But then I experienced what my father had to endure in his life; his friends sucking the life out of him.  It’s because the way I perceive friendship. My take is this; if I am going to be your friend, I accepted the friendship because I see the good in you and that I truly believe that you’re a good person. But I also accepted your flaws, your imperfections as human being and try to adapt to those. But then repeatedly, I got screwed by friends exactly because of this. By friends who took advantage of my inability to repel their flaws. And when I get screwed by them, I don’t retaliate much since I always try to accept the fact that it was partly my fault for not having the strength to prevent it from happening.

These past few months, I think I’ve changed a bit. Maybe a tad bit like how my mum sees in people. See the negatives in people first. See what kind potentials that they have to make your life harder, or in any way screw you. I hate doing that but being screwed by people recently really made me angry and that makes me looking at people a little bit more negatively. And that’s a bit of a dilemma for me. How do you approach this issue? Do you start positively or negatively? I’m a Muslim and from what I’ve learned from our prophet, you know, be nice. But then you also know that people are dumb, ignorant, and selfish and they have all the potentials to be these. Maybe not intentionally but circumstantially, usually, maybe. People will always try to reasoning their action when they’re doing wrong, making it believable to them that it’s ok. That it’s not a sin to do so. So that they don’t have to feel guilty when they’re doing something that is clearly not the right thing to do.

I’m glad though, that even when I got screwed, at least I found some few friends that I hold dearly to me  because they truly befriended me unconditionally, accepting my flaws when I can do the same to them.

I’m still pissed off, by the way.....

Just half a second too late..

It was the year 1986. NASA's Challenger blew up during take off and the Chernobyl meltdown accident happened that year. I was 7 years old, and I was in my first year of primary school at Sekolah Kebangsaan Bukit Hampar which was sharing with Sek Dato' Wan Idris' building at that time.

It must have been 3-4 weeks into school. It was just after school and I was waiting for the bus to pick me up. I wanted to get across the street to the bus pick-up area, so I kinda jogged my way through since I was pretty excited about coming home. Precisely the same time I stepped onto the road, a cream-colored car was passing in front of me. The driver stamped on his brake and I hit the side of the car just by the fender of the left front tyre.

At that moment, if only I had been about half a second earlier or the car had arrived just a bit later, I would've been hit and most likely that I would've not survived.

That accident never really left me. I always have these thoughts; What if I've died then? What if I never existed beyond that? Would life be different without me in it? Would life be better for other people without me? Or is it just be the same because my existense is insignificant?

I'm trying to make sense of my existense. Talking to God is not easy. It's not like He's gonna answer me directly when I ask Him questions, is He?

Smoking and depression

People who knew me would say that I'm like a chimney. There would always be smoke coming out of my mouth. Nowadays, my smoking habit has been just as it was when I started smoking 11 years ago. About 1 1/2 pack a day? So roughly about 4 cartons of cigarette? Yeah, you do the maths, I just can't be bothered.

And my habit gets worse when I sit down with friends, talking about serious stuffs. It's one cigarette after another. Sitting in front of the computer's monitor for hours doesn't help either.

As I'm getting older, the more I keep damaging myself. People say that when you hit rock bottom, the only way left is going up again. Well, life is not all sugar and cream, honey. There's no other way to sugarcoat it.

When I was a kid, my mum would always told me to work and study harder. She would always said that good education will get me to the top and by then, I could buy all those stuffs that I'd wanted as a kid back then. It's like that quotation from the ASN advertisement back in the 80's when the father would pat his kid in the back and said "Nak, belajarlah rajin-rajin. Ayah akan melabur dan terus melabur untuk masa depan kita".....(que the music, panning to the ASN logo).

I hated that advert. What a load of Haufen Scheiße (pronounced haufen shaize, if you don't know your deutsch)(cakap Jerman daaa. Ni jerman betul tau, bukan cakap jawa).

But I guess the hardest thing for me to do is trying to get along with my life with a smile on my face. It's hard to go on when you don't have a heart to do so. That's why sometimes I get it when people commit suicides. The harder I think about it, the much more sense it becomes. So smoke away, Yin. Don't think too much.

There's a quotation from a movie I watched a few months ago. The character, an old man said in that movie "I am tired of being thankful for scraps". It's just a simple sentence yet it is really deep. For us muslims, it's about being thankful to God or syukur. That sentence gives a glimpse of how I feel and my constant argument in my soul about my syukur to God. It's not that simple, is it? It just can't be simple, can it?

Stupid is as stupid does

Being an adult sucks. Being a kid also sucks. I don't think I enjoyed my childhood that much. I didn't really enjoy that much of my teenage life either. So, yeah, life kinda sucks.

But amidst that all, I'm just trying to maintain my sanity, my whole being as person, my function in my family life and in my social life. I don't have anything special, but I do cherish all my collective thoughts that define me as me. The only me with my unique-ness and all. I would like to think that I am unique in my own way, and at least that's an encouraging thought.

I'm writing this out just in the spur of the moment. Not really trying to say anything clever or anything. With a cigarette in my hand and the monitor in front of me, this is my life as I know it. I'd probably will never have a bright future, or having wealth, or fame or anything that I would always like to fantasize of having.

Being content with your life. That's hard, you know.

Internet is a vast place with lots of information and knowledge. It's also a place where you can try to define yourself to others. But be careful of what you're trying to understand and telling others at the same time. You got to remember that not all people in this world speaks english. So, some can be misleading especially if involving translating literatures from another foreign languages. This is where it is important that you have good grasps on your understandings and languages.

An old fart dissed at me for trying to advice him to be careful when putting quotes from an arabic literature site into his website. I was trying to say that the translation is being made by some poor schmuck that translated quite poorly from arabic to english. It's like reading in arabic, and directly translating it to english. So it sounds weird and a little bit out of context. But no, that old fart said that I was trying to attack him or something. Doesn't he know that I was trying to save him from being embarassed? People from all over the world can read his website, and you know what, first impressions are; his english is poor, he doesn't have his own opinion that he has to take some other people's quotes and worse that it's all poorly translated. I mean, if you want to impress people by being clever, at least fake it really well even if you're not that clever.

I don't really like writing about people's weakness. In my whole life there were 3-4 people who really annoyed me to no ends. And this old turd is one of them. Because he was not sincere in his friendship with me, he used me to all his benefits and spit me out like a used bubblegum. I will never forgive and forget that. Because not once in my life had I ever backstabbed anybody or ditched a fellow friend or family.
That's why I think, I'm a little bit anti-social at times. Because it will just give me head-aches and heart-aches.

We live in a corrupted world. People are mostly dumb, dishonest, greedy, selfish and you know it. Want to be a good, unselfish person? You'll never be rich, never succeed as much as you wanted and you will always be conned by others. I know this, and I've seen this. And sadly, this is the kind of world we live in.

If only I'm the godfather of a powerful mafia group. Heck, I can just tell anybody to whack that fool. Ahahahaha..

Simian line

I am odd at birth. Different from the rest of my family members, even my relatives. The most obvious is that I have curly hair. And I mean, really curly, like maggie-mee curly. When I had long hair, I either have to tie them down for most of the times or I have to use hair straighteners quite frequently. Otherwise my hair will look like David Arumugam from The Alleycats. Terima kasseehhh!


One day I showed my left palm to a doctor and he noticed that I have a straight line across my hand instead what you normally have. You know, when I was a kid, my teacher will told us kids in the class that the markings on both palms resemble the arabic numerical digits : IV & IΛ which equals to the 99 names of Allah. I don't have that. Instead I have a straight line across my left palm in which, combining with some obscure lines making it seems like the symbol Λ or 8. So my palms read out 8 + 18 = 26. And my mates would then looked at me and said "Dude!".

(This is not my hand, I can't be bothered to scan my own palm)

He jokingly told me that mostly people with down-syndrome has these kind or markings. It's a distinct feature, apparently. So what? I'm supposed to be a retard now? Maybe I was supposed to be like that Dustin Hoffman guy in the film Rain Man. Superb at calculations but dumb at everything.


Apparently I have what they called as Simian Line or Simian Crease. Simian because primates like chimpanzees or monkeys has those distinct lines too. These are some excerptions from Google about people with Simian Line :


As the simian line is a combination of the head and heart lines, it is the frequent assumption of chierologists, dermatoglyphics experts, and palmists that the simian line performs the functions associated with both lines. That is, the bearer finds it difficult to separate emotions and what is desired (the heart line) from intellect and what is thought (the head line). They believe the simian line gives the ability to focus on one thing, absolutely, to the exclusion of all else. It is believed that these people generally achieve and accomplish far more than most, developing techniques and inventions that will last for generations. They also supposedly experience far more misfortune than most, usually due to the same intensity that drives them. The ambition for success in business endeavors will be strong, as will be the tendency to shut out all else in pursuit of these ambitions. People with simian lines are seen as being complex, forceful, goal-oriented, and egocentric.


Okay, some are true, but not fully. Personally, I think it's a bunch of horse-shit. I believe in Qada' & Qadar. Although, sometimes on a personal level, I have a few questions I really want to ask God about a few things happening that I really can't add-up. I can make up my own answers though, but in my twisted mind, I can really give really interesting and mind-bending answers that would really shaken my aqidah instead. And I really don't want to do that.

A bald girl once told me that I have lots of potentials. Man, I really hated that bald girl. Actually she is not that bald but her forehead, man, a helicopter can land on that thing. She's kinda cute though, but she irritates the crap out of me. She's supposed to be this intellectual person but my God she is so stupid when it involves other human beings.

Potentials. What the crap is that supposed to mean?

Photography

I'm not an artist. Well, I don't think that I have the talent to be one. But I do like to express myself, my heart-being to the world. I just don't really know what's the best medium to do so. I attemped writing first. Not so good, I would say since my language is so messed up between Malay and English. My english is not half-bad but I learn my english from tv shows and movies that I watched. So my vocabulary is quite limited to only what I've heard. ( I don't read, I'm much too lazy for that).

I learned guitar-playing since I was 16. On and off playing for a couple of years and I can only produce my own tunes for the last 2 years or so. Out of 12-14 tunes that I made, only 2 or 3 that I can say, relate closely to my heart.

And now, photography. I only learned photography since last year, more or less. On and off learning from borrowed cameras. I know how to use photoshop, doing basic editing and retouching since my university years but more to just for the sake of knowing how to use the basic stuffs inside the software. My only camera before this was a compact film, RM100 cheap Kodak kamera. You know, the one where you have to use thumb to turn the film inside. Very noisy and a bit embarassing at times since all of my mates use digital and I'm still on film.

My sisters supported me when I asked them to borrow some money so that I could buy a relatively expensive DSLR camera. I borrowed RM5k each plus my own money and I don't know when will I be able to repay them back. Some guys are quite embittered and on some level, despised my coming as a photographer. I mean, I haven't got a photography job yet and people are saying bad stuffs about me already.

I don't feel bad about it though. I'm not that bothered about it at all. I was bred from a boarding school system, so loyalty to your friends comes first. Backstabbers are usually will be dealt harshly. Your family will always be your family but your friends are family too. So, in my book, I don't betray my friends unless they betray me first. Now that, really bothers me. Just don't jerk me off, that's all I'm asking.

I'm still searching that part in photography on how to express myself. I like it when there's emotion in that picture, there's a story to be told in it. That's difficult. Technique-wise, I'm ok I guess. My learning curve is going just about in my expectation. My limiting factor is that I'm a bit shy when taking pictures. Not much experience when interacting with people whilst taking my pictures. And I'm not that much comfortable taking snapshots of outsiders; let's say, a girl having a drink on the side walk and I wanted to take her picture drinking that beverage. I'm a bit shy to do that. But I really wanted to take more of those kind of pictures.

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious"

I like this quote. It describes me as a whole in just two sentences.

yin