Beracahvalley: Project Blook

Ramblings about things I like and things I don’t

2009-03-01T15:05:00.002+08:00

Ramblings about things I like and things I don’t

(because I have the time to write and I have been asking myself what I really like or want.)

I dislike

things about the modern society sometimes – like how some people are trapped by their self imposed sense of success driven by their greed and selfishness since they only seems to look out for the well-being of themselves. There seems to be something disturbing about the city somehow though I cannot point it out exactly what that makes me feel uncomfortable but perhaps it is the perfect street, prefect buildings, prefect smiles plastered on their faces with big brand names all over like a factory manner.

I like

places without the perfect street and buildings and I want to have an adventure and live like going to Cambodia and India to learn about their culture and help some kids there. There I will be rich. Rich in experience and purpose and laugh at how sometimes I take things for granted or my own self imposed narrow point of view about the world at large.

I dislike

stereo-typing and how human judge people based on external stuff like looks, race or background but I suspect it is our nature as humans to put things into label like marketing or something. Placing labels on someone's appearance or race or anything else alone sucks and stereotypes are disgusting. Take some time to look beyond the surface – labels are meant for can soup. There is no point having a beautiful façade on the surface but empty in the inside.

I like

beautiful minds, people that are comfortable with themselves despite their imperfection and people being who they are despite it may goes against the norms of society and I think gays are bold ( though I am not gay or something ), they defeat their insecurities and conquer their inner demons on how people look at them.

I dislike

how cheesy pop music is at times and prefer words that touch me and lyrics that mean more than just about sexual, stupid heartbreak or explicit things.

I like

words that make give me inner hope and a will to continue to walk or beautifully written and something that inspire or I can relate to. Perhaps occasionally books that make my heart break a little with a rush of emotion – even it is somebody's tale or not true but I love the passion of it all.

I like

art, art that have a story and meaning behind them and not just random models on the cover of the magazines with too much make up and too much photoshop with the focus on just looks alone.

I like

to take photos of random things and the simple beautiful around us that many of us fail to see and honest heart to heart conversation with a few close friends in a homely environment instead of a big crowd of acquaintance.

I dislike

how some people cannot seem to understand something unless you push it right in their faces, when someone is only nice to me when they need something or just keep up with the appearance which is stupid.

I dislike

each others' masks and the need to decipher the feelings beyond the masks without being told what it is specifically, people with screwed up beliefs of what is right and wrong and those who can be easily manipulated and people that manipulate them for their own benefit.

I like

beautifully hand crafted items and non factory made stuff. They are one of a kind yet sometimes I can be a walking contradiction and I do like man-made things because once in a while it gives an artificial glint of happiness and if you lost it or break it, you can always have a new one.

I dislike this world.
I like this world.

I want to live in a world with things that bring me a simple glimpse of joy and perhaps that is all I wish to ask for.

Thoughts on words stolen from Grey's Anatomy

2008-09-30T23:59:00.008+08:00

Grey Meredith's narrating:

"For extra credit, Mrs. Snyder used to make us act out all the parts. Sal Scafarillo was Romeo. As fate would have it, I was Juliet. Most of the girls were green with envy. I wasn't. I told Ms. Snyder that Juliet was an idiot. For one thing, she falls for the one guy she knows she can't have......"

"Everyone thinks it's so romantic: Romeo and Juliet, true love...... how sad. If Juliet was stupid enough to fall for the enemy, drink a bottle of poison, and go to sleep in a mausoleum, then she deserved everything she got...... "

"Mrs. Snyder explained to me that when fate comes into play, choice sometimes goes out the window. Maybe Romeo and Juliet were fated to be together, but just for a while, and then their time passed. If they could have known that beforehand, maybe it all would have been okay. I told Mrs. Snyder that when I grow up, I'd take fate into my own hands. I wouldn't let some guy drag me down. Mrs. Snyder said that I'd be lucky if I ever had that kind of passion with someone, and if I did, we'd be together forever. Even now, I believe that for the most part, love is about choices. It's about putting down the poison and the dagger and making your own happy ending most of the time. And sometimes, despite all your best intentions, fate wins anyway."

*
*

Foolish heart, I wish you beat not at times.

That old man and I

2008-09-29T18:47:00.007+08:00

Some say parents form the basis of your morals at an early age, their actions mark on your unconscious as the means for judging right and wrong in your life later while some will argue that what you believe to be moral or immoral is a gradual process that builds up over time through plain trial and error evaluations. Still more would assert that morality lies within yourself, that what you believe is based within, something within have an influence on what you are and what you do. Nature or nurture, for whatever reason I am the way I am, you will probably loathe or even despise people like me. However, it may not be why you hate people like me. It may be because you are envious of me, or maybe my indifferent attitudes about my material success could give you a brief hunch of rage, but you do not really loathe me for things like that. It is more like the amount of money I take advantage of my workers out of, the devices I secretly employ to keep desperate illegal immigrants working for me at appalling wages, and the multiple tax fraud I have committed are the reasons why you find it revolting. However, I have never been caught but still I know deep down I do know how much I would be hated if, for even a second, this mask I wear daily came off. If, even just for once, people were to see me in my true light, you will really despise who I am – because I used to hate guys like myself when I was younger.

Once in a while, reports come in about people just like me and I hear everybody talk about how much they hate them or what they would do if the penalty were up to them. However, I know the fact is that rich bastards will get off with the minimum punishment, probably by paying loads of money (but that makes little disparity considering the money is stolen in a sense.)

And I know all this perfectly well as it is exactly what I myself would do.

*
*

Today I knock off early – something not many people in my position does that, but for today, an urge took hold of me. I was enjoying my favorite meal at an old food court and I thought about the things I have done and the things I am doing, and I wondered for a moment whether or not to be proud. I think yes, I have done a lot, but have I really done anything to be proud of? Sure, there is my very own company, but it is filthy in my own mind. Although I am not quite sure why but I still do it now.

As I was leaving the food court, an feeble looking old lady asked to have my tray cleared and I told her I would do it on my own yet she replied if she did not clean up after me, what use would she be?

It was heartrending and I guess it had yet to dawn on some people what awaits them yet and during that brief moment, I cannot help but think back to that old man I used to once worked with all those years ago……

When I was a kid, some time during my school term break, I did a little construction work for my father’s company. It was a nightmare. I can still remember some days I could barely make it; the muscles in our arms would burn at the end of the day. There was this old Chinese guy there who had this job in his entire life I think. Construction was just about all he knew since he had little education. He had an old raspy voice, the type only men like him could have the type who had been working their entire lives away, the type that only knew what backbreaking labor was about, and who had done it so long that there was no idea as a tomorrow without it. Anyway, this old Chinese fellow worked very hard but there were always times when age would catch up to him. I remembered it was mainly the lifting that troubled his thinning frame and for a minute, the lines on his face would prevail as if they are standing out on their own against his skin, and you could see a sort of helplessness in him as he clenched his eyes shut and waited for it to pass. And, as soon as it had begun, the fire in the muscle would come blazing back as quickly as they had departed. Those wrinkled lids opened back up and sometimes they would connect with yours. If they did, as always they seemed to, his raspy voice would be repeating the same old phrases.

“Boy,” he used to say in his heavily Chinese-accented English, that voice as low and rough as ever, “growing old is hell.”

Looking back, it is perplexing to remember what the old man had said so long ago and he never constrained its meaning.

“Boy, growing old is hell.”

However, he never once remarked that growing old is hell because of something. He never remarked it was hell due to your health, or losing loved ones to disease, time or watching your children leave you. Had that been on purpose? Probably not, but as I look back, I cannot help but hate the old man for being so right in his statement. Maybe he became despondent that he had been doing it this long. Perhaps there is no pride other than making money to buy souls which will come to a sad end for many. Suicides of older folks have been increasing slowly and what is there to really to look forward to except work and more work and like a carousel it mocks? In such a society, what kills is a mislaid worth of values. When the lights are dark, the vision blur as you watched your superciliousness years played out before your languishing bones, the call to restful eternal bliss only seems to be more persistence.

During the long nights I spent turning and tossing and ensuring that extra money I should not have in the first place remains mine, or try to make sure I will not be the next person waiting his court date, I can still see his fragile frame, going back and forth through half-finished buildings on the construction site. Maybe I am just instinctively trying to avoid the life of slow hardship that I had seen that old man go through at the hands of my father, and ironically enough that I put others through to assure I will never have to but of course, I think it is most possibly that I am just a greedy bastard.

There are times when I look back and, despite the luxury of my position, I know that we are the same -- that old man and I.

I wish

2008-09-28T07:45:00.001+08:00

Contentment is art form few achieve greatness in.

Perhaps because no one has informed them that it is, In fact, an art form to be coveted and pursued. Which is why humanity is always in the wild pursuit of other things; addictions, money, fame......

I wish I was five again -- life seemed easier and things like time or money was not an issue.

Drowning

2008-09-28T07:14:00.000+08:00

Collectively bleeding from imaginary cuts
Silence plagues a heavy heart.

The world has failed to blow apart
neither empty nor full, drowning.

All memories are traces of tears

2008-08-29T22:07:00.002+08:00

A post taken from my personal blog written on 7/26/07:

My favorite film*

2046 – All Memories Are Traces of Tears

It is awesome so I cannot really summarised it and you got to watch to appreciate that, it basically goes like:

From the Internet know-it-all, the wikipedia:

"The main character Chow Mo-Wan, ( Played by Tony Leung ), is an emotionally wrecked man writes science fiction stories, in which 2046 is a popular year and place to which people travel through time. The stories are titled 2046 and later 2047 (a collaboration with Faye Wong's character). Chow Mo-Wan still struggling to get over the loss of his idealized love, Su Li-Zhen. He returns to Hong Kong after being in Singapore for a number of years to try to forget his pain. To cover up his pain, he becomes a suave ladies man. Chow attends many lavish parties and beds many women. At the start of the movie, unable to get over his lost love. Chow was a prisoner of both the room and tried fruitlessly to recapture his past through the present by trying to play back those memories."

Therefore, 2046 is actually about the many impressions of repeated variations of the same theme: the pointlessness of returning to the past.

In the end, he realizes that these women will never be the same to his most beloved. The events and emotions displayed in this film help to reinforce the director's thesis that people cannot remain in their 2046s forever and need to some how find the courage to leave them. As Chow finally discovers, the notion of a mystical 2046 where nothing ever changes is, in reality, simply fictional.

*
*

I came to realized that maybe unknowingly, I seem to be trapped living in the present moment but leaving part of me somewhere just like many people. I am not sure why. Sometimes, we hope so to take the train to 2046 like Wong Kar-wai's movie to reach a mysterious place called 2046 in order to recapture lost loves and attachment to their past. In the world of 2046 nothing ever changes, so there is never loss or sadness.

But does time turn back when we hope so and have time turn back and return to what it was? Perhaps it lies and that certain slight comfort brings a bit of a hope and human cannot take much of a reality.

*
*

Sources, notes and external links:

For more information you can go to: The offical 2046 site

A review of 2046 from www.lovehkfilm.com

*The year 2046 has its own significance for Hong Kong. It is 49 years after the handover of Hong Kong by the British on July 1, 1997. At the time of handover, the Mainland government promised fifty years of self-regulation for the former British colony. The year 2046, then, references the moment before Hong Kong's special, self-regulated status ends.

Typical of Wong Kar-wai films, the arcs are presented in pieces and in non-chronological order with many scenes in the film involve characters conversing back and forth in different languages ( Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin ). It is assumed that each character, while only speaking one primary language, is more-or-less fluent in the other languages.

*Wong Kar-wai’s movie is one of the few filmmakers working in commercial cinema who refuse to be enslaved by traditional storytelling, his avant-garde style create meaning through visual images, not just words.

Running out of time

2008-08-09T22:12:00.000+08:00

This post was written in my personal blog some time back during 9/20/07:

Currently all is quiet except the whimper of a prayer to God that with a language that most know not. The familiar darkness fills up the room somehow except my cat is not around with me. He is currently in the hospital right now and I am not sure how he is doing. Hope all is well.

Starting blanking at the clock as it ticks ticks ticks......

Of a life that is as complicated as everyone else's, struggling for balance, juggling time. We are always running, running out of time......

*
*

Running has a particle impact in Forrest Gump*. In the movie/book, Forrest, of course, does not see this as making him special. However, it is his ability to just run on a path that drives his life.

In the midst of much chaos in his life that seems to have no reason and no real purpose, one day he just decides to run. He runs out of his county, out of his state, and starts to run endlessly across the country and just well keep running. Something about his running makes people curious about him. They begin to see him as a person with a mission somehow. They even follow him in the hopes that he will give them something -- some wisdom about his purpose.

Finally, there is a large crowd following him. Suddenly Forrest stops. The crowd is awe struck and they sense that Forrest is about to give them something.

They ask him. Are you running for world peace? Are you running for the environment or for nuclear arms or some other reason? His reply is simple but profound. "I just felt like running."

Sometimes we are not content to just run. Sometimes we look outside ourselves for someone who appears to have a purpose in their lives. What we fail to realize is that all of us are just running but perhaps into different direction.

Am I content to live just for the sake of living? Am I happy for just being who I am, not striving to be someone better? I doubt most of us will just run without a purpose like Forrest, just do something for the sake of doing that thing. Our mind seems to be more complex than that. We all were taught to be better, to work harder, and to reach deeper into our heart for some unknown. Is that a good thing?

But then again, are we content with this state of mind we are in and just be happy with it?

*
*

Sources, notes and external links:

*Forrest Gump is a 1994 drama film based on a 1986 novel by Winston Groom. In the Bible, it also happens that Apostle Paul likes to compare our lives to running a race, too.
You can read more about the movie here: www.allmovie.com

Of lies and little falsehood please

2008-07-16T19:21:00.008+08:00

Please -- lie to me, just one little falsehood and tell me that I am not just what I am.

I look at you, and I wonder. You are so rich, so new. That no matter how hard I try, I still won't be good enough for the rest of the world. If I'm not good enough for me, then how could I ever be good enough for them? Stupid and held back by my own insecurity.

Please -- lie to me, just one little falsehood and tell me that I am not just what I am.

It's a battle within -- Do I want, or am I too afraid to be who I always thought that I wanted to be? I don't know anymore. Feeling helpless because of weakness that I know that I can fight. I want to win but failing would break me so badly.

Please -- lie to me, just one little falsehood and tell me that I am not just what I am.

To end my mindless babbling. I never have anything good to say and I am so tired of speaking that I have become silent. I own no one any explanation. I have no sense of self. I know what I do not want to be but I have nothing to replace it with......too many feelings a myriad of images, a plethora of ideas.

Please -- lie to me, just one little falsehood and tell me that I am not just what I am.

Love does not exist in a world where liking is touch, unrestricted,and words are garbled by tongues that are not used to speaking. To know such intense comfort of hope and be pulled away is like ripping away your lungs after a life of breathing ( With out a death to save you from this new pain )

*
*

This post was originally known as "Please lie to me" from my deviantART account ( http://beracahvalley.deviantart.com ) It was written sometime back but still it is how I feel perfectly well at times when my blue infinity seeps from me.

Of the night remaining in my heart

2008-07-12T23:17:00.009+08:00

The clock strikes 3.48 a.m. in the morning but my senses are listening for the familiar rustle of leaves at this hour where the gentle night wind always gather. I have my empty stare at the walls with my mind lost. The night came and went.

I did not sleep well but these feelings remain familiar. I seem to be searching for something, yet I do not know what it is.

Searching foolishly for what I do not know.

Alas, yet the night remains in my heart.

*
*

The night was dead, just as I have been.

Of thoughts, emotional fragments, life and memories

2008-07-11T01:13:00.007+08:00

I used to hate typing. It used to feel cold and mechanical. I know it may sound ironic. However, to think about it I think I am slowly getting used to it instead of letting my pen dance upon the paper in an endless mad waltz -- I had actually succumbed to writing my journals online a few years back.

For the first time in all of history; you can read other people's diaries -- not just one published person's travel diary or memoirs, but near-uncensored current thoughts at times.

Writing has been one of the few things in this life that helps me escape and liberate myself from what is within somehow.

At times, when some of my readers write in or leave their comments, I felt that bond and that strange satisfaction.

It is strange. People I barely know now seems to have some sense of attachment at times. At times, as I read my readers' blog, I find that I can relate to so many of you who are down at times or in certain situation and I am these things – a project, being redone over and over again like a canvas to work on.

We humans are strange creatures living in the basic nature of the universe in extreme complexity and mystery, and finally death. As a result, we seem to be always trying to find something fulfilling, filling our desire-driven selves with vast inner space.

It seems that all of us want so badly to immortalize ourselves even when we are still alive by taking our images on photography, parchment diplomas, carve our names on tress and writing down our little tales. It is the same impulse.

Yet for words, what value do they have? They often do not remain and will be soon forgotten in the passage of time. But still we write.

Maybe we do not seems to able to stand the idea of our own voices falling silent like some radio running down?

And I am one of them.

And thus, this place is my escape where I pen down my thoughts and my emotional fragments, life and memories.

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*

Personally, I would like to thank Renaissance Publishing for the project blook. It is the satisfaction, of having my words published somehow. Ambitiously, published in paperbacks will fill dreams enough to last me a life-time; but having my own online readers, sometimes perhaps even by chance -- I live on that.