Claud

An avid collector of your hopes and worries, a romantic at heart.

She thanks her fairies, for blessing her with people who know compassion down to an art.

For accepting her for who she is, who never fails to turn up,

in times of need as well as happiness, or just there for a loving hug.

They say good friends tell you your worse, and still keep you at the end of it. What if someone gives you a deadline, and tells you that you need to change or else…

When we agree that people who mind don't matter, and people who matter don't mind, can we really carry this out? I find myself at a gridlock - what if the person who matters also mind, what if that person is a very close friend who mind. What does it then mean, when they mind your actions/words?

We are all imperfect. Do we really believe that and expect that from others and ourselves?

Change takes time, and it cannot be rushed. If we have formed the habits over such a long period of time, it's equally unreasonable to want improvements in a few weeks or months. When we ask someone to change, do we reflect upon ourselves? When we tell someone about their faults, do we also reflect upon our own behaviour? Do we ask whether we could be wrong? While we bemoan the fault of others, do we commit the same fault by asking the same? Who judges and who gets judged in return? Why should friendly interactions between people become one that is transactional? Why is it that more people matter to us, the more they also mind? What is being sought after?

I stand in a state of dystopia.



All relationships takes 2 hands to clap. When the hands are far apart, it takes even more effort to bring them together to clap, sometimes the right hand has to initiate first, sometimes the left. But they will always meet in the center to create the sound. If the right hand is kept stationary, the left hand has to do all the work in clapping. It feels awkward and after a while, I'm pretty sure the left hand will feel tired as well.




I am thinking about having another blog to write about my thoughts about geography. Hmm…will be posting some stuff about it soon.

On an entirely random note, I think it's hard to separate the self from the social sciences. It's hard when your life is so intertwined with your studies, when people start to do things that bites against logical/factual arguments and then provide the most essentialist, racist, sexist, misogynist, stupid-st justification for saying/doing what they do.

It irks me, that people pass on information as if they were fact and truth. I guess for starters, reading 'smartly' (any kind of reading/interpreting) can be done in 3 stages. What is being said, who is saying it and the most importantly, to whose interest does it serve. Just because we cannot see those interests, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means we have to dig deeper.

It's often safer to say "I don't know" rather than to fight vehemently for a cause that you know very little about. The more you are compelled to do something for an organisation, the more you should be wary of that compulsion. Are you being manipulated to serve a certain interest that unknowingly bring harm? Are you simply a mule to carry certain ideas to further certain oppressive ideologies. I find that by the time I interrogate every aspect of that organisation, I have lost my compulsion to further their cause because there are often too many loopholes in their arguments, if they are not ludicrous altogether.

Do you believe that learning is good? Do you accept that learning means making mistakes? If you accept these two ideas, then you must also be ready to accept for others to point out those mistakes. Therefore, in short, to learn is to be criticised and despite its bitter tang, it is also an acquired taste. Critique is the highest form of flattery and if someone doesn't even intend to engage, it shows that he/she has no interest in your ideas (because they are too ludicrious?).

I guess education is about having an open mind. If you are not ready to accept alternatives or even open to play the devils' advocate, then you have had learned very little, and will learn continue to learn very little. In the age of social media and easy access to information, paradoxically, we know even less about our world. We find ourselves lost and confused, we latch onto anything that seems familiar and 'good'. However, we must be careful not to become information mules just because something seems good on the surface, without understanding the full extent of report or history that led up to events.

The world is fucking complicated. A person who proclaims to know it all, or presents a very simple 'us' vs 'them' scenario is a person we should be wary of. Why do I say so? Because firstly, causation is one of the hardest apeshit to prove. Even statisticians or researchers cannot find a perfect model to depict causation and to say A causes B is truly, something only god will know. Secondly, a story often have multiple actors, some voices are heard, others silenced. How sure can you be, that the story you're hearing now, has every actor in it? Thirdly, simplifying a world into simple categories does not make reality simply, it retards understanding. Every situation has too many variables for it to be reduced to just a few. While it is true that some matter more than others, but the case in point is that sometimes, the details really do change how we see things (for instance, Raffles did not land at the Singapore River, but actually somewhere nearer at Whampoa).

This post has been spurred by the recent KONY viral video….facts are framed to portray certain interests that are veiled as truths. That's why I say, the social sciences and personal life are so intertwined, simple because it changes how you see and engage with reality. A little humility, goes a long way, in making the world a better place to live in.






Every time I'm feeling troubled, I write. I guess writing has always been a way of talking and making sense of how I'm feeling - rationalising it.

Lately, I'm at a loss for words. I don't quite know where to go, or what to do because it just seems that everything is very unsettling. I can take hardship, I can take pain. What I absolutely cannot stand: is uncertainty. Uncertainty keeps me up at night, keeps me distracted in lectures, and keeps away from people. I feel that there's a need to solve this problem before I can move on with my life. For so long now, I have been uncertain for so many things and I guess this is where I finally blew up.

Blame it on the hormones, or the astrological influence on my star sign, but I cried yesterday after welling up for a couple of days. I guess crying is really the only way I know how to let things out. Floodgates opened, and after emptying out my emotions, I felt emptier still.

I know I'm not very good company these few days and I feel that I'm keeping people away from me because of it. I want to be happy again, I want to be myself. Yet I cannot because circumstances are holding me back and uncertainty of whether I'm making the right decision weighs heavily on my mind.

A friend once told me that whatever decisions we make, the decision will make us. So it's not a matter of choosing wisely, although that of course is important, but he said that choosing 'wisely' only has its limits because we only know so much then. The issue here is then to cope with our choice and learn to choose better in the future.

I feel that my life has only just begun unfolding and the last 22 years of my life was lived in a relative dream. At this moment of limbo, moving forward, you are now responsible for the choices you make. The repercussions of our choices therefore make us in the future.

I want to be happy, and the choice I make therefore was always a simple one - to make me happy. So when something ceases to make me happy, but instead brings anxiety and doubt, the rational self-loving thing to do is to move away from the cist of these negative feelings.

I don't need to make a decision now. But ultimately, a decision has to be made. In the mean time, hormones, the month - whatever.