I wonder if you’ve missed me as I’ve missed you. Possibly not.

The last few weeks have been for cocooning, resting, thinking, working. For listening and watching and reading and making notes and thinking some more.

For putting stuff in, so that I can bring stuff out.

This past year was a quite an emotional year for me. I struggled through most of it; badly. I never imagined it to end this way. But it did. Get over it Ganz, you stupid fuck.

Now we enter 2010. Twenty-ten. Wow. We’ll all start by looking back and inside. Then looking forward and out.

Then we’ll see what happens. Are we ‘under the dome?’ Not literally but figuratively. We are all on this planet and, at least for now, it is self contained, much like a tank of sea monkeys. I never really knew what the fuck those things were anyway.

No help is available from outside. It’s sink or swim, up to those of us who live here on the fragile surface of this tiny ball spinning fast through the cold and black and utterly unknown.

Another year and countless opportunities to see people exhibiting an astounding misapplication of judgment.

Love as usual eluded me. This time quite utterly.

I wished my life was a movie. At least you can fast forward to the end and see how it all went. Unfortunately I have to live every second of it and have no idea how things will end. Well it ends with my death but it would be nice to know before hand if you got married, made friends, had children, saw the world, help change the world a little and perhaps most importantly were you worth a damn to anyone else.

Dear God I find your humor in all this most disturbing.

There was a time I worked for ACP Computer near Raffles Boulevard.

It was terrible.

The people there just seemed zoned out.

Passion was asleep.

All the women and sissy men ever did was gossip.

And gossip they did about every little thing.

The biggest mistake I made was to listen to my father.

I started work as soon as I finished my national service.

I remember the times I just sat behind the office building and looked at the ocean.

Sometimes I cried out of my frustration, being boxed in, adhering to rules, and living a meaningless existence.

I devised a plan to get myself out of the company.

Looking back I’m glad I did because now I am king.

I get to be the master of my own destiny.

There are many philosophies in life that you can subscribe to.

I like to think that all of them are wrong.

The only one that truly matters to me is my own.

No one is right when everyone is wrong.

Besides no one here can really judge us.

Sure society does, but it only does so because it feels threatened by our eccentricities and potential.

All my life, I have heard the right way to live. Study hard, be the best , stay faithful, don’t go against God, pray, defend the nation, protect capitalism, don’t test water, don’t be a hero, stay safe, get a safe job, marry and have children.

I really don’t know what I want out of life.

But I know what I do not want out of life.

Life can be as easy or hard as you want it to be.

There is no grace in death.

We all die like cats and dogs.

Might as well make our lives interesting for we will never get this chance ever again.

Once in my naivety I requested a testimonial from a previous employer.

She told me she won’t write one because I had only worked there for six months and didn’t make any significant contribution to their organization.

If you really think about, the time she took to write this deliberate reply she could have instead used to write a short testimonial.

Nothing much, just a short generic testimonial.

It all comes down to your own willingness.

Nuff said.

Don’t you ever wake up and realize that you being alive is perhaps the greatest miracle in the Universe. I mean every individual particle that makes you who you are in its self has no consciousness or even the inert capacity to know what is going on around it. But here we all are the only sentient beings in the known Universe and if you really think about it, every problem you ever faced, or will face stands in pale comparison next to your potential as a human being so long you can free yourself from inhibitors placed upon you by society, state, religion, family and even by yourself.

Our whole culture is moving for some time now with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus gives us a philosophical theory, or rather, perhaps, a vision, you accompany the odd and disturbing view of the world of The Stranger.

Sisyphus was condemned by the Olympian gods to spend all eternity in fruitless labor, rolling a rock up a mountain until it would roll back down of its own weight, again and again and again.

Nothing could be more absurd, Camus tells us, than a life of such futility.

The “absurd” is this vision this sensibility that has come to preoccupy the modern mind or at least to a large extent my own.

Camus defines the absurd as a confrontation between rational human beings and an indifferent universe.

It is the view that, despite our hopes and expectations (for justice, for salvation, for peace and harmony), the world does not deliver or care.

It is noteworthy that Camus is an atheist. But he also says that if there were a God, it would not matter, life would still be absurd.

In The Stranger, Camus suggests that death makes life absurd. This view has been around since ancient times.

The character of Sisyphus makes it painfully clear that an eternity of futility s more absurd than a mere lifetime of futility. Death, then, is a kind of blessing, an escape from perennial boredom.
Sisyphus and Ecclesiastes both suggest the absurdity that our lives amount to nothing.

One of Camus’s target in the Myth is the contemporary glorification of science and objectivity.

Galileo’s retractions before the threats of the Church were more comic than tragic, Camus suggests, because it is life, not truth that really counts.

The absurd is born Camus suggests, of the impersonal, abstract, scientific view of the world and what one contemporary philosopher has called the “view from nowhere”.

Ultimately only personal experience is meaningful.

Reason is characterized by the question why?

This is a quest for explanation, for justification for an account that makes an action or an event comprehensible.

But every why leads to another why?

All series of why questions end nowhere.

In terms of understanding as well as satisfaction, life is essentially absurd.

Understanding does not give us satisfaction.

The absurd is a confrontation between our rational minds and an indifferent universe.

Sisyphus can be interpreted in two ways in this context.

He devotes himself to his labor so completely that he must be considered happy. Thus, the role of reflection, of reason, is a problem. It leads to a question “What does this amount to?” to which the answer is nothing.

He understands his task worth resentment, and his resentment of the gods thereby makes his life meaningful. Sisyphus rebels by refusing to accept the absurdity imposed on him.
Camus present reason as problem.

Rationality has different meanings.

It refers to consciousness on the one hand. Only human consciousness can see absurdity in a repeated pattern.

It refers to the intelligibility (comprehensibility and justice) of the world on the other.

Either we find the meaning of life in our lives. Camus seems to be saying, or not at all.

From The Stranger and Sisyphus, the answer is that life is its own meaning; philosophical reflection does not give us meaning,

In Camus, only in so far as we are engaged in our lives do our lives make sense.

Ultimately I guess I been right along, life is what you make of it.

Why is there a need to psycho analyze myself? Why can’t I go about living my life the way most people do.

Why is there this reluctance to let my hair down (metaphorically speaking of course) and be part of the world. Go have fun, get drunk, and enjoy life without asking too many questions.

Why do I spend so much time and energy trying to figure out things that has no monetary value.

Why? No one really cares about my endeavors and besides like most truths we are often left unamused and if ever contend.

As long as I been able to remember I have never been able understand life. I have come to accept that none of us can even begin to comprehend our existential meaning because there hasn’t been a species like the human race in the universe that we know of.

One question remains. Why than is it important for us to know things we can’t comprehend. Shouldn’t we just forget about such things and go on to live a fruitful life? But what than is a fruitful life? And why is it so important that we should  live productive lives? Can’t I just fall in love, have a dozen kids and be some romantic poet in the French countryside without ever giving a damn about the big questions.

I already know the answer to my question, I could.

But we are a silly lot. Some us keep pushing the what-if questions until we find ourselves in uncharted territories. And guess what happens next, no one knows what is going to happen next and the whole lot of us will go through life either liberated from the past ideologies or terrified at the prospect that we have arrived at the new world without a map or a cartographer or we simply try to exploit each other by forcefully asserting ourselves in the abyss.

If hope is the only thing that gets us through a dreadful situation and things comes right for us in the end than hope is a good thing.

But what about if we go through years and years of false expectations that something might happen but never does and all of our possibilities run out and all of our chances disappear because of the expectation that was never fulfilled than hope can be a very evil thing.

I have enough of the latter happen to me so many times in the course of my life sometimes I wonder why I am still a hopeful. Perhaps I don’t want to live a life devoid of hope because if it wasn’t for hope why than would I bother waking up each and every day knowing I am destined to die.

It is the ambiguous nature of hope that makes life bearable to some and unbearable to others and just confuses the rest of us.

Why should it matter to us if we are deceived and we never know about it. Since appearance is all we have anyway.

And yet reality does seem to matter to us. Would it matter to you if your spouse or lover is unfaithful and you lived and died happily nevering knowing it?

Would you be indifferent to which world you live in whether it was so or not.

Strange creatures we are, we silly human beings.

Do monogamous mammals have this worry about their spouses?

One has to rise up out of one self to look at things objectively this way. Even be able to imagine these two worlds.

I guess this is the only way we can understand objective worth.

You might ask why do the other possible worlds matter if they are never realized. But I suggest if one was to take meta physics seriously or what great Socrates called wisdom or Sophia than unrealized worlds do matter. For there by we come to recognize objective value of things and their worth because we are creatures of fantasy, myth and storytelling.

Do you love someone because you were kissed by him?
It’s not love, it’s inferiority complex.

Are your palms sweaty, is your heart racing and is your voice caught within your chest?
It isn’t love, it’s like.

You can’t keep your eyes off of them, am I right?
It isn’t love, it’s lust.

Do you love someone because you can’t live without their touch?
It’s not love, it’s lust.

Are you proud and eager to show them off?
It isn’t love, it’s luck.

Do you want them because you know they’re there?
It isn’t love, it’s loneliness.

Do you stay for their confessions of love, because you don’t want to hurt them?
It isn’t love, it’s pity.

Do you belong to them because their sight makes your heart skip a beat?
It isn’t love, it’s infatuation.

Do you think he or she is really gorgeous?
It’s not love, it’s infatuation.

Do you pardon their faults because you care about them?
It isn’t love, it’s friendship.

Do you share everything with them?
It’s not love, it’s friendship.

Do you tell them that they are the only one you think of?
It’s not love, it’s a lie.

Are you willing to give all of your favourite things for their sake?
It isn’t love, it’s charity.

Would you sacrifice your own life for them?
It’s not love, it’s heroism.

If you love someone because you think that you shouldn’t leave him because others think that you shouldn’t …
It’s not love, it’s compromise.

Do you know you love them because you simply cannot live without them?
It’s not love, it’s dependency.

Does your heart ache and break, do you cry for their pain, even when they’re strong?
Then it’s love.

Do their eyes see your true heart, and touch your soul so deeply it hurts?
Then it’s love.

Do you accept their faults because they’re a part of who they are?
Then it’s love.

Are you attracted to others, but stay with them faithfully without regret?
Then it’s love.

Would you allow them to leave you, not because they want to but because they have to?
Then it’s love.

Could you live without them, content with knowing that they are happy?
Then it’s love.