Assorted Notes

MONDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER 2014

My professional ambitions* are WRITING, PUBLISHING what I write, and MAKING MONEY.

* Professional ambitions: What you do when you are not relaxing or doing things that improve your life.

THURSDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER 2014

Incidentally, on Tuesday, 17 November 1998 I asked: “Why Taiwan?”

I answered: “To be free of debt in two or three years’ time and to empower myself financially. Why? To focus on my singular ambition – to write. Why? So I can give expression to my need, my desire, my urge to create. Why? So that when I return to dust, I can leave something behind.”

How does this compare with what I wrote on Monday? In both notes, I used the word ambition. In both notes writing featured prominently. But what good does it do if you finish a novel every few months, and every few weeks another short story, and every now and then a poem or an essay, and no one ever reads it? That is where publication comes in. I have made it a priority to learn how to publish – my own literary projects, but also more commercial projects.

I also mentioned financial empowerment in November 1998, to make it possible for me to pursue my “singular ambition”. Now, too, I want to make money, not just so that I can spend the best hours of my day on my own projects, but to make life easier for the special woman in my life, and to be able to enjoy more of life with her.

In short, the choice of words is somewhat different. What is behind it, has remained more or less unchanged.

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SUNDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER 2014

A guy on a motorcycle cuts you off seconds before you get to a traffic light. You have to brake sharply. The guy races through the intersection, and because your forward motion was interrupted, you are forced to wait at the red light.

Six blocks later you crash into a car. Not because you’re a bad driver. Not because the other person had done something terribly wrong. You crashed into them because you were still steamed up because of “that other pig” cutting you off – six blocks earlier. Now you have to pay for the damage to someone’s vehicle. Because you couldn’t restrain your emotions. Because you took all your resentments, all your insecurities with you on the road.

Same with pre-race trading. I increasingly get the idea that my understanding of the story is no longer as big a problem as it was eight months ago. The way I enter into trades is also considerably better. But because my mind is not what it should be – because of the heat and humidity, the fact that my bicycle’s chain falls off every day and then the overweight foreign dude with the grandmother bike has to stop on the bridge to reset his chain with his keys, and who knows what else, every now and then I allow a trade to go where it wants instead of controlling it. And it’s not because I am a bad trader, or because I don’t understand what’s going on. It is because I can’t restrain my emotions. Because I take my clouded mind with me to the trading session. And the result is that I don’t make money – or worse, that I lose money.

We like to tell ourselves that we ought to be happy, that it’s better for our health and our relationships and so on. Verily, verily, I say to myself: Work on being a happier person, make it clear to all your insecurities what they can do to themselves, and make more money.

A happier person with fewer insecurities will probably also find it easier to remain calm in the traffic. Which might just one day save your and/or someone else’s life or limb.

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MONDAY, 18 AUGUST 2014

This evening in a local supermarket I observed a young couple loading kitchenware into their trolley. I thought to myself: “Imagine that was your dream when you were 28 or 29 – to be married and to start a family of your own.”

Not too many seconds later, I remembered it indeed was my dream when I was in my late twenties.

There was a problem though. I had no confidence in the process of making yourself useful, pleading or begging for a job, or smiling eagerly enough or performing your tricks well enough to be employed by some company or commercial enterprise. (And then, when it suits the company or enterprise, or when they want to go in a different direction, or when you start costing them too much, they throw you out in the parking lot with your box full of sharp pencils, Tip-ex, and a picture of you and your wife and your two children. And a dog and a cat. Waiting at home not knowing new money won’t be coming in at the end of the month.)

For the next fifteen minutes I focused on my groceries, walked out to the parking lot, got on my bike and rode home.

As I was pedalling, I again pondered the core of the marriage-children-work idea. By the time I got home, an alternative opinion had formed in my mind: If I had wanted badly enough to be married in my late twenties and to start a family of my own, I would have tried harder to get work in my own country. I would still not have trusted the process, but like most people I would have closed my eyes, jumped, and hoped for the best.

The truth is, I did want to get married and start a family in my late twenties and early thirties, but there were other things that were more important to me. I ended up pursuing these other … dreams, these other ambitions.

Eventually I did get married – to a woman who is my partner, who understands me, and who loves me. And although we don’t have children, one fat cat with character and his eccentric cousin complete our family portrait.

And for me, that’s perfect.

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WEDNESDAY, 30 JULY 2014

13:15

More than a month of silence … and then, this:

Is Brand Smit a middle-aged loser? Who makes the accusation? Who defends me? Who argues against me? Who is the magistrate? Society? Impossible. Society’s values and standards are primitive.

The fact is, in this existential complaint I myself make the accusation, and I myself am the prosecutor, advocate, and, finally, the magistrate. You find yourself guilty? Then society will treat you as guilty. You find the accusation groundless and reject it? Then society doesn’t have a case.

16:15

Two possibilities for me:

Option one: Mediocrity: I publish my books, but I don’t do any marketing; I know how to make money, but I don’t do it because I don’t want to take risks with my money; I know how to get in better physical condition, but I’m too lazy.

Option two: On fire: Live out the rest of your life like a protesting Buddhist in Saigon in 1963.

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TUESDAY, 3 JUNE 2014

According to Wikipedia, artists and other creative people in early nineteenth century France started gathering in lower-class Roma neighbourhoods where the rent was more affordable. A common misconception at the time was that Roma people had reached France in the fifteenth century through Bohemia, the western part of what is now the Czech Republic. This resulted in French people calling the Roma in France, Bohémien. Because the creative types began gathering in the predominantly Roma neighbourhoods, people started referring to the artists and creatives by the same moniker.

What does it mean to lead a “bohemian” lifestyle? The same Wikipedia article where you can learn all of the above facts describes a bohemian lifestyle as unconventional, with few firm commitments, and a focus on musical, artistic, literary or spiritual ambitions. People who pursued a bohemian lifestyle in the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century were often associated with unorthodox or anti-establishment political and social views. Frugality and even voluntary poverty were sometimes part of the story. The association with the Roma was also one of outsiders who lived apart from more conventional communities and who were not bothered that much with the latter’s rejection of how they lived their lives.

Some other interesting bits from the Wikipedia article:

[It] is not enough to be one’s self in Bohemia, one must allow others to be themselves, as well. What, then, is it that makes this mystical empire of Bohemia unique, and what is the charm of its mental fairyland? It is this: there are no roads in all Bohemia! One must choose and find one’s own path, be one’s own self, live one’s own life.” ~ Burgess, Gelett. “Where is Bohemia?” collected in The Romance of the Commonplace.

[…]

Bohemian is defined in The American College Dictionary as “a person with artistic or intellectual tendencies, who lives and acts with no regard for conventional rules of behavior.”

[…]

In 2001, political and cultural commentator David Brooks contended that much of the cultural ethos of well-to-do middle-class Americans is Bohemian-derived, coining the paradoxical term “Bourgeois Bohemians”.

[…]

By extension, Bohemia meant any place where one could live and work cheaply, and behave unconventionally; a community of free souls beyond the pale of respectable society.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism

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