Assorted Notes

TUESDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2008

I recently had a thought about [a gambling-related activity with which I thought I could make money]. I guess I can make money with it in the long-term, but I have a problem with the amount of time I spend on it, and I have a problem with what it does to my mind. If I end an hour with more money than what I started with, I am ecstatic; if I end up with less money, I am not so much unhappy, but let’s just say a general sense of happiness and well-being is completely absent.

After drawing a comparison between that and anything that requires creativity – can be a poem or an article for a web page, I mumbled in the direction of the refrigerator: “It is too important.”

To end an hour’s activity with a profit is simply too important. I follow my strategy and go through the steps with the thought in the back of mind that I just have to make 1000% (that’s right, one thousand percent) profit within four to six weeks then everything is hunky-dory and I can go on vacation. Then after an hour I walk back to the kitchen with less money in my account, disappointed, a little angry, and increasingly uncertain. “Will it work?” I’ll mutter to myself.

I put everything on the table. I risk my health, my happiness and well-being, a trip to my own country to see my family, my hope, my … faith – on the outcome of an hour’s activities that are supposed to make money.

This piece is starting to look like a confession, so let me make it clear: I do not gamble – not with cents, and not with dollars. I carefully work things out. I go in for profit, not for entertainment.

Nevertheless, to win is too important. Losing also weighs too heavy on my mind. Can the situation be saved? Or should I steer clear of anything where I win or lose because in both cases my blood pressure threatens to go through the roof?

Then again, everything that raises my blood pressure? What is left? Reading? Definitely out! I get all worked up and discuss everything with myself out loud. Movies, TV? Same story. Going on vacation to see my family? Problematic – there’s the stress of saying goodbye. Teaching English? There’s the noise, and the insolence of some of the kids … oh my goodness! Is this check mate?

WEDNESDAY, 1 OCTOBER 2008

In Korea, I had the insight that I hate to lose, because I expect to win. What inspired this insight was the severe distress I used to suffer when I lost an arcade game like Daytona USA or Soul Edge against someone. A similar thing rears its head nowadays with games on my computer like Pacman, Tetris, and FreeCell.

Why is it so important for me to win? It certainly confirms that I was right about something, but why is it so important to be right?

Is the problem an exaggerated sense of self-worth? Do I constantly need confirmation of my value as a person because uncertainty about it lurks just beneath the surface?

Am I doomed to be forever tossed between an exaggerated self-esteem, an insatiable need for confirmation of my value as a person (as manifested in the need to be right), and looming uncertainty about my own value and the accompanying anxiety, while existing in a reality in which everyone sometimes wins and sometimes loses, where everyone is sometimes right and sometimes wrong?

______________________

THURSDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER 2008

Why I do what I do: a conversation with myself on the way to the 7-Eleven late last night

Reason one: Distrust, since the age of fourteen, in an adult life of get a job, get married, get a loan to buy a house, get a loan to buy a car, have children, then the economy turns bad or some other fuck-up that makes you lose your job, you get desperate, you borrow more money, you move to another city, you trade in the car for an old wreck, you explain your situation to friends and relatives and strangers, you get even more desperate until you get to the point where you are willing to call anyone “boss” or do anything for a paycheck.

Reason two: Even when I was supposed to get ready for a career, interests like history and religion weighed heavier than subjects like personnel management or marketing.

Reason three: Like millions of other people I, too, have been given a gift, and I’ll be damned if I do not apply my life to something better than a mediocre existence.

MONDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 2008

We often hear ourselves and other people say things like, “My life should be better,” “X should actually be Y,” “A should be B.” You also regularly remind yourself that life hardly ever works out the way we want. You do your best, and you try to be happy with what you have. Yet you keep striving for a better life, to make things better.

Most of us know that life is a struggle – for a higher level of existence. Sometimes you succeed, and your life is better from that day on. Sometimes you struggle for what feels like an eternity, and you barely remain standing. But – and I know I have used this image more than a few times, but here it is again – if you are not down for the count, you’re still standing. And as long as you remain standing, you struggle on.

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 9 JULY 2008

It’s five to two in the morning. I feel like a cheap prostitute who’s been selling his body for his dreams all day long, but who still ends up with nothing.

Fuck it; then I’m a cheap prostitute. Tomorrow I lie down again. Tomorrow I dream again. Because … whatever. That’s how it is.

09:12

Every time I believe in something and it backfires in my face, a piece of my soul stays behind. This is a problem because I need to believe. Otherwise, what’s the point?

09:59

How do you go on believing, if you know something can backfire in your face anytime?

What you do is you think twice before you jump into bed with every new idea that promises you the world.

11:24

“More than a million blind warriors form the vanguard.” ~ from a documentary on ants

FRIDAY, 11 JULY 2008

I am good at struggling, but can I deal with success?

Just thought I’d ask, again.

THURSDAY, 14 AUGUST 2008

A statement to which no price can be affixed: “You loved me when I was poor.”

WEDNESDAY, 20 AUGUST 2008

My motto: Be reasonable.

[no date]

Standard marketing advice:

1. Here’s what I’ve got.

2. This is what you’ll get out of it.

3. Here’s what I want you to do next.

______________________

FRIDAY, 13 JUNE 2008

That then was Thursday, the day numbered “twelve” in the month labelled “June” in the year following “2007”.

I know there is a point behind everything I fill my days with. Time flies. Everyone gets older. The world perishes bit by bit.

Time for bed? Why? Because I’m tired of sitting on this chair, but especially since sleep traditionally precedes breakfast. And I like to do things right.

TUESDAY, 17 JUNE 2008

It is because we are born that we die.

It is because we survive 85 years of life that we die of old age.

It is because of life that we succumb to death.

THURSDAY, 19 JUNE 2008

Today is not January 6^th, the Day of Epiphany, and I know I have an almost programmed tendency to go profound whenever I get near Lane 55 [my first neighbourhood in Taiwan], but as I was pedalling past early tonight, it struck me: Life came to me.

In Korea, I often spoke of pausing at the red light, waiting until I can continue with my life. These sentiments were repeatedly reconsidered in ‘99 and 2000. Taiwan was, initially, like Korea, a place of waiting: Waiting until I could go “home” – where I could live a fuller life, where I could finally commit and belong.

June 2008. I am still in Taiwan, nine and a half years later. Still here, as I remind myself every time I pass by Lane 55. But I am not waiting anymore. People came to me. First it was just friends, and then, finally, love.

* * *

To me Natasja represents LIFE. To me, she is LIFE incarnated. Surely we are all, technically speaking, but to me she is a truly wonderful manifestation of LIFE: her personality, her willpower, her survival instinct, her enjoyment of things, her experience of things, even her fears, although she doesn’t always talk about them.

Of course, Natasja would have been here regardless of my presence. She would have come here anyway, and she would still be here now even if I were not. But if I did go back to look for LIFE in South Africa as I had planned to do more than a few times, I would have missed her.

I was here in 2004. And she came here.

The rest is my blessed experience of LIFE.

THURSDAY, 26 JUNE 2008

“Marry me, Rita,” says the title character in the film, Sgt. Bilko. “I know I’m a longshot, but sometimes they pay.”

______________________

FRIDAY, 9 MAY 2008

Here are the notes I should have made on Friday, 10 February 2006:

Besides learning to make money from home, in my own time, and with work that I see fit, I set myself the following goals over the next two or three years:

1. I have to learn to fail utterly and completely, and then to start again the next day, and to fail utterly and completely again, and to start again the next day.

2. I have to learn to venture an opinion and make predictions, and to be totally wrong, and the next day to again venture opinions and make predictions, and to be totally wrong again, and then the next day to again risk an opinion and make predictions.

3. I have to learn to be patient. I have to learn to progress painfully slowly, even slipping back every few days almost to where I had started, and then to continue the following day.

Oh, and I have to learn all the above whilst someone whose respect I want to be worthy of witnesses each and every one of my failures, and knows of almost every single time I am and have been wrong.

MONDAY, 19 MAY 2008

If you stop breathing, you die. If you stop trying, you fail by default.

SATURDAY, 24 MAY 2008

“One of four thousand,” dictates my mind while I am lying flat on my back.

One of four thousand writers now living, who write about life in a certain way. And because not all these writers are active – for a variety of reasons, it makes the work of the writers who do write so much more important.

THURSDAY, 29 MAY 2008

Just over the bridge on the way to my usual dinner place yesterday, I thought of how many times I have boasted – not intentionally, but still – about great wealth the past two years, and how Natasja has listened to it all, how she has seen how little has materialised thus far, and how she still loves me.

By the time I parked my bike next to the lamppost, a thought had struck me right between the eyes. I shall illustrate it thus: Once a woman has decided to love a man – or when it happens in the mysterious way it does, the man on the receiving end can casually proceed straight to the nearest Daoist temple. On the way, he can pick up a kilogramme of joss sticks and once at the temple, light up one after the other while thanking, solemnly, and with tears welling up in his eyes, every single figure or statue that resembles any kind of deity for the good fortune that had befallen him.

SATURDAY, 31 MAY 2008

(Part of a larger kitchen contemplation of Eros and Thanatos: the desire to live and the desire to die.)

I take good things for granted, dismiss them as insignificant, or even ignore them, while I consider unfavourable outcomes – even relatively trivial events – as incontrovertible evidence that “things are not right”, that I am busy “screwing up”, that “things are obviously not working out – and perhaps never will”.

By the way, who am I, and what am I doing with my life?

______________________