oh! it's been a week..?

I've just realised that it's been a week since I updated. Better write something in case a certain over-imaginative someone suspects I'm dead and in a ditch somewhere! Which reminds me - that one time when I really, plausibly *could* have ended up that way and frantically tried to call for help the someone I chose to call decided to react thus upon seeing my missed call on his phone (at 4am, no less!): aiyah, it's only Leah lah. Never mind!

Hmmm. Sometimes I'm not so sure despite Pam's countless - and very much appreciated, I might add - professions of love that my friends don't secretly find me quite irksome and expendable... Oh yes, I DO recall Tim saying once that I'm quite expendable. (Kudos to him for a super-quick recovery, though - "I said, expAndable! With an A, not E! Can eat and grow fat!!")

Anyway - I have no idea how I got started along that vein.

The week has been hectic -
tons of reading, some pretty disappointing classes (nothing this term is really exciting me academically speaking.. I think my 3+6+4+2+3 years of school are starting to get to me...), a paper due, a rather random mid-week visit by Kahyong (who apparently doesn't know the difference between Wednesday and Thursday), an even more random encounter with Chan Lek whom I very randomly bumped into on the street (which momentarily made me panic and wonder frantically, as I am wont to do sometimes - "where the hell am I? England? US? Singapore? Somebody hold me." **), plus a number of very nerve-wrecking (but rather flattering, nonetheless) encounters which prove my theory in the previous entry about guys. I think I might settle for a good-looking asshat.

** I am not the only crazy goon who does this - Diana does, too! Not to say she is a crazy goon, of course. I told Berlina that Diana and I do that. And she said promptly, "What drugs have you two been taking again??". Eh, we have a reputation problem man..


Oh and I also watched Hotel Rwanda.
The others found it inspiring. I found Don Cheadle's character very, very attractive, and I was also rather disturbed and depressed by the film. Throughout the whole film a single theme leapt out at me: Left...behind. I don't know why it always touches something quite visceral in me - it was one of the main themes in "The Poisonwood Bible" (book recommendation! go read!) and I remember being very shaken by how Barbara Kingsolver literally used one of her characters to embody the idea of being left behind - the character was born with some congenital psychomotor problem that made the left side of her body crippled, so she was always dragging her left side behind her, and when her mother was made to choose which of her children to save from some crazy ant attack (this is set in the 1960s in the DRC), of course the mother chose her beautifu, perfectly-formed sister to carry to safety, not her. It's the arbitrariness in the way we choose that I cannot bear, I think - crippled or whole. Black or white. Male or female. Rich or poor. Are we really born that unequal?

Also, the film reminded me that the Rwandan genocide happened in 1994. When I was old enough to be cognizant of the terrible things happening. I have often wondered at the utter callousness and almost unbelieveable irresponsibility and blindness of the generation that allowed six million Jews, gypsies and other assorted human 'detritus' to be killed right under their knowing noses.

And then it hit me that we are no different.
Every generation has its Holocaust.
The DRC, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, the Niger delta, Rwanda. Same difference.
We have always been callous selfish manipulative vicious greedy fools. Fools that the most perfect and sinless man who ever lived died a horrible, horrible death for.

How much pain are we causing him with our mindless, needless slaughter? With our habitual, ritualised, studied indifference and tacit complicity?

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This is something that I feel intensely about, and it seems to have helped the couple of people I've sent it to, so I shall post it here -

From Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
(emphases my own)

“We reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the ‘Es muss sein!’ to our own great love.”

[...]

“Necessity knows no magic formulae – they are all left to chance. If love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.

“Our day to day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. ‘Co-incidence’ means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven. But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.

“Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition – the same motif begins at the beginning and at the end – may seem quite ‘novelistic’ to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on the condition that you refrain from reading such notions as ‘fictive’, ‘fabricated’, and ‘untrue to life’ into the word ‘novelistic’. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

“They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realising it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”

“While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs, but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.”

Excuse me while I go and mope around morosely now... I'm feeling a bit like Isaiah Berlin's fox right now.