Wednesday, December 31, 2008
It's now 10 minutes to 10pm according to the clock on my table. Approximately 2 hours from now, we would have left the year 2008 behind and stepped into 2009. So I thought New Year's Eve would be a good time for some reflections on the year that has passed and some resolutions for the year that is to come.
2008 hasn't been a very good year. Some countries have been hit with natural disasters, others have become paralysed with political turmoil. The whole world struggled with rising oil prices, rising food prices, and then came the bank credit crisis.
But, at the risk of sounding cheesy, I think there is hope for change, although I'm skeptical about how much and how fast Obama can bring about the great change he promises. He may be the President of the United States, but he is not the Messiah. But I would still like to retain at least a qualified optimism.
On a more personal level, 2008 has certainly been an eventful year. In the first half of this year, I successfully completed the most important academic paper in my life up till now - the Honours Thesis - and managed to get the First Class and the research scholarship I had been working towards for as long as I can remember. It was an experience which I'll always remember, especially when I prepare for my Masters thesis half a year from now.
Of course, there were also more ambiguous moments in 2008 which were not clear-cut successes or failures. I took a big risk and finally did something which I had been thinking long and hard about, and although the consequences were not quite what I expected, I think I did the right thing. I would be lying if I said that I don't sometimes regret what I did and want to go back to how things were in the past, but at the end of the day, I'm glad I took the plunge. The whole ordeal has taught me a lot about human beings and has made me a more mature person.
The second half of 2008 has been a pretty fruitful period of rest for me. It was great to take a break after four years of studying and use the time to do all the things I did not have the time to do previously. Within the past six months, I have read books by Woolf, Kafka, Joyce, Calvino and a few others which have been on my "to read" list; I have beefed up my theoretical knowledge to some extent by reading (and re-reading) essays by critical theorists and a book on cultural studies; I have revised my Japanese all the way from Japanese 2 to 5 and have taken the JLPT2 exam.
I have also taught myself fashion illustration, perspective drawing (though I'm still very bad at this) and familiarized myself with Corel Painter. I think my drawings have shown a marked improvement although there is still a long way to go before I can compare myself to the likes of Juliana or Luo Lan.
I have also overcome my long-held resistance and joined Facebook, and found that it is actually a pretty useful tool for keeping in touch with one's friends. I have attended many gatherings and met up with long-lost friends and made new ones. I have eaten lots of nice desserts; I have finally tried the famous ramen at Tampopo; I have even drunk my first alcoholic drink (and nothing bad happened).
I have attended the Singapore Biennale and other art exhibitions; I have visited MAAD, I have watched the first public performance of Laremy's plays.
And I have found the time to simply laze around in my room, surfing the Internet for D videos or lounging in my armchair with manga or a fashion magazine in my hand and my mind drifting away to ponder on all sorts of random things, without having to worry about work undone and looming deadlines.
So all in all, I enjoyed 2008. And I hope 2009 will be a better year, for myself, my family and friends and for everyone in the world (yes, even THAT GUY I really dislike - I hope you realize what a horrible person you are and do something about it!). So here are a few resolutions for the new year.
1. Study hard and get good grades (obviously I need to).
2. Keep fit and stay healthy.
3. Do not succumb to the temptation of using work as an excuse to keep people at too great a distance in order to avoid the complexities of human relationships.
4. Perservere in the path that I have chosen.
5. Become a stronger, more mature, more independent adult.
There is this beautiful passage right at the end of Italo Calvino's novel (?) Invisible Cities which expresses very succinctly how I want to live in 2009 and for the rest of my life.
Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.
He said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."
And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by living together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
Happy New Year!
kaoru said at 5:49 AM
|