My window shivered as the last shred of cold wind slithered past the leaves of glass that was to keep the rain and gusts out. For a moment, life seemed like a Monet, dotted with colour but still so disparate and desperately in need of closure.

Every childhood is a basket of stories, bright and dark, some prancing in the sunshine of May, others lingering like dark clouds in October. We grow up with secrets, with guilt, with joy and jaunty memories. Yet how many of us choose in the end to turn to face the faceless ghouls of our past, the wrongs we have soiled our hands with, the curses we swore, the hatred we bore and all the desires we embraced as bitterness mingled and flirted with the forbidden fruit? Some of us carry to our last breath the heavy hearts of regret. We may have left wives who still love us behind as they nurse their broken hearts amidst wails of lonesome infants. We may have broken with our very hands the backs of our futures because of foolish errors that flushed our minds. We may have – at the drop of a hat – abandoned reason for madness, simply because we let emotions take the reins, because life seemed vacuous of meaning had we abandoned that magical moment to take revenge, to reach out for the core of our desires, to mutter that curse that sealed not the fate of those we hated, but that of our own.

I am not writing about regret. Neither am I to write about childhood. I want to think about life even as I can write only a quarter of my life story. I grew up with every ammunition to annihilate depression. I had loving parents and godparents and friends. I got almost everything I wanted, and that which I did not get, I probably didn’t mind not getting anyway. But somehow, perhaps in my desperate plea to flit away from the horrors of life that I have seen in my life and others’, I headed straight into its ugly embrace. I have been mired by too many tales of bitterness that those embittered were desperate to forget, and I have been told of too much sorrow and abandonment, as cry after cry tore through this broken land. K once told me that people who grew up knowing they were abandoned by the world tend to think especially hard about and look especially hard for these contortions of the human face. We grow up smelling the salt in the air, hearing the throttles and chokes and ultimately we learn to wash our hands not clean of this sorrow, but of the nature of this twisted world and go on waiting for the next good or bad thing to happen.

It’s true that I had every reason as a child to be happy. Yet I knew I wasn’t and probably would not for most of my life. I didn’t grow up depressed. Neither am I now or was I ever. But there was always this sinister complication in the labyrinth that is life that I was acutely aware of, that life isn’t always as simple, that there were sub-texts in every murmur and every cry. Yet amidst these layers of meaning, I knew that I needed to move on. I would keep my clutches tightly on these threads of meaning and slowly take my lifetime to weave my own tapestry. I knew it wouldn’t be a happy picture, but I knew too that I needed to learn to be happy.

And so it began, a life of bonhomie as I pointedly sought to put away carefully every broken eggshell that could no longer be put together again. But I noticed it. Every moment of joy for me was like a retiring clown, tired of jest and eager to slink back and head home. I desperately tried many times to hold it back, but it would almost without fail fade away and leave me in desperate solitude. Yet amidst the strong lights of the circus of life, I would notice and bathe in the shadows that wouldn’t go away. I was the jovial one, the one who was deep and introspective, but always eager to throw in a joke or two and eager to share a ‘sunshine smile’ I was told more than once that I had (and probably still do). But that was about as deep as anyone could fathom about me. The occasional good friend would peel another layer of the onion, but that was all. The core remained damp with tears, and while at first sight and touch felt hard, would sink and never inflate again if pressed. So that was life for me, not of duplicity – for I had never aspired to be what I am not – but of merry solitude.

If one were to theorise about one’s life and the principal patterns in the cosmology of one’s history, one could conjure a multitude of ideas. But I am a vapid mind, and I can only think that I have led so far a largely misunderstood life. At times, I wish someone would call me a social misfit, so that at least, I feel that someone is seeing me in the right light. But despite my silence at work unless prompted to speak, I have been told that I am eloquent, thoughtful and at times witty with my lampoons of UDPs (universally disliked persons).

So my life rumbled on like a square wheel of stone, heavy and capable only of painfully rocky rides but nevertheless mobile and granted the passenger a fluidity of the scenery and some excitement if the occasion allowed for it. But of late, I have been waiting. And learning to wait more graciously. Too many questions can be answered only by time, I am beginning to understand, and when time refuses to throw the answers out into the air, one can only wait. But waiting is becoming an art to a mule like me who has little room for patience in my life. There are different forms of waiting. The wait that one is ground under like one awaits the blood report after a night of bacchanalian debauchery, as one clasps one’s hands tightly in fear. There is the wait that one soaks in as one awaits to inhale the brilliance of a blood-red sunrise in Cyprus. There is the wait that one mingles in as one awaits the arrival of an important luminary, amidst the clinks of champagne glasses looking busy when they simply sing about nothing. But of late, I have been drowning in the wait of nothingness, the wait as one falls feet-first into a deep dark ocean like a blade into the pool, as the cold envelopes me and as I wait to know if I will sink to my death or get to rise above the torrents and waves and hear the gulls one day. It is that stage of liminality, of uncertainty as one transcends from one dimension to another, not knowing if the transition would be smooth or one fraught with treachery. It is like pregnancy without technology, when one has no clue if the flesh would be a stillborn in one’s womb, until that fateful day when the water breaks or when the infection sets in.

And so I have lived. I am still waiting, still breathing under the dark water, still cutting deep into the body of currents as I see the flickering lights above where the sun was growing dimmer and dimmer. I will – so I have been told – soon reach the seabed, with plenty of air still in my lungs. My legs will still have the spring to launch me right up to the gulls – so I have been told – but I choose to wait nevertheless.

It is still too early to tell.

《蜀相》曰：“出师未捷身先死，常使英雄泪满襟。”

此为颂诸葛孔明所为，以其鞠躬尽瘁、舍己报国之躯而咏之。然，叹今时今日，私心作首，企有如此忠君哉？今以前为利，纵有言之为不顾私欲、大公无私者，终亦不如昔日众烈士矣！

吾今执笔书之，实乃抒其闷气，以解连月之不公兮！怀才不遇者自古有之，大材小用者恒河沙数，其志士之隐忧遇笔成文，吾今郁郁乎，少则姑且不顾，多则怒发冲天，遂每每上书表文，皆有不悦之事，果真令愚感慨不已。纵不敢自谓远谋深算，然，愚居于庸者之下，庸者恍惚，少些亦有愚于旁兼顾也！有忧者，以避之而省之，以免后患，庸者竟拂袖而去，或以为仿如僧道不屑红尘，实若愚昧不堪焉！呜呼！此之管窥蠡测，实属井中之蛙，感之存为酒肉歌舞，纸迷金醉。待有疾风乱世之遭，如此尽管不属贼寇当甲，皆仍有不攻而自破之忧矣！纵是长江洪河也必有归海之时，如此愚娟，又何以堪？

东坡曰：“何妨吟啸且徐行，竹杖芒鞋轻胜马，谁怕？一蓑烟雨任平生。”人生七十古来稀，区区役役，冉冉光阴，如此折腾，又有何意焉？速比略描之，此为长恨而谱之。恨，犹如秋风寒灯。息之，则凛冽无暖、昏黯无明。任之，则明亮诱人，有忘却昏残之陷，空享其明亮之余，竟不顾窗外秋谨所曰：“秋风秋雨愁煞人”矣。待灯以灭、烛已尽，寒冬临至，唯恐柴筏不捡，终究受寒而死乎！

-“to build a democratic society, based on justice and equality” –

I can’t say I didn’t feel a thing when I heard that being read out to me yesterday morning when I was in the parade square. There was the hassle of an observance parade and all the pain of standing still when I am not supposed to, if a doctor’s orders are anything to be reckoned with. But there I was, and it was the first time in quite a number of years and after a series of tumultuous experiences that I was brought again to this familiar pledge and our anthem.

And that phrase up there struck me especially. I guess it’s not just because of my understanding of the various words up there. Democracy. Society. Justice. Equality. There is a nice ringing to the words when you string them up like that that almost resembles a poem. But there is a deeper meaning to that of course. The meanings are incontrovertibly subject to centuries of exhausted debate, but I half suspect that my emotive responses were stirred because of my own experiences of late of various systems as understood by my various friends either in SG or elsewhere. Of the US, of Germany, of the UK, of rural Cambodia, of China, of Taiwan. All these countries declare that they are or aspire to be akin to at least one of the ideals as enumerated in the quote, but either due to divergent construals, ethnic dissimilarities, historical differences or simply a confusion of priorities, these countries have become rather different and peculiar specimens of democracy in society stemming from justice and equality.

But let’s just look at SG. I will be – if I’m not yet one, which is at best contentious given that I am already in the military – in the civil service soon, so I am quite comfortable to declare that I ought to look at the deeper subtexts of this utterance. We have our social ideals that are laid out more explicitly on the table than other pledges, in that we acknowledge quite overtly that there are primordial or historical differences that we as a demographic have to overcome. Race, language and religion are dimensions that have proven of late to be catalysts of disaster and for implosions of societies, and thankfully we have put in place several policies for decades now to try to curb this. The efficacy of such policies is subject to debate and has been so, but the point at least is that coupled with these policies and our domestic intelligence, we have managed to stave off whatever proclivities there might have been that jeopardized such internal association that is society as we understand it.

But note that society here refers more specifically to what was accentuated at the outset of the pledge, that it is a commitment made by citizens of SG, not just societal members, but citizens both in and out of SG, but most certainly and exclusively of SG. So what happens in the laboratory called SG when its citizens are purportedly committed to build a society that is democratic, just and equitable (or egalitarian, which is I assure you very different from being equitable as the moral or political philosopher will tell you)? Or if we just look at the broad corpus of policies in place in SG or that which applies to Singaporeans?

Democracy by itself is almost always a safe ideal to have. One can always slink back to the traditional or purist definition and break the word up into demos et kratia (the people and power/rule). The Greeks had a good deal to say about this, because they happily toyed with the boundaries of people-hood. It is not just that women, children and slaves were not considered to be part of the people or citizenry. Only some men were considered citizens. So the idea of the polis and the rule of the few on behalf of the many (who were not citizens anyway and hence were justifiably denied rights to rule) was perfectly salubrious to them. The same can be said of any regime today. Insofar as Fidel and Raoul Castro are the only two citizens in Cuba, we have one and a half citizens in the blighted country today, that is quite plausibly deemed a democracy.

It’s because there is such a provision in ‘democracy’ ipso facto that we now have the more ‘enlightened’ ideal of liberal democracy, which – by its very name – intimates to the liberal or enlightenment tradition of prizing the individual. Insofar as women and children can be understood to be rational and have the capacity for independent thinking (and slaves should be an abolished category anyway), they all should be given rights of protection and some rights to decide some things for themselves. It is a bane if you ask me, because I believe more in the tyranny than the sagacity of the masses. To that extent therefore, I’m glad that there are no influential regimes today that are true liberal democracies. More common would be representative democracies that disguise themselves as being liberal politically, which works fine with me because I don’t see how they are in substance liberal democratically.

But we have chosen in our pledge to omit ‘liberal’, much to the dissatisfaction of some Singaporeans today. As a result, we are free to wander around the entire universe of ideas in history that trouble themselves with the invention of democracy. But we are restricted to be loyal to Justice and Equality, whatever their faces may be like. And this is when I have one grouse. Restricting ourselves to jurisprudential justice, I wonder why it is that our courts seem to have at best a muted function in raising concerns about our laws, which surely must be their bread and butter. Our courts pride themselves to be efficient and certainly immune to much financial corruption, but they are more like passive instruments that dispense rulings like a pharmacist does than an important mirror that reflects to the higher authorities of legislature what the problems are in our laws that may no longer be relevant or still subject to much debate that may have wider repercussions in our society if dismay or distress pervades. Entrapment is one big issue. The stretch of applicability of the death sentence is another. When talk is rife that the state is increasingly distant from the people on the ground, we need every possible avenue to hear the sentiments of the people. Note that I referred to the rife of talk, which surely is a result of perception. Even if – as I can imagine the retort to be – the courts do in fact so reflect the sentiments, the reflection is done most curiously in a rather embarrassed or muted way. We don’t see the courts doing it and we don’t see the results if they do so in fact.

To me, it is true that Justice has some immutable attributes. To kill an innocent person is wrong and begets punishment. To steal when the thief will not suffer extreme discomfort or inconvenience without so doing is wrong and begets punishment. But beyond that, I think there are more gray areas in today’s discombobulated world of morality and justice that than there are black and white zones. And to that extent, it is imperative that we work out what we as a people, as a citizenry who pay taxes and to which the state has a responsibility, believe to be right or wrong. Of course, the details of certain fundamental principles cannot be worked out by 4 million people. But I do hope that when it is clear beyond any shadow of doubt that certain rulings appear to be mishandled, a figure of authority can stand forth and explain the decision and subject himself to legal experts who do not happen to think that the decision is just. It is the spectacle of debate, even if not everyone can understand it, that might work in favour of a state and its citizenry that may be showing signs of disgruntlement.

Equality is a bigger ambiguity. If justice was a smoke in shadows, equality would be a shadow of smoke. Different societies have different objects that they want to be equitable or egalitarian about. Communists have more faith in the material, and almost everyone else in the immaterial. Are we talking about an equality in opportunity allocation, that everyone has an equal opportunity to get into the Deans List in NUS (which begs the question of when we start the equality: does every Singaporean then have a right to get into NUS regardless of his/her grades, that may be bad for reasons beyond his/her control)? Or do we want to dispense opportunities according to one’s needs and merits (geneses of which would be difficult to ascertain, and notoriously so)?

Sometimes when I studied big philosophical questions or even encountered relatively unnoticed ones that after ruminating for a bit got me frustrated because I saw deeper links to more intractable questions, I got inundated and wondered where to start. But there are times when I get so inundated that I personally wonder if I will get to my own answer even if I devoted my entire life to that one question. This question of equality and justice would likely be one. I suspect that it would be easier if I focus only on legal justice of the two questions, because the courts are systems that have rather clearly defined responsibilities on a fundamental level. But beyond that, statesmanship and policies have too many premises that are sturdy only when one is comfortable with upsetting a certain group of people. It becomes too difficult at the end of the day to work out the niceties to please everybody since policies usually have more free way and permeate certain boundaries and portfolios in a manner that the courts are less inclined to.

But thereagain, it is a bigger question and a more personal one that I have to settle first: will I be in the service for long? Its only fair for now to say that I am inclined to, but it is still too early to tell. It all depends on my experiences when I start work proper.

Happy Birthday Singapura.

For some time now, I’ve felt as if I have defiled my own dignity as a human being, as a person who ought to – by the very fact that he is human without any mental defects – be able to introspect and think about the world, about life, about the goings-on of this dizzying laboratory of emotions. Of course, I suspect that this failure is a result of my own indolence, as I have allowed myself to sink into the new depths of dimwitted drudgery in this silly job I now have.

I used to abhor people who cast blame conveniently on the system, on others around him, on the weather, on anything but himself. But increasingly, I’m seeing symptoms of the syndrome in me, as I cast blame on the menial tasks that are simply interminably thrown to me. It is harrowing sometimes when you think of going to work. True I am a clerk on weekdays, and the idea of a clerk is almost inextricably bound to words like ‘slack’, ‘bum’ and the like. So I had expected as well. But I never quite realized that my job would entail so much miserable phone calling and gritting of teeth when you are treated like dirt for no apparent reason by the people you take so much trouble calling, arranging interviews for, hankering after to make sure they have the right ornamentation for their uniform and making sure their credits and leave and all the rest of the perks they get are properly disbursed. It’s like a bitter mother who has neither room nor reason to scream and ask for remuneration of some sort, even if it comes just in the vague and desperately rare form called ‘respect’ in the organization.

And all this calling and administration – alongside absolutely time-devouring meetings of pointless issues – are taking their toll on me. I feel almost as if my wit is slipping through my fingers with each passing day, when I work from 8 to 5.30 on lucky days, giving myself 10 to 15 minutes for lunch and heading right back to work once the swill is washed down with some cheap sweetened dye diluted in water. More often than not, I work beyond, and suffer the travails of a boss who is both infamously inept and procrastinating who insists almost every day that nobody can be more ill than her but because she is oh-so-close-to-death but still oh-so-loyal-to-the-cause she should be an inspiration to her subordinates who are oh-so-callous-to-be-inspired. Then, when you comment purely out of goodwill that she has stopped coughing in the office for some days, she instantly breaks out into a series of weak and deflated coughs and insists again that she is so ill and ought to be resting at home but is so busy that all of us who must by definition be so free ought to come to her rescue.

I’ve bitched a lot about my boss to many friends, and I sense to my concern that I am getting very close to my wit’s end towards her. I try to be civil still and we are still friends, but I definitely steer clear from her if we have to co-exist in the same confined space of the interview room when I need the extra space to prepare my letters and mail packages for my guys. Her voice now begins to send shivers down my bent-over spine even when she is here just to chat, because it is just so laden with complaints and reminders that she is sick that you feel sick with her just by listening to her whimpers.

But back to my life. My interviews are coming up and I feel simply put that I am rotting away mentally by the minute in that blighted existence of an office. I used to have some time to do my own reading, but this has come to pass with the torrents of work that surge my way. Now I take quiet sneaks out of the office and try to spend 10 seconds more in the toilet by washing my hands once more just in vain hope that in that 10 seconds she was calling for me to no avail and hopefully when I sneak furtively back to the office she has forgotten what she had called me for previously.

But if this is what life is, then surely there is a deeper question to be asked, about where the dignity is. I told myself when I first got posted (I refuse to use ‘joined’ because I didn’t ‘join’ it. I was not and probably will never be part of it) to this office that I will do everything above the table. My lunch and rest breaks will be legitimate and I do not need to worry about being caught because I am not sneaking out of the office. But in due course it began to dawn on me that such idealism was never allowed to germinate in the cold confines of my office. You simply have to stay back if you want to let others think that you’re doing your work, and otherwise you don’t get the green light from the bosses that you are at least a mediocre worker. You will be deemed a sloth even if you have done your work more efficiently so that you can leave on time (note that I’m not even talking about leaving early). There are many practices that continue to confound me in this office and I suspect strongly that they will remain abstruse and enigmatic to my dying day. Much that we learnt are good organizational skills and practices suddenly become locked up like the artefactual mausoleums of cabinets encasing eons of years of documents belonging to persons long gone and close to dead.

So it is all very obnoxious I must say, that I have to cast aside my dignity and even work slowly and whine and whimper like a dead puppy would that continues to cough when you comment that it hasn’t coughed for some days. You must insist that you are inundated with work and writhe in your seat like someone just stuck a durian into your ass and hope that the missiles don’t hit home. When they do, whine more loudly and hopefully the missiles undo the damage and the dead kids stand up and play again. No I am disgusted. But what can one do?

I liken my predicament now to a blind man leaping over a cliff. There is no way to tell just how far over the edge you are already, or whether you are just hanging in the air and will never reach the other side without having your guts spill all over when you hit the ground. I am not simply waiting for my job to come. I need to proactively work for the coveted job. And unlike some of my peers who simply get to be in there already before they are even liberated, I have to work against the tide and keep my dead brain alive. It is all so depressing because this reeks of injustice that no one wants to work on.

This isn’t just pre-Monday blues. This is a whole stretch of blue that will likely shroud my interview days. I know this would be superfluous worry and I am throwing more thorns on my own path. But I guess I’ll need the time. Weekends now no longer are retreats from the horrors of work itself. It is time to rest your ears from the interminable whines of your boss and persistence that she is oh-so-sick and oh-so-busy because she’s oh-so-loyal (note that soon after she tells you she’s too busy to do X and so tasks you with it, she heads back to her cubicle to chat with her friends about ‘food and flowers’ and her ‘trip to Turkey … no why don’t you want to go to Turkey? But I don’t want to go to Japan’ conversation that of course illuminates on all but the very dim the fact that she is oh-so-dedicated indeed). I am not exaggerating facts when I say I feel nauseous when I hear her go on about this again. Hypocrisy ipso facto will make me green already. Hypocrisy that implicates me will make me sick. Hypocrisy that implicates me doubled with cheap calls for sympathy certainly make me throw up.

Oh this is all so depressing. Goodbye Sunday. ‘ere a blue Monday rises.

(I might add: my dignity now is so compromised that I don’t any more remember the password to my preferred blog account. I resolve nevertheless to redeem some of that lost value and recover the key to another bastion of my past experiences and desultory memories of yesteryear)