Have you ever been alone in a crowded room when I'm here with you?

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room; well I'm here with you...

"Oh, I always roll my sleeves up" - Me
"Really?" - Jill
"I don't like having my forearms covered for some reason" - Me
"I couldn't do it. This school is freezing during the winter" - Jill
"Yeah, my arms get cold in February air" - Me

ZING!

w00t! I've hit the 150 page mark. Not that book length matters a great deal to me but I gave myself 200 pages as a working number when I started, just to add some focus. So theoretically, barring major changes, I'm 3/4 done! Of course, considering I've just set foot in the month of February, it might turn out to be longer than 200 pages. But I mean, the April month is just going to be exams and suchlike. And the ending.

Why have I never thought about tape-recording my thoughts?! Ingenious! Of course, I now need a recorder of some sort. It feels weird not to write "tape recorder" but of course, we don't use tapes anymore...

OMG Canada...

Alright, a new day, a new post! If only every day were like that. If I had a book I wanted to publish online, I'd do it all at once, post-date the entries, and just let my blog update itself for a year.

Recently, I joined a group on facebook titled, "Dear Taylor Swift, if I get 1000000 to join will you go to prom with me?" Now, set aside the unlikely scenario that he even manages to get 1 million people to join the group (I seriously don't think it's going to happen) I want to write about why I laughed when I first saw this, and then proceeded to join the group anyway.

See, there's something to be said about pipe dreams. I think that deep down, everyone needs to have something that they never expect to happen, but can wistfully look upon from time to time as one of those "wouldn't it be crazy, awesome, and spectacular if..." moments/scenarios. I mean, people tend to have very contradictory things to say about pipe dreams, depending on their moods. Sometimes, people will shrug their shoulders and say "anything's possible," and then at other times, they'll shrug their shoulders and say, "why bother if the chances of it happening are next to nothing?" I suppose it has to do with whether or not they're feeling optimistic or pessimistic. But I'll tell you why the optimistic view is better (and it's not just because optimism is generally better than pessimism as a principle).

If there is something I've come to understand about life, it is that it really is more unpredictable than any of us like to believe. After all, we like stability in our lives. But the funny thing is - and this has to do with a term coined as "loss aversion" - we are FAR more sensitive to unpredictable, BAD things that happen to us, as compared to unpredictable, GOOD things that happen to us.

For example. Statistically speaking, if you flew on a plane every day, the chances are you'd have to fly for 19,000 years before you crashed and died. That means if you insisted on committing suicide by being involved in a natural aviation accident, without deliberately tampering with anything to make this more likely, you'd have to fly every day for 19,000 years to statistically guarantee your death. Now, I don't know if these figures are precise but you get the point. Mathematically, if we assume that these figures are accurate, for every 6,935,000 times you get onto a plane, you die once.

Let's look at this Taylor Swift idea. Even if Taylor Swift doesn't end up going to prom with this guy, what does that prove? That so far, 0 out of 1 attempt(s) have succeeded. This means that he has to fail at this endeavor 6,934,999 or more times to even say that the chances of getting Taylor Swift to go to prom with him are less likely than dying on a plane. You're telling me that it's reasonable to be afraid of dying on a plane but unreasonable to think that Taylor Swift could go to prom with this guy?

We get carried away by the fact that people have died on planes before but nobody has ever succeeded in getting Taylor Swift to be their prom date. True enough. But billions of people have gotten on planes while I imagine (despite her huge fan base) that there haven't been as many people trying to get Taylor Swift to be their prom date.

But all this isn't to say that it's likely that she'll go to prom with him, I'm just pointing out why it's silly to ridicule people for their dreams when your fears are probably far more unreasonable. The point, really, is that we have to allow ourselves to have these pipe dreams. And we need them because sometimes, crazy and unlikely GOOD things happen to us. But if you don't even have a pipe dream, then the chances of it coming true becomes less than 0 - it becomes, in application form terminology, "N/A". We need to allow ourselves to dream of a better life; a better world. We need to allow ourselves to imagine how infinite we could feel if the right circumstances came together. The chances of them happening are slim enough without further constricting from your sometimes all too practical mind.

So either join the group or leave the poor guy alone. Besides, if I were Taylor Swift, I'd do it. One evening out of the many you will no doubt have, to give some poor schmuck a crazy, spectacular, "highlight-of-my-life"-type evening he'll remember until he dies? Seems like a good trade to me.

Hmm, I have 2 blog ideas. One's more of rant. One's... not. Let's do the rant. It's more fun and it's bound to have more holes in its logic.

I hear the word "compromise" being thrown around a lot these days. And I mean, it's not a new term. We're taught about compromise from a very young age and we're taught that it's one of those important life skills you have to learn if you ever wish to coexist peacefully with people in a world where not everyone sees things the same way you do.

Somewhere along the way, I feel like the term "compromise" has gotten bent out of shape. Or at least, the occasions for which we use the term has. Much like the phrase, "there's nothing more to life than girls," except that it's hard to know if the latter phrase ever existed in the sense that it should. But I do truly feel that once upon a time, "compromise" meant what it really ought to. For example...

Say you love Asian food and I love Western food. We decide that we'll alternate going to each type of restaurant every week. Or we find a place that serves both types of food. This is a compromise.

You want to go to a concert on a Wednesday night but your parents don't want you going out on a weekday. Your parents let you go and you promise to get all your work done before the concert and come home at a reasonable hour. This is a compromise.

Seems fairly simple right? When two people have conflicting desires, you make concessions for each other and call it a compromise. And for the most part, this is true. However, it's important to note - and this is the part that I find people are forgetting - it's only reasonable to expect a compromise if both parties have a legitimate claim on the moral importance of what they want.

For example, if quiet hours start at 1 AM and your neighbor wants to hold a loud and raucous party until 5 in the morning, 3 AM is not a reasonable compromise. In fact, he has no right to ask for a compromise at all. Quiet hours start at 1. If you can't live with that, you shouldn't be in residence.

If you're the kind of person who's an hour late to everything, you do not show up half-an-hour late to your wedding or some other important event as a "compromise." No, you imagine that the events starts an hour before it actually does and you prepare yourself accordingly.

Put simply (and to cut my ranting short), you only have a valid claim to compromising if both sides of the argument are equally valid. People, for some reason, seem to forget that this is not always the case and think that the instant there is a conflict of interest, then compromise is the "right" way of resolving the issue. Um, no. If someone is clearly in the right and the other person is clearly in the wrong, the person who is wrong gives way. You could argue that we can never really distinguish right from wrong. I think that while this is sometimes true, it is also an excuse given by people who are either always the ones who are wrong, or incapable of making sound judgments.

And just to link this to someone I've written about before, this is another example of the dangers of being too left-wing (in the civil sense). If you've moved so far left that you believe in universal relativism, i.e. only individuals are qualified to judge if their own actions are right or wrong, that you can't see how this is sometimes not true, especially given the context of living in "society", then you are out of your mind. But I do think there might be a link between our society's move towards the left and this erroneous view that "compromise" is always the way to solve conflicts. I mean, for Christ sakes, didn't we learn from 1935 that when people roll big tanks into demilitarized zones, "compromising" probably wasn't such a good idea?

Newly discovered "text message templates" (for the truly lazy):

"Please call me back"
"I'm late. I will be there at..."
"Where are you now?"
"I'm on the way"
"Urgent! Pleas contact."
"I love you"

Because we all need a faster, more efficient way of telling someone we love them.

I wrote a passage in my informal writing project about this but in case some of you don't get around to reading it, I want to take the opportunity here to express my take on the differences between bars and clubs.

Giving my distaste for dancing without a prescribed set of movements, one might expect dancing to be a significant contributor as to why I dislike clubbing as much as I do. But it really doesn't. I mean, true, that is one aspect of clubbing that I don't enjoy. However, there is nothing inherent about dancing that detracts from clubbing's overall worth beyond the fact that it is obviously a turn-off for people like me, who don't enjoy doing it very much.

But that is largely a manner of personal taste: something I try to minimize when I assert that going to a bar is better than going to a club. In reality, it has to do with the melting-pot-like culture of clubs vs. the more individualized culture of a bar.

You see, the one thing I have always been conscious of, when I visit clubs, is how very very loud the music tends to be. Grant and I were actually talking about this the other day. Grant pointed out that there seems to be a trend in popular music where artists are demanding, through their lyrics, that the DJ "turn the music up" (see: Cascada, Ke$ha, for example), as if the earth-shattering decibels at which DJs tend to play their music were not loud enough. Clubbing breeds a culture of "losing oneself in the music," as it were (so to speak) and it is this very idea of mass conformity that frightens me a little bit. Because one very obvious effect of playing music at extremely loud volumes is that it drowns out conversation.

Bars, by contrast, are not designed to drown out conversation. In fact, they are designed to facilitate conversation more than hinder it. The frequency with which "conversations" take place is less important, however, than the fact that you do not lose your voice in a bar. Now, your judgment and reason might be severely impaired, depending on how much you've had to drink, but at the very least, you reserve the right to dictate the extent to which you wish to lose yourself in alcohol. Like I said, you never lose your ability to speak out at bars. And I feel like as long as you have that; as long as you are able to vocalize your feelings, you are capable of asserting your individuality. For some reason, putting something into words gives it a sort of power that would never exist if it were unspoken. This is why they always tell you, "Just say no," isn't it? For all the human rights activists who speak out against "silent consent," it's really nothing compared to the force of spoken non-consent. I always feel that no matter what I lose when I walk into a bar, my voice is something that stays with me.

Not so is it with clubs. Whenever I went go to one, I always felt like I make an unspoken agreement to "blend in" with the rest of the people at a club; and the music is there to ensure that everyone is united under the particular song that the DJ is playing at any given time. Grant and Brittany once did a rather comical rendition of club behavior (one that involved him slithering up behind her, putting his hands on her thighs, and begin grinding up against her while murmuring seductive lines into her ear) and I remember Brett proclaiming, "When did it become socially acceptable to do this?!" I think this sort of behavior is made possible by the idea of being part of the mass culture of clubbing. We get so wrapped up in "losing ourselves" in the music that we lose ourselves in every other sense as well. Maybe we literally forget how sleazy Grant's actions would be when it's dark, and we're drunk and on a dance floor, surrounded by other likewise drunk people and music played at earth-shattering decibels.

Now, all this is not to say that you can't have fun at a club, particularly if you're going with a group of friends. All I'm saying is that there's a seedy underbelly of nightclub culture that just doesn't sit right with me. And even the times when I went with a group of friends I was still conscious that there was this choice presented to me: conform or get the hell out. This was at Alfies, of all places: the mildest, possibly least threatening club in existence. Imagine how I feel at a place like Dirty Dog.

Edit: I googled Dirty Dog. And I quote from its homepage:

COME TO DIRTY DOG IF YOU DARE

Rule Number One:
You must play dirty.

Rule Number Two:
Girls Rule

Rule Number Three:
No Boys on the Bar

Rule Number Four:
First Timers Must Ride the Pole

I have to post about this because I thought this was the funniest thing ever. My English prof went on a rant today about the lyrics to the song "I Believe" by Nikki Yanofsky. If I could title this post, I would call it "Flemming's Doomsday Forecast."

There comes a moment when my heart must stand alone
On this lonely path I've chosen like a house that's not a home
Sometimes when I feel I've had enough
And I feel like giving up
You willed me to be all I can be
Now nothing can stop me
I believe in the power that comes
From a world brought together as one
I believe together well find
I believe in the power of you and I


So according to Flemming, Nikki made the error of trying to rhyme "find" and "I" in the last two lines. He claimed it was inexcusable that she did not opt to replace "find" with "see" and "I" with "me," which would have made for a pairing that did not require us to stretch our definition of what it means for words to rhyme. Somehow, he drew the conclusion that this would lead to the degeneration of our country and that we might as well expect the youth of tomorrow to be drinking from a paper bag under a bridge.

This is what we learn in English class.

The complexities of the English language, example 289:

"It's too bad Katie'll never know the extent to which she's affected your life" - Goddard
"Well, she knows to an extent..." - Jon Wong
"Just not the extent" - Goddard

Explain that to your ESL students.

Here is a tidbit about me that might shed some light on why I sometimes adamantly refuse to broaden my tastes in food. I mean, the whole "I eat to live, I don't live to eat" thing is true. But I realized this today when I was eating lunch with some friends and told one of them that I was pretty sure I wouldn't like what she was currently eating: I like/dislike food based on texture more than taste. This is why even though I don't really care for eating (in which case one might assume that I shouldn't care about what I eat), I can also be really fussy about what I eat. There's just a lot of food I look at and say, "I just can't see how I would enjoy the feel of that in my mouth". It also explains:

Why I love pulp-less orange juice but wouldn't touch pulpy orange juice with a 10-foot pole.

Why I love apples and I like pies but I don't like apple pie because I don't like the feel of apple chunks in said pie.

Why I don't like fruit in my yogurt.

Why I don't like squid.

Just some examples. There's nothing about pulpy orange juice, apple pie, fruit yogurt or squid that my taste buds reject. I just can't stand their textures when I eat them.

Sometimes I wonder if I will be forever doomed to be dissatisfied, no matter where I go. It's not so much a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side," more as I find that I can never stay in one place for too long without stagnating. I sometimes think that this is not completely true; that if I ever found a place where I could be perfectly happy and content, I would be ok with staying there for... at least a long time. But then I consider that if the perfect place doesn't exist, then the fact that I would be ok with a perfect place is irrelevant.

It's not that I always feel like I need to be somewhere better; only that I need to be somewhere different. I've come to realize that unless my life is constantly changing, it will never be very long because I'll feel the need to make that change happen. You could say that people like me simply aren't born to be ok with the status quo - and since there will always be a status quo as long as you're around long enough to understand it, I'll never be ok with just being somewhere unless there's a very good reason for me to be there opposed to somewhere else.

At the same time (and here's the irony of the situation), I'm also terrified of new situations. This is something that I fully came to realize from attending TORF (Teacher's Overseas Recruiting Fair, formerly understood by Jon Wong to be The Overseas Recruiting Fair, who has since then realized the error of his ways but hasn't yet gotten over his childish amusement of 'The ORF' as a term). I was at an interview with some bloke from Thailand when I realized, "I can't do this." I cannot teach overseas in countries other than Singapore/Malaysia/Australia/Places where I know someone, because I would not happy doing it. That is the cruel reality of what happens when you establish a life in new places: you have to make new friends.

This is not to say that I never make friends. But there is no guarantee of this. By this point in my life, I have come to understand that for someone like me, making friends is a matter of chance, not choice. There is no other way of explaining how sometimes, I can go to places where I literally meet around 100 new people and not make a single lasting connection, and sometimes, I can go to places where I meet only 1 person but make a lasting connection with that 1 person.

As Grant once said:

"Different places have different energies, for whatever reason, and we can do nothing to change or understand the reasons why. This is why you sometimes hear stories of a poor kid who is bullied and mercilessly teased at one high school, and this is transferred and suddenly becomes the most popular students at his new school. Nothing about his necessarily changed, but, he was thrown into a new vortex of energy. Why should that vortex be so different and treat him so differently? Who knows - the kids are all the same age and probably from the same area - this is nothing intrinsically different about them - but somehow different energies have grown up in that place that are different from the next one"

This is something he has said that has always rung true to me. And it will ring true to anyone who isn't the kind of person who can go everywhere and befriend people. There are people like this, by the way. There are people who I believe have personalities with such... force, that they will be able to change the dynamics of places they go. Kevin Fernandes is someone who would probably embody this spirit. Strangely enough, I find that Dave Griese does as well, in some ways.

There are also people who are so unconscious of the prevailing energies in any locale that they will always "march to the beat of their own drum" and in doing so, create their own little bubble that's so unique that it draws people to them, simply by virtue of the fact that the current energies seem to pass through the person in question. These are the people who are always deemed "quirky". Usually, what makes them quirky is precisely the fact that they aren't self-conscious or aware of the fact that they are introducing their own personality, regardless of whether it jives with the current tone. For some reason, Andrea Nesbitt is the first person that comes to mind, even though I've spoken to her all of, like, once (more than once - say 7 times).

But I digress. The point is that I have neither a particularly forceful personality nor one that is blissfully immune to the prevailing energies of a locale. And thus, making friends is largely a matter of chance. And nobody give me any nonsense about "putting yourself out there". I've tried that. The success rate of that for someone like me is an even 50/50. I have no more luck being outgoing than I do being socially withdrawn because being outgoing is not part of my personality and when you do something that goes against the grain of your personality, it never comes off as honest and people can sense that.

So at the end of everything, I find myself in a bit of a pickle. Because getting away from the status quo is not as simple as getting up and leaving. Or at least, it leaves things up to chance. And like almost everyone else on the planet, the thought of things being left to chance terrifies the hell out of me.