Where Do The Children Play?

When I'm twenty I'll drive my own car!

Probably. But you'll no longer want to play Superheroes then.

So how have you changed?

Apa Aku Tau

Please don't spoil my day

I'm miles away

And after all 

I'm only sleeping.

Waldron's Putdown

Talk of individual rights is often supposed to be a way of registering fairly basic objections to the arcane computations of the utilitarian calculus. It is the utilitarian who is supposed to be telling us that everything is all very complicated, and that whether we allow horrible things like torture, censorship, or the execution of the innocent depends on all the circumstances, long-run calculations of probability, etc. The theorist of rights, by contrast, is supposed to be the one who can produce the trump card, the preemptory argument-stopper: 'Thou shalt not kill. The idea of rights has often been seized on precisely  as a way of avoiding the casuistry of trade-offs and complex moral calculations - a way of insisting that certain basics are to be secured an certain atrocities prohibited, come what may. But if rights themselves are morally complicated, the spectre of casuistry reappears. Complicated problems presumably require complicated solutions; but it was the simplicity of rights-based constraints that was supposed to be their main advantage over other more recondite and precarious modes of moral reasoning.The sad fact is, however, that this simplicity and moral certainty is simply unavailable.

- Jeremy Waldron, A Rights-Based Critique of a Bill of Rights.

I Miss People

I've been under room arrest for half a week now - and two more weeks are looming.

I've been missing people a lot. In my now-routine siestas which divide day and night studying, I dream of people, and of home.

Just now I dreamed of pouring down a whole can of Sprite on the stairs at home - and thinking, 'what was I doing' and getting the intense desire to apologise to my mother, even after I woke up.

I noticed then that I had been in constraining myself in a tight space and, in the process, shut other people out for quite some time. Conducive for study, yes - but terribly lonely.

I miss people - of that feeling of knowing that other people lie beside me in the living room when I try to get to sleep, or of that happiness in seeing faces of friends after a long time.

I know it would be over in three weeks (just three weeks, imagine that!) but it feels a lifetime away.

Relatively true though - people say a part of you die during the exam period, and that part get reborn afterwards.

Anyway, rindu bah. Betul-betul ndak sabar balik.

Such Is

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,      
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
  So how should I presume?

- Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

Abbey Road

Prior to this I never properly went through the whole album in one listening. I didn't really get Sgt. Pepper or Revolver, White Album came close - but this one really did it for me. Let go of your inhibitions, and listen through the whole thing. There's a reason why it withstood the test of time.

Morning Has Broken

Next week it's week eleven. Shit is about to go down. I'm still stuck in a wave of unproductivity, what with waking up late every day.

But it's always a beautiful moment to have a real re-start. See you on the other side!