Thoughts From Home

It has been quite some while, hasn’t it?

I’ve been on an unintentional hiatus: an idyllic life, filled with summer readings and catching up with family. In other words, I have little to show for my holidays.

Here we are then, the penultimate third year. Law school folklore usually tells of how changed law students find themselves to be at this period: youthful idealism of public service takes a back seat in favour of corporate ambition, optimistic can-do attitude traded for realistic expectations. 

I’ll have to say that I am not much different in this respect. Mind you that his is not necessarily for the worse. 

I was afraid of changing before. Being a bit of a Pollyanna made me all too glad to use my naivety as a shield from fervent pessimism. This shield was sufficient, apt even, to grant readiness to venture something beyond my sheltered existence back then. But I could not now pretend to being the same person, having been exposed to and internalised beliefs and values which contradict those which I held to be integral to my identity. 

I have not lost my goodwill. I have merely traded it for experience, and I would not have had it any other way.

But those are ancillary matters. In the real world, anxieties about my social passivity as well as the pragmatics of post-graduation are abound. My ire with the former is that spurious thoughts for a more contributory existence are usually frustrated by my innate tendency to overthink and dismiss mental complications, leaving me enervated. As for the latter, I am simply terrified. While part of me is eager to desert theories for practice, I have seen how difficult it is to find a desirable place in the professional world.

But that’s another day’s worry. The bigger question has always been: why does it matter? Why should I bother? Would I end up filled with regret in the end, regardless? While asking oneself the same question might bring some answers one will fervently stand by, those same answers may be to the ire of others - some post-Pollyanna individuals, even. A bleak perspective, isn’t it? You may cherish your mind being your own, but ultimately you’re all alone in there

Ah, but now, three weeks away from end of holidays at home is not the right time to worry about these things. Till then!

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.