A ceaseless quest for perfection may begin as an amusing quirk, but it gets frustrating and tiring when you start applying that to everything you do. It consumes you and governs your life. You throw away a humongous bowl of batter, that you had spent an hour mixing because it doesn't taste the way you want it to; you throw away iced butterflies and fondant shapes because in your eyes they look ugly, and you couldn't possibly have the heart to give them to anyone. You look in the mirror and truly despise that ugly thing that stares dolefully back at you.

"And why does it keep spewing that way?
I mean, you know, I mean..."

"I know exactly what you mean," I said,
Eyeing the blond highlights in your black hair
And your blue lenses the shadow of a foreign sky.
"It spews continually if only to ruffle
its own reflection in the water; such reminders
will only scare a creature so eager to reinvent itself."

-Sa'at, Alfian, 1998 "The Merlion", One Fierce Hour, p. 22

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it" ---- Blaise Pascal, Pensees

"Lots of people try to say that all truth is relative or subjective but no one lives that way. Most of the time when we cop out on truth, we have a reason: we don't want to live by it."

I've taken the above quotes from a reply D. made to C.'s note. In a strange way, they sum up what I've been battling with today. God perhaps does have a quirky sense of humour, but it's amazing how He speaks to us. Sometimes, just sometimes, like today, out of free will, we, or rather I choose to live my life not according to truth, but rather by falsehood. This is a little hard to explain, but when there's a moral battle at stake, sometimes, it's vanity which governs the way we think and feel. In this case, I chose to allow vanity to consume me. It is so deceptive, this green, azure serpent that coils around your heart. It persuades, it cajoles and finally you give in only to be bitten and you realise that momentary pleasure leads only to a spiral of darkness and a vicious cycle of sin. Sin perpetuates itself and spiritual attacks strike fast and fatally - where it hurts the most. Sin can be likened to Pandora's box - you open it just for a mere glimpse and it swallows you completely. It only takes a tiny taste of that poisoned apple, before you become addicted to its temporal sweetness and you crave more of it. It's like power. Power excites the mind and drives the senses. We forget however how poisonous it is and slowly we die from the deadly venom. We die because it's dangerous. It's dangerous because you are not aware of its influence. It's dangerous because we crave the false security it provides and because we choose to succumb to its siren's call, only to feel worse than we first began. Sin, Vanity, Pride... many guises, but all fatal, eats you, devours you, renders you impotent. It laughs at your stupidity and delights in your fall from Grace.

God help us, God help me - stupid people we are.

Two days ago, the HDB people came knocking on our doors. Remember the last time I posted about the $2000 + deficit in payment, no thanks to the zealous efforts of the dad, NOT paying his side of the bills? Well, guess what? While he said he will settle it, according to HDB, the lack of payment has risen to $5000 + . Apparently someone has been quietly NOT PAYING his side of the agreement. I wonder how long more it is before our house finally gets confiscated by the relevant authorities and we have to go begging in the streets. BAH! Bloody piece of shit.

I'm wondering if the advent of facebook signifies the end of blogging. Facebook, I think, creates an alternative space, where the self comes alive abeit virtually and vicariously through the posted comments, the inter-social exchanges, the photographs and videos. The boundaries of space are indeed reworked when we realise that there is actually no real space, but a thread of databits which we take for real. In defining the self through your posted profile, and whatever virtual traces you leave behind, in living in the perpetual "now" through your status updates, we create an avatar of who we really are. When the chatbox pops up, we believe that we are truly talking face to face with so-and-so and the image either takes the place of the real or becomes the real. This is the hyper-reality that Baudrillard was talking about and it is this very same almost instantaneous response mechanism that engages us and keeps us going back to facebook. Rather than writing out how your day went on a blog page, in retrospect, facebook becomes an extension of your present self. The "is" in most status updates is the most deceptive. You are simultaneously doing whatever you are typing and in that sense, your status becomes a performative mechanism that transform your readers perception of you and who or what you are.

Having said that, a blog is definitely conceived as a much more private space, where greater insight can be given about the self or person authoring the blog. (Although this is a general misconception and whatever you publish online is in fact public domain) The blog is usually where a person pours out his or her personal thoughts and emotions, and the blog provides a space for deeper honesty. However, much as it may appeal to the voyeur in us, because we think we are gaining valuable insights into a person's life, we may find that with bloglocks, or any other form of privacy enforcement mechanisms, this may not be the case and we might end up none the wiser. Still, how private can blogs be? Who is to say that there isn't someone secretly reading your entries from the blog companies involved? But please don't get paranoid, I'm only postulating.

Avenue Q. was simply phenomenal! It was laugh-out-loud hilarious, it was sexy, it was edgy, it was contemporary, it was bloody fricking good!