Speak Good English

Lately there has been a big drive in Singapore to ‘Speak Good English’ and radio deejays have been discussing whether we should all be speaking proper English instead of the Singapore bastardisation of the language which we call ‘Singlish’. What heartens me is that there are people who ring up these radio stations and insist that Singlish is part of our identity and should remain for the long stay.

When I was little growing up, my parents put me in Speech and Drama classes, I took part in Oratorical competitions in school and had a short stint with debate. I used to turn my nose up at Singlish and think it was such a poor man’s language, if you can even call it a language. However through the years, I’ve acquired a certain fondness for the mish-mash of dialects and languages that make up Singlish. When I was reading Law in Manchester I realized how much Singlish has become a part of my life. Hell, I realised how much I loved Singapore and all her idiosyncracies.

I had dreams of travelling the world and staying overseas when I was younger, but somehow my time in the UK made me appreciate what I’m proud to call my home. When I’m away from Singapore, I enjoy the experiences overseas and the memories I take back, but only when I’m back does my soul settle and do I feel that this really is where I want to be.

There has been so much criticism about Singapore and how to improve the country and her people, which is never a bad thing. I think people should always be thinking of how to improve the better good of a society. There are some things that drive me crazy about Singapore but these oftentimes are the silliest things I miss most about home. Singaporeans are known to love shopping and eating. Ask most Singaporeans on the street what their past time is and it would definitely be one, if not both of that. I personally am not big on shopping, but I do love my food. Many of my non-Singaporean friends laugh at how much I love my food and sometimes mock me for that, but the truth is we’re no different from the British who love their ale, the Americans who love their reality tv and the Australians who love their sport.

Ever since I’ve gotten back to Singapore, I seem to have become super defensive about anything bad said about my country. It’s one thing to have a short little bitch session with fellow Singaporeans about this or that that annoys us about Singapore, but when any non-Singaporean decides to have a go at the country, for some reason I take it personally. It becomes such that they’re not criticising the country or random people in the country, but that they’re coming up to me and telling me the meal I cooked for them just tasted awful (I think the food analogy just proves how much I love my food!).

As it is so many things in Singapore have changed from when I was a kid. Old buildings have given way to new fangled malls. More and more open spaces are cleared to build a new apartment and the history of my beloved country has made way for urbanisation and a giant drive to be a hub in every conceivable industry. I guess I can see the logic of it. As a country, Singapore has no natural resources to speak of, hence nothing by way of commodities to offer the world. So to get people down we have to be snazzier, louder, more over-the-top. I get that. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that my heart aches because it feels like my childhood is slowly being erased and flattened just so there’d be another Gucci or Prada that we can shop at.

So when people talk about doing away with Singlish altogether, it breaks my heart. I can make peace with old buildings giving way to new, a country’s heart at the end of the day is really in its people. But that we want to take a country’s worth of people and tear them down like some decrepit warehouse and make spanking new malls out of them, that troubles me. Who would we be when that happens and what would we stand for? A country full of people who speak with a fake accent just so the world would understand them? I dread to think of that day and I pray in my heart of hearts that that day wouldn’t arrive before I die.

Another Closed Chapter

NEXT 5 MINUTES

There’s a brilliant song by Steven Curtis Chapman called ‘Next 5 Minutes’ that has always struck a chord with me, especially the following:

Every moment God is giving is precious
Every heartbeat, ever breath I take
We'll never have them back once they've left us
There will never be another right now
So right now

I'm living the next 5 minutes
Like these are my last 5 minutes
'Cause I know the next 5 minutes
May be all I have
And after the next 5 minutes
Turn into the last 5 minutes
I'm taking the next 5 minutes
And starting all over again
Starting all over again

Lately I’ve been feeling frustrated and tied down by a million things. I’m caught up with regretting and harping incessantly on things in the past, fretting about things in the future (which to be honest, may or may not happen, because who really can read the future?) and just worrying about things that are hardly worth worrying about in the first place. In doing all this, however, I’ve come to realize that I’m missing the present, ‘the moment’, as some would call it.

I’ve been caught up with the most ridiculous of issues, thinking, rethinking and then overanalysing everything there is to analyse (or everything I think there is to analyse). I’ve been going round and round in circles and coming to nothing at the end of the day. Days have flown by with me in a state of distress and last I checked, a couple of years had gone by since I’ve actually really just enjoyed the moment for what it was (yes, the phrase ‘time flies’ very much applies to my life at present).

For a long while I’ve sat around half-heartedly praying for some light at the end of the tunnel, whilst adamantly refusing to give up the past/future burdens because I had become accustomed to this warped comfort zone of worrying that I managed to build for myself. I was hoping for some strange sort of compromise, I suppose – or rather I was just cutting a lousy deal with God hoping He’d allow me to have my cake and eat it.

The thing I realize now – aside from the fact that God really isn’t so dumb and that He can see through all my endless waffling and terrible deal cutting – is that sometimes something has to give. And yes, I am very aware of the fact that this is a long time coming and that I should perhaps have come to it many, many light years ago.

The problem is, it really is so easy to fall into the rut of woe and despair (forgive the melodrama). A problem hits you and next thing you know, you’ve created a million possible worse case scenarios, all of which seem to be far worse than the previous one imagined. All of a sudden a small, teeny, tiny problem becomes this whole whirlpool of disaster that is almost impossible to solve in a lifetime. The irony of it all, is that all this is self-created, and we spend a good portion of our lives trying to damage control when in reality, all we have to do is take the illusion of ‘omigawd I want to kill myself because this is the world’s largest problem’ apart and realize that there really is nothing to the giant issue in the first place.

As usual, like all my pathetic few entries, this is more a rhetoric than anything deeply meaningful or enlightening. I suppose I just wanted to send a reminder to whoever who still even reads this blog to live life for the next 5 minutes, nothing more, nothing less and who knows, you really might enjoy life’s ride. I know I’m going to try. Till the next entry (which from my track record would probably be in a year’s time), here’s a song I remember from my childhood that hopefully would help (well, me more than you, because I’m the melodramatic one who apparently has problems that the world should stop to mourn):

Sometimes my life is like a ball of mixed up coloured string
So full of knots and tangles, I just can’t do a thing
And when I try to sort it out I realize that I’m
Gonna have to take it one string at a time.

One by one
Each multi-coloured thread
We’ll go blue by blue
Green by green
And red by red
Till the colours come untangled
And the knots are all undone
One by one
One by one

WHY I WRITE

So friends whoe known me a while know that Ie been seeking for meaning in my life, in my job etc. Ie loved writing since I was young and it has frustrated me that Ie never quite gotten my dream career path. However, it has struck me of late that Ie more or less pushed my little wheelbarrow of dreams into a little rut and instead of figuring out a way to get the wheelbarrow out, Ie just stubbornly pushed it further into that rut and happily moaned and whined about my state of affairsang on, take appily?out of that sentence and that was me for the last few yearsnhappy, frustrated and bitter.

I realize now though that Ie been given a brilliant opportunity. Yes I am well aware of the paltry number of its?I get on this blog, but I like to think that those who do come back to read, come back because somehow, somewhere I may have touched somethingr I thinking way too highly of myself.

Nonetheless, Ie come to terms with this God-given talent (I understand the word alent?here might be pushing it, but humour me for a while) that has been put to naught of late and realize now that my situation isn quite as bad as I thought it was. I not paid to write, so I can write whatever I want, whenever I want. No one forces me to put my pen to paper daily to come up with something that pleases the masses.

Crazy Extravagance

Just the other day I watched a documentary titled an versus Wild? Someone very dear to me thought that it might be the kind of show I would enjoy sensing my love for rock climbing and the like. He was wrong, and whilst it wouldn have been the kind of show I stop channel surfing for, it did leave me with one thing. To cut the long story short, the show is essentially about an ex-SAS man who is left in the middle of nowhere and has to figure out the way to civilization using only a knife and well, nature. One part left a lasting impact on me. As he was trudging through the rainforest he looked up and saw one beautiful flower and he said something to the extent of his just shows God generosity and extravagance, he plants a beautiful flower up in the middle of nowhere despite the fact that so few enter this forest?I made up the bulk of that sentence, but that was effectively what he meant to say (I think).

I well aware of the fact that my little anecdotes or pieces have become rather dark of late. Ie had so many of my dearest friends come up to me gently trying to prod me back to the person that I used to be. The truth is that for a long time, Ie been unable to see the light. Life seemed meaningless and I felt that each day that went by was just another day that went by and to a certain extent, I was an empty shell of a person, struggling to find a reason for my existence.

 I talked to a kindred spirit today and told him a story I remembered about a lady who was supposed to break some record for swimming across a channel or sea (or something that equates to a huge expanse of water) and the first time she tried, the water was deadly cold and the sky was foggy. She gave up after a while. She broke the record on her second try. On being interviewed, she said that she couldn visualize the end the first time round and just could not find it in her to complete the entire distance. On her second try, she had her goal firmly etched into her head and was able to go the distance.

For so long Ie lost sight of what was important to me. I used to be someone who loved God and was determined to live a God-fearing life. Not to say I was a Bible thumper, throwing out Bible verses after every sentence, but I had my priorities right. I loved God more than I loved anything else in the world and I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to make a mark, just so people would look at me and know God love. (Not to say that I thought I was God). I wanted people around me to be touched by this passion and love that was overflowing and through my actions, my life, perhaps see a little bit of Heaven.

I fell far from grace. As my life went on, so many other distractions came in. Things that on their own held no weight, but when put together with a whole load of equally irrelevant things, served to be a dead weight pulling me further into a sea of lost dreams and failed ambitions. For a long time, all I was doing was struggling to stay afloat, more concerned with not drowning than keeping my focus firmly on the prize. And one day, I became so caught up treading water, I tossed my focus, my deep beliefs and my principles away, thinking that was what was pulling me down. What a huge mistake.

The truth is, I may not have been the coolest person in town, nor the person people looked up to and emulated, but long ago, I was the person that loved. And I loved strongly because I never ran out of love. I never ran out of love because God in his generosity and extravagance kept pouring out His love over and over and over again. And when I decided to go my own way, I pulled away from that. And then I became the cold, dead person I am right now, constantly trying to relive the past, when in reality, Ie become a lost cause, drowning in my own vainglories.

Perhaps it all coming back to me now. I trying little by little to claw my way back to the person I was, whilst slowly unloading one foolish ambition at a time. And things are becoming less fuzzy. The fear of how I can find meaning in my life is fading. And I starting to notice God works of beauty day by day ?his awesomeness with each bolt of lightning, his artistic self in the inspiration given to musicians and to writers, his love for beauty in the purple skies that come with each sunset. The reason for all this? Simply because God loves us that much. How then can I say that my life has no meaning, when I surrounded by beauty beyond human invention and intelligence behind human invention? I should be dancing every day in the knowledge that I was given all this and fervently sharing God crazy love with the world. That the least I could do. And for the longest time before this, I couldn even offer the least.