Today me and my fiancee went to the Mutiara Damansara to buy a ring and go see a movie.
About the ring, we finally agreed on a ring for our wedding. I bought only one since I'm not a ring wearing type of person. A bracelet maybe - but not a ring. Unless that ring has got some special enchantment on it - like make me go invisible or something. Now THAT is a useful ring.
Anyways we bought it at Diamonds and Platinum. There are basically 3 jewelery store at The Curve. Habib Jewel, My Diamond's and Diamonds and Platinum. In terms of prices, I could say that My Diamond's has the cheapest rings of them all. Funky+simplistic design. It was nice to look at at first. But then after quite sometime looking back and forth I find myself hesitating to actually decide upon which ring to get. So we got out of the store, and walked on - intending to look at what other stores has to offer.
Habib Jewel's collection was quite a few. But quite a few of the same thing. The difference between most of the rings available wasn't that stark and convincing - just a couple more diamonds there, a slight variation in design here. I'd say their goldsmith is lacking in creativity department.
Next we went to D & P. The collection was quite nice. And the price range was OK as well (since it was within my budget of RM 1k-ish. The ring we agreed upon was an 18k white gold ring with 2 diamonds attached. The design was quite sophisticated and sleek (whatever that means). It was matted in some parts as well (I mostly fell in love with the ring because of that. I got this thing for matted metals). In any case, it made the ring look nicer since the diamond and the design became the subject matter of the ring (instead of the ring itself which usually would steal the limelight).
So that was about the ring.
The other part of my day was about the movie we went to see - Yes! Man. At first I came there (to Cineleisure) under the pretense of seeing The Spirit. But having going there with my fiancee, I've decided at the last minute to buy the tickets for Yes! Man instead (so that she could enjoy it too. I don't think that she would watch The Spirit with the same passion that I do, being a self-proclaimed comic book/movie buff that I am).
So on we went. The plot was interesting. Plus Jim Carrey, as he's getting older - is fast-becoming one of my favourite actors. Like fine wine (if wine does gets better with age. People do say that often though..). What I mostly like about him is how well he could in different roles - from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to the early days of Ace Ventura. But frankly I like to see him in a more serious role, or at least a romantic comedy (none of those Dumb and Dumber, although the movie do kick-ass) .
The movie brings with it a unique view of how we should live our lives. Say Yes!. Say yes to everything. And perhaps anything that might be coming in our way. There was this part in the movie where Carl (Jim Carrey), the then unbeliever of the Yes! philosophy, went to the Yes! seminar after a friend of his mentioned how the Yes! philosophy had actually changed his life. So in the seminar, Terrence (the Yes! guru), talked on about that by saying 'no', we are closing all the doors of option in our life, and 'yes' actually opens it. I actually find myself intrigue by this statement - and it does get me thinking silently, reflecting on the choices I've made along the years that I've lived as a human on this earth. I could say that I was a bit of a Yes! man myself. Hehe~.
Opportunities do come - if you want it to come. If you let it come. Change can happen, if you want it to happen. I think there is something in the Quran which sounds something like "Sesungguhnya Allah tidak akan mengubah nasib sesebuah kaum, melainkan kaum itu berusaha untuk mengubahnya sendiri". In short if you want 'change' to happen to you, you're gonna have to work for it.
Which brings me to my next favourite quote, "If you want something you like, you gotta help enough people to get something they like" - Zig Ziglar. In the movie (yeah I know, I'm still talking about the movie), Carl had to help (in his case, say Yes! to) many people before finally getting what he wants in his life. A concept that I couldn't agree more. Well at least we as muslims should be aiming ultimately for 'keredhaan Allah'. Heck no matter how much 'pahala' you acquire, if Allah is not 'redha', then off to Hell with you. (which reminds me of a story...)
How is life going to be like after marriage eh? I had always aspire to be someone who would always go to mosque after getting back to work, maybe take some hadith lesson as well - after I get married. I wonder now, now that I am actually getting married, whether I will be actually doing that. Sometimes I doubt myself. But I guess I shouldn't be thinking like that eh - I should say Yes! instead :)
Today I sat down with my dinner beside mom. She was watching the news in the lounge - while trimming her nails.
We talked about stuff. Mainly on the ASB's dividend distribution this year. 7 friggin percent with 1.75% as bonus. Not much I thought, dad says with the state of economy Malaysia enjoyed in the past, we should have been getting up to 9%. Meehh~ "Janji ade.." I thought to myself.
Then the news shows the most hilarious pic of the night - a guy (journalist) throws off his shoes at George W. Bush.
The guy's got some balls! I mean wow..talk about guts. He must really hate the fella huh. But then so does the rest of the world I would imagine. Can't blame him really. And I would imagine that after Bush left, he'd just be getting a slap on wrist and maybe some little fine. Nothing he couldn't handle..I mean hey, he just did what everyone else in the world would WANT to do but don't have the cajones to.
On the other hand..if Secret Service got their hands on him - then that's a different story.
The closest thing I could come to that is this, and it's not even a real person (just a wax at Madame Tussaud. Notice the shock on the lady's face behind me. )
Booyakasha!!
Damn I feel good today. Just got a new contract offer from my boss. A permanency and pay raise. Nice~
Just when an extra cash would come in handy. Perhaps I could get a bigger stone for my lady's ring eh?
Anywho, alhamdullillah. With the economic forecast looking gloom and uncertain, this new contract certainly feels so much sweeter.
7 months have passed - and I am still at Comptel and starting next year; a permanent staff there.
Right then when she(my boss)told me about it I was freaking glad! But my face tried to hide it as much as I can. Kontrol macho la kan. After getting to my cubicle, I was all grinning to myself - felt so good. Wish I had that 'cone of silence' they had in the movie 'Get Smart' - so that I could scream out loud how fucking glad I am. I still am actually. Hehe.
Told my parents about it. They seem pretty happy. Good, I thought to myself. At least now dad wouldn't be nagging me anymore about how I should've worked in the government or some GLC (read TNB). I was all too happy to show him the envelope containing the contract (I actually danced in front of him).
Gonna get the family together for a lunch-out this weekend. Good things are meant to be shared. :)
Well to be honest, this post is serves not to explain why I don't clean my room. It's more to sharing what I just picked up on BBC News.
But yeah I do somehow hope that my mom and dad can read this. At least then, maybe they won't be breathing down my neck every so often, heh.
Favourite quote from my dad; "Sedangkan bilik ko yang sekangkang kera tu pun ko tak boleh nak bersihkan,..kemas-kemas,..macamana la ko nak pikul tanggungjawab dah kawen nanti (or something like that..kinda forgot..) "
well anywho, here goes the article. Taken from BBC
The Brilliance of Creative Chaos
George Bernard Shaw liked the tidy approach
Are we able to think clearly when surrounded by mess because chaos is inherent in all our minds, even those of the great writers and thinkers, asks Clive James.
The great thing about this slot is that I can pontificate. But a wise pontificator should always remember that he won't solve a global problem in 10 minutes, or even do much more than usefully touch on it in 10 hours. There are two main reasons for that. One reason is that the global problems are, by their nature, devilishly complicated. But everyone knows, or should know, that.
The other reason is less obvious, because it lies within the nature of the pontificator. He, or she - in my case he - speaks with a special pontificating voice: integrated, judicious even in its doubts, purporting to contain the distilled wisdom of a lifetime's experience. Almost always, I suspect, this voice is at odds with the personality from which it emerges, and in my case the discrepancy is so glaring that even I can spot it.
As I prepare this script, tapping away at the keyboard as Socrates might have done if he had owned a PC, it seems to me that my brain is at my fingertips, with all its scope and knowledge. But then, after looking up at the screen and noticing that the last two sentences are all in capitals and include various chemical formulae for substances unknown to science, I bounce my forehead off the desk and make the supreme mistake of looking around my room.
It's in chaos. The pontificator with plans for fixing the world can't organise his own desk, and as for what lies beyond the desk, forget about it. The evidence that I've spent years forgetting about it is all out there. Piles of old newspapers and magazines. Stacks of box files containing folders containing memos about the necessity to buy more folders and box files. Hundreds of books uselessly hidden behind hundreds of other books. A small statue of a Sumo wrestler, or else a life-sized statue of a small Sumo wrestler. A bag of random receipts that my accountant might have found quite useful in their year of origin, 1998.
But let's start with the desk. Or rather, let's not. The desk is too much. Little of its surface is visible through piled notebooks and shuffled papers. But observe this vertically striped earthenware mug full of ball-point pens. If the phone rings with information I must take down, I reach for one of these pens and find that it does not work.
Shambolic
In the same vertically striped mug there are 15 other pens that do not work either. Vaguely I remember the day when I planned to sort through these pens and retain only those that did work. But I got distracted. What else is in the same mug? Jelly beans, several of which have grown fur.
And that's just the mug. What about this desk drawer over here on the right? Ah, there's a touch of organisation here. Every year I put a new set of vital names and addresses in the designated section of my appointments diary. But I never get round to transferring vital names and addresses from previous diaries into the current one. So there are 10 years of diaries in this drawer alone, to supplement the line-up of 20 years of diaries standing over there in the corner of the room behind that valuable stack of obsolete phone books. Or, as I have just typed, obsotel nophe kobos.
There are books I know I own but I have to buy them again because I can't find them
All over again I count my blessings that I have not been chosen as one of the subjects for Eamonn McCabe's series of photographs called Writers' Rooms. In London, an exhibition of these photographs has just opened. The photographs have been running as a series in one of the upmarket newspapers. When I looked at the early photos in that series I was envious. Would I be chosen? Then I started praying that I wouldn't be, a prayer which has mercifully been answered.
There are some prizes I would like. I would quite like the Nobel Prize, if the money could be delivered tomorrow in a suitcase, clearly marked "Nobel Prize money: bank immediately or it will burst into flames." I would quite like the Booker prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Forward prize and the Unicef prize for the chronically disorganised. I can hear myself pontificating while accepting any or all of those awards. But what I don't want is to be photographed in this room, because any shred of credibility I had as a pontificator would evaporate instantly.
I noted with shame that even the most shambolic of the writer's rooms in the photographs was better organised than mine, and the majority of them might have been deliberately arranged to remind me that I myself was working in a skip. These paragons had got it all together without it getting on top of them.
Force of nature
You could tell that everything was there for a reason. If a woman writer had the propeller of a Sopwith Camel mounted on the wall, it was because her great-grandfather shot down Baron von Richthofen's second cousin in 1917.
Order and romance for Barbara CartlandWriters had their books arranged by category, in alphabetical order. I moved into this office 10 years ago, the books came out of their tea chests in any old order, and any old order is still the only order they maintain on my shelves. There are books I know I own but I have to buy them again because I can't find them.
Let me add that everything is well dusted. A cleaner comes in once a week and she does a good job. But she is under instructions not to move anything, in case I need it. So she has learned just to polish the whole lot as if it were an installation at Tate Modern.
Other writers clearly find it easier to get their act together, and no doubt most non-writers do too. But judging from my own admittedly extreme experience, they can only get things under control by striving mightily against a force of nature that wants things to be disorganised rather than not.
Scientists call it entropy. Back in the early 19th Century, Carl von Clausewitz, in his great work about military strategy On War, called it Friction. Clausewitz said that you have to have a plan for the battle but the plan had better include plenty of room for the absolute certainty that the plan will start growing fur from the first moment of its execution.
I have just been checking up in my copy of Clausewitz - I had to buy another copy, because my original copy is somewhere in my bookshelves, which means that it might as well be on Mars - and I can tell from every sentence that he was writing with the insight conferred by self knowledge.
I'll bet all the money in my foreign coin collection - it's over there in the fruit bowl, and some of those hundreds of obsolete francs and deutschmarks are sure to be worth something to collectors a hundred years from now. I'll bet all that money in the fruit bowl - and if you're asking where the fruit is, I gathered up all my powers of organisation and threw it out only a month after I forgot to eat it. I'll bet all that money that Clausewitz, when he was working on his magnum opus in his last years, was sitting at a desk that looked like the morning after the Battle of Waterloo.
His name for the accumulated effect of Friction was the Fog of War. When I read that, I could tell straight away that here was a man who, like me, couldn't toast a slice of bread without filling his apartment with smoke. When his widow prepared his manuscript for posthumous publication, she probably found sandwiches in it.
Dangerous signal
When DVDs came in, I rarely played my VHS tapes again, but the VHS tapes did not move out. There are several hundred of them here, stacked on the floor. My first copy of Clausewitz might be somewhere behind them. I know there is a squash racket behind them because I can see the edge of its frame sticking up.
Will I ever play squash again? Of course not, so why is the racket still there? Perhaps it's trying to remind me that the best equipped pontificator is the one who is aware of his own propensities towards chaos. Unable to organise his own breakfast, he will be less ready to condemn officials who can't organise an efficient system for sending out student grants, or collecting private information onto a CD-ROM that won't be left on a train.
But even the most self-aware pontificator is still likely to expect too much of the world. Rarely will he be sufficiently amazed that society functions at all, considering some of the human material it has to work with. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Diogenes, wedded to simplicity, lived in a tub. But he still roamed the streets of Athens by daylight while carrying a lamp. He said that he was looking for an honest man, and everybody wrote it down, saying that Diogenes the cynic was a piercing analyst of the human condition. But maybe he just didn't know how to turn the lamp off.
Sitting at this computer, on whose keyboard I have just typed the word "lamp" and actually written the word "lump", I am face to face with an item of technology that Diogenes would not have known how to switch on. I barely know how to switch it on either, have often failed to switch it off - why does it ask me "do you wish to report the error" when I don't know what the error is? And yet I do know that its mere presence in the pile of rubble I call my desk is sending me a dangerous signal.
This miracle of machinery is telling me that order can emerge from chaos after all. Well, yes, it can, but only against heavy odds, because chaos is inherent even in the minds of those who make the miracles. And it is certainly inherent within the pontificator. I can pontificate about that with some certainty, even as I type the last words of this sprict, scirpt, script, reach for my mug of coffee and get a mouthful of ball point pens.
Eamonn McCabe's Writers' Rooms exhibition is at the Madison Contemporary Art gallery in London until 17 January 2009.
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