A New Semester

So here I am again, in the Hong Kong International Airport typing. Just an hour away from boarding my plane to San Francisco and starting a new semester. Starting anew. This is my first post in quite some time. Being at home amidst all the people and the scenes I find dear made me really just want to vegetate. The food that I miss. And sadly, the humidity - which I so totally absolutely did not miss. Grace would probably probably attest to that, going by the scarcity of emails from me going her way. Then again, my mom wold counter that Grace gets a better deal than she does anyway.

I on the other hand, will let women be women and keep my mouth close.

I guess nobody should start another day the same person that they were the day before - life has too many lessons to teach us. I wake up each day, not wanting to be the same, but worrying that I'll lose myself. The concept of "myself" as a constant of course, is rather fallacious. So we accept that it is a dynamic thing - but how dynamic? And where do we draw the line? Sometimes when we rush to save "who we are", we have to wonder whether that state of things should be saved - which requires immutable truth. Yet, to me - truth is largely relativistic, if not entirely. As is good and evil.

But I shall not bore you with philosophical rants in this post.

2006 was a rather momentous year. I saw the beginnings and the ending of my relationship with Wan Jun. I must say, that period left me with a greater capacity to be cold and heartless. Not that it was always a hellish ride while it lasted - the emotional topography of that year was rather interesting. The months of lonely search that resulted in the Astro scholarship. Yet, I can separate the euphoria from the agony of hopelessness that was as a doppelganger to me for so long. There was coming to Berkeley, and hardly missing Penang at all. Hardly missing Malaysia. The people I missed dearly, but not the country. Feeling I should study harder. Feeling I should not bury myself in books. Feeling that not feeling would be most wonderful thing in the world.

Only if that came to pass, "wonderful" would be a concept that I would not be able to appreciate.

And not a single day passes that I do not detest this human filth that envelopes me. This organic weakness. It seems to be a Christian thing to always wonder at how our biological systems are so intricately designed. That the efficiency and complexity of it all makes intelligent design a blatant truth. Me? I see frailty. I see weak minds, incapable of single minded drive. I see pointless suffering and a denial of how vulnerable our pathetic forms are. How sad, that I will probably never live to see the day of completely cybernetic organisms.

But life moves on, even as I sit here typing. And when my fingers stop moving, pressing against the slightly tarnished keyboard of my MacBook, perhaps I will move on with life - just to see what lies around the corner, just to seek change. Oh look, they already have.