A Hedonistic Weekend

Our relatives who were sick with dengue are being discharged today. My cousin was discharged yesterday. Heh, it's really interesting how the mood changes in that hospital room. When faced with the prospect of yet another day of hospital stay, she was all listless and bored. And then the blood test results came back with a good platelet count, and then the nurses came in to tell her she could leave right now, and then the invalid and the family members around her were all suddenly reinvigorated, and far more cheerful. Heh, staying in a hospital really does make you feel sick by virtue of the nature of the place. A psychological thing, I guess, but an understandable response. One needs to prepare oneself for utter boredom in the hospital.

Anyway, we headed out of the wards and down to the taxi stand, for the three-minute ride home, and you could tell that my poor cousin was actually far healthier than she looked. Well, at least she can get a breath of fresh air and sunshine now, and have TV to herself, and access the internet, and eat food with taste =P But of course, she remains under the watchful eyes of the grandparents, which essentially means that she left one ward to enter into another =P Ah well, she will convalesce in whichever fashion that suits her best I guess.

These few days have been totally decadent. Not a scrap of work done, despite the Hist S common test coming up. There is precious little motivation to go on, and anyway, it doesn't look like any studying will return a dividend worth my while. So instead of looking at E H Carr, I've been reading Roth's The Human Stain and playing the guitar. Here's a nice bit that I read last night when the oppressive heat was keeping me awake...

"You can't let the big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a w and impose its ethics on you. Not the tyranny of the we and its we-talk and everything that the we wants to pile on your head. Never for him the tyranny of the we that is dying to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral we with its insiduoud E pluribus unum. Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard. Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self- discovery - that was the punch to the labonz. Singularity. The passionate struggle for singularity. The singular animal. The sliding relationship with everything. not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?"

It does take a special kind of courage to strike out on your own indeed. Not to belong to any one group or clique, and more importantly, not to mind that it is so. It's something that springs from self-confidence, and an acceptance and appreciation for the pros and the cons of being the outsider. I've tried before to be this kind of person...but it turned me into something snobbish. In refusing to be part of some bigger body, I became arrogant. I guess you also have to be comfortable with that, and not mind how other people see you. But then again usually when you're interacting with people, it's the other person that has the power, and not you, so what he sees in you is more important than what you see in yourself.

Being an independent spirit...the selfishness and self-regard underlying the romantic notion of the lone ranger. Now I am in a position to retreat from everything that I am currently a part of, and to do so with minimal upset and fuss. But I know that I will not do this, because there are responsibilities that bind me to other people. And never to hurt someone else...a sudden streak of independence would break too many relationships and cause too much pain.

To be an independent spirit seems to require so much selfishness and callousness and dismissal of other people. And yet, when such an independent spirit comes into a room, you can feel its power, its confidence, its formidability. Answerable only to itself, it can do anything it likes to you without any restraint except when doing so will harm itself too. The raw strength of such a character cannot but inspire respect. But it does not inspire one to try to break through, the risks are too high that you will get hurt. Once you decide to become a lone ranger, it's hard to turn back.

* * * * *

Oh well, enough philosophising. Yesterday Pui Man came over to play with the electric. Heh, and into the evening, Greg came back from church activities, so he took the acoustic, and I went to get my classical. It was rather funny, to see every type of guitar represented in our little circle of guitarists trying to play songs by Joe Satriani and Metallica and the rest of them. Rock on a classical guitar is really funny =)

Anyway, playing the guitars, and we were learning Fade to Black by Metallica, the song that plenty of people in RJGE love and play. Hehheh, it's really not that difficult, after you slow down the tempo by a lot. And it's immensely satisfying when you can make the same notes that Metallica plays come out of your own instrument. You even start to feel like a real performer, with those riffs flowing smoothly through your fingers, and you're really playing an instrument, not just plucking strings to make a sound. And she was right...the electric really is rather fun to play, because it can make all sorts of sounds that the other two can't. Like bends and slides, and the whammy bar that lowers the note being sounded by up to a semitone. And all that fingerwork! Purely exhilarating.

So it was the three of us crowded around Greg's computer plucking away at the guitars, and I haven't had so much fun in a long time. To be sure I never had so much fun with a guitar before. With these rock pieces, everyone has to play a different part, and everyone has something cool to add to the piece, what with the solos planted in at strategic points. It's exhilarating because of all the fancy stuff we do, and because only one person at a time does it, so there's no security buffer of lan4yu2cong1shu4. I'd imagined sessions like this when I first joined Guitar. It's ironic, I guess, that it's only after my tenure in RJGE has ended that such things have started to happen.

Hehheh, during dinner my family was rather impressed with Pui Man's Cantonese, and that took the conversation off the beaten track of childhood and school stories into topics of culture and roots. And how I can't speak Cantonese even though it's my mother dialect. I guess I should eventually learn it; but, like the studying, the motivation really isn't there =P

pondered by phoenican @ 4.7.05