Saturday, August 19, 2006
Co-Laterality.
Yo.
LOL.
Im bored.
Holidays are coming.
Ahhahah.
Im having ice cream.
Vanilla, Chocolate, Tiramisu, Rum & Raisin, all courtesy of Haagen Dazs.
Pleasure costs $24, sugar diabetes comes free =)
Reminds me of a time in Austria back in sec school years where we were all served an awful-tasting bowl of salad and I saved the day (erm... right.) by recommending we all pour sugar on it and eat it - masks the extreme bitterness. It worked wonderfully.
AnYwAy.
Just watched Collateral on DVD. Wonderfully artful show about an average LA cabbie who is forced to drive a hired hitman to 5 locations to kill 5 people, all in one night. Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx sure have awesome chemistry.
But the movie also has some interesting themes. Spoilers ahead. Also, if you're bored by long texts and don't feel like generating the mental capacities to digest what's below, then shoo.
But then again. Yooooouu knooow yooouuu wannnaaa. =)
Foxx plays a cabbie with big dreams and no action - he's been bumbling around in his cab for 12 years, and he intends to someday own a limousine company. He's got the plan all hammered out, except he has never acted on it. What's significant is this is how most people are these days - lives flash by, those youthful dreams that provided strength and motivation sidelined to the most unvisited depths of one's mind. People would rather stay within the comfort zone of routine, why take that risk? Let life go by, work like rats and don't aspire to be too much. Zuo ren yao shui bian yi dian.
Cruise is a cold, calculating hitman with the personal motto of 'adapt and improvise'. Unlike Foxx's character, he lives life on the edge, keeping on his toes. Like all stereotypical bad guys, Cruise had a broken family and is a man who totally believes in his personal ideals, which in turn drives his complete disregard for the human lives he takes. To him, the world is full of robots living life in perpetual trance, and he is the one guy who stands out, kind of like the world revolving around him.
Questions of morality and ethics swirl around one's mind when watching this movie... what justifies Cruise's character when he goes around knocking people off like soulless animals? The layman would say things like 'think of that guy's family' or 'he was such a nice person, what a pity' or 'he could have achieved so much'.
And then you start self-examining. Here I am everyday, forcing myself out of bed at 6 when everything else in my body tells me not to, taking the same train everyday with thousands of people I don't recognise, going through the motions at school. Oh, what would be of me, if not for these academic goals controlling my life?
In a final gun showdown in a train, Foxx's character shot Cruise, and when Cruise realised it, he just calmly gathered himself and sat himself down on a seat.
He repeats his first complaint to Foxx about LA: "I read about this guy who gets on the train here, and dies. Six hours he's riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around L.A., people on and off sitting next to him. Nobody notices."
And then he dies as the train pulls away, his corpse looking like any other sleeping train commuter.
Where'd he go when he died? Is there a place for people who do things that everyone else considers wrong, but they themselves consider right? Can a universally harmonious society ever accommodate 'misfits' like these? Our modern morals are the result of centuries of religion, tradition, and technological evolution. What is considered socially acceptable changes with time. Technology accelerates this change. The world would not be globalised if not for metal ships, nuclear weapons, satellites, etc.
40 years ago, an Asian girl who regularly goes clubbing is trash, barely better than a prostitute. Now its perfectly okay and normal, even expected! It's called "Having a life." Heard about it?
50 years ago in the States, it was almost impossible for a black man to hold a high office, or even share a bus seat with a white man. Now a black woman is the Secretary of State.
70 years ago here, it was normal to get married at 13. Now, most wait till 'after studies'. Late 20's.
500 years ago in Europe, you could get humiliated and chained up in public for being lazy. Now, slacking is almost a national youth pastime.
Not long before that era, literature was completely contained within the walls of the church, and people's religious lives were dictated by the parish. Back then, if the king converted to a new religion, the whole population was expected to follow or be executed.
Soon, the printing press expedited the dissemination of ideals and opinions. People started gaining knowledge. With knowledge comes responsibility, like a *certain superhero's uncle* said. Nowadays, we have a choice of how to pursue our own religion, and we seem perfectly comfortable in that, in our separate versions of morality.
'Havoc' girl shares the same church pew with someone who conducts herself in the most moral way possible, and they both get along happily, both nonchalantly proclaiming their love for the same God, both singing the same worship lyrics, going through the same motions. When the pastor preaches against 'immorality' and 'sin', does that 'havoc' girl feel condemned? Does she have her own moral principles to immediately cancel out the indirect condemnations of the pastor on her behaviour, and assure herself that what she's doing is acceptable, or forgivable, hence justified?
Such morals may go like these:
-Having sex is a basic human function, therefore, I should follow my basic instincts and sleep with whichever guy I fancy (courtesy of Izzy).
-All my friends spend their nights out at the clubs, so I should go to. Who are my parents to stop me? My life and body are mine to lead, and I shall do with them as I please.
-I wanna 'live life to the rawksome maximum', 'get out and shake my booty', 'hang loose in da club', 'get grindin on a saturday night', 'show off my hot bod while it still oozes sex and conducts lust in others'.
Now, a (stereotypical) atheist with such friends would probably not bat an eyelid. After all, the side effect of a first-world society is that its youth are comfortable, hence disillusioned-ly stupid, deluded by a love of absolute, anarchic freedom to do as they please. Go ahead, It's Your Life (Bon Jovi?) after all. Do as you please, you're gonna shoulder the consequences anyway. Drink? It's your liver yea. Smoke? It's your lungs anyway. Cheat on a partner? Hey, it's cool. Just don't get found out.
But what if such an amorous lifestyle affects you? What if you love that person and want to marry him/her? Are you still willing to shut one eye to practices which you know are wrong, but am already too late to correct, all because you were selfishly, foolishly apathetic in your youth? What if such actions affect you, your health, your money, your family? Only then would you take action?
A person under the moral umbrella of religion is a different story. He or she would probably have to keep 'immoral' practices under wraps, or at least shared amongst a close circle of friends that share the same principles and most likely, age, too. Why? Simply because many religions, stemming from centuries-old tradition and a long- standing set of behavioural rules, frown on the same set of morals that secular society and popular culture have embraced. Religion provides a psychologically (yes - it's psychological for most people - except for some. go figure.) comforting, universal shield against all evil, but it also gags and severely restricts its followers. Freedom-loving rebels, youth especially, despise this, and that's why many backslide, or else maintain a disgruntled commitment to religion, all because religion must be passed down from generation to generation.
The modern world coos delightfully at multi-dimensional characters. No longer is the ideal, faultless, one-dimensional Superman universally admired by young girls. Instead, they prefer men with a dark side, or a dark history, 'ordinary men who were forced to grapple with being a superhero'. Such characters, like Batman and Spiderman, now capture the hearts and mind of audiences. Apparently such people are 'strong' and 'sexy'.
Likewise, a handsome 'bad boy' with parallel religious commitments would probably be a very desirable one-off date (yes - a one-off date), and it would be 'cool' to know such people. (like, say, a teenage dude who clubs and gets drunk, and dresses in metal studs and black leather, but still attends church every Sunday with his clueless family) What. Is he the epitome of fun and family combined together? What's wrong with dressing in black leather and metal studs, right? It's just clothing. Yes. To them, 'getting with the hip crowd' or 'chilling at a club', all while holding a good job, are perfectly justified. The 2 phrases would probably be widely used in advertisements by clubs, but sound staid and as awkward as Lee Kuan Yew singing a punk rock song when used here in an argumentative against them, don't they?
So, what is the solution to the ideal, happy life? Well, I can safely say I know the answer, the solution. However, the answer is an absolute, total sum. How one arrives at that sum, depends on the lifestyle choices that one makes.
The answer's Balance. Balance in Life, Balance in Everything. Simple? Capisce? How you interpret and implement that is completely your choice.
Aforementioned forced conversions are also why we have many religions which don't belong to the locality. What's Islam doing in Asia, for example? (this is a random example - I'm trying to be unbiased here.) Malays weren't Muslim all throughout history. They were converted from Hinduism, Buddhism and Animism (lesser known: mostly referring to the belief that everything on Earth has a soul and spirit) in the early 15th century, influenced by Arab, Chinese and Indian Muslim seafarers during the Islamic Golden Age. And even now, leaving Islam is still extremely condemnable. You lose your name and your friends, and would most probably be threatened to be disowned. In 50 years, would that still hold?
Are you sure that the gaining of knowledge is always positive and desirable? Is it better to have knowledge and be a burdened and tinted soul along with it, or have blissful ignorance and live in pure personal utopia, much like the scenarios of the Matrix movies?
"The richest places are not the cities, Hollywood, or the oil fields of the Middle East. The wealthiest places on Earth are its graveyards! Buried under them are thousands of great dreams. The fastest car, the cure to cancer, the best cuisines, the rockets to outer space, all lie trapped below 6 feet of earth" - Paraphrased from Rev. Kong Hee
jOhn thought at 3:47 PM