Whatever, Gabriel.

Normal snappy mood for debate has been dampened by a moderately somber week - four funerals in succession since Monday. Thankfully no one directly close to me, but all relatives of friends and relatives of relatives. Also thankfully, I had only to attend one of them, but the sudden outbreak of mortality one week before Chinese New Year doesn't really augur well, even to my modern, positivist, post-Enlightenment mindset. Guess the old superstitious Chinaman paradigm is hard to shake.

One of the people who passed away was the infant daughter of a colleague. Now, this colleague was one of the more unpleasant to deal with, for a variety of reasons. I obviously never liked her much, but maybe now I understand a little bit more about why she was always so snappy and bad-tempered - apparently her daughter had been ailing for quite some time now. Ah well. Sometimes in one's self-obsession with self-gratification, one forgets about the world around us; even the little portion of it that encompasses the people we see and interact with from day to day. Even our closest ones.

But in the end, the dead only know one thing, that it's better to be alive.

"Everyone you meet can teach you part of what you need to know. But you need to know some incredibly unpleasant things."