Word of the day: "euplastic"

Firstly, The Associate would like to prissily state that he generally picks words that are effectively part of his lexicon, incorporated by years of devout meditation and bibliophilic fervour (although, as I've said before, as much as one would wish otherwise, one doesn't get many opportunities to use words like "frenulum" and "incondign" in daily conversation). Selecting unknown words at random from an online dictionary betrays weakness of character. So there.

I must confess that, upon reading through this blog's archives, most of what we write is stultifyingly banal compared to some of the melodramatic travails or deeply moving insights I've seen in other diaries. Granted, a diary, by its nature, is a blow-by-blow recollection of daily events and self-absorbed observations that are often of little relevance to outside readers; unless you happen to be at the apex of some crucial historical or emotional event. In this context, Anne Frank comes to mind, and even then there were only so many "help I'm trapped in an attic while the Nazis are out to get me" type entries before it got a tad stale.

It's also quite depersonalised too at times; awareness of writing for posterity, even in this bastardised form, does inhibit one's candour at times. Forget the wealth of detail which my fellow bloggers like Gabriel invest in this journal- just how much *isn't* being said? How accurate is this journal as a snapshot of capturing one's daily life, observations, thoughts and recollections? Just how much detail is *lost*? For my own two cents, I notice that I often catch myself refraining from mentioning certain facts; omitting certain details, partly for readability's sake (admittedly not that major a concern for me:), but also out of a certain.. wariness at revealing too much on a forum which is directly accessible to the public as a whole. Often, the discrepancy in detail between my private but far more disorganised journals can be telling.

"A picture is not the landscape."

In any event, I also wonder why of late we feel so compelled to inject some form of deeper justification to ourselves for what we do on this blog. Frankly, it shouldn't - for me, it ostensibly serves as a way to organise my thoughts in a more coherent manner, a way to keep my atrophying narrative skills in shape and to kill time in between work. Emotional catharsis and a certain... wary embarrassment at the sheer triviality of the effluvia I verbally disgorge shouldn't be a factor at all. But they are.

I have also decided to get back in touch with my roots and start reading more Malaysian sites and references; over the last couple of months I've realised that coming home to the land of my birth has been difficult - 12 years of absence has really put me out of touch with the local geography and demography. I hardly know my way around town. I hardly know anyone here. Most of the local ... buzz .. seems vaguely foreign to me. I find more contextual relevance in the daily conversations of my Singaporean friends. If I'm going to be geographically based here for the long haul, or at least in the medium-term - I really need to asssimilate more local context.

Today, on the way to work, the stretch of road between the National Museum and Dataran Merdeka were positively thronged with marchers for the Hari Kebangsaan parade. I was appalled by the amount of expense and effort that gets consumed in these displays of nationalistic fervour. I mean, how many schools, squatter colonies, drug addicts and social ills could be rehabilitated with even half of the money that gets burned in these galas. Admittedly, there was something positively stirring (and male) in watching military armoured personnel carriers and towed artillery grandly traipsing down the road - but still ....

But I guess people need symbols to rally around; some kind of tribal identity atavism that reaffirms our bond as an interdependent nation of communities and individuals working towards a common good. Although I wonder just how much the top 5% of the population wealth bracket actually contribute towards "common good" as opposed to "increased shareholder value".

Idle thoughts today.

Am wallowing in the emotional disjoint that comes from completing yet another engrossing computer game. Currently it's a toss-up between Morrowind and Warlords Battlecry 2 (have resolved not to buy any more games until I finish at least two more - besides, there's nothing that fantastic on the market at the moment). Morrowind has a lot of appeal - it's the most epic RPG I've ever seen to date, it's got scale like nobody's business, the graphics are beautiful, the world is incredibly realised, and the sheer diversity of option is staggering. However, it's time consuming, and the sprawling nature of the game means that there's going to be a lot of bread-baking type activity - buffing up skills, cherry-picking the best items, pumping up levels and stats. What I've seen of the story looks fascinating though, and the missions do seem more varied than the usual FedEx type "bring item A to person B in city C." Warlords Battlecry 2, on the other hand, is a fairly generic but involving fantasy RTS - good unit mix and RPG elements, spiffy sprites, and surprisingly no storyline. But SSG's Warlords franchise has a lot of nostalgic memory for me - I remember playing Warlords 2 with friends on one PC; taking turns at the keyboard in the bygone days of pre-Internet multiplayer...

XXX is out on the big screen here, I suppose I should go watch it, if only to use up some of my TGV movie passes. Maybe that's just the thing I need tonight; some cinema time alone, dinner out in the city by myself, and a bit of aimless wandering downtown to put some perspective in my life. I'm tired of heading home and listening to the unending stream of nag; of having to deal with the peccadilloes and idiosyncracies of family living. Go to a good restaruant. Eat some decent pasta. Check out the people passing by with usual mix of amusement, cynicism, reflection, and bitterness. Maybe go to Kinokuniya for a few books. It might also elicit some pleasant throwbacks to living in Australia, when I could move around the city center at will. Kuala Lumpur can be a hellishly difficult place to navigate even with a car; more so given that I have the direction sense of a blind and deaf wombat. Most of my morning drive to the city is performed by pure autopilot; I practiced the route about 15 times before I got it right. Generally I start the car, and it fascinates me how the brain can build in these reflexive routines in its neural pathways through long practice. There's almost no conscious thought in the morning drive threading through traffic, watching for stop signs, obeying traffic policemen - most of the time I'm lost in listening to inane radio banter or CD music. As my old driving instructor (who was also a part-time wushu instructor) put it - it's like the Karate Kid. "Wax on, wax off."

I'm also not particularly relishing the thought of going back to my room for aesthetic reasons tonight; my father ordered our family retainer (I know it's a pretentiously archaic term to use, but "maid" in today's Indonesian/Filipino slave-labour-agency-context doesn't quite fit describing a person who's worked for my family for over 30 years, and she's not quite "amah" material) to clear out all the unopened boxes from my room into the storeroom. Am in fits of rage, mainly because that means my access to the stuff in those boxes will be from now on characterised by choking in the dust and spending hours sifting through OTHER boxes. Not that I really need all my old computer manuals, seldom-read books, quotations file, photo albums, or even leftover computer parts that regularly, but it's irritating to think it's no longer within my direct sphere of residential influence.

Finally completed Tad Williams' Otherland series; it's one of the more epic sci-fi/fantasy fusion blends I've read to date. Although the primary orientation is definitely within the sci-fi realm (genetically engineered telepathic brains in orbital satellites, informatiion-based life forms), the fantasy elements include a dizzying array of VR worlds - think Star Trek's Holodeck, with character and more mutants:) Having finished a book AND a computer game at the same time leaves me rather hollow - once again I am confronted by that bleak mental void in between gratifications.

Oh well. Off to lunch now; managed to euchre a friend over at PWC into picking me up from work. He owes me a meal; and it'll be good to have lunch with a non-colleague from a change; all the work-related conversation and financier jokes relating credit resume evaluation to picking up girls gets a bit stale. Ah, yuppie humour.