Number Nine Dream

When you're in your twenties you're being an adult for the first time, and you have to realign your priorities in life. Almost without exception, I hear a lot of final year uni students remark, "oh my God, I've just taken my last exam." What's so amazing about taking your last exam? It is that from the moment that the person enters school as a 5,6 year old, his life would have been centred around exams. It is not that difficult for him to name his reason for living: it is the exam. But when you rip that centre out of his life, a major reorientation is needed.

I once told myself, you have enough dreams to last your whole life. That is true. But what becomes of those dreams? There are plenty of instances in my life where I've been lost and headed down blind alleys. Let's look at some of those dreams.

Musician

It would not have occurred to me when I was a kid, my parents breathing down my neck to make me put in that one hour a day. I hated practicing. I wonder why people never seem to realise that people hate practicing piano. It's bad enough to hate practicing, and when you know that you aren't good with your hands, and all that practicing is futile, it's even worse. I still cringe a little when ppl come up to coach me on something that needs hand eye co-ordination (basketball for instance).

That being said, I think I have a good shot at being a composer. Except that writing stuff alone is not going to get you very far. You still need the big logistical problem of having things performed. For a few years I stopped composing because there was no way of writing things down. Then last year I started writing things down, and after that I wrote some more stuff that I'm happy with, but it's dried up a little recently. Anyway the writing part is OK. It's the translating all that stuff into music that's the problem now.

Academic

It's hardly the case that I became really interested in knowledge only when I got to the Uni. But I suppose at that time the educational system is hardly inspiring. Singapore educational system is second to none for drilling the basic facts into peoples' heads, and even the angmohs admire that. But above that and beyond, it only really gets interesting when you get to the uni. And even if I were inspired by knowledge while in Sec School and JC, it's for those ideas that you get to learn about in the uni.

And I think that it's like building a house. The part all the way up till JC is when you are pounding in the foundations and building the pillars. It doesn't look like anything is being done, even though it's a lot of hard work. It's dreary and boring. And uni is when you bring in all the prefab stuff and fit it on, and suddenly, magically, the house appears.

I would go into a field which is intricate and complex. I thought about artificial intelligence for a while. I think I would go into a field which involves a lot of complexity, and it is not difficult to find one. The big problem with academic stuff is that when you get the main idea, and that is usually early on, it's a lot of fun. But after that it is the long hard slog and the project takes forever.

Books

People have this image of my being a bookworm, even though I've had to explain to them that I've only been one for 10 years. OK, 10 years is a long time but I was more likely to listen to Jimi Hendrix / REM / Sonic Youth all day when I was back in JC.

This was probably related to the previous dream, of being an academic. I thought I'd better start reading everything I could lay my hands on, just in case I ever got the chance to be an academic one day. But now my house is stocked up with too many useless books and I set a target last year to clear 2 shelves of books by reading and selling them away. I have read through more than 1 shelf already.

Marathoner

This was something really accidental. Just that at some point in my life I got to know 5 people who have done marathons. So I signed up for a marathon at the end of 2008. It's very tiring to practice but it's too late to stop now. Anyway I finished it. Although "finish" is rather flattering to me. Towards the end when I was in an army of stragglers, I thought, "this is what it must have been like when Napoleon was retreating from Russia".

Playwright

I wanted to be a playwright in school. But I think I blogged about this before so I won't bore you with the details. Anyway bottom line is that I've taken this as far as it can go so I'm OK with this.

Career

Nothing much here. At one point my thinking was, "everybody thinks that this is important, so it has to be important." It wasn't easy at first. I'm still getting by. Maybe for now I will just have a job, get by and at the same time work on my other dreams. Until such a time when I stumble upon something that is compelling enough that it becomes another one of my dreams.

Pussy

The one time that I have been in love, something strange happened. Everything gets imbued with a whole new meaning, although if you were to press me about it now, I'm not sure I can explain what this "new meaning" is. Whereas I was a more easy going person before that, I just got more forceful over certain things. When am I next going to get somebody? Well I used to think, make more of your own dreams come true, and this problem will fix itself. And it used to be that impressing women would be a great incentive to work at those things. Little by little, though, it stopped being important, and now when I wake up in the morning, I know that I will measure how useful a day has been according to these other things outlined above.