Up in the Air

Yesterday was not feeling very good when I got back from work. I don’t know where all that feeling of sleep deprivation came from. Anyway this morning I woke up and I felt a flu coming on. So I told my boss I’m on leave. He actually asked me what the reason was. That’s the thing – if I get treated like a kid when I’m 25 I grin and bear it, but I’m much older now so I was pretty mad.

Let’s put it this way: it’s Friday. You wake up and feel a flu coming on.

Option 1: you go to work. You boss is happy (actually, more like “happy” because your boss is never happy), you’re not happy, you get sick on Saturday, and spend the weekend feeling miserable.

Option 2: You go to a doctor, and get hard evidence that you shouldn’t go to work. But you feel bad, because you’ve just spent $20+, of which some of it is company’s money. It’s basically like taking a lie detector test. You can only do it so many times before you feel like you’re being treated like a kid.

Option 3: You take leave. At the most your boss will complain about how you took last minute leave. But you’re actually paying this out of your leave entitlement, so why is he going to complain? (And anyway I always have a lot left over by the end of the year, so I’m also doing myself a favour).

Most of the time I would have taken option 2, but today I just hated going to the family doctor, and just paying him money to write me a sicknote. So I just paid with my leave. So technically you have a pretty solid excuse about why you want to take urgent leave. Which makes me wonder why my boss would bother to ask me for a reason to take urgent leave, since I can always tell him that I’m not feeling well.

So at the beginning of my day off, I always thought about the plans that I was going to do. Go to the office and pick up some work and feel less guilty, sit in a café and study, swim. But I was sick and sleep deprived, so in the end I slept until the afternoon, then I went swimming, and after that it was time to meet my friends for a movie.

So I watched “Up in the Air” with Shingo, Nat and Crazy Frog. (OK I know that Crazy Frog is not a nice name but gimme some suggestions and I will rename him.)

This movie in a way reminded me of another movie that I watched, that generated a great amount of acclaim: “About Schmidt”. And I can imagine why: because they lay bare the great amount of loneliness that exists at the heart of American life. Not something that’s universal by any means, but it means quite a lot to an American.

Without giving away too much about the movie, it’s about an executive which clocks up an incredible amount of flyer miles, going from city to city as a consultant. He’s chosen a life up in the air, going from hotel to hotel, clocking up mileage points. He’s good at his job, and it’s a stable career. The meaning of his life is getting as many miles as is possible. He keeps his emotional distance from other people, and goes to a different room all the time.

Well all that suddenly brought back memories of my student life, when I was basically a nomad. Turning up in a different classroom all the time, studying stuff I basically wouldn’t have much to do with. Not really knowing a lot of people. Travelling light. I remember that: the permanent impermanence. Brushing past strangers. I’m wondering where the 4 years went. Actually I know, I had been filling up my head with new ideas and knowledge. Just that – later on you find out that it would have been better if you had built up something more organic - expertise in a few areas, not all – and had some deeper experiences instead of just – like the Chinese saying, qing ting dian shui (skimming the water like a dragonfly).

But what he called this experience is something that I did identify with: self-negation. Like I did want to disappear for 4 years and I did. I even went to a uni that was in the middle of nowhere. (Not my first choice, but I didn’t complain about it being in the middle of nowhere. I thought that being in the middle of nowhere was romantic.) But we’re from Singapore, and that’s like in the middle of everywhere, so it was a great switch for me.

So the movie was good, but not as excellent as the reviews made it out to be. (Agreed with Nat on that one) I’m not a movie fanatic. There was a period of 2-3 years when I went to the movies because I believed that it taught me things about life. In a way they did, but I’ve come to realize that even though you can read a lot of little nuances into situations, even though you can analyse characters in such a way that you get “A”s for your essays, what are you going to do with your life is a different thing. And since then, movies have lost quite a bit of shine for me.

There was this time when Crazy Frog reminded me that the movie did say that the difference between boys and men is that men know what they want in life. Take that sentiment to the extreme, you choose your path in life, and follow it down to the exclusion of everything else, that’s maturity. It’s a viewpoint I have little sympathy with, even though nowadays I would think about it a little, as opposed to when I was younger, I would just very rudely brush it off.

It says a lot of him as a person, I think he’s of the mentality that bearing a great weight on your shoulders makes you a better person. It might be true, although I were to think a great deal about it. Which should explain why, when Nat was going on and on about what he could do with a life with a lot of freedom and no responsibilities, Crazy Frog was pretty quiet.

What I say, though, is that in a way I’m not a person with a lot of commitment. I think my miserliness goes a long way. I tend to do things which give quick gains for not much effort. At the beginning things are great, but as you progress, you do need to do the difficult things too. And I probably have neglected that. Suppose I were to say, I want to build a financial life. I need to do that amount of work and research before it gets done. Suppose I were to say, I want to get a girlfriend, I need to spend time and energy, hunting for food. Whereas some of the time, I would just say, look at all those books. I can just pick them up and learn life’s lessons at not very much expense, all of that time being comfortable and cosy. I suppose that’s how I ended up being a bookworm.

And it does go back to what George Clooney’s character does. When companies don’t see much of a profit, they take the easy way out and fire people. George Clooney himself doesn’t like commitment and being tied down, so he just keeps his distance away from other people. That’s one view. But the other view is that you measure your life in terms of distance. OK, George Clooney takes it to the extreme, and it’s a grotesque parody, he measures his life in miles. But you can measure your life in the number of interesting experiences you have. That is also a valid metric.