Monthly Archives: Dec 2010

Bye Bye Blackbird!

This is a very interesting experiment — what exactly happens to the patients parts of whose orbitofrontal cortex (which plays a central role in regulating emotional feelings whether to approach or withdraw) are damaged so that they lost most of their emotional lives. Their reasoning and logical abilities are intact and they can perform normally on tests of intelligence. When these people go out into the world, you would assume these people are free of emotional distractions and able to see through the haze of feelings that blind the rest of us and achieve perfect rationality.

Just the opposite. They found themselves unable to make simplest decisions or set goals, and their lives fall apart. When they look out at the world and think, “What should I do now?” They see loads of choices but lack immediate internal feelings of like and dislike. They must examine the pros and cons of every option with reasoning, but in the absence of feeling, they see little reason to pick one over another.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. Along a similar line, it’s hard for the controlled system to beat the automatic system by will power alone. That’s why all self-control would fail eventually if it’s up against one’s true desire.

Last day of 2010 — I read an article on Boredom (Boredom Enthusiasts Discover the Pleasures of Under-stimulation) and bought a book on Exuberance.

And I cooked a beautiful pot of mung bean soup for myself.

May next year be filled with genuine exuberance for life.

The Confessions of A Snob

Last day in Nam and already looking forward to returning to Kong. I can never fully relax when traveling. My life has been highly structured. I long for returning to those daily routines like long walk up the hills, morning reading, afternoon drinks, and late night jazz.

Like Schopenhauer once said and I catastrophically came across at an impressionable age, life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom; my longing — or human longing — is constantly moving between adventure and security.

Yesterday, after a quite good trip to Ha Long Bay, I still came to conclusion that I tend to like travelling in more developed places (gasp!). As much as I love the beauty of Mother Nature, I am equally appalled by its philistine nature.

  • Floating Market, HLB
  • Weird Drink List
  • War Museum
  • Saigon Post Office
  • Elephant Ear Fish
  • Gigantic Buddha

Saigon, Saigon

Was sitting at this lovely cafe “Green Leaf” sipping Pina Colada and surprisingly, they’ve got free WiFi! Facebook is also blocked in Nam, I discovered.

Ho Chi Minh City looks like a second-tier Chinese city at the level of Ningbo or Nanning. Thousands of maddening cyclos were roaming along every street, which looks dusty and rundown even in its most hustle and bustle district. The sense of anarchic madness kicked in when I was applying for the visa-on-arrival at the HCM airport — everyone was queuing the wrong queue and didn’t know what to expect. Finally it was my turn, this small, dark, emotionless Vietnamese guy was as terse as possible, to the point I was completely clueless whether I was in the right queue or not. I waited for about 20 minutes before he used his eyes to direct me to the sideways. And then came this Vietnamese cab driver who didn’t speak a word of English and somehow thought I was going to check into InterContinental, even though I repeatedly said my hotel is Hotel Continental Saigon (Which was the setting of Graham Green’s The Quiet American).

Got a lovely letter from Down Under. That, along with a glass of Pinot Grigio at the pavement table watching maddening traffic around me, made my day.

Wandering around a bit in the hotel area — it was totally mad with all sorts of piercing sounds clashing into each other. For many Vietnamese people, the favorite pastime seems to be sitting around on the stairs in front of an inhumanely gigantic shopping mall; and for many young people here, hugging (literally) brand name logos for a photo is THE thing to do.

It’s late now, but thanks for massive noises outside my window, I could only half-sleep.

The Social Network

Was reading the newspaper this morning at Pacific Coffee and had to say the editorial quality dropped to a new low. C’s story, “Change tack on Korea, experts urge Beijing”, was a hodgepodge of weak judgment, excessive repetition and even a spelling mistake that was forced to the front page.

Look at the intro: “China yesterday urged close ally North Korea to follow though on its offer to allow UN nuclear inspectors to return …” — that’s equivalent to Mum urges her boy to do homework after school and what’s anything significant about that? Then the second paragraph, which should have been the intro — which would not have salvaged the article but could have at least made it not as a spectacular failure as the existing one — started to cite experts as saying Beijing’s N-Korean policy had fallen off the rails. And then came, very jarringly, our dear spokesperson friend from the FM.

Aaron Sorkin was on BBC “Arts and Ideas” program and made a compelling statement on the Facebook phenomenon. While Zuckerberg may have the best of intentions when creating the website,  what it has done was exactly the opposite, Sorkin argued.

“What socializing on the net is to socializing is what reality TV to reality.”

FB users are constantly re-inventing themselves to what the world would love them to be — and there’s an insincerity to it, and it is, to essence, a performance when you put on a status update saying “oops, got up too late coz I went to a fabulous party last night”. We don’t show our flaws on FB, or we only show those cute ones.

“It’s an insincere form of communication.”

It’s A Wonderful Life (Xmas)

Those fine things in life —

1. Bus ride to Stanley on a sunny day with Kermode around the ears

2. One drink or two at sunset writing my blog

3. Deep night Jazz saturating the room, with moonlight shining in

4. Saturday morning AMC movies

5. 1am phone call from you

6. Reading at the crack of the dawn

7. Morning yoga

8. Morning jogging on Bowen Road

9. Cracking a joke, and pottering around

10. A sentence perfectly crafted

Dosha Types

I have been determined to be Pitta-Vata type, according to the old Ayurvedic philosophy. The main qualities of Pitta type is strong-willed, determination, aggressive, angry and jealousy. The main qualities of Vata type is restless, impatient, whimsical and fickle.

http://hubpages.com/hub/The_Best_Diet_For_Pitta_Dosha_Type

Ayurveda makes total sense because it’s a body-mind approach.

I live in the era of saturation, which aggravate my expansive tendency — I’m always trying to exhaust the entire spectrum and ended up being exhausted.

The fear for, and deliberate avoidance of, selection and discrimination, is one type of mental laziness.

Sakitini/Young Thing

Two ways to apply for a Vietnamese visa — one is to line up in front of the Vietnamese consulate the other is much simpler and easier — apply on line and get your visa upon arrival. My indecision is completely hereditary, or more accurately, one clear parental imprint. Mom always prepared six pencils for me before every exam just in case — see the link?

Had a few drinks with a young girl at Soho. She is only 24 and still got a whole life ahead of her. I can’t say I’m not jealous. But I would not want to return to the 20s — young and stupid and easily scared. Now am halfway through. Had my fair share of regrets already.

The Man Who is not There

Winter is finally here in the Kong. Crisp and brisk.

Had a good sleep last night, which means having a number of dreams I don’t now remember of.

But that last sentence I said to myself before bed stays with me and was the first thing popping up in my head this morning — ride that damn wave.

Are You on the Train?

Am off today but spent half of the day msn-ing work-related things. Feel lousy and so trivial.

At Stanley again. A tonic to a HK-based soul. It has recorded, witnessed a lot of personal stories now.

I said before Love is the only answer. And I didn’t only narrowly mean romantic love. Compassionate love for fellow human beings, tolerance, accommodation…is the only way out.

Take an Authentic Stand

The more I get to know how profoundly early childhood experience molds us, the less I come harsh on myself.

Most of behavioral patterns are formed at very early stage in life — at the pre-verbal stage of development — but continue to sustain themselves through out the rest of life. Those behavioral patterns are defensive in nature — they’re acquired as a means of defending the emerging self, which at its most vulnerable and fragile moment, from potentially injurious experiences. But they remain locked in the body even though the original perceived dangers have long since passed. They can’t be accessed through cognitive or intellectual insight. They can only be accessed through the body.

The critical point to remember is, this defensive mechanism happens so early that it is a non-verbal, pre-intellectual event. As such, it can be addressed in no other ways than through the body.

Through greater awareness — both cognitively and bodily — obsolete responses can be abandoned and alternatives created.

The biggest individual tragedy — one continue to present the defensive pattern to the world while the true energetic self recedes from awareness, perhaps for the remainder of one’s life.

My early childhood answer to the perceived dangerous world was to excel to avoid being abandoned. To excel at any cost. Later on I gradually discovered I’d just be fine being my very imperfect self and every existence was uniquely beautiful, but that cognitive insight can’t be translated into embodied awakening. Compulsive competitiveness is still my default response.