Keep A Peek

Twenty Nine

cirnelle — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 11:13:24 +0000

You’ve had a hell of a year. An introspective summary would reveal a messy graph, the peaks and valleys fluctuating unpredictably and to asynchronous frequencies. Somewhere in between your serial conquests and breathless finales, there were surreptitious glimpses of doubtful pauses. Concocting that magic cocktail of fun and pain is a skill which you have yet to master. I have a nagging suspicion that you’re biting off more than you can chew. Your blunders and disappointments were a tad too abundant to be attributed to mere inexperience. But you know what? That’s the price of venturing out of your comfort zone. You have always been way too cautious. And frankly, your obsessively meticulous execution of balance preservation is boring and devoid of meaningful significance. Fuck that. Your callow attempts in trying to establish what is perhaps bigger than yourself is probably futile and foolish, but you wouldn’t have it any other way, would you? Just be mindful of the crippling effect of sheer bravado and you’ll be fine. You’re eating and feeling healthier now. Keep that up. Make time for your family and friends, they are needy because they love you. Create and participate in good madness, you have someone beside you who’s as willing as you are. Please only those who matter. Be firm, but retain your candidness. Have empathy and be kind. Dream dangerously and outrageously, but don’t make dreams your master. Think freely and deeply, but don’t make thoughts your aim. You’re in the last year of your twenties, and I can’t think of a better time to tell you this: you’re no longer young enough to claim you know everything. Here’s to a year filled with an abundance of spirited moments, thoughtful ventures, cathartic discoveries, serendipitous joy and inspirational mistakes. Now drink up.

Happy birthday.

Something Good

cirnelle — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:46:09 +0000

Today we promise eachother forever. A part of me still refuses to believe this is actually happening. Especially not to me, the guardian of cynicism and antithesis of ceremonial romance. Love is an arcane and impossible language. Like plucking feather from thin air, like smelling roses in a desert, like galloping on unicorns, like chancing upon your soulmate, like promising eachother forever. The odds are against us, I’m acutely aware of how flimsy the foundation of this whole institution and how fragile a promise sustained by human temperament is. But you have this magnificent gift of distorting reality field around me. It’s amusing in an almost heartbreaking way how I allow you to enter the sacred realms of my perfection, no holds barred, no hidden proxies, mind, body and soul tout compris. I need freedom, to an almost destructive extent. Nobody has ever managed to keep me grounded for long. But when I finally met someone who is willing to set me free, I actually clung. My apocalyptical attachment to our chemistry-induced dances entices me as much as I am grateful to your ever encouraging nods to my wildly unpredictable ambitions. In the most bizzarely harmonious fashion, your steadfastness complements my foolhardy self. I feel like I can finally stop rebelling and start building the scaffold of the rest of my life. And I can’t imagine doing this without you.

Out of sheer mischief, I wanted to give you a fist-bump the moment the mayor pronounced us man and wife. I held out my fist to meet yours but my unconventional initiative ended up in you firmly grasping my fist and then proceeding to plant a peck on my lips. Your eyes twinkled while every one else laughed. Oh so typically us. When we walked out of the cityhall and I looked over the sunset decorated horizon, this song from The Sound of Music came to my mind:

Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must’ve done something good

All is good.

Merry Xmas?

cirnelle — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:03:22 +0000

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Source: A Christmas message from America’s rich

Conscience. Too easily forgotten these days.

Protected: Starting-up

cirnelle — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:27:02 +0000

Roots

cirnelle — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 11:22:24 +0000

Note: This piece was initially published on the CERN Student Club’s Creative Voices in 2010. The website is now under major revamp, thus I am re-publishing it here.

Running along the fringe of existence

I wander the two spaces of my lifelong presence

One that bred me and one that breeds

From where I came and to where the journey leads

Trailing along some disfigured memories

The humid ensemble of childhood alleys

Where does the winding end?

Where does the heart land?

Pining down fractions of noetic victory

Searching for meaning in a breathless frenzy

Moments of fear and pauses of longing

Tip toeing tears and unconfessed yearning

If I stay long enough

If I fight and cheer and wonder and laugh

The frenzy will rest, the circus will empty

And I will find my familiar alley

Motherland

cirnelle — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 11:25:16 +0000

You are messy. You have bad habits and bad manners. You bite the hands that feed you and make questionable decisions. You act like a buffoon sometimes and sulk if nobody is laughing. You are impulsive, immature and insensitive. Despite all your flaws, kinks and imperfections, I just can’t seem to get you out of my system. You are home to my loved ones and best friends and god damnit you better buck up or i’ll never forgive you. But i’ll probably still love you. Happy birthday, Malaysia. Luv ya.

Ruffling

cirnelle — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 14:06:05 +0000

Have you ever faced an invisible wall? That’s how I feel now. Confinement. Constraints. Restrictions. Invisible because they are all in my head. Trapped in a hypothetical space shoddily built upon some flimsy but stubborn and evasive tissues and transported by erratic neurons. All the toughest decisions in life, all my ponderings and agony. You think they reside in your cerebral cortex but actually they are all cunningly tucked away in some old forgotten attic, waiting to spring on you at 4 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. And you know what we all are? We are all slaves of our minds. Our uncanny (not to mention annoying) ability to find patterns where there are none, our tendency for confirmation biases, our natural need to rationalize irrational acts and thoughts when reprimand should have been appropriate, our inclination towards wishful thinking when we should be waking up and y’know, smell the shit.

Nothing is more elucidating than your own stupidity. Really, nothing.

Bulb

cirnelle — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:27:21 +0000

Depend on no one but yourself.

The Universal Equation

cirnelle — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 15:29:01 +0000

Besides a few constants in life, I have always thought that change is good. But I have never considered the possibility of fate and chances outwitting my meticulous calculations. And lately I have come to realise that, stripped down to its barest, life is really just about parameters. We are all going to die. What matters are the in-betweens, and the in-betweens are determined by choices (if you believe in free-will, which I vehemently do) or chance (if you think God plays dice). My education tells me that these parametric factors are a function of both nature and nurture. So then, if the expansion of my ideals is inevitably quantized by a biological need for security, and George Eliot says that our sense of security more often springs from habit than from conviction. Thus by inference, in order to fly, old habits need to die. And lord knows they die hard. But if they are actually just something as variable as a parameter, there is absolutely no plausible reason why they cannot change. Plus, change is the only constant in life.

Who needs a shrink when I can write?

Let’s Talk About Love

cirnelle — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:25:03 +0000

“You complete me.”

Jerry Maguire uttered those words and swept legions of female off their feet. Why is it that human beings seek their other halves? What is it that maintains and fortifies the bond between two person? What is this mystic power that dictates our longing to be ‘completed’? Why do we love? Why do we strive so hard to be loved (I’m not talking about Freudian sex)? Procreation science explains the motivation behind the act, but not the reason that determines the emotion. I have always believed that we love because we seek an extension of our sense of self. We seek kindred soul to affirm our existence. We seek the emotional fulfilment of, against all odds, finding another person with reciprocal yearning that codifies our desire, that begets our passion, that solidifies our affinity, that substantiates our ego. And who is crazy enough to stick with us through it all because the alternative is substitutory, improbable, and never going to be as good. Or so we fear. Aristophanes’ somewhat comedic hermaphroditic theory (in the case of heterosexual love) on the subject of love is a romanticized version of my belief. Our need for a sense of belonging is a product of physical and deterministic influence, while our quest for love is a gamble undertaken under poor instructions and guided by instinct. What a lousy predicament! But perhaps it’s the thrill of the search. Perhaps this notion that the very fulcrum upon which our perfection dances is mounted upon a disconcertingly delicate balance is what keeps us alive. We stand to fall, and then we are complete.