Live life, here and now

I was flipping through an Elle magazine last night and came upon this article about why we are always unhappy despite living safer, longer, and more comfortable lives than our predecessors. The article is typical of women's magazines, but I gave it a percusory read and noticed what an interviewee said. He's a psychologist or counsellor, I think, one of those annoyingly well-adjusted people who have everything in perspective, anyway.

He said that to live life to the fullest is to live in the present. That's right, to live here and now. That is something I've got to learn. I'm always thinking about the future, about how everything would be better in the future. I would be a better person, I would learn to correct my faults, given enough time. What propels me forward is the future. It's like tunnel vision-- you're so focused on the future that you defer living. I always forget that to change myself or to start a journey, I should begin now, this day, not this weekend, not the near future.

Have you ever had an experience like this: I bought a pair of shoes that was so comfortable but I kept them in the shoebox and did not take wear them, because I thought: this is a good pair of shoes and I want to save it for the future, perhaps when I go travelling. A year later, I still have not worn the shoes. I took them out of the shoe box and they were peeling. The sole came out of one of them. I couldn't wear them anymore.

Is it that the saving-the-best-for-last mentality is not always the right one? That we should enjoy the fruits of our labour right now, instead of "work, then play", deferring the good things to the future?

Fishy business

Just saw on TV a programme featuring Japan. In one of the segments, they feature tourists catching fish for their own lunch at Tokyo Bay. The fish are trapped by a huge cage-like net and during low tide, they would go into the cage and net the fish. It was cool! They caught sea bream and tiger prawns and squid.

Then the fishermen would prepare the lunch and all of them gather together in the rickety small fishboats and had lunch en mass at some makeshift tables and benches. It was so simple and un-luxurious and so, un-Japanese.

In another segment, the host asked to see the wrinkled hands of a chef at a small seaside inn and he asked him how long he has been a fisherman and chef. The chef replied: 60 years, since he came back from the war when he was 20--they're used to hard work.

The host said: now those hands make such exquisite food.

I guess that scene was supposed to be respectful of the aged chef, but for a non-Japanese like me, that was quite disturbing and uncomfortable. The logical question that should come to the viewer's mind would be: did he ever kill anyone, or perform some atrocities with those pair of hands during the world war? After that, would you still be able to stomach the sashimi that he made, in spite of the fact that they look delicious even to someone like me, who's repulsed by raw food?

What does it say about you?

Every human is an individual, a universe unto itself: ever-changing and expanding. Why do I always forget that? Why do I hold them in contempt, simply because they're taciturn and thus have less to say about themselves? Why, especially when I'm like that myself, when I know that it is this type of people who yearn more than anything to connect?

Even at this age I still have a lot to learn.

Journalism-- a silly craft

I like(d) to write and I was so excited when I got into a communications school and majored in journalism. I was going to be a journalist--a respectable, professional, and more importantly, an intellectually stimulating career.

Now, a few years on, I look back and I wonder and I know I don't feel the same about it anymore. During my second year, we were asked to read readings that debate whether journalist can be considered a "professional". The consensus seems to be that it wasn't. Lawyers, architects, engineers are; journalists aren't. You do not need specialist knowledge; you don't really even need an university degree.

That's not the main point. The whole debate seems lame and self-indulgent. That I won't be considered a professional didn't bother me much--after all, journalists are well respected in my country, and unusually, they are well paid too. (I know, because I've processed the tax returns of a mid-level newsperson once, when I was temping for the tax department) They are seen as brainy people. I want to be seen as being an intellectual.

Journalist wannabes are the wannabes of wannabes, if you ask me, right down there with inspiring actors/singers--they are all just as egotistical.

They all think they have depth; they can write; their prose affect and mobilise people; they can change the world with their scribblings.

After 4 years of journalism school and of scrutinising the local papers, I don't know what to think. I think that journalists do not write the truth; they sensationalise the truth. Editors and lecturers are always exhorting about news values: why would readers want to read or know about this? What would catch their attention? Why is this story worth publishing? What new angles can be purported?

So we, as journalism students, with the commendable aims of trying to outdo each other and to get as good a grade as possible, wrung every drop of juicy bits we could out of the news. We're not lying, but.

I've even committed the ultimate journalism sin of making up a quote because I was not able to get what I wanted from the interview subjects.

In a small, safe country like ours, with so many people chasing after so little news, it's hard. I get sceptical, I can detect when a journalist is trying to make something out of nothing--it's just a waste of the reader's time and the newsprint. It's not respectable anymore, is it? It's not even intellectually stimulating, is it? It's just silly. And some of them, they are not even truthful about what they're trying to say (I'm talking about politics here). They sway readers not with objective facts but with innuendos, connotations, embedding them in the text with carefully chosen words that are not neutral. That's sneaky.

Time travelling?

You know what unnerves me alot during travelling? Especially to places that are in a different time zone from the place I live? It's the feeling that I've lost time.

I've been to Australia and Japan which are in time zones that are ahead of my country's. When I'm there, I keep thinking to myself: It's already 8 pm over here and the sky is dark. Yet my friends are over there, basking in the soft sunlight of 6 pm. What are they doing? How are they spending their "extra" time? Are they going to have their dinner soon? Would I be missing out on something because of the "lost" time?

Weird things to be thinking about, but that's how I am when I'm away in another country -- tightly wound up and worried.