sometimes your subconscious tries to tell you things your brain refuses to accept.

and aptly so.

after last night’s dream (and what a tear jerking affair it was), i do wonder, if i’ve been oblivious all this while. the past several jolts seemed to do me no good, perhaps now, and perhaps only after this, i will realize how useless waiting really is.

better late than never, i always say.

Where would the world be without questions? Well, for one, that sentence wouldn’t exist. There’s just something delightful about that sickle-shaped curve with a dot underneath; it’s one of my favourite, if not my favourite, punctuation marks. Maybe that was why I decided to take up Spainsh instead of French during high school – they have the most eloquent idea of putting an upside-down question mark right before the question is asked, to inform the reader that Yes, A Question Is Coming Up Next.

Yet questions can be one of the most infuriating things in the world. Remember playing the “why?” game with your mother, or having it directed at you? Not only that, everyone seems so hell-bent all the time on finding the answers to the most pressing questions: “What shall I eat today?” “What shall I do?” “What job should I get?” “When should I retire?” “When is my life finally going to start picking up itself again?”…for every answer, there are another million questions that are raised. So we so often find ourselves lost among all these uncertainties. Sometimes, I think we should embrace these uncertainties just for what they are, because who says that a question must be answered? Epiphanies only come to the mind that thinks and ponders. And I do love a good epiphany. Stay curious! Keep exploring! Trying to figure out how to open the lock is infinitely more interesting than finally getting to open the treasure chest!

One of the main reasons why people are hesitant to study philosophy is because of the idea that it treats the problematical that these people may deem as not practical at all.  There is a seeming vagueness and continuous controversy brewing always in philosophy and because of this nature, sme people are easily disappointed and ends up in fields of study that are more practical and profitable – where these people are most of the time in no position to dispute, question, or contrast primary information about things.

But to those people who truly understands the value of philosophy, the excitement and anticipation to seek fuller explanations to vague key concepts is just the start of pursuit of philosophy.  Philosophy demands so much from people who seek for it – those who study it should free their minds from the prejudices and convictions imposed by society.  But in return, those who truly seek philosophy rewards themselves with a sense of woner, a wider perspective on things, and a chance for philosophical contemplation (the latter gives satisfaction as a result of enlargement of the Self).  Philosophy, according to Bertrand Russell, has only values for people who study it and to those who need it.  It is not studied for the sake of any definite answer, as philosophy in nature is grounded in its uncertainties.  Instead, it enriches intellectual imaginations, gives Man a sense of free intellect will and puts a higher premium on the ability of the mind to be one with the universe.

Once we came across with certainties and definite answers that are usually found in fields of science, we find that the knowledge that we derived from them is momentarily satisfying.  It is the next dispute, the uncertainty, the argument, and the ‘unsure’ that really interest us.  These uncertainties we fid in philosophy, designed in the mastery of a particular subject and the acquisition of intellectual virtues as we study it along the way.  There are no practical considerations, only a keen sense of interest for knowledge and anticipation of the pleasure of such possibilities that will enlarge our thoughts, such that we can view the world impartially.

“tell me, do you love him?”

“i love him enough.”

and so, is that how it will be from now on? a second-rate type of love? if so, let me know, so that i can ’settle’.

maybe my ticket for first-rate love has already expired.

Yesterday, Churchill Downs announced a deal to buy online handicapping and gambling site Youbet.com for $126.8 million.  For those of you not familiar with horse racing, Churchill Downs is a widely recognized name in the thoroughbred horse racing industry, with the Kentucky Derby as its crown jewel. 

I’ve been fascinated with the thoroughbred racing industryever since I did some leadership development work with a thoroughbred racing farm several years ago.  Horseracing is facing a challenging set of strategic headwinds.  Its wealthy lifestyle customer is aging.  Its core money-making market segment (the serious gambler) is finding numerous other ways to spend money, from the more readily accessable casinos popping up in many states to the growth in online gambling.

Churchill Downs purchase is a good example of strategy based on monitoring of changes in the external environment.  The Youbet.com purchase addresses a trend (the increasing percentage of horse-racing bets placed online) and also indicates Churchill Downs executives are monitoring a key uncertainty (the legalization of online betting in the U.S.).  By monitoring uncertainties, you can more successfully play trends.  The trends indicate actions that you will eventually need to take but it is the uncertainties that give you signals for timing your strategic actions.  In this case, there have been recent signals indicating legalized online betting may be getting closer.

When we do strategic planning with our clients we always discuss how they can monitor the uncertainties moving forward.  In response to our client  needs in this area we worked with a number of our key clients to develop Strategic Radar, an intelligent, real-time monitoring tool.

was talking to R the other day when she brought up the term ’social incest’, which struck me with such force; akin to a block of wood coming towards me at full speed. perhaps it was the relevance, or maybe even the fact that the pairing of these two words had never occurred to me, that got me thinking long after that conversation was over.

social incest.

let that phrase roll around in your head if you please. the meaning itself is self-explanatory. yet, it explains my current situation to a tee.

so the premise is that being the busy human folk that we are, we lack the foresight and time to mingle out of our current social group. which, in that sense, results in us having relationships within this same group.

so like that how? (don’t look at me, i’m a victim too)

which leads me to my next epiphany about self-sabotage. blah blah blah.

isn’t it strange how it’s basically a vicious cycle of destructive relationships and never-ending pain?

sigh.

I’ve come across a very very interesting play in New York last January, as with all thought provoking literature I came across in life, it changed my life.  And here’s the preface of the play that I think everyone should read.  Doubt was on the screen last February in Hong Kong.

By John Patrick Shanley

What’s under a play? What holds it up? You might as well ask what’s under me? On what am I built? There’s something silent under every person and under every play. There is something unsaid under any given society as well.

There’s a symptom apparent in America right now.  It’s evident in political talk shows, in entertainment coverage, in artistic criticism of every kind, in religious discussion.  We are living in a courtroom culture.  We were living in a celebrity culture, but that’s dead.  Now we’re only interested in celebrities if they’re in court.  We are living in a culture of extreme advocacy, of confrontation, of judgment, and of verdict.  Discussion has given way to debate.  Communication has become a contest of wills.  Public talking has become obnoxious and insincere.  Why?  Maybe it’s because deep down under the chatter we have come to a place where we know that we don’t know… anything.  But nobody’s willing to say that.

Let me ask you.  Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort? Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting? Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed?  Have you ever told a girl you loved her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction?  I have.  That’s an interesting moment.  For a playwright, it’s the beginning of an idea.  I saw a piece of real estate on which I might build a play, a play that sat on something silent in my life and in my time.  I started with a title: Doubt.

What is Doubt? Each of us is like a planet.  There’s the crust, which seems eternal.  We are confident about who we are.  If you ask, we can readily describe our current state.  I know my answers to so many questions, as do you.  What was your father like? Do you believe in God? Who’s your best friend? What do you want? Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so.  Because under that face of easy response, there is another You.  And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way.

It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things.  When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he’s on the verge of growth.  The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seems at first like a mistake, like you’ve gone the wrong way and you’re lost.  But this is just emotion longing for the familiar.  Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind.  Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present.

The play.  I’ve set my story in 1964, when not just me, but the whole world seemed to be going through some kind of vast puberty.  The old ways were still dominant in behavior, dress, morality, world view, but what had been organic expression had become a dead mask.  I was in a Catholic church school in the Bronx, run by the Sisters of Charity.  These women dressed in black, believed in Hell, obeyed their male counterparts, and educated us.  The faith, which held us together, went beyond the precincts of religion.  It was a shared dream we agreed to call Reality.  We didn’t know it, but we had a deal, a social contract.  We would all believe the same thing.  We would all believe.

Looking back, it seems to me, in those schools at that time, we were an ageless unity.  We were all adults and we were all children.  We had, like many animals, flocked together for warmth and safety.  As a result, we were terribly vulnerable to anyone who chose to hunt us.  When trust is the order of the day, predators are free to plunder.  And plunder they did.  As the ever widening Church scandals reveal, the hunters had a field day.  And the shepherds, so invested in the surface, sacrificed actual good for perceived virtue.

I have never forgotten the lessons of that era, nor learned them well enough.  I still long for a shared certainty, an assumption of safety, the reassurance of believing that others know better than me what’s for the best.  But I have been led by the bitter necessities of an interesting life to value that age-old practice of the wise: Doubt.

There is an uneasy time when belief has begun to slip, but hypocrisy has yet to take hold, when the consciousness is disturbed but not yet altered.  It is the most dangerous, important, and ongoing experience of life.  The beginning of change is the moment of Doubt. It is that crucial moment when I renew my humanity or become a lie.

Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite – it is a passionate exercise.  You may come out of my play uncertain.  You may want to be sure.  Look down on that feeling. We’ve got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty.  There is no last word.  That’s the silence under the chatter of our time.

John Patrick Shanley

Brooklyn, New York

March 2005

You know, when you think about tomorrow, you realise just how many variables there are to take into consideration.

Say take for instance, what course I want to do in university. Then you think about the long term prospects. And then you consider the interest value, and the potential to be able to be successful at it.

I really do think that is what makes life so interesting. The unpredictability of it all, the many unknowns. It makes everything in life a surprise, and it makes everything somewhat mysterious. But at the same time, I think it is the same thing which makes us fearful.

I think it is perfectly human to want to control everything in life.  In a sense, we want to determine our own routines, out future, our fate. But the problem is that, often times, we find that the more we want to control it, the more we seem to be unable to do so. I suppose, that’s the reason why after sometime, we come to a conclusion that the best thing to do is to live each second as if it were our last. The rationale? The desire to control tthe next moment makes us worry and weighs us down, and takes the joy out of our moment. LEss that worry, life is actually more simple, more pleasant. The simplicity arises from that we realise that to live each second as our last, we no longer are as concerned about the many variables that affect tomorrow.

Of course, having said that, I’m not encouraging us all to be myopic and use that as pretext to not take responsibility for our actions. True, we shouldn’t let our decisions be ruled by repercussions, for there are, as already mentioned, so much room for error owing to the large number of uncertainties. Clearly, to do so would be to make things extremely unpleasant for oneself. But to allow our actions to decide tomorrow would, on the other hand be plainly irresponsible.

At the end of the day, I think there’s a fine line between the two mentioned scenerios. ON one hand, we overly worry about the future and the uncertainties. ON the other hand, we would be creating more uncertainties. The compromise is, of course, sensible worry. Not to worry about everything, but also not to ignore everything. At the end of the day, we have to be prepared to take accountability for our actions.

One must be wondering what is running through my mind, leading me to say all that. Well, the biggest question of my life. I realised that as one progresses through the education system, one becomes increasingly confronted by the question of “what’s next”. Choices narrow, and the consequences of each choice actually could have an implication on the next few decades of ones’ life. After all, the courses we pursue at the higher level becomes increasingly specialised and hence limits our possible career routes.

For a person like me who tends to have a wide range of interest, the axiom “Follow your heart” seems to be irrelevant. Cause it’d mean I’d probably end up doing a lot more than I could be allowed to do, and hence over working myself. One step further would be to follow my head, which means I rationalise out my choices. BUT as already mentioned, there’re SOOOOOOO much to consider, that at the end of the day, I’m still unsure. And thus, I try to reduce the number of uncertainties by trying to make somethings constant, only to realise that it’d not be a really informed choice. In the end, it all becomes a gamble, that we’d make the right choices based on the right assumptions and the right considerations.

Life. Ain’t it interesting? Everything’s a gamble.

I love walking in the rain.

Have you ever been at a crossroad, stopped and think about which direction you should best take? You have no clue where you want to head nor do you have a single clue about actually wanting to risk going to either route.  You do know that one route has a higher risk of you driving down to your deathbed of depression – cum digging your grave. And the other path, well, it would be a constant battle of wondering what it would be IF you had taken the riskier path.

Am sure you have. Be it a situation of being in a romantic relationship, be it a career choice and be it your education path.

Personally,  I myself had a track record of taking blind steps. And, would usually end up blinking my way through the riskier route. And after 26 years of breathing in planet earth, I know better than to use up my chances as carelessly as I once did.  I learnt that God does not hold your hand all the way – He teaches His people by dropping them off from a cliff at times.

I am stumped by all means. Stuck and wondering about the possibilities of the road less travelled.

Sembahyang istikharah kata orang. God will then give you light.

Tak buat-buat lagi.

Here I am, blessed by Allah SWT with a wonderful job, supervised by a wonderful boss and having a wonderful set of colleague but yet … my heart feels like a freaking barren land. I can barely identify with my enthusiasm when I first started my job couple of years back.

Sigh.

Sometimes, I wish making decisions can be as simple as A   B  and   C. But maybe, for now, I’ll stay at this crossroad.

Until the light shines through.

there should be a rule, a law perhaps, that disallows bad things from happening more than once to nice people. a kind of karma law that protects the innocent.

—

after Z and the respective humiliation. it has been a long time. and i thought that time would have made me wiser but unfortunately, my wisdom seems to be decreasing disproportionately to my age. woe.

A was everything i thought i wanted. but i, after living overseas for that short bit, realized that i wasn’t even sure what i wanted anymore. it was unfair and positively unjust, i know, and i apologize for all the pain, all the effort.

K was my life support through it all. but yet, there is that sense of betrayal, bewilderment rather, when i found out that things were way more complicated than that.

E is like me in so many aspects, yet not. there is that sense of familiarity that is difficult to get with anyone. i wonder if it is because it is meant to be something more or if it is the start toward the end.

because i have lost faith. in myself, in the institution, in fairy-tales, in you. i can no longer ascertain where make-believe ends and reality begins. i seem to be waiting for something, only i don’t know what it is.

bugger.

Sometime next week, if all goes as planned, I’ll file my first dispatch from Texas. I am leaving this Friday with my daughter to spend some time sorting out my life and thinking about my time with my beloved.

I’ll be in the extreme Southeast corner of Texas where nothing moves except alligators and oil tankers sliding imperceptibly along an Inland Waterway canal to unload their cargo of Middle Eastern oil at Texas refineries in and around Port Arthur.

I’ve been to PA and Nederland (pronounced Neederland) several times and for someone who has lived in exciting places like Petaluma CA, Southeast Texas may prove a challenge. I’ll probably spend a lot of time in WalMart and IHop, counting the cans of black-eyed peas per square foot and gorging on pancakes and maple syrup.

Then, if life really slows down, I may sit on the back porch and watch the squirrels scamper through pecan trees (that’s pronounced pee can, as in two words).

This may or may not sound humorous, but it’s my best effort at the moment to take my mind away from reality. Once I achieve some sort of emotional balance, then I’ll take on the task of deciding where I want to be on a more permanent basis.

Until that time rolls around, my posts may be erratic and speak of an instability that would make the the Twilight Zone appear as sane as the Bush White House.

“you have lost your cheer”, E said, in a tone of disgust, similar to “i have lost all hope in you”.

have i honestly? bah humbug.

i am in a quanandrum.

a good friend told me: you can tell when you’re over someone. it’s when you’re able to incorporate him back into your life. have his number, his facebook feeds, and speak to him normally, and that means an actual adult conversation that does not consist of awkward silences and feet shuffling, thumb twiddling, but vocabulary stringed together to form meaningful sentences. if you can’t do that. you haven’t gotten over him.

oh. *shuffles feet and twiddles thumbs*

and with all this talk about me being over and done with “he who shall not be named”, it only took a phone call, a text message, and external circumstances to make it all messy again. i’m a sham.

tell me, did you fall for a shooting star
one without a permanent scar
and did you miss me while you were looking at yourself out there

i have nothing to more to say except; happiness comes first, charmaine. partners, abundance, and cool shoes come later. but i can’t help loving you. i’m hopeless.

na na na na na na na.

Where is life heading
Where am I going
am I agreeing to all what the life is offering to me
or am I really fighting hard to get what I want.

confusions & uncertainties refuse to leave me
these are not what I had asked for.
where did my planning go wrong
this is not what i had demanded for…!!

Uncertainty at every step…i am tired of…..
somebody show me where i am heading
what future holds for me, i would like to know
& to add to all of this excitement
you walk into my life, again unplanned…
again…i don’t know where this is heading
what i am doing

life has strange ways of showing me
wat i had not asked for
and wat i received….!!

The kinds of uncertainties and risks I regularly encounter in producing (and giving) concerts are not like what I wrote about when I was swimming in such jargon of energy trading and risk management. It’s no longer theoretical or mathematical. And I don’t suppose there are fancy models to hedge such risks or reduce associated uncertainties, other than the ideas of redundancy from my engineering textbooks. By redundancy, I mean having a back-up, a duplicate, something on stand-by, a readily available replacement or substitute course of action.

Producing a concert involves managing the uncertainties and risks associated with the unexpected. When I was preparing for my final exam composition concert last year, I considered every single one of the 40 musicians a potential source of risk. A musician may not show up for rehearsal or be late or leave early. No one was getting paid, and as such no one had an obligation to deliver. What assured me that they would actually show up on the day of the concert?

The implicit contract to participate and deliver a performance rested on their integrity as fellow musicians. I could have done away with this delivery and performance risk by binding them with legal contracts and financial compensation. But I was a fellow student on a shoestring budget, and the status quo was to help each other. I did actually face the above risks, and the stories deserve another blog or two.

What prompted me to write this blog entry is the dramatic beginning of tonight’s concert.

The concert of 5th of May 2009 was planned months in advance and noted on our website concert agenda. Yet for one reason or another, it could not be confirmed until the day before. This meant that it was nearly impossible to schedule other activities. The uncertainty turned into optionality when, on the day before the concert, we were given the option of having an additional concert on 6th May. Our host asked if we wanted to give one concert (and if so which) or both.

Given that these were free and unpaid concerts, we had no obligation to give them at all. In other words, we could choose (at this late stage) to 1) not give any more concerts than the two already given on this tour in Spain and spend the remaining few days under the sun; 2) give one more concert — on Tuesday 5th May or Wednesday 6th May evening; or 3) give both concerts. There was no penalty associated with these choices.

In risk management, optionality is not usually free. An option is defined in financial textbooks as the right but not the obligation. Optionality, in my language, translates to a kind of flexibility. A wide network of contacts gives you more access to knowledge and connections than a limited one. House keys are a kind of physical optionality for they unlock and open doors but you don’t have to use them. A multi-lingual person has more optionality than a mono-lingual one. A ticket to the theatre gives you the right to attend the show, but you can always choose to sell or give it away or forfeit the use and do something else.

As musicians eager to play and maximise performance opportunities, we decided to take the third option — to give both concerts . This left us with very little slack and only a few hours for a day trip to Santiago de Compostela. Whatever free time would be spent on rehearsing for these concerts.

One hour before the “cinco de mayo” concert in central La Coruña …”break a leg.”