who is it that can tell me who i am?

It seems odd to say this, but it's true: reading through my blog entries over the years has made me remember who i used to be, which is another way of saying that it's made me remember who i am. i'd kinda forgotten.
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sublime

To think that i used to think Bach was boring ...
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the calibrated life

Some years ago -- i honestly cannot remember exactly when -- G, a friend / former classmate from junior college, confessed to me that he had carefully calibrated his grades when we were back in school. It was a deliberate effort, he said, to make sure he didn't stand out too much or alienate the rest of us with results that were too far above the norm. So he started his JC career with the mediocre grades the rest of us were getting (only in our case, the mediocrity was far from intentional...), and allowed his grades to improve gradually over the two years. He ended up doing well enough in his A levels to go to Stanford on a government scholarship.
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G and his carefully calibrated grades came to mind a few days ago, during brunch (kway chap and tau suan, with oolong-and-osmanthus tea on the side -- i cannot bear eating 'western food' these days...) with another old friend / classmate from the JC days. i can't remember what exactly triggered the memory -- but that's less important, i think, than the conversations and thinking it led to over the next few days.
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So i've been thinking about the calibrated life. Kinda like the macro version of what G did with his grades back in school. It takes a special kind of person to be able to do that, i think -- one has to be of a certain calibre. Back in school, i think most of us mere mortals were just trying to get whatever grade we could get. To be able to look at the entire situational context, decide what one wants out of it, and have the excess ability (because it's only when the ability is in excess that one has the freedom to use it in whatever way one wishes) to be so "meta" about things -- i'd never realised back then how scary G was. Which was probably part of his point -- to keep his scariness hidden from view.
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It's kindof frightening -- the thought that some people might have the capacity to be so calculated about their lives. And if you're making calculated decisions about everything, doesn't that reduce the rest of the world outside yourself to objects that you manipulate in order to get what you want from life, to get the life you want. i mean, of course, to some degree we all do this -- this is how human beings interact with the world. But i guess it's the degree that matters.
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And there's something to be said about how life does, i think, in most cases, eventually elude even our best attempts at calibration, our best attempts at control. That is what life in God is about, isn't it -- giving up our right to control things (which is only ever an illusory right after all), and handing the reins over to the One who created and knows all things. Letting go.
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Still. It's not a bad thing, to know what you want and need in life, and to calibrate things so that you get as much of it as you're able to. The letting go will happen when it happens.
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pizza

So i had takeaway pizza for dinner today -- good pizza, mind you, from a good and proper Italian restaurant, not from a fast-food pizza joint. And i swear -- it reminded me of America (not in a good way!), and made me dread going back even more.
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The funny thing is, i don't even eat pizza that often when i'm in the US. Actually, i don't eat pizza very often, period. But i guess there's something so quintessentially American about having takeout pizza for dinner. And admittedly i do it more often there than i do here. (Who needs pizza when there's such a wealth of good cheap hawker food so easily available and accessible?)
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Anyway -- all this to say i am so not looking forward to going back. Sigh. i need to change my attitude. This is getting me nowhere.
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