[Jinryu]: Man these firms

[Jinryu]: Give ma a job! That’s all I ask

[Jinryu]: I will even WORK

[Zanshin]: Don’t wait to get hired, just show up and start working.

[Zanshin]: ONce you know how their system works, you’ll be able to forget the employment contract!

[Jinryu]: Genius!

I didn’t care too much about the first rejection letter, which was from a London based firm (because, well, it’s in London, and that’s a bit far).  However, I just got a “thanks, but no thanks” from a Sydney firm that had a winter clerkship.  I rather wanted that one.  It’s the one that [CaptainK] works at, and which he and [DilligentB] helped me so hard to prepare for.

It is true that it’s easier for me to deal with these disappointments better than last year, but still– they suck.  With every rejection letter, the future becomes more uncertain. And I hate to be a drag about it, but it’s always there at the back of my mind– nothing ever makes it any better.

There’s another application due at the end of this month, and then the main bulk of all the other firms opens up applications in the middle of June.  Just need to keep my energy up.

I went to the Baduk Club this afternon and played a game against [Clockless2].  I call him Clockless2 because he has a style of play that takes so BLOODY LONG.  Can you imagine playing a single game of chess or baduk or… well… I don’t know what– for over two hours?

I’m used to playing online games, where the way that game clock works, a game very seldom goes over 30 or 40 minutes.   As a result, I’m weaker against players who take their time– an example of another player was the club’s VP last year, [Clockless1].

Anyway, Clockless 2 beat me at a game a few weeks ago and I was pretty surprised– just a few months ago when the semester started, I was able to beat him with a handicap.  For him to beat me in an even game?  Totally shocking– it was bad for my morale, because it just demonstrated how little time I’d been dedicating to baduk because of all these school and work commitments.

But well– I played him today again, and beat him by komi (less than 6.5 points of difference). 

Sweet, sweet revengeance!!

Since I finished my Business Associations essay Monday afternoon, about 10 minutes before the due time, things have gotten a bit easier academically.  Not easier in other ways though.  All the other things in life were put on hold while I was getting the major school and some clerkship deadlines taken care of.

I went to the baduk club and played a game against [Chairman] (a reference to Mao)– when I’m playing properly, he shouldn’t be able to beat me.  But I was rather upset– during that game, I commited about 5 unforced errors, whereas he made about 2.  By unforced errors, I mean mistakes that you make not because of strategy or reading ahead– I mean something obvious that you should have been normally been able to do.  It’d be getting a free shot in basketball and not being able to shoot– it’s a complete loss of an opportunity that, by all means, shouldn’t even be conceptualised as a bonus, but should rather be framed as a basic prerequisite type duty. 

Anyway, it just goes to show that aside from the fact that most people at the baduk club are getting stronger, I’m getting rusty and weaker.  When I first joined the club a couple of years ago, I wasn’t one of the stronger players– in fact, I was one of the weakest.  I climbed to the top because I would play about a game every two days online, if not in person.  Nowadays, I play aboug a game per week, which is barely enough to keep rust from accumulating.  In contrast, the other members are playing 3-4 games per week.

I guess I should be happy– that means that they’re getting something out of this club!  But few things are as annoying to me as feeling others pulling ahead.

Judo feels the same.  I haven’t been to judo in about 2 weeks, but went to the advanced class again on Tuesday.  I found out that 11 of the whitebelts from the beginners’ class have now been promoted to my ranking as well.  Man, I miss the undergrad days when I had so much free time.  Or college– when I skipped 75% of my classes to go training at Senshido gym with [Terminator].

Anyways.

It was good to go.

Midterms and, worse, finals, always get me into this certain mode.  It’s a lot like being under seige or something.  As soon as I handed in my last essay, it was as if the news had just come over the radio that war was over– the clouds parted and suddenly, I felt exhausted. 

And hungry.

Turns out that my weight dropped to 65kg because I’d basically been subsisting for the entire weekend on meal replacement shakes and rice crackers.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

At that point, the nazi shoots Sean Connery in the stomach.

“So, Dr. Jones (Harrison Ford)… if you want to save your father, find the Holy Grail.”

…or something like that.

We had VHS, and my mom had friends at work, sometimes who had two VHSes video machines, so that meant that they could copy tapes for us.  It didn’t happen often, but for the movies that we did have, I cherished them.

Before my college days when my outlook on life came to be defined by shonen tales and bildungsromans, my life started off idolising adventure:  Swinging across chasms of snakes and fire with a bullship; dueling with lightsabres at the ends of the galaxy; flying to Neverland on nothing but faith.  Compounded with my uncles comic book collection, there was probably always the understanding that nothing in real life would ever be quite so fantastic– but there was nothing stopping me from trying.  ANy  little fantasy in life that I could play out would be an objectively small, but subjectively priceless.

The Holy Grail in Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade is one of the most fanstastic items that I have ever come across in all my years of childhood (which I extend to underlap even my adult life).

It represents the ability to keep things as they are.  Not that kind of situation where someone asks you “would you like to be 18 again?” because, really, I wouldn’t.  

“Would you like to be 18 again, if you could take with you what you have now?”

Hmm… maybe.  Maybe if I had the mind of my 18 year old self, who, at the time, was only concerned about getting better at Jeet Kune Do.

But on the whole?  Would I give up all the experiences I’ve had until now, just to be able to start again at a certain point?

Probably not.

There are many points in my life that have been good, and many times that have been bad, but on the whole– I would no more go back in time than I would commit suicide.  

And what is suicide, really?  To me– it’s putting an end to all experiences.  It’s a decision that the pain of seeking out more outweighs what I could get out of the process.  And I don’t feel that.  I don’t feel that at all.

It’s one thing to go back in time out of curiosity, or because you don’t remember.  It’s another thing entirely to go back because you feel regret– that you could have or should have done something different.

I don’t like story arcs with time travel– it gets too messy with time travel and those kinds of things.  But what I do like, from The Last Crusade, is the idea that I can live forever– because who I am now is who I am. I can’t change that.  I don’t have to be proud of it, because it’s not necessarily an acheivement.  But I shouldn’t feel guilty about it– because if that were the case, I’d constantly be living to the dictates of something in the past.

That might be why I’m constantly bothered by the fact that I’m about a hundred thousand dollars in debt.   Debt is a lot like guilt, except that it doesn’t go away just because you decide to feel confident about yourself.  It is, however, a representation in some way or another of something you must do because of something in the past.

I’m slowly but surely coming to terms with the fact that debt should not be guilt.  You might think this should be pretty easy– but for someone who grew up under a pretty tight family, my conception of “owing” gives it quite a bit of weight.

Ironically, studying law has helped me sort that out a bit– borrowing money isn’t wrong, so long as it’s contractually agreed upon by both sides.  It’s a means to an end.

Getting over the guilt of being about a hundred thousand dollars in debt has not been easy, but it has been necessary for me to enjoy enough quality of life to keep myself sane.

I just finished an essay for one of my classes, Business Associations.  It was only 2000 words, but given that I had other midterms, and I was working pretty heavily on clerkship things, I really only managed to start working on   Sauturday, even though it was due Monday at 4pm.  No matter how you look at it, 2 days and something isn’t really a lot of time to get a research paper done.

But when it gets done, it’s done– I get this sense, not of relief, but more akin to triumph: here’s me, and here’s the world.  The world tried to kick me down, but I got through it.  I survived.

And while it might not be glamorous– slaving away in front of a laptop for two days straight without proper food or sleep never is– it is glorious, because that’s what life is: glorious, compared to the alternative.

My greatest fear is that some day, all my adventures will come to an end.  I wish there were such a thing as the Holy Grail– not because I want to be able to turn back time and fix whatever regrets I might have– but because I want to be able to keep going forward.

I often forget my age.  Someone at judo  a couple of weeks ago thought I was kidding when I said I was 30 years old– he thought I was early twenties.  Awwww, shucks.  (“Just because I can throw you around doesn’t mean I’m young!”)   But maybe that’s because I’m at a stage in my life where, despite all the shit that goes on, I keep finding reasons to justify going another day. 

There might be a difference here– when I was in my twenties, I had no purpose in life. I was trying to sort out who I wanted to be, but I had no idea of the mechanisms or the pathways to figure that out.  So I was just there idling, and being egocentric, and jumping on any interesting opportunities that fell into my lap.

At my current state, I feel like I have a very good idea of who I want to be, and a better idea of how to get there.  As a result, I’m pretty busy– but those few things that I make time for, I treat them as lifelines that keep me grounded as a person.

From an outside view, there’s probably no difference– because that just means that when I do things, I do them with energy and conviction.  If I am somewhere, it’s because I want to be there.

Largely, I think this is probably one of those things that I’ve become better at– managing how much trouble I get myself into. I mean, a lot of the times, we have the ability to make choices in our lives about what we want to get ourselves into.  Sometimes, we get into things that we don’t enjoy, and that’s okay for a bit.  But we must never forget that at the end of the day, time is limited and we should only do things that we can really attribute worthwhileness to. 

Even lacking the Grail, we still must go forward.

Needing to wear seatbelts makes people perceive driving as dangerous, which deters people from driving.

People don’t like seatbelts, and this deters people from driving.

Seatbelts, if used incorrectly, cause more harm than they prevent.

Get rid of seatbelts: and more people will buy cars!  Stimulate the economy!  At the same time, there will be so much traffic that you would never reach sufficient speeds to have a dangerous car accident anyway.  And the bikes will be safer!

… or something like that, is an assertion I’ve heard to explain the difference between mutual exclusivity and correlation.

From http://helmetfreedom.org/888/2-4-million-australians-put-off-their-bikes-by-helmet-laws/ , I’m copy pasting their main page here.  My thoughts on the matter will follow in the next post.  Although you can probably guess by the fact that I’m tagging this post in my “stupid people” metacategory which side of the fence I’m on with this.

I bought this laptop back in 2007 or so, while I was in South Korea.  In it’s day, it was a real workhorse– nowadays, running linux, it still manages to get the job done, but sometimes it shows it’s age a bit.  The internal wireless stopped working one day, after acting a bit suspicious for several months.  No efforts to reinstall drivers or find a software side problem revealed anything.  So right now, I’m using a good, old fashioned 40 foot ethernet cable, even though I’m typing this literally one meter away from the router.

I like using ethernet cables though.  To have something physically joining my computer to the internet feels solid and powerful.  I know that wireless technology is pretty awesome nowadays– in fact, the latency and packet loss is so low on most connections that over the past few years, I’ve been able to play online using the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 without significant “lag frag” issues.  But I’m getting old fashioned perhaps.

I realise that as time passes, I’m becoming more like the kind of old people that I used to make fun of when I was younger.  I’m reminded of the passages from Baz Lurmhan’s “Sunscreen Song” where he talks about nostalgia, and how we remember things to be better than they are now.

I am happy that I can use this 2007 machine, 6 years after he was born, and it still kicks like a mule.  I bought a netbook in 2012 for a fraction of the cost, but despite some of the glam features on it that this full sized laptop doesn’t do, it just doesn’t match up when I want to do something simple: like blog.

The differences are minute.  Everyone’s got netbooks now, including me– [CM] and I both have smartphones, we even have a Kindle and an iPad.  But when it comes to some old fashioned activities, like writing for the sake of it? My old 2007 machine beats all the so called convenience and mobility of everything else.

The first reason is because the screen is just so huge and comfortable.  I don’t get that claustrophobic feeling that I do when I am using my netbook, and I don’t have to keep flipping virtual keyboards on and off on the mobile devices.  At the same time, i don’t feel wasteful with a too huge external monitor.  Here on my 2007 rig, I just feel like things are just right.

CM asks me sometimes if maybe it’s time that I get a real desktop, because my papers are only going to get longer, as will the nights.  But writing on this machine, in a way that I’m unashamed to admit, is like writing with a friend.

When CM first moved to Australia and I was in still in Canada, unsure if I’d be accepted for law school, this machine was the one that I patched and scripted to get Skype to work in Linux properly (you might not understand the trouble, now that Skype technology is so pervasive– but in fact, it’s very difficult to get skype to work properly on a Linux machine sometimes).  This computer is what bridged the distance between CM and I while we did a 22-hour time difference long distance relationship for about half a year.  We got onto many fights, I shed many tears over this keyboard.  We also shared a lot of happy moments.  I wrote that very first personals ad by which I met [CM] on these keys.

I wrote applications and papers on this machine, and I will continue to do so this year as my papers and application season starts up again.

I suppose the thing is, like many other things, I get attached to the objects that I interact with.  Not in a collector hoarder sort of way where I get more and more of things– like friends, the closer I become with something depends on how useful it is to me.  Just recently actually, I was using this laptop to do video editing for a Litigation assignment.  Despite being past it’s prime, running linux on it was worked wonders for keeping my machine running lean and fast– so even for some moderate video editing, it didn’t fare too badly at all.

The WiFi did die about a month ago– permanently.  I’ll be sad when I one day have to retire this rig.

I think that caring about a thing is important.  It’s what’s missing in a throw-away society where we can get everything instantly.  In my opinion, no, you can’t solve all problems by just throwing money at an issue.  We’re lead to believe that getting something newer or faster or smaller is always better– that’s not true.  That just gives you a different package to deal with the same problems, problems that have head on solutions if only we’re willing to take the time to invest in our ability to deal with a problem, instead of our equipment.  Generalisations don’t hold true everywhere, that’s for sure– but from a sustainability standpoint, would it really hurt us so much if we used something a bit longer before throwing it out?

THe truth is, I have so many things to write about– lots of things have been going on!  The problem is that lately, I’m always tired.