Merdeka

When Malaysia turned 52, one of my sisters, two old friends, three new acquaintences and I were at a mamak stall drinking Milo ais, eating French fries and watching the Everton-Wigan game on a screen propped precariously by the drain. (Neocolonialism hurhur.) They told us that "orang mau tengok bola," so I didn't get my countdown. After the game we walked back to the hotel, and sister and I joined another bunch of fellow convention-goers; we prayed for the country then had several rounds of Uno and Snap.

I don't know where this country is going, but it's good to know that someone does.

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I just got back from a camp in KL. Why I'm blogging instead of replying emails or attending to Facebook or reading or going to bed is beyond me. Or not -- narcissism is, sadly, within both the scope of my conduct and the bounds of plausibility. But during my bus ride home I thought of the admissions essay I'd written for college, and about how it's been just about two years since I first got to Williamstown. So here be essay-which-I-hoped-might-impress-scary-college-people-in-December-'06. o_O

Highways

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.

I have spent an unwonted amount of time on Malaysia’s North-South Highway. I remember sitting in the back seat of our old station wagon with my three siblings, inventing stories, reciting Bible verses or Cantonese poetry (neither of which we really understood), playing my father’s game of making sums out of number plates, admiring sleek sports cars, or dozing on each other’s shoulders. Then there were the moments when I would silently revel in the landscape around us, whether it was tree-blanketed hills, urban lights, or a star-dusted sky.

We made frequent trips up and down the country to visit our relatives and run errands. There were also the poignant, cramped drives every time we moved to a new parish. The car would be filled to capacity with last-minute packing and perhaps our sedated pet dogs; we would share a contemplative fatigue. One vivid recollection is being fetched from the airport after two years of living in Oak Park, Illinois; the highway seemed more familiar than the van I was in and my suddenly-grown cousins.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,

For the last four years most of my highway sojourns have been solitary, taking a bus home from Singapore for the holidays. After hauling my luggage through customs it was always a relief to sink into a padded seat, trying to shake off the surreal ‘I was in Phys Ed two hours ago, and now I’m in a different world’ feeling I always got.

Usually I would read, either a book that I had neglected throughout a busy semester, or perhaps a Literature text or Chemistry notes. Surprisingly often the loneliness that accompanies independence would be salved by a chance meeting with a friend on the bus. Two things didn’t change, however: the view the highway afforded of the land I love, and the bliss of reaching my destination after hours of travel.

Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.

The six of us still take car journeys together, with the adult-sized children squeezed in the back seat uncomfortably. As this requires the convergence of six schedules and an air ticket for my sister, these trips are far less frequent. And while the general atmosphere in the car remains the same--apart from the reduced airspace--our conversations now cover my grandparents’ health, malapropisms overheard in Singapore and Wisconsin, the physics of gas stations as well as the merits of studying philosophy and break dancing.

Another difference is that my two elder siblings now take their turns at the wheel. I’ll be learning how to drive soon; the prospect of mobility is exciting.

And whither then? I cannot say.
--from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring

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Pa's ordering a car next week -- I think it'll be our first actually new car. First we had an old station wagon, then in Oak Park we first borrowed a car and later bought a small one with bad heating for USD800 from a family leaving the U.S., and when we got back to Malaysia we first borrowed a car and later bought it from the family friends who'd lent it to us. Is interesting, this trajectory.

I still can't drive. :(

Tick tick ticking away

Today the think tank that I'm interning at hosted an all-day event at a hotel. The only other event on our floor was a "recruitment drive" (read: battery of exams -- we're talking Singapore) for the school area I did my 'O' Levels. I moseyed over to the school event a bunch of times (during breaks lar) but didn't get to talk to the teacher whom I know but who probably doesn't remember me. I did get to chat with a handful of kids and parents, though, and almost freaked out mid-sentence when mental calculations told me that I'd taken said exams seven years ago.

And I don't really know what to add to this, except that I'm sitting at home with family and dog and cat and A Portrait of the Artist and contentment.

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Yes lah, I'd counted correctly. I'm not that old, thank God. Hurhur.

Stuff I like

1. My brother

It was our first complete family outing in years. The six of us got to the mall 20 minutes before the movie started, so we sent my brother, who is usually very streetwise, to get tickets while we parked.

My brother caught up with us as we were walking into the mall.

"The guy said to just go in first and pay later."
"Hah? Which guy?"
"The one there lah."
"... you mean the parking attendant?"
"..."

2. (the rest of) My family (too)

We got tickets to District 9 anyway. I won't comment on the movie now, not least because I only actually watched half of it: they'd used handheld cameras liberally, so I got really dizzy and burped and coughed a lot and had to close my eyes a lot and take a ten-minute break outside the theatre.

So after the movie I had an excuse for not walking straight. (For once.) And I wasn't the only weird one during our trek to the mall escalator: my mother was clutching a basketball, because the rest of us had been discussing the logistics of dropping the ball from the top floor. To see how high it would bounce back, of course. Preferably without killing any unsuspecting shopper. And Ma decided that she didn't trust us.

Then in the car on the way back we had a debate about why we always debate.

<3

3. Walking

And trains over buses, though I don't have that option in Penang. Tumpanging other people's cars is comfy, but I always feel bad for imposing. Taxis are more an economic choice than an environmental one (yes lah, I know the two fields overlap and all that). And driving isn't a choice, because I can't yet. But it's been scary to realise how much having your own wheels enhances personal safety, especially in areas with long dark alleys and sketchy cabbies between the train station and home.

4. Fitted sheets

Every time I've made a bed over the last half decade I've felt thankful for modern conveniences. Well, usually lah.

One two many

[The title of this post was supplied by my cousin, who hasn't read any of it but just wants me to be done with it.]

I was going to blog about something else, but then I finished reading Pratchett's Nation circa 11pm on Saturday and felt so happy and so sad that I had to write about it.

But first I finished reading Dawkins's The God Delusion, which I'd started a couple weeks ago, and went to sleep. I got up and blogged a bit, then church and family time intervened. Next I wrote some more, and it was sleep again, and work, and hanging out, and family time, and sleep. Then you all stopped reading my blog.

And then you came back! And right now I have a two-hour wait for a follow-up appointment about my scary acne medication, so we're at Saturday evening again. I bask in your enthusiasm.

I felt happy because Nation is a dazzling book, and you want to read it. Trust me. I felt sad because the person who writes these books that I love does not know the God Who loves him.

It doesn't seem fair. I am a scrubby undergrad who judges new acquaintances, unintentionally sounds pompous, frets about boys and wonders if she if developing a double chin; Terry Pratchett, OBE, is a distinguished author who writes the funniest, humblest fantastical satires. His only apparent fault is phenomenal popularity, which makes him a tinge less cool. Surely he deserves to know the Master of the Universe so much more than I do.

But I guess the thing is that no one deserves to know the Master -- no more than readers like me, who respond as much to a book's incandescent story as to its author's perceived spirituality, deserve to know Terry Pratchett. And you never get to know why you are thus privileged. And as long as your time-bound life lasts, you have to be content with this ignorance.

Richard Dawkins is a man who is not content with ignorance -- a brilliant man, to whom Pratchett repeatedly pays tribute in Nation. In The God Delusion, Dawkins makes a case for the extreme statistical improbability of God's existance and discusses its pernicious effects. My understanding of it is:

1. Life is improbable, and life must have come frome somewhere.
2. If this improbable thing called life were created, the thing that created it should be even more complex, ergo even less probable.
3. However, natural selection is a process that builds on each anomalously surviving organism, which give rise to increasingly intricate and anomalous biological entities. Thus human life.
4. Additionally, our planet's capacity for fostering life is also highly unlikely, say 1 in X.
5. However, there may be a multiplicity of universes with differing physical laws. Also, within our universe there are a lot of planets, many times more than X.
6. It is self-evident that the physical laws of at least our universe, and perhaps others, are in concert with life. Further, the fact that we are thinking about existance means that our planet is indeed one of the (1/X)*[however many planets in our universe] that can host life.

I don't see how different this if from St Anselm's argument for God that Dawkins's discounts, apart from a conflation with the cogito principle. I'm also not a fan either the Dawkins or Anselm positions, but really shouldn't be talking like this because I've only taken one semester of philo formally. Besides, I'm in the hospital.

That made no sense, but making sense all the time would set too high a bar for my rambles. I'd be unseemly...ly happy to argue about these arguments in person, but I always get really nervous about setting things down in text where I don't get to respond to people's responses.

But yes, to the point. In a testy adolescent girly discussion, one of my O Level classmates floored us with: "You can't argue faith." You can argue religion (historically psychologically socially etc) and you can try to argue God (ontologically relationally etc), but by definition you cannot argue faith.

Faith is the gift of believing in something that is too big to grasp. When faced with vastness, we find recourse in narrative and metaphor, as in the Usborne (I think) illustrated children's somethingy that someone gave us when I was six, which depicted sex using robots with spring extensions. Hence bread and wine, the word and light, marriage. The language of faith does not coincide with the language of reason, so calling someone stupid for not having received faith is unreasonable -- just as it would be unreasonable to call a lawyer stupid nor not understanding quantum. (Whatever you reasonably choose to call lawyers is not my business.) (Probably not a good time to mention that I'm angling for a scholarship to law school.) (Never to pratice, though.)

Umm. Yes. It's not an issue of nonoverlapping magisteria (which Dawkins disagrees with in his book), or disjoint sets of science and religion. It's not that God isn't the province of reason: reason is the province of God. It wouldn't be logical for the God who created the intellect to toss it aside -- He trumps it.

And it's always so hard for us to remember that God wins, because we're engrossed by the chronology of gameplay. We forget about the manual that tells us how the game unfolds, and how it's really not a game, because the stakes are our lives. And we forget that the everytime God -- into Whom omniscience and and omnipotence, free will and determinism collapse -- keeps inviting us to the winning side.

But it is so hard to be ready to claim this easy triumph, so God lets us play. Because, as any worthy kindergarten teacher would tell you, we learn through play. Besides, there's inherent value in that fun. And so we frolic and conspire in what Dawkins calls Middle World. More often than not we are unaware of higher dimensions, like the goodly square in Edwin Abbott's Flatland, which Dawkins alludes to and which my professor recommended in response to a Descartes paper I wrote during that one semester of philo.

God knows (I think) that I still need to play; I'm terrible at learning my lessons and often operate in an inefficiently circuitous manner. For example, I picked The God Delusion to be able to justify the Dawkins aversion I'd developed after reading some of his interviews and articles. And then I really really wanted to blog about The God Delusion fifty pages in, but restrained myself because that would defeat the whole point of me reading the book.

As with Nation, the ending of The God Delusion made me feel happy and sad. Dawkins writes:

Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World, tear off our black burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive -- as well as just mathematical -- understanding of the very small, the very large, and the very fast? I genuinely don't know the answer, but I am thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

Dear Professor Dawkins, I pray for the day you and Sir Pratchett discover this Infinity. And I desperately hope that the hiccoughs and egotism in this post will not impede anyone's discovery.

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On a related, though not pertinent, note: one reason why I'm glad that Pratchett is British is that "the pants of time" just sounds silly.

Going public

On Sunday I sat in a big room and listened to my dad preach about Nathan rebuking David for sleeping with Bathsheba. At one point, after recounting an anecdote from a movie, he almost yelled from the pulpit: "It's not just sex!" Later he castigated parents who indulge their children too much.

He may have attributed the anecdote to the wrong movie, but I really, really respect my dad.

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I googled my name and almost jumped when my blog was the first hit -- the last time I checked it was buried under pages of other stuff, mostly newspaper stuff I'd written that doesn't expose anything remotely personal. This time a couple of my email addresses came up too, because of groups I was affiliated with (and groups affiliated with groups I was affiliated with). Is scary.

I don't know -- I sort of started this as an anonymous blog, but apparently I've been here for almost four years. I don't feel compelled to either take my blog off the public listing or go through the comments and delete my name from all of them -- that's just too perasan. But I'm still weirded out. Then again, me being weirded out is not an unusual phenomenon.

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In real life, my internship's been really satisfying and it's been such a joy to have my extended family around as people trickle in for my granddad's birthday do. Yay for cousins whom I haven't seen in years. <3