Whew! Here I am… finding myself doing something I used to REALLY enjoy doing before but haven’t done in a long time… sitting in front of the tube, computer on my lap… and letting my thoughts just drift back and forth… and type away…
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For some reason, typing in this position feels much more comfortable… it even feels good to a certain extent… and quite honestly, I haven’t felt this way since this laptop was new and I just wanted to use it for the hell of it. I know… kinda pathetic… but true…
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I realize I haven’t blogged in quite some time… the past weeks have just been hell in the office. And with regards to matters at work… for some reason, I just never saw fit to write about stuff that happened at work. I realize that many people do this: write about work… and they come up with the most utterly interesting entries: somehow I can’t manage to think I can do the same… so what the hell… maybe some day… after all, pretty much all I do these days is work.
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… which brings me to recall a chat conversation I had with a really close friend recently. As what usually happens when one chances upon a good old friend in chat, the usual ‘Hi, Hello, How are you doing-routine’ is followed with an update of what’s going on with the other. It was during this moment that I began asking myself: is my life really so boring that one can manage to describe it with such few words? …that for the most part, I’ve only been describing what’s going on with my life with the same phrases over and over again for the past God-knows-how-long.
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And then I thought about it… my life’s NOT boring! … at least not to me… soon enough, my friend found herself remarking a similar thing: she’d tell me, “nothing new, everything’s the same… stressed with school, going to the gym.. etc.’ then she interrupted herself… ‘It’s not really as boring as it sounds… its just boring to explain to people…’
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What an utterly brilliant explanation!!!
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Then I got to more thinking… I found myself pondering on the usual routine of characters in films who decide to abandon some desk job to become a writer (just how many times will I have to bear seeing such a routine in the movies!?!?!?!?!)… The usual explanation: coz the character supposedly wants more adventure in his/her life… that he/she wants to live a life wherein “each day is different.” (Can’t bear to remember how much I’ve heard something like that’s been said on TV or in the movies as well).
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Thus the quintessential conclusion: that a person whose days in life being same as the next is living a terribly boring life and is destined to a life of unhappiness that’s drab, boring and full of beige.
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Ditto for anyone who works in Central Business Districts all over the planet… to all people who wear expensive shirts, ties and suits that all look the same anyway… to all the people who work in glass box buildings in office cubicles… to all the people who spend large parts of their day within a relatively small geographical radius… to those who encounter nearly the same comfortable people all day: parents, a close circle friends, wives, children or a girlfriend. Ooooh… how regular… how boring… how dull… how comfortable… How Sad…
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----------- Boundary Here--------------
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And cheerios to all the writers and wannabe artistes of any sort who travel the world endlessly… to all those who motorcycle across South America (suddenly everyone wanted to do it after that film)… sipping coffee in some Café in some European city… to all the musicians, artists… to all the adventure junkies who climb mountains, rappel off cliffs, swim with sharks, surf super huge waves… to those who lose themselves on neon-lit dance floors rubbing bodies against nameless, dark faces… to those people who meet strangers everyday, have bizarre conversations and have the most outrageous and scandalous sexual encounters… Oooooh… How out-of-the-box… How exciting… How interesting… How ‘I wanna be just like that…!”… How Chirpy…
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What’s with all the stereotypes anyway?
When did the so called ‘unorthodox’ start becoming so generic?
Since when did such associations bring about such labels about one’s life???
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Granted: a person’s life does get a bit sad when it gets ‘boring’ and the usual symptom of this is when the person begins to feel that ‘today was like yesterday and tomorrow’s gonna be like today.’ But are the associations that I’ve thought about (see above) capable of drawing such a compelling boundary between the ‘sad / boring’ and the ‘exciting / happy’? Somehow I sense that despite the fact that such boundaries reveal some truths… that for a large part of it… we’ve allowed such boundaries to trick us…
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I find myself asking this question because I do wear ‘office attire’ most days of the week, I go to the same office everyday, encounter the same people, and do pretty much the same thing… but interestingly enough, I hardly consider my life to be boring or sad. That in fact, I find it to be quite exciting (for the majority of it at least… hahahaha)… and despite one day being generally the same as the next, I don’t find it to be so.
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I thought about it some more until Mies Van Der Rohe gave me a very good answer: “God is in the Details”
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My friend was right… my life from the outside looking in is indeed repetitive and perhaps even monotonous… but I don’t find it to be so… because for now, I’m in a state wherein all the little nuances about it make it so interesting to me… little details… qualities that might be too esoteric for those who do not share my interests and see things the way I do.
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So I guess what I’m trying to say is that the determinant of whether a person’s life is ‘boring / sad’ or ‘exciting / happy’ is not about on which side of the ‘boundary line’ one’s life more or less falls into… but rather, on how one appreciates the little nuances and details about the life he/she leads in general.
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Now I can’t help but recall happy childhood memories: wearing a uniform (i.e. exactly the same thing) to the same place (school) everyday, seeing largely the same 40 people in class plus the teachers and looking forward to the same things everyday: Recess & Lunch Break, Voltes V, Voltron, G.I. Joe and the Transformers… It was all the same if I think about it… but I can pretty much say that I was quite happy too… and if I think some more about it, I realize that though it seemed all the same… it really wasn’t. I mean, the Transformers were always the Transformers and it usually ends with the good guys winning… but no matter how much ‘same-ness’ there seemed to be, seeing Optimus Prime and the Autobots kick Megatron and the Decepticons’ asses was always different and unique (and consequently exciting and thrilling) in each episode… including the replays!
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Perception is indeed a beautiful thing
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p.s. …that’s just what I think anyway.
