Now I've xin it all

The last post has prompted me to assemble some new words inspired by one we know and dearly love. As a collective, we may call these words xinisms. But xinism itself has a meaning beyond just a collective noun. A xinism is a sentence, saying or utterance that is both erudite and embarassingly ambiguous. A classic example might be:

"I don't mind if Gandalf doesn't come, as long as his staff comes."

Or something equally mindnumbing. Friends and other loved ones are invited to celebrate this young wonder amongst us.

ximple: an explanation that is obvious to the speaker but not the listener. It can be used following or preceding the explanation itself, "Look, it's really so ximple."

xincere: praise said gushingly. Almost a twitter but not quite. The word is usually used upon receiving such praise, for example, "Thank you, that was quite xincere." But can be used at the end of a letter or posting, too. As in, Yours xincerely, brownpanda. When used this way, it means that I not only like you but I can feel we share such vibes, it’s scary.

xintillating: a mind or conversation that sparkles but remains incomprehensible

xinical: random statements interjected into conversations at random moments. As in, “That was a rather xinical remark.”

xinbiosis: a close friendship characterised by conversations comprising unfinished sentences and/or exclamations. A typical conversation might go something like this:

Girl A: Did you see that movie?
(It's always girls. Only girls have that kind of psychic insight into each other minds that transcends words. They look for a similar insight in the men they love but alas, we invariably disappoint. Anyway, the conversation begins innocently enough.)
Girl B: Which one?
Girl A: You know, the one where...
Girl B: Yes, yes, yes. I saw it yesterday.
Girl A: Isn't it wonderful?
Girl B: Omigod, the guy...he's so CUTE!
Girl A: Oh yes, I know. And in that scene...
Girl B: That's right. Omigod, I could like totally die!
Girl A: God yes, I know exactly how you feel!

The bemused onlooker has no idea which movie they are talking about, let alone know how they feel. The sentences invariably end with exclamation marks and lots of screaming and giggling. There is also a strong religious undertone. You get the drift. Maybe not, but you know how it goes. It's a highly refined form of twittering.

xintax: a branch of logic that proves that everything evolves from and revolves around ballet and dance, OR which, it didn't quite happen that way but there were a number of signs, and to cut a long story short, "God told me."

We welcome other contributions. Oh yes, a word on pronunciation. The words are pronounced with an emphatic or hard 'sss' sound, which might, to untrained ears seem to indicate a high level of sarcasm.

The art of conversation

It's official: we have lost the art of conversation. I wonder, did we ever had it? Often, success in holding a conversation means being a good listener. Or else, it is being someone who can talk a lot of nonsense and making people laugh. Are we, have we ever been, good at being able to talk about things that matter and understand one another?

Conversation: A History of a Declining Art
Stephen Miller, 2006

Clearly, by conversation, I don't mean the chitter chatter that we still do. Or the twittering of teenage girls at the back of the car. It's the oddest thing. Put two or more teenage girls in the back of a car, and they twitter. Guys cannot twitter. If girls be birds, then guys are beasts. In a car, guys need to be driving, or else they will sit tensely still and gaze out the window. Or fidget. If we could, we'd prowl. So, if you put a guy together with a girl who twitters, then the guy basically have no choice but to ask her to marry him or something equally drastic. And of course, once married, the twittering turns into something else. Now, if we learn to converse, then these things won't happen. We'd be able to talk and actually understand one another. And not have to get married just because.

The internet has come to the rescue, as it has in so many other ways. The best and easiest way to converse today is to blog. When you blog, you get to think carefully of what you are going to say. You even get to go back and change your words. People can respond as they might and you get to choose who to respond back to. It's conversation without all the pitfalls.

I've realised that there are only a number of ways to write a successful blog. By which I mean a blog that is widely read - like xiaxue's. One of them is to write it like a magazine - specialising in reviews about computers, environment and dieting. People read this because they are interested in the topic you are covering. It's a one-stop for the latest, plus a bit of humour and personality. The other way is to be so very funny. It helps, in this case, to be a pretty girl. I don't know why, but it helps. Sometimes, you don't even have to be funny, just be a pretty girl. Pretty boys don't hack it, I'm afraid. In this case, people drop by because they can associate with what is said, share a joke or two, and pass the time. Don't ask me why people, both men and women, find it easier to associate, even over the internet, with a pretty girl than with just about anybody else. They just do. The third way is to have a lot of friends. Or fans. Famous people are simply interesting. So everything they have to say is worth listening to, even if they say the silliest or most obvious things.

Which takes us to the teen blog. Teenagers do not converse. They rave and rant. They have enough of listening (to parents, teachers, and just about every adult they meet). They need to have their say. Without any proper channels to vent their feelings, teenagers blog. Visit a teen blog and you will not know what they are on about. You are not required to know, in any case. All their tags are complimentary ones, from friends, righting and spotting them on. And they tag one another. Teen blogs are basically a support group. All fine and good. But I am no longer a teenager. And through this blog, I've realised my soul yearns for conversation. G.K. Chesterton puts it best:

Orthodoxy
G.K.Chesterton, 1908

Friends, Romans and countrymen, talk to me.

The basis of your premise

The response to the previous post is well worth the price of a free lunch - even beyond the pleasure of meeting someone new, or even having lunch with an old friend. It reinforces my belief that the best argument for the existence of God is what I have called divine intelligence.

The problem of the centre of the universe, arising from the Big Bang theory, seems at first to be mindbogglingly difficult. But, take a few things into consideration, like space/time continuum, and it all falls into place. Even a child can understand it. And you cannot be but amazed. And yet, there are so many unanswered questions yet remaining. There is no end to it. You go, wow, and then, you are left scratching your head again.

Which leads me to Becca and her statements about faith, transformation and Christianity. It also has to do with the dangers of logical thinking - a common tool of the enemy. You see, God's intelligence is awesome - it is both simple and powerful. It is beautiful beyond understanding. It stirs up your soul like the way music does, or a good story, or poetry or falling in love. And it is available to all of God's creatures.

If you look at life logically, you might think: we ought to work hard, be the best we can be and always do the right thing. And you find you cannot. So, you feel guilty, and/or sorry for yourself, and you try harder. What's wrong with this logic? Nothing. Except it is not God's plan.

You see, if you believe in Christianity, then you must begin with the understanding that God loves us. And, he created this beautiful world for us to be happy in, so that we can praise him and love him in return. How can you be happy working so hard and feeling so guilty about your failures and all the fun you are having, and thinking you should be like working 25 hours a day?

If you believe in the Christian God, then begin by seeing what a wonderful world he has created. How good life is, and how you can really be happy. You don't know how to be happy? Love one another. Accept each other the way we are.

Logic tells us that if we accept each other for our faults, if we cherish our parents because they nag, and our children because they love life and hate to study, they will do all the wrong things - nag us more, and play more and study less. Right? Wrong. The reverse and wonderful thing happen. When parents find that their children are willing to listen to their nagging, they nag less and can show their love more. The time together is spent more in conversation than in quarrelling. Even if the parent continues to nag, the different response of the child will make the time spent together so much better. It will be more like listening to your parent's troubles than being scolded.

In the same way, when children are scolded less, and made to feel useless less in spite of their failures, they actually work harder and enjoy studying more. People are made the right way: they want to be successful, they want to love one another (and to be loved), and they want to do the right things. The most frequent reason why they don't is because we don't trust one another enough to let it happen.

So, what is the basis of your premise? Do you believe in God? Do you believe he is a loving God? Do you believe that he is all powerful and therefore in charge of everything? If you believe all this, then trust him, trust your deeper instincts to love and to let go, and then you will see the world in all its glory and beauty. And you will see your own transformation, from a stressed-out frustrated over-achiever to a happy, well-adjusted person who is happy just being one of God's wonderful creatures. And your days will be filled with wonder, exploring the mysteries that God has created to amaze us. You will not be lazy, but alive, eager to do good deeds and to be useful to others. You will care when others are hurt and you will do what you can to help. You will be the best you can be, if you will but let go. You will do all these things and not be tired. Your energy will be abundant and overflowing. Remember, the first command is this: Love God, and love one another. Open your eyes to first see how much God loves us.

The point of it all

My dear readers (I think there are about 3 or 4 of them) will know that I am both literate and a simpleton. In other words, I read a lot but understand very little. And what I understand, I understand in a simple way. Which is why I don't understand the Big Bang theory.

According to this theory, attributed to Edwin Hubble of the Hubble telescope fame, the universe started as a big bang because the current universe can be observed to be continuously expanding in all directions. The velocity of the galaxy is proportional to its distance. Galaxies that are twice as far from us move twice as fast. The thing is, this expansion can be observed in precisely the same way no matter where you are in the universe. In other words, seen from earth, the galaxies are seen as expanding away from earth. But seen from the moon, or some other extraterrestrial rock, the galaxies will be observed to be expanding away in exactly the same fashion. This uniformity of the universe is scientifically referred to as its homogeneity.

OK. Enough of big words and inadequate simplification. My question is this: where is the center of the universe? Any explosion must begin from a specific point. In fact, the big bang theory suggests precisely such a point. And if you look at the results of an explosion, you can backtrack to the source of the explosion - where the bang happened. In that sense, there must therefore be a center of the universe. There isn't one. At least none that we can identify. Why not?

As I see it, there are a few possible explanations, none of them satisfactory:
1. We can only backtrack an explosion in our universe because it occurs in an external time/space continuum. You cannot backtrack the explosion from within its own time/space continuum. While this is philosophically appealing, I don't know if you can prove this.
2. The expansion of the universe is a kind of optical illusion - something to do with the relationship between time and the speed of light. What we see of the universe is not as it exists at that moment but of the light that was emitted some time back given the time it takes for the light to travel to where we are.
3. The universe is expanding but there is no origin. Since the size of infinity is equal to the size of the universe, an expanding universe need not have an origin, since it can expand eternally in a space/time continuum that is infinite. Or to put it simply, the universe has always been expanding, but was what it is today.

Does any of this make any sense? Free lunch to anyone who can explain this to me. Judgement will be made collectively by all the esteemed readers of this blog.

PS: In researching this question, I looked up the size of the universe. It's unknown and disputed, of course. But one of the ways by which we measure its size is to look at how far away is the furthest star. And, I guess, multiply that number by two since we are presumably measuring the radius. All this is guesswork on my part, but I am just wondering, if we were in any other part of the universe, will all the stars seem equally far away like it is on earth? If so, does this tell us anything about the big bang?

PPS: There is, of course, a correct explanation - which I found out after I posted this blog. The above explanation also contains a lie, so don't trust everything you read.

Being relevant in the new age

Meet Alan Fletcher, graphic designer extraordinaire. Here's how he remained relevant by staying irrelevant:

"Graphic designers don’t find solutions by manipulating materials, not since the computer replaced their drawing boards, set squares, ruling pens, compasses, and all their old paraphernalia. But Fletcher, notably after leaving the design group Pentagram which he helped to found in 1972, stayed with the physical rather than the digital. He said that the drawings he made for a paper manufacturer’s promotional booklet used “dip pens, rollerballs, ballpoints, fibre-tips, soft pencils and hard leads. Coarse cartridge, smooth cold press, handmade papers, laid and wove stock, blotting paper”. His other tools were brush and ink, scissors and coloured paper, for text as well as images. Scratchy pen lettering, complete with blots, became a recognisable Fletcher idiom."

The logo of the news service Reuters, designed in 1967, in use until 1996.

Poster of the Best of British Authors (1980).

“There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists.”
opening words of Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art,
first published by Phaidon in 1949.

Self Portrait
as “an international safecracker
wishing to protect his identity,”

All of the above information is obtained from domusweb, internet home of the premier architecture magazine from Italy, Domus. You may have to join (it's free) to access the full article. *sorry*

Truth and the poetry of logic

My dear dd mentioned that we think alike. Ah well, what can I say - great minds. But, truth to tell, she has outstripped me in many ways. What I have is perhaps the advantage of experience.

This experience is of little value in today's world. A good friend puts it succinctly:

"I know the answer. It is easy to say but hard to do. The world is moving so fast, we are becoming obsolete by the time we are 40. A friend of mine was retrenched. Because he had a good package, he took his time looking for another job. By the time he found one he liked, two years later, he couldn't hold it because he found he was obsolete. He waited too long and was too fussy about the jobs he was willing to do."

Bearing in mind that our life expectancy is in the eighties, this means that for those retrenched in the 40s, they have some 40 years of being irrelevant to society. Because that is what having a job means. It is not just about making ends meet, our work, however much we dislike it, is how we identify ourselves in the eyes of society. It reflects our place in society and also our value. True, it is not about money. Being a good mother, for example, counts for a lot and certainly, most mothers are way underpaid.

It also doesn't make sense for society to have some 50 percent of its population not working. If you include those who are students (many of us are fulltime students to our mid 20s), then the number is easily more.

On the other hand, it is impossible for us, as we grow older, to keep up with the latest. And so, even as we try, we know we will not be able to keep up with the young. Does this mean that our shelf life ends at 40? If so, this will spell disaster to the modern society.

The alternative then is to find a different, yet still useful, role for us as we grow older. I think we have to accept the fact that we must continue to learn. But as we grow older, we bring something more than a blank slate to the table. We must find ways to make what we bring an advantage.

What we, the older amongst us, bring is something not measured by logic. It is the reason why science needs both experiment and logic to achieve truth. I like it that the two words - experience and experiment - stem from the same root word. My dear dd will call it intuition - something that women have more than men.

The one great truth is that whatever we believe now is wrong. Not entirely so, but wrong if we think we know it all. We need to open our minds to new possibilities, and in the free world, we will not be hampered by naysayers. So, yes, dear daughter, your teachers were wrong.

Africa's "Mother of Trees"

Singing rain

I love the rain. It washes away stuff. Like the shower, the water washes my body while in the bath, the muck just stays floating in the water around you. This raining tree is an art installation in Singapore. Apparently,

Dutch-born artist Iepe B. T. Rubingh . . . says he uncovered the Singapore Miracle tree’s supernatural powers after ‘talking’ to it for three weeks. Inspired by traditional folklore, he believes that the rain from the tree cleanses one’s sins, cures diseases and acts as a kind of fountain of youth.

That's why we need to cry. The tears wash away our sorrows. And so deep is the sorrow that cannot be washed away. And our eyes are dry of tears. We carry such sorrows with us.


The Singapore Biennale is the best thing to have happened in Singapore like since forever. My regret is that I missed most of it. Now that the exams are over, check it out. You will grow in directions you never thought possible.

When you are young, life is like rain. It soaks you until you can feel it seeping out through the pores. As you grow up, you may miss this rain. Instead of seeing the sun, you may see only the darkness or the starkness of life. Like water that falls on the mustard seed, the rain now is to help you grow into a tree that can withstand the rain coming down, the streams rising, and the winds blowing and beating.

I was struck by this parable when we read it again last wednesday. Building the house on rock is not appreciated nor even meaningful without the rain and the wind. And yet, in themselves, the rain and the wind are not evil things. It says something about the relationship of good and evil and why God "allows" evil that I cannot put into words.

This blog has been a desert for the last several weeks. I have been building this blog on rock but oh where is the rain and wind?

let there be light

Once upon a time, there was a firefly. A little boy caught it and put it in a jar. Sometimes, the firefly would fly and so the jar would be lit. But sometimes, the firefly would be still, and the jar would be dull. A scientist came by and saw the boy with the jar and said to the boy,

"Give me your penny, and I will make you a jar that will be lit forever. Its light will come from the sun itself. And you will no longer have to rely on the whims of the firefly."

You see, the scientist knew that all the worldly possessions of the boy was in that penny and in asking for the penny, he was actually asking for his world. The boy knew that the scientist was a clever person and well, what else is a boy if not foolish. So he gave the scientist the penny and the scientist gave the boy the jar of bottled sunshine.

It even came with a blueprint describing exactly, and very scientifically, how it worked. Sadly, as the boy found out, it didn't work. To quote the boy,

"The Sun Jar offers no light and will only work in complete darkness, The only way I can get my Sun Jar to give off that warm amber glow is to sit in a room with no other light source, I also tried my Sun Jar outdoors and it even struggled then, replacing the rechargeable battery with a normal one did help, but this does defeat the object.

Anyway it’s now gathering dust in my living room, and although the LED’s are a disappointment the thing still looks great as ornament."

And therein lies the moral of the story.

place Singapore

We often forget how important history is. We think history lies in the past, is behind us, buried and forgotten. Not so.

Living History
We live in history. The wisdom we gather from our parents and our teachers evolved over time, from their parents and their teachers and their parents and teachers before them. The places we live in also evolved over time. Despite being a young nation still, there are many Singaporeans today who were not there when Singapore was born. And what it means to be a Singaporean is clearer today precisely because of the time that has passed. We've grown into our roles.

Raffles Hotel, Chinatown, Little India, Holland Village, Tiong Baru and many more places like them are important to us today because they were part of our past, even a past we didn't live.

Making History
And thus we make our own histories too. Changing the tone and texture of today so that tomorrow is slightly different. Things that somehow last through these changes - chye tow kueh, chee cheong fun, roti john, and singlish - despite our efforts to outgrow them, leave their imprints and we learn, yes, these things are important. Events change us and as we change, we leave behind imprints that define the future generation.

Experts think that history is made by great people - politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs - who lead and change the world. They are merely the symptoms of a greater change, of individuals who made changes to their own lives, responding to what they see of the world around them.

Knowing History
It is good then that we should be aware of and know history. We came from it and are part of it and will define it for the future. History is simply an acknowledgement that life is change and connected. Like the butterfly effect, small things - a word, the decision to say sorry - can change the course of greater matters to come.


Fifty eight students have spoken aloud about their favourite places in Singapore. Some are Singaporeans, some are not. They are all architectural students from the AR2722 Design and Environment program. Read them, vote for them. Leave your comments, leave your marks. Say hello.