it’s been three full weeks since i’ve tasted ‘freedom’ from school. a lightness most of us are so familiar with - and one that no doubt tasted better when i was groping giddily in the dark towards it.
so now, i got my ‘freedom’ and i am downright bored.
i feel like a farm cow who has suddenly been freed from the range by the farmer. “go on, you’re free to go”. all i can do is moo the same song i’ve been mooing and stare stupidly at the grass beneath my hooves and right back at the farmer. of course, i’ve got alarm bells going off in my head telling me the myriad options and things i could be busy with. yet, the bulk of me (all 63kg of it) is resisting and rebelling against this unbearable lightness and prefers very much to grow fat on the couch mourning about nothing and everything - or if pressed further, simply mourning the passing minutes.
on the toilet bowl (incidentally my favorite thinking seat), i asked myself if i was truly a low-life and a heap of organic waste in my absolute boredom. (man, you big piece of shit, moping around excessively)
and in the midst of my scatolgical musing, i hear the frantic voice of Zizek, as it were, telling me how my condition is a reflection of postmodernity, and so on, and so on …
it is as if Zizek is the shit. and i don’t mean that in the derogratory manner, but more of that awed strain of veneration (like when one is high and everything you drink/smoke/hear is “the shit”). anyway i digress, back to my shit:
i remember Zizek commenting on how postmodernity ushered in (through the cultural logic of late capitalism) the demise of what he terms the ‘Symbolic efficiency’. by that, the mercurial Slovenian was speaking of how we basically now live in an environment reminding us constantly of the need to exercise our own choice. but it is as if we now have the injunction to enjoy the massive options and choices laid out in front of our eyes.
in our highly-mediatized environment of mass entertainment and spectacles, it seems that we are constantly bombarded by the latest offerings of entertainment (further reified by how we have almost free access to movies, games and porn). and it is in such a situation that if you are suffering from boredom it is simply your fault. you’re too lazy to even exercise your choice now that you have the freedom to. (i wonder if boredom can thus be labeled by others as a ‘first world problem’ forgetting how problematic such a label is in the first place of course.)
but maybe, and to borrow Zizek’s logic here, my very gesture of choosing boredom is in fact my transgressive act. against the myriad (consumer) options that are screaming at me, i am choosing to subvert this new injunction to enjoy these tailored options. and instead, i shift my basis of enjoyment in boredom itself. i may be mourning my boredom and all, but secretly i am reveling in the pleasure.
who knows? and where am i going with this? i don’t know, really. i’m so bored i’m trying to rationalize my boredom and trying to install for myself a stand-in for this loss of symbolic efficiency. if so, then i guess there’s no real escaping it huh. well, the trick is not to fall in love with ourselves. too deep and you fall into the toilet bowl.
in that instance, everything clicked into place.
as if each of us in our own private time were finally connected.
in that whiteness, our lives were flattened out
histories of violence, histories of desires left unturned
private museums of collected trinkets and thoughts.
enola gay careering above us on this historic day.
eyes locked on the city below, and with a silent goodbye.
bombs away, onward to the clear light of day.
i was holding you, was i?
little boy, are you lost?
or was it you who brought us together?
don’t you just hate it when a dozen insurance agents line the street and each take their turn asking you the same question in the hope that you’ll eventually purchase some insurance scheme from them. and i’m pretty sure that it isn’t just me that is praying that none of my old friends at reunions would be bringing work over to dinner and asking around if any of us wanted to buy insurance from him/her.
but this is just a small part of my aversion to insurance in general. that has always been something about it since the first time i discovered it in primary school that has irked me. i remember looking through the list of body parts and how much each of them corresponded to in terms of money payable to you should you lose them, and trying to figure how ‘they’ arrived at these values. (of course, the naive me thought that if my family ever goes poor, i could probably die or go missing in order for them to get through the day with the massive payout.)
that said, isn’t it weird that should i die, my family and love ones would receive an amount stipulated by the insurance scheme that i have purchased. therefore, in a strange way, my ‘value’ is tied to whichever package i had finally procured for myself. but perhaps more disturbingly (at least for me) i am at the final instance of my life reducible to monetary terms. granted, this money is definitely helpful (something’s better than nothing, eh?) and my family might be able to use this money to pay for the funeral rites and so on, without having to take a deficit to their own bank accounts on top of this loss - i.e. one loss piled up upon another. but doesn’t that mean that the insurance really doesn’t benefit me myself at all and that if families are forcing you to take up insurance … the eerie logic is that it is more so in their interest than yours. after all, what do you have to gain considering that you’ve probably turned to dust already.
ok, granted this may give you a piece of mind insofar as you can tell yourself that your loss will ultimately be attenuated with the imminent payout. my question is, would that be more self-serving in fact? since you basically try to free yourself of being a ‘burden’ as it were and somehow the monetary value placed on your life seems pretty much like a narcissistic display of worth if you ask me.
let’s move right along. there seems to be a perverse relationship between insurance and capitalism (i mean, jsut think about how insurance policies only really emerged to massive scale in the advent of capitalism). but more so, insurance is in this sense an affirmation of the commodification in capitalism: everything is perhaps violently reduced to monetary terms. furthermore, in our highly mediatized world that features a seemingly-insatiable amount of media violence, the result is a public obsessed with risks and potential catastrophe (from the global to the personal). such that it is in a world of chaos and uncertainty that your best bet in life is money - which is where insurance comes in to save the day. which is pretty ironic in a way considering how monetary value is predicated upon something as spectral as goldbars which hide behind bank vaults that many of us would never ever get to see in our lifetime.
“once you get the feeling, it wants you back for more.
says it’s gonna heal again, you won’t make the call.
one step back, you’re leaving it
but now it’s moving on.
why won’t you believe it in, until it’s gone”
— Bombay Bicycle Club, Shuffle
“You’re what, in your third year now?”
I nodded, with busy hands washing the tiles in unison.
“Studying English literature right? Are you planning to become a teacher when you graduate?”
On that note, my hands paused for a brief moment while the rattling sound of tiles greeting each other continues to fill in. If the tiles were speed-dating, so were we on the mahjong table. An annual fanfare that leaves one with dreaded questions such as that which my auntie posed.
“Well, not really. I’ve not figured that out myself. But probably, I’d further my studies,” I replied as I offered a quick caricature of a smile. “Probably. Film studies.”
My hands were now working overtime to drown out the possibility of her pushing her winning tile to my face.
Too late.
My cousin seated across the table who stopped short of arranging her tiles interjected like a good business partner, “Wah, so you want to be a film director or something?”
As if on cue, my aunt rocked into laughter. I felt like I was in an interrogation scene with the Corleone family. If only Coppola could have met my family or been to the annual new year gathering.
Just great, I sighed into my beer, the dynamic duo. Should have stayed glued to the television instead. As the session goes on, so too does the calculations. Dreams dreamt long ago are tossed into the pile, as mothers and fathers try their luck at finding the winning combination. Adjustments were constantly made to increase their chances. Vicarious lives put on display. Possibilities traded away in the chatter. Of this, of that, of the future yet to come.
“No, but anyway, you’re studying business right?” I said, as I returned my cousin the tile she had been looking for.
My aunt nodded in approval while my cousin went on to talk about the myriad projects and internship opportunities that were laid out on the table for her. While she blabbered on, I looked to my aunt who was clearly beaming at her daughter, at her winning combination. My brother on the other hand was busy trading tiles, counting tiles and paying no heed to the white noise around him. One had to be mindful of what was being brought to the table.
“So what, you’re going to be a businessman?”
All we could hear now was the conversation between the hardboiled detective and the femme fatale playing in the background, offering to fill in as a fugue. My aunt, appalled by the reduction I offered, simply threw out her tile in mock disgust.
“Eh, hu!” My brother let out in an undisguised joy.
“Thanks auntie.”
That, he said in mock gratitude while he drank in the moment of triumph.
Clearly, my brother was the best player at the table.
“In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.” — Slavoj Zizek, Speech at Occupy Wall Street 2011.
woah nostalgia. 5mins walk from cvjetno studentski dom.
(via fyeahcroatia)
Twenty Years Later: The Bosnian Conflict in Photographs -