Reanimation

Well, it’s my first entry; don’t know what to talk about, don’t know what to do with this enormous text box that needs filling up. Why did I start this for then? I used to have an online diary at diary-x.com. The whole site just collapsed. Everything went poof. And for me it was about 45 essays. Essays that I used to enter essay competitions, essays that I handed up to my teacher and passed it off as original works, not that they weren’t though. Well, when I heard that diary-x went kaput, it was as though a large part of my heart got ripped out and thrown out the window, stampeded on by a herd of wild wildebeests and thrown into the incinerator. A year’s worth of essays is worth more than a mountain of gold man; and it’s all gone just like that. Whoop-dee-doo. Anyway, I just decided that maybe I should start writing again. A few years have gone by, I’ve grown a little older, not necessarily smarter. I’ve made mistakes, paid for a few, basically led the life of a normal guy; nothing magnificent, nothing impressive.

A New Year’s going to begin, New Year’s resolutions? I haven’t thought about them though but they’ll probably go something like this:
1. Cut down my time on the Internet.
2. Kick ass at the English Language.
3. Get the best results in the whole damn college.
4. Lead my life with confidence. That means no more petty arguments, no more holding grudges against people, etc. etc.
5. Basically be the best I ever can be.
These are pretty big goals, which mean pretty big work, which brings me to a very important point. I’ve said the exact same words a year ago and nothing turned out great. In fact, the whole thing went boom on me. I’m not proud of it, but it’s not like I can’t do anything about it. It’s either I get busy living, or get busy dying; take the bull by the horns or die trying. I’ve screwed up quite a bit; I’m not going to let it happen again.

Am I looking too far? Christmas comes first right? Christmas - the season of giving. I find myself saying this year after year. Christmas is the season where people with materialistic desires satisfy people other people with materialistic desires. Is it just me, or do people around me just celebrate Christmas for the presents? Walk down Orchard Road, Christmas decorations to advertise Christmas Sales. Signs all around saying “Buy this, buy that”, “Spend more, spend more”, “Discounts here”; and everybody just laps it up buying things that they probably won’t need, satisfying what they say in economics, “endless wants”. I don’t go shopping, so I won’t know what “retail therapy” means. I’m not a fan of presents but I am guilty of the materialistic thingamagi that has been going around since consumerism was in fashion. I own an iPod which is currently on loan to a dear friend of mine. I have a Nokia 6300 which serves me quite well. I have a Bluetooth Sony DR-BT10CX headset which I use to listen to music on my Nokia 6300. I have an Automatic-Kinetic Hamilton watch that does nothing else but tell the time and a Pierre Cardin black leather wallet. I wear a Hugo Active Jacket, a pair of black Giodarno jeans, a navy-blue Lee Cooper T-Shirt and a pair of quite worn New Balance 813 running shoes. Do I need all these in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. Are they necessities needed to survive? No. I’m a slave of consumerism. With all these endless products on the market, advertisements telling me what I need and dictating what I want, people buying the latest thing on the market, Nokia phones, Apple portable music players, Braun Buffel bags, Armani Exchange shirts. It seems we end up with a lot things that we “need”. Materialism is in fashion, consumerism is the catalyst. Merry Christmas shopping guys, next time you see a nice Versace dress in the window, think where your money is going to.

My take on Christmas might seem a little too extreme and I apologize for the “woah” factor, but in all honesty, that’s how I feel about Christmas in the 21st century. No offense to those doing Christmas shopping.

That wraps it up for Christmas. Lately, I’ve been thinking about where my life is going. I sit on my ass all day looking at a 17” computer screen, typing on a 101-key USB keyboard, Quietkey and I look back on my life and ask myself, where has it gone? Most of my waking hours are spent looking at the thing you’re looking at right now and it has been that way for most of my life. Which means, not only am I a slave to materialism, I’m also a slave to the computer. In my case, it’s an Acer T310-30P5MR, Windows XP Professional Edition, 3.00GHz with 1024GB DDR Ram, 128MB ATI Radeon 9700 Graphics card with integrated sound card, etc. etc. The computer itself costs about 2K SGD. I’ve given 2/3 of my waking hours to this machine. This means that this computer, is worth 800 SGD (I was quoted this from the nice man at the computer store. He told me the computer was old) and 1440 hours of my holiday; in short, priceless. And that’s only the holiday. I’ve had this computer for about 6 months. I don’t even want to know how many hours this computer has taken from me. The irony of it all is that, I gave it to the computer. The computer did not hold me at gunpoint and demand 2/3 of my life from me. Nor did it sneak up on me when I was asleep and suck out my life through any orifice in my body. I willingly gave my time to it. Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, Starcraft, Maple Story (Yeah a bit, when I was incredibly bored), Ragnarok Online, lots and lots of movies, these things are what I spent my life on. Is it worth it; at that point in time, yeah, probably? But when you receive your result slip and notice that the As, Bs and Cs have evaded you, and you wonder where they went, that’s when you really think about whether your time on the machine have been worth it. I used to boast about how “Pro” I was at “Dota” and it was all for shit. Dota doesn’t get me my grades, and they certainly don’t make me money, unless you count the 5 dollars I won from some sucker that I could get a godlike streak before level 9 which I did. The things I should be doing like researching my paper, downloading notes I don’t do. The things that I should only be doing after I do all these, I do. My priorities are a little topsy-turvy don’t you think? Ah well, probably won’t happen again, unless Blizzard comes up with some kick ass game that has the whole world playing, maybe.

Oh as for the title of the blog, I wasn’t really thinking. I just put the first two things that came to my mind. First was the song “Thoughts of a dying atheist” by Muse and “Hubristic Hedonist” which was my nickname for quite some time, thus the name “Thoughts of a Hedonist”. Don’t see the hedonist part? It’s all right, after all, what’s in a name?