It is difficult. I wrote those poems simply because it was nice to externalize the emotions, but I fail miserably when I actually try to verbalize it. It is hard because it is so enormous, it is so important and all consuming. Being in love, is really about seeing the whole world in the other person’s eyes. If I am still not seeing the world that way, I am not fully in love, I am not there yet.

Love is also about communicating and feeling devoted to another person. If you cant make the connection to the other person, it is not love yet.

On the other hand, true love should be easy to spot, even as it is hard to reenact.

I should not feel so sad and lonely. Well, I am not lonely per se. But at the same time, I dont find an exit around me, no matter what i do. I am alone but i am not lonely simplistically speaking. How do i explain this? I have probably just thrown away the best thing that happened to me in a long time… I feel the weight of responsibility on my shoulders and the tendency to just close off and shut myself down. Of course I wont do that, i wont be able to do that.

But who is to understand me? How can I expect people to understand me when I dont give them my full heart?

This is what I have here:

Please dont love me
Because one day when it’s broken
I cant bear not seeing you again…

Please dont give me your heart
and tell me I am the one of your life
because I am afraid…

how am i supposed to let myself
break your heart
when I love you so…

and then how can we imagine that moment
when we need to bring this to an end?

It is so true - I have written this 5 years ago, and lo, it is still true.

I wish for simpler times. I do yearn for the times when I was younger, fresher and had less on my mind than now. And fewer people whom i needed to please or felt that I need to please.

I had a nice talk with KH after work about juggling expectations. She pointed out that no one could please everyone at the same time and only selfish people would expect to be pleased all the time.  I do feel that because of my initial behaviour, people tend to expect from me or make it clear to me that they expect something from me. I myself like to please people and enjoy the feeling of being able to please people. But that just sets up lots of expectations and some times I feel exactly the opposite way: I want to curl myself and hide myself in the rough shape of a weathered boulder so that the storms and the winds and the harsh stares, the wisful looks of others do not fall on me. I just dont want to hurt others but i am not sure how to set the limit the nicest possible way. That’s why i wish things were simpler.

On the shore of times

As we look at the lapping waves

of the past, the futures, and the years washed away

We wonder

Who will meet

and who will miss each other

who is in the right time, yet in the  wrong place

who is in the right place, yet in the wrong moment

how the sea of time is going to witness it all

but yet, like rising and ebbing waves

wash its traces away

with the years and the passing days.

Now I could recall, without feeling sad

The way we said goodbye

It was a bright summer day

the sky was perfectly blue

when we said goodbye

good luck to you

We sat at the table

We laughed at jokes and

said nice things to each other

but deep inside, we tried

not to think about the end

the closing of our books

and the moment when we really said goodbye

which was long after I waved my hand

at your diminishing form

that perfectly beautiful summer day.

I sat alone in the apartment, after emptying everything and sweeping everything clean.  I was tired and i just wanted to cry outloud. Boys need to cry sometimes. Cry for nothing. Why did I become so soft? Did I not have one full month to come to term with this? Did I not try so hard to soften the fall by spreading it out over the weeks?

I just could not think of anything, feel any way except for that I felt very sad. I just wanted to lie down and waste away right there, in the middle of the emptied, echoing apartment. I was afraid to move on and I was trapped in that feeling of utter despair, of total fear. I have talked about this fear of relocation before. It was the fear of going somewhere new, the fear of displacement, the fear of uncertainty. I was also making a connection between my housing situation with something greater: general uncertainty in life. I felt an itch for change, an itch for moving on, but at the same time, i felt horrified by the frequency of changes, of the fact that nothing seemed permanent. I had thought that this job was the ideal job, this place was the great place to be at least for some number of years. Now there appeared to be many reasons I should move on. I felt the urge to move on, but i was ambivalent about the merit of moving on. I was uncomfortable with the frequency of changes, but i was also very uncomfortable with the fact that I might be fooling myself and feeling too comfortable here. I could not say which was the more delusional thought.

When I sat down there, in the waning light of the day and staring into the window, I knew that I was just yearning for some assurance of some sort.That the rest of my life was not going to be like this, of packing up, of moving out and of letting go. That eventually this journey would lead somewhere I could be happy and contented. Granted - people often say that life itself is a journey, there will be no destination, but there have to be a destination or at least a shelter for one’s emotion.

What I needed was just a fresh perspective into the whole situation, a ray of light that helps me see my situation in an objective manner.  It could well be a crazy way of thinking, but I was very sure I would totally cling to it like a drowning person. It was one of the most vulnerable moments in recent times for me. I had probably read too much into this whole moving out and dislocating thing, but fundamentally I was really asking myself about coping with changes and effecting changes for myself. How should I balance the two opposite urges: to move on to explore versus to stay on where I feel comfortable?

I am going to write a longish article about architecture, after reading the book “Architecture of Happiness” by Alain de Botton. I have slowly become his fan, having read in 2006 “How Proust can change your life”, and “The consolations of philosophy”.

I have a bunch of interesting thoughts on this to be elaborated soon…

Trying to ease myself into this sense of indescribable loss
this inespacable feeling that i am still and will be forever missing something
for fears that i may feed before I’ve done my deed and found my place
for fears that i will never see you again and for fears, how ever irrational,
that our world will grow apart

I had several projects due for review this week. Most of the reviews were almost brutal! Firstly, not only that the projects are still very much in their infancy and therefore not in a baked in any way, but I went into those meeting hoping to get some constructive comments and encouragement. If this was like my senior thesis, this is just the first couple of weeks where I am still trying to understand the background of the subject. I was expecting an open forum for discussion and brainstorming. However, these projects operate under very different mode. We are supposed to take very structured baby steps that are constantly supervised and managed. There is always some pressure on getting the “right” type of work done, not just about getting some work done. Exploration and thinking outside of the box is important, but they do not show up in the output to be reviewed. The output is meant to be something thought out a priori and put together and have to be in the right format to be even considered. It is cumbersome and it is very limiting.

However, it also lets me recognize my very different approach to doing explorative and complex project works previously: I operated in a very ad hoc manner, I like to jump into the middle of it all and quickly figure out steps to get myself out of the mess and get some serious work going on. It is the same with my leadership style. I like to be the rescuer, the improviser who rushes into the situation and quickly take control of the situation. I liked to pop in and give some great ideas to get the team out of the doldrums, but i was never the guy who would stay around to streamline and painstakingly structure the organization after the firefighting is done. I had never had to plan ahead to much, I had never had to report my organization and my thoughts in a streamlined manner, except for when I was doing heavy academic work. However, in my experience so far, academic work is subject to a very different set of expectations and presentational conventions. Academia tends to be more critical but also more appreciative of intellectual efforts spent. In the business world, as always, the business values trump everything. There lie my issues with adjusting to the more organized, more carefully thought out mode of working, and also with adjusting to new expectations.

Media Re:public » Blog Archive » Shiny happy people laughing (Knight@MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media)

A great set of examples of how social media can be taken to the next level. Civic journalism is a powerful concept that is being made possible by social media and technology. It also highlights how important it is to utilize traditional communications mode such as voice to connect people.

Two outstanding examples are

What’s Up: Telephone-based local news system. Supports local youth organizations to coordinate activities or just to help local youths keep in touch of each other using toll-free phone systems.

Rising Voices:

Launched in May 2007 thanks to the support of a Knight News Challenge Award, Rising Voices seeks to empower under-represented communities to make their voices heard online by 1.) providing financial support to outreach projects, 2.) developing a series of participatory media tutorials, and 3.) cultivating a network of passionate citizen media activists to help encourage and support the replication of outreach trainings.

Both can be hugely important and interesting in any developing country. I cant wait to see something like this in Vietnam.