it has been long, zilin has gone fishing. where have you been? you have been at the back of mind, telling me that i should write something and reminding me of times past, when i had millions of ideas running through my mind, bursting through my brain. and yet every time you did that, i pushed you to a further recess in my mind, only because now, nothing ever strikes me. have you suffered because i am now impoverished?

my sense of wonder has seem to be replaced by everyday practicalities.

in the past, my showers at home produced perfectly formed first sentences, i would rush to type them out, and the thoughts just flow. they never stopped, till i ended the entry. now, i cannot even get past the first 5 words. even these phrases themselves, never seemed good enough. what has changed? certainly, the angst and the grief and the rage has gone, although i never saw myself as an emotional teenager. but perhaps these emotions were really manifested in my writings, making me a productive writer, at least in my blog.

i am scared, i am scared that i can no longer write. i am scared that i can no longer debate. most of all, i am scared that i can not even begin to have a well formulated thought.

i still have all these fleeting ideas, bubbling from all sorts of things i see — the apparent advantages to retaining gender roles, the mind running towards distraction, the maintenance of friendships… but i shut them down. i shut them down so that i can think about research. and now, i am scurrying back once again.

suddenly realized how i made a fool of myself

wow

suddenly, the gravity of it all strikes me, it being my decision to leave for another 5 years, to complete my PhD in the US. planning it many months ago never seemed so serious, just me going through the motions of taking my GREs, writing up my statements, and submitting my applications. up till today, when i boarded the plane to go for my interviews in the US, the implications of this trip today never really struck me until i was about to land in narita airport.

i have only been back home for 4 months, but it has seemed like forever. my sister and brother are all moving forward in their lives, seemingly close to entering new stages in their lives — marriage, kids, own families. my parents are growing older by the day — just this 4 months has seen my mum in hospital twice.

on the plane, i realized that i do not want to be away from it all for this five years… i want to be there when my sis has her first kid, i want to be the aunty who gets to play with her kid all the time, the aunty who teaches her kid how to talk, and the aunty who showers her kid with presents. i want to be there when my brother struggles to propose, when he gets promoted in work, when he feels successful about his life. i realized that this coming 5 years are very different from the previous 2 years that i have been away, for this 5 years are exactly when my family will be transiting into new phases in their lives.

my parents… they are getting older. going back home has made me feel like a kid again, like my parents are going to look after me forever. but the truth is that they are growing older, and after this 5 years, they would already be in close to their 60s. the experience of seeing my mum in the hospital made me know that my siblings and i are kids who do not want to leave my parents in the hospital alone. whether or not we have work or whether we have stayed for a long time already, we just cannot seem to leave. how then, can i leave for this 5 years, knowing that anything can happen? my dad, the one whom i always have such great conversations with… just not something that i feel i can find anywhere else.

i don’t want to leave my family… but how? it is not even a rhetorical question right now, i am asking this question in urgency. i cannot freeze their lives for this five years and then return. and it is not even sufficient that i return every break, because it is not the periods i look forward to, but the little day to day things that happen in my family, with my family.

i can’t turn the clock back now, i have already invested so much into doing this. how can i change things? my sister told me before i left to my undergrad in berkeley, that if you gotta do it, then you gotta do it. but at what cost? the cost of not being there for my family? of not being happy because i am not with my family?

5 years. suddenly i realize the length of it all.

30 min ago, this was pretty much what i wanted to write. But in the midst of attempting to blog on my andriod, i discovered a comment from a month ago, on an entry from a year ago. The question was, ‘to zi lin: why?’ the question stumped me, particularly because i had no idea what the post ‘trick gate’, which he commented on, was about! After much laborious searching, the answer i turned up was unsatisfying, for all it said was ‘zi lin has gone fishing is disappointed. Sigh.’ on feb, 2009. I had no idea how to answer that question, and i had completely no idea what i myself was even referring to!

I flipped through a couple of entries close by, rummaged my brain, yet all these failed to turn up any clues. I was distressed! If my blog was meant to be a collection of memories, how would this particular piece be of any significance whatsoever? There was no memory linked to this entry, no clues to even begin the retrieval process. Within a short span of 5 min i was resigned to the fact that the entry had became a useless post in this flood of zilin has gone fishing.

What, then, was the role of zilin has gone fishing? If it was a place of catharsis, why should it have been published? If it was a place of public catharsis, should i have been disappointed that no one responded until this mystery commenter did one year later?

I had meant it as a place if recollection and ratiocination, but i guess zi lin has gone fishing had become a monster!

Now I really hope that comment was no spam.

getting a $255 parking ticket for stopping in a bus stop zone certainly made me feel that i have entered the adult world; the idea of having to give up so much money to maintain the order of society, and not being let off only because you know it was a innocent mistake. thinking back, i realized that i have only spent so much money on myself once: a $300 on a psp after months of work at pathlight, and that was only once in my lifetime. in comparison, $255 to be given to the US government for something as simple as stopping in a bus stop zone is definitely somewhat painful to me.

this incident has been a jarring experience, not only in the sum of money, but also in terms of realizing how my friends look upon the same situation and in some sense, the morality and principles involved in the situation.

in many aspects, interacting with my friends over the issue of the parking ticket reminded me of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, though i cannot exactly pinpoint which stages my friends or i am currently in, but certainly i can feel that there are differences in our perspectives. however, i cannot be sure if they are really stages in the development, or merely different ways of looking at the world.

what is punishment? being asked this question, the answer seems to be relatively simple; certainly it is a consequences that we must face for doing something wrong. but is the answer really that simple? in some sense, i guess i am asking if there is a causal relationship between a wrong action, and a punishment? i would think there is not, unless we are thinking about karma or some sort of divine intervention, which i think would be too deep and off-tangent in this discussion. in my strangely confused mind, i believe that the relationship shared between a wrong action and a punishment is that of human creation. but to what purpose? clearly, we punish because we do not want the bad behavior to be repeated. thus, punishment is not an end — it is a means to an end. i would find it hard to believe that others would think punishment should naturally follow bad behavior without a reason.”you deserve to be punished for your bad behavior” – but why? only because punishment deters you from repeating that bad behavior. the only connecting factor is that punishment is a means to the end that we want: reduction in bad behavior. on the flip side, we can just as easily say “you deserve to be given $5 for your bad behavior” – and that does not make sense, because giving $5 does not reduce the person’s bad behavior. thus, punishment is only given because it serves the purpose of deterrence.

but this is certainly not a common concept to everyone. in psychology, we learn that there are people who are extremely high in their belief in a just world, i.e. one believes that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. so in this world view, i guess it is possible that one can take punishment as an end, it merely happens because we have been bad. but i would certainly not endorse this world view — i do not see it as a productive one, how do we choose to act then? we can choose to be good, because we do not want to face the “bad things”, but if so — then we must believe that punishment is a deterrent as well.

that brings me to my main question – if we have learnt our lesson, and understand the reasons behind a specific rule/law, and because of that, know that we are not to repeat the bad behavior, should we then still be punished? the end is achieved, should the means still be applied?

i know that this stand brings up all sorts of problems: how do we know that the person really learnt his lesson, is the lesson really well-learnt, can we really implement the law on a case-by-case basis etc. but i am asking this question on a personal basis. if you have learnt the lesson, and you have understood the essential reasons behind the law, and you have decided that you must never repeat the same mistake, should you still be punished?

the law is there, with reasons to justify each specific rule, but none of this reasons, i believe, is simply that the law should be followed. the law is not there just to be followed. the law is there to tell us what to do, BECAUSE of this reason and that reason, and it is not there only to be followed.

i think this conundrum is the main reason why i have trouble convincing myself that i should pay the $255 parking ticket. being one of the many members in a society, certainly i must follow the laws, and the law clearly states that i will be punished for violating this rule. but if i know why i must follow the law, and if i know why i should not repeat the behavior (which is NOT so that i won’t get another parking ticket), is the punishment then still necessary?

the convenience of running an efficient society certainly seems to be the only reason why i should be paying up — because no one can spare the time to understand and be convinced that the person in the wrong has already reached the desired end, without using the means.

Am I not pretty enough?
Is my heart too broken?
Do I cry too much?
Am I too outspoken?
Don’t I make you laugh?
Should I try it harder?
Why do you see right through me?

I live, I breathe, I let it rain on me,
I sleep, I wake, I try hard not to break,
I crave, I love, I’ve waited long enough,
I try as hard as I can.

Am I not pretty enough?
Is my heart too broken?
Do I cry too much?
Am I too outspoken?
Don’t I make you laugh?
Should I try it harder?
Why do you see right through me?

I laugh, I feel, I make believe it’s real,
I fall, I freeze, I pray down on my knees,
I hope, I stand, I take it like a man,
I try as hard as I can.

Am I not pretty enough?
Is my heart too broken?
Do I cry too much?
Am I too outspoken?
Don’t I make you laugh?
Should I try it harder?
Why do you see right through me?

Why do you see, why do you see, why do you see right through me?