The Enlightenment

I kind of intentionally overslept myself and missed 10am service yesterday. Well, it was one of the occasional church combined services, and hence there wasn't any youth service or cell group matters. Haven't had the experience of sleeping in late on a sunday morning for a long time, so yesterday was a good excuse to skive. It was a good break from school work and church though, got to spend time with my family, as we had lunch and then head off to visit my maternal grandma at Bethany Hospice in choa chu kang. She had a stroke during christmas eve last year, but her condition is much better now. I think the stroke affected her speech abilities but she can move her limbs around. My mom's 7-8 siblings have been taking turns to visit her everyday, but yesterday everyone turned up at the hospice to celebrate CNY. My cousins weren't there though, except for the younger ones. So as usual, I would try to make sense of whatever hokkien conversations that were flying through my ears, and make small talk with my younger cousins.

So anyway, it was a good break from school work. I was getting a bit of an anxiety attack over the weekend for my seemingly lack of inspiration/motivation to write my thesis. Badly needed a friend to bounce some ideas on IR theories, but my only good friend who is good with IR and theories and insist that I have realist tendencies, is on exchange. Sigh... Well, at least now I'm quite satisfied with the first 2 pages of my thesis, after many days of writing and rewriting. A good intro probably makes it easier for me to blast my way through the remaining 40 pages or so.

Anyway, the photo above was taken in Berlin. I think it was part of Germany's way to restore some sort of German pride in their own history. What I learnt back then from the folks in the pubs, was that the germans were never at ease with themselves after WW2. It seems that there was a deep national psychosis that nothing really good came out of German history. It is funny and scary that 4 years of hypernationalism can kill a country's nationalism for a good 60 years. So Berlin had this idea of restoring German pride by putting up a series of exhibitions/festivals to remind themselves of their great intellectual and cultural history during the Enlightement.

I kind of like that display of German philosophers. Maybe I identify myself with that bit of German history/struggle. I know it is a bit slow, but my new year resolution has only began to crystalized in the last month or so. Well, besides trying to keep those vague resolutions that I made way back in dec 05, I think I just want to receive as much knowledge from books, and wisdom from God in the next 1 year or so. I think when you turn a quarter of a century, you start to realize that you are slowly reaching a threshold in understanding yourself and the world. Maybe you make incremental changes to the way you think, but by and large, your worldview is more or less fixed. So if the government is bad, means it is bad. If the world is a tough place, it is a tough place. It will be rare for any paradigmatic shifts in your worldview unless the Creator comes in and shakes your brain.

Yeah, so I hope 07 and 08 will be fruitful years to learn more stuff, a new language, a new philosophy, a new worldview. Maybe I'll work after that, or maybe I'll really do phd. But for now, it is time to continue on my thesis adventure. And I just realized I've popped all the 8 squishy siew mai tarts after typing this blog. No side effects yet.. ha.