How time flies. On the 21st of this month I shall have been with Cognitive Edge for 3 months. This new year promises to be busy and interesting, what with projects at work, a new school term on the way and a new housing lease as well.

New year, new beginnings, new blog.

It's been a while since I've written or even blogged but as I was telling my colleague Angelina yesterday at lunch, getting back into the 'writing groove' is one of my goals in 2010.

While I consider blogging to be more journalling than actual writing (as in a formal essay or article), I think it is a very good form of discipline.

I remember reading that Yeats, in his younger days, wrote some verse every day whether he felt like it or not. Now obviously I won't be doing that as verse is quite different from blogging, but the idea is there. Practice hones and - saying this tongue in cheek here - no doubt such practice will come in handy during term papers.

In the meantime you might expect to find ramblings about literature (bought a volume of Shakespeare and one of Donne on New Year's Day itself to kickstart my re-reading resolution) interspersed with the occasional photoblog of Singapore's cityscape, or just pieces about work and life in general.

Happy 2010, everyone. May the Year of the Tiger be a ferociously-successful one.

The world is harsh, cruel, cold, unforgiving - and yet from time to time small, random acts of kindness and graciousness can brighten up the entire day.

Manners - whether civility, graciousness, courtliness - are largely ignored, lost or scoffed at in this modern age, so much so that what should be default has become a rarity. Opening doors, carrying heavy bags, helping to carry a stroller up steps, walking on the outer side of the pavement.

Saying please and thank you to all and sundry, from bellboy to waitress. Noticing and anticipating. Being thoughtful. Putting others ahead of self.

Have you made the world a little less cold today?

Note: Scott Schuman, author of The Sartorialist, shared his desire to be a "more graceful man for my graceful woman". Wonderfully inspiring and something I want to emulate - not to any particular person but to the world at large.

Last night my Twitterverse and even LJ friends list were abuzz with this video of a troupe of 7 year-old girls performing a dance to Beyonce's Single Ladies.

Now firstly I am no great fan of R&B music; it is mostly a cesspit of unimaginative lyrics and beats and even melodies, tired and rehashed, the only thing that saves the genre is slick dance moves coupled with sexy, skimpy outfits. Note I put 'sexy' and 'skimpy' together, not because they necessarily go hand in hand but because in this case it does. I understand that. Glamour sells. Sex sells.

But such sexuality projected by 7 year-old girls, both in dressing and moves? My stomach churned. I couldn't watch the video for long, not the least because the song itself is irritating and I'd rather subject myself to thrash metal.

Some might say I have no right to comment as I am clearly not the mother of any of those girls, and I am not, but surely as an adult and a member of society I am permitted to air my views about these parents allowing their daughters to essentially dress and dance like whores. What does this say about this world we live in, where girls as young as 7 are allowed by their parents to look and move like adults? This rapid sexualisation, indicative of modern society, cannot bode well for humanity as a whole. There is a time and place for everything - permitting girls of 7 to develop and flaunt their bodies and sexuality as wares on a stage is not it.

I don't think I am conservative, merely desirous of propriety. I don't see their dancing, technically good as it is, as 'artistic expression'. Perhaps if they were a decade older, yes, I'd say they have sexy moves. But they are not, and it sickens me.

If there is a promise I have made myself, it is not to make value judgments on other cultures and customs that seem barbaric or heinous. Dave's recent post about Legitimate cultural difference or barbaric rite provided some very good heuristics - namely the one about physical mutilation of a child being wrong.

Now I don't see how the culturally-sanctioned practice of female foeticide in both India and China is any less worse than physical mutilation of a child, so I make no apologies for my trenchant castigation (and reneging this once on my promise). In this instance it is India that caught my attention, thanks (somewhat reluctantly) to a friend who pointed me to this article about India's Missing Girls in the Guardian and an eponymous documentary on Youtube, which I refused to watch, saying it would depress not enrich me.

In this modern world it is easy for a young person to become cynical and jaded about many things, this concept of 'love' amongst them. Yet every now and then a heartwarming story will appear out of nowhere to strike a blow against that fortress of cynicism and guardedness and nearly, very nearly, has one believing that things can change for the better.

This week brought a double blow to my fortress at least. First Prop 8 in California was ruled unconstitutional by a Judge Vaughn Walker and the second is an article by Lisa Ruth Brunner published in the New York Times' Modern Love column. (My thanks to Dorothy Snarker for highlighting it in her blog.)

Brunner makes no bones about the fact that the object of her desire and ultimately love was also a girl, and how instead of following a boy wherever he went she ended up following a girl instead.

We all have that first love. You know the one. The one who either brings a bittersweet smile to your lips after many years or a sweet smile of reminiscence when you recall that laugh, that voice, that look. The one you will always remember and perhaps, even, write about. The one you will always, in some way, love.

Certain parts of the world have come far. While the plague of female foeticide and infanticide still ravages vast lands, we have the heartening progress, the gradual shift away from hetero-normativity, an increasing tolerance of diversity. For those fortunate enough to be recipients of that progress, revel in it and pray that one day it will be the same in other parts of the world.

Meanwhile, I will go back to re-reading Brunner's article, and after having snooped around Google to find out who the object of her affection was, I expect it will be interesting.

Image from Art & Perception

My son, let not them depart from thine eyes: keep sound wisdom and discretion: So shall they be life unto thy soul, and grace to thy neck. - Proverbs 3.21-22

A post on my Livejournal friends list set me thinking. The post in question had to do with how best to teach one's offspring the art of discernment, and some of the suggestions given were pretty much what I expected from a Christian-centric community.

Where five years ago this article would have made me cry out in rage, now I simply shake my head and wonder what's next where this country's society is concerned.

Work life has a rhythm similar to the ebb and flow of the seas, and as far as its likeness to a complex system is concerned no one week is the same as the one that went before it.

This week was a very busy one indeed; Dave was in town for KM Asia and the slew of meetings and engagements that follow his presence as a matter of course. What you get when you spend two consecutive days with Dave is discourse simultaneously stimulating and dynamic (or spasmodic, if you happen not to cope well with rapidly shifting thought patterns and changing of topics). German and Italian and English operas, Mozart, Beethoven, Baroque, Handel, humanities, Shakespeare, politics, current affairs and of course the weather, no conversation is complete without talk of the weather.

One of the things I lamented about and will always lament about until I move away is the lack of proper, and I do mean proper culture here. No Baroque repertoire, no operatic repertoire, no (proper) theatre, no (proper) rugby to name a few. It says a lot about a culture's underlying beliefs that the humanities are not promoted at best and derided at worst. A child who wishes to read Anthropology, Divinity, Theology or Classics has to go overseas to do it. That's the keen irony, alienating and essentially kicking out one's own. I can't see that benefiting any society.

I'm convinced I was born into the right era but at the wrong place, but at least the latter can be easily fixed. I work towards the day when I could, in himself's words, have to be in London and easily look up any number of similarly-interested parties willing to accompany me to the opera that very night.

The day such a paradigm shift happens here is the day I know I'd have died and gone to Heaven. That might just be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I don't know that I really care...