Christmas Special 2005. Amidst the Falling Snow

Remember your first encounter amidst the falling snow? Snow absorbs sound, so when it falls, everything is enveloped in a blanket of silence. I have been thinking a lot about moments lately; how a single moment changes the course of everything. What do you remember in that one moment when you see the snow falling from the heavens? Some people only remember the bitter cold, but others remember that one moment of wonder, before that feeling of wonder eventually wears off. That is characteristic of moments – they never last long enough.

I didn’t make it for a Christmas Special last year (I made it for the Thanksgiving Special instead) and I felt it is time to create a Christmas Special for all the awesome readers out there! You know who you are… The theme for this Christmas Special is “moment”. Why? For it is not everyday you see Yoruki, Miles, Joan, Junko, Machiko and Saru-Ji celebrating one joyous moment together. The thing I love so much about Christmas is that people are generally more genial during Christmas; people are in the mood to give and share. Similarly, the characters in SKOOKUM! briefly forget all the shit they gotten themselves in and chooses to get together to celebrate Christmas.

As we are lost in the wonder of Christmas, we should at the same time consider all the graces we have received in the throughout this year. I am certain that we did not get everything we hoped for, but we should not lose sight of the things that were actually bestowed upon us that were denied from others. I have been meeting a lot of people all over the world lately, and the stories I heard were always somewhat similar, people gained something and they lost something at the same time. It is true however that some people gained more than others, but oh well, we only have ourselves to blame if we are not as cunning, scheming and malicious as the other guy. I learnt that while people respect you for being good, it never truly pays to be good; unless of course, in the afterlife.

I really hope you guys dig the Christmas Special, and prepare yourselves as SKOOKUM! enters its Second year in the running. Actually, it hasn’t really been a FULL year, considering all the time I was late for updates as well as the technical difficulties we faced which put us in a hiatus. I wanna promise a more vigorous SKOOKUM! come 2006, and I hope ALL of you stay tuned to the events that are about to unfold.

Happy Holidays!

104th Street. For You Grandma

My grandma passed away last week.

She was 76.

I was generally distressed over her passing for I loved her dearly. However, in comparison to my Dad’s passing, I felt that I could handle my grandma’s passing better. As they say, the first cut is the deepest. I was glad that my grandma passed away rather peacefully, and that my mum and her siblings (my uncles and aunts) were around when she left this world for a better world.

It is never easy to handle a death of family, the trauma and the painful thought of never seeing that person again. Everyone was telling me that I should not feel too sad for my grandma, for after all, she did live to ripe old age, and that it would in fact be more painful for her to continue living and suffering the pain of her illness. I understand their logic perfectly, and I know that that is the truth, but still, how can I come to terms with the fact that the person is no longer there? That the person no longer exists physically in your immediate surroundings?

It is never an easy thing. As I helped out at my grandma’s wake I pondered often about the very fragility of life; with our very mortality. Our entire life seems to be dictated by moments. One moment someone’s there, the next the person’s gone. There are time moments change everything, and out of a sudden you’re faced with an entirely new situation in which you must come to terms with… Maybe that’s why we need religion, to BELIEVE that there is always more to life. Even so, religion does not always provided answers to everything, at least that’s what I feel.

Still, it is the looking forward to something better that keeps religion alive. As Douglas Adams in his book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” writes, the one thing that makes life pleasant is having something to look forward to. Unless you’re Virginia Woolf who believes that there is no afterlife and that death is the ultimate end, then you either got to make the very, very best out of your life or end up bitter and miserable. Questions remain, and nothing is answered. Probably that’s why we need philosophers.

I love you grandma. And I’ll Miss you so.

Just When You Thought New Zealand Sheeps were Great

Be thankful you're seeing only ONE doing it. Wait till you see all 3 million of them doing it. It's Raining Crap Man! It's raining crap!

A Dream Date Gone Terribly Wrong

Here's one lady you WON'T want to date. No Kissing. No Oral. No Anal. Just plain staring.

103rd Street. In The Mood For Luxury

I was reading a special edition of Time Magazine’s Style and Design for Winter 2005, which is incidentally not about what’s up in the world of fashion and design, but it is really about the best products to get and give for Christmas this year. The only problem apparently is that all of the products featured in the magazine are LUXURIOUS goods, which means you can forget about getting any of the featured items in the magazine if you are not willing to part with $5,000 or more.

The Style and Design magazine if anything, offers a perspective of what it means to live luxuriously. Clearly, what is meant my luxurious has changed over the years. Currently, as Fendi’s CEO Michael Burke notes, luxurious today doesn’t mean being the biggest, it’s about being “intimate and unique”. Luxury is therefore, able to own something that says a lot about you, and at the same time gives you a mark sense of distinction that few (or none at all) share. More inescapably, luxury is a mark of wealth; luxury is what you get when you are rich.

The Style and Design Magazine therefore performs an additional function, it makes people who are not exactly really, really rich to aspire towards what it means to live the life of the rich, to live the life of luxury. People feel compelled to get the goods featured in the magazine because they feel that by getting it, they are much closer towards living life luxuriously. The product has moved from being a product of desire, it has become a product that determines a lifestyle, notably, the lifestyle of the bourgeois class.

There is nothing wrong with the bourgeois way of life, in fact all of us are in one way or the other living the bourgeois life! Reading literature, sipping coffee in cafés, attending functions and conventions – all these are a mark of a good life, and that is exactly the mantra of the bourgeoisie, to live a good life. Problems only occur when people aspire too desperately for a bourgeois lifestyle, and they begin to bend laws just so that they could taste luxury. These people become the thieves, the robbers and the deviants of our society. These people are not monsters, on the contrary, they are products of the society; the same society that teaches people to live life luxuriously.

We recognize what it means to live luxuriously, but what’s crucial at this point is that we too know when to step back and look at it perceptively, that even though what we see in the magazine is desirable, it is not something that we should enslave ourselves for. Is having really awesome cell phones, handbags and watches the ONLY way in which we can determine luxury? In that case, everything is material, and the root of human happiness is material goods. Somewhere deep in ourselves we know that is not true. Sure, the material stuff is important, I am not going to deny that, but that is, and should not be the sole importance of our life. Very simply, what is the point of getting a Vertu cell phone worth $8,600 if there is NO ONE you can talk over the phone with? As we look deeper, the luxury goods only mean something if there are special people you can really share it with.