Could this post be any later? Well, yes and no, but for the purposes of this entry, the answer you are looking for is “No.” A few people wondered what had happened to me and don’t all people assume the worst when attempting to answer an absence? Hmmm, plenty to document and so little time as always. Where to start?

The corporate Christmas party was on a Friday night (three Fridays ago). Yes, you read that correctly. Christmas party. I thought the company was moving offices over Christmas so they had to delay the party (by a month!), but I heard that it’s actually a traditional thing (It’s just as well, because the locations they consider to host the party are seriously pricey around Christmas and New Year’s). The theme this year was “1950’s Rat Pack” so nearly all the guys were kitted out in black suits, white shirts, straight black ties and hats. I hadn’t been to a themed dinner/dance function for yonks, so there was going to be much fun to be dished out. Add free beer and wine with a room full of office folk and you’re going to have yourself a merry little Christmas (even if it is in January). Office workers are strange social creatures as it is, but add copious amounts of alcohol and they do act stranger. Seeing colleagues letting their hair down and shaking their limbs on the dance floor is always a fun sight, but the best part is seeing the serious faces from the upper hierarchical echelons turning their frowns upside down, showing anyone who cared to watch the reason why they never dance whilst sober. The day ended with a bit of difficulty because Sav had invited one of the guys and his friend to crash over at our place. No, that wasn’t the real problem. People crashing over is not a problem at all, as long as there’s enough space. It’s a normal point of courtesy too, provided the crasher doesn’t idolise Jack the Ripper or believe Ed Gein was the most underrated “professional” of his time. The real problem that night was getting the two drunkards home with my only help being a fairly tipsy Sav. One of the drunks was staggering around with his eyes half closed, looking like he was going to do an all too literal open-mouthed rendition of Yakkety Yak (emphasis on “Yak”) any moment and the other was babbling on about how he had to catch a train to London at four in the morning. Four in the morning! We took a while to decide on the best course of action, which allowed time for passers-by to enquire about why we were looking like extras from a Dick Tracy cartoon. We eventually got a plan together and headed out to find a taxi rank.

The levels of human and paper litter in the streets at this time are staggering. It’s like for a few hours of the early morning every weekend the streets are turned into a landfill for take-away boxes and expired drinkers queuing for their ride home, and as you might have known, taxi drivers are at their busiest in the city hot-spots after the clubs chuck people out into the street. This meant that drunkard #1 had to stand around for a while till our turn at the front of the queue. This would have been an easy feat for him if it wasn’t for the fact that his centre of gravity was constantly teleporting around his body. He also had his eyes closed, which was just as well because I think it would have confused him even more to see the world as a Gaussian blur. The visual signals his brain was receiving would surely have helped him to believe that he was anywhere but where he was (i.e. Earth). I am not sure how much alcohol he consumed that night, but I am going to go with the theory that for every glass of alcohol ingested, his eyes closed by around half a millimeter. That would have been about right. Whilst holding him up straight and walking him to the taxi rank, I felt the tapping of hundreds of tiny fingers on my hat and looked up to notice the sudden beginnings of a Saturday morning early shower. Getting drunk people home sucks but getting drunk people home through the rain really sucks! I had previously heard stories about how inconvenient rain is when undertaking such a cumbersome task and used to shrug them off as embellished accounts, but having experienced it, I can assure you that it sucks the big one.

Drunkard #1 was getting wet and wanted to sit down but we wouldn’t let him because asides from completely soiling his suit, the chances were he would have inhaled a puddle. I was slightly worried because I’d never seen someone so wasted, yet still upright. He had so much alcohol coursing through his Scottish veins that I’m sure he would have still been over the legal drink-driving limit when he sashayed into work on Monday morning! We had to make haste, because as time passed by he progressively began to resemble someone who was losing an argument with gravity in an exponential fashion. Every time we stopped walking, he’d hunch over and try to take a seat right where he was standing. My tactic for now was to keep him awake and this was achieved by keeping him walking. This meant a lot of walking in circles on the spot and even though the taxi rank was under two hundred yards away, I must have made him walk a few hundred more. Anything to stop the pneumonia and rigor mortis kicking in.

Drunkard #2 seemed to be fairly with the programme. I figured his ability to string together coherent sentences was an indication of sobriety, but I was proven wrong when I asked him during the taxi ride who he had been calling on his mobile when we were outside. “I have no idea” was the best answer he could come up with, followed by the egads!-whap-my-forehead-inducing question, “Where are we again?” He was talking on the phone a lot and in one of his phone conversations inside the taxi I remember him mumbling “I don’t know where they’re taking me” and “I appear to be in some sort of vehicle.” It only occurred to me later that he could have been on the phone to his mother, giving her coronary palpitations from having her believe that her son had been drugged and kidnapped in a taxi by people with blurry faces.

Even though #2 was free-standing, he caused other problems, namely due to his uncanny resemblance to a young Justin Hawkins of The Darkness fame. His long curly hair and Hawkin-esque features meant that he could have easily passed for the rocker’s younger brother. This was supremely evident from the hordes of people approaching him in the street to shake his hand whilst he nodded agreeably in a drunken stupor. I would later find out that he had been mistaken for his near face-sake many a time; the best time being in recent memory when he was at a The Darkness gig. He got mobbed by guys who wanted to have their pictures taken with him and hoist him up, and girls who wanted their breasts signed before taking away a saliva sample. So, it didn’t help that Sav and I were dressed up like 1950’s henchmen, because our taking care of the two in turn helped dress up the illusion that we were their bodyguards. It also didn’t help that Sav was dividing his efforts evenly between helping getting the drunken twins into a cab and his newly uninhibited drunken stance at taking a shine to and greeting every single person that walked by in a skirt. Here was a guy who normally refuses eye contact with fanciful women, now miscast as the role of an inebriated poseur, capable of turning up the charm in the style of one particular Italian. “How you doin’?”

In short, we got them home and gathered the two in the kitchen. #1 was on his way to sleepy land, so we tried to get him up the stairs to Sav’s room. Of course, with his eyes closed he was hardly going to be able to negotiate our unfriendly staircase, so in the end, Sav had to carry him up the stairs, fireman style. I helped him up the stairs and we got the guy to sleep on the floor with a blanket. When we went downstairs to attend to #2, we found him missing. Whilst we were checking #1 for signs of breathing and putting him into a crude recovery position, #2 had made his way out the front door and was already at the end of the road. Sav made a dash out the door and down the road to try to find him and luckily found him not too far away, going in the opposite direction to his desired destination: the railway station. We got him back to the house and he was still speaking quite clearly so we explained to him that he wasn’t going to get on any trains till the following day. He explained his warmth at our hospitality and tried to get out of it, but it didn’t take long for him to give up and crash out on the floor in my room. He fell asleep immediately and it was a good thing he didn’t snore, otherwise I might have throttled him in my sleep. I’d tell the Police I was “sleep strangling” again. I’ve always wondered if that would hold up in court. ^_^

One of my childhood ambitions was to be an illustrator when I grew up (or at least when I was of an age eligible for inclusion on a payroll), so I am always delighted when I see certain innovative artworks that make me think, of both everything and nothing in particular at the same time; simple art that just makes me think. Last week, I lived vicariously through Kozy and Dan’s work because I realised that if I was ever in an illustrator’s shoes, I would not use my shoes to go running. I would sit at a table with my implements of creation poised in between my fingers and draw myself into another world.

Kozy and Dan are super cool because not only did they do the art for the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” single, they also show their influence from Asian culture and pop-culture, including my favourites, Hokusai and Hiroshige (a variation on the theme of Hokusai’s wave prints is shown above). There’s something particularly wonderful about the Japanese woodblock prints. It instills a calm in me that makes me believe there is more out there to the world and lights a fire inside of me, making me want to search out all that is beautiful around me.

The great waves depicted in Hokusai’s prints range from the torrid to the placid. They remind me of the things life can throw at you. The waves, to me, are like a metaphor for the things in life. They remind me of the waves that crash belligerently over you, enveloping you and carrying you along for a distance, and the other types of waves; those that splash benignly at your feet when you walk on the beach with your shoes dangling in your hands. There are waves of all magnitudes and a wave is very much like a situation or problem that comes careening towards you from the distance, often at a thundering pace like it was manned by an unearthly force. As these waves approach, you have to make a decision. Do you let them crush you or do you let them carry you away?

The other week it snowed! It wasn’t nearly enough and managed to give the town a single coating of the white stuff when what it really needed was three coats. It was cold enough too to make sense of walking around town wearing three coats, but I refrained. Even so, I garnered enough stares when my black coat became snow-bleached white as I ambled home through the misty descent of tiny dancers. It only snowed for about an hour and to this day, the great white has made no repeat appearances. I saw photos from further up north and even London (an hour away by car) had seemed to have been blessed with deep precipitation from the wands of all the snow faeries of the land. I knew that moving down to the south would minimise my chances of seeing snow, but I had no idea it was going to be this meager an offering. The snowfall here was disappointing, very much so like those uninspired travel books that don’t contain photographs. You know, the ones that tease your senses by telling you of a beauty that exists out there somewhere, but provide only a blank canvas for you. Painting a unique scene in one’s mind can be liberating, but it’s not always easy to make brush strokes with your mind’s hands when the brush is dry. I was glad to have been outside in the snow and to have been able to watch it as it fell like crystalline pennies from Heaven. I saw the snow fall lighter and lighter till the large snow machine in the sky decided to stop. And like with the disappointing travel books I’ve encountered in my life, in the same way, I was left with a sense of wanting more.

Every once in a while you encounter something that makes you step away from your shell for a moment to question the very thing that constitutes a miracle. I never really believed in them because I had always been a believer of coincidence and karma. I fell into this way of thinking due to the cynicism I harboured towards the mysteries of the world. A miracle could be defined in its simplest form as something that cannot be explained, but I always believed that everything can be explained. If you look hard enough, at the core of your search you should find the answer.

When I was a child, I always used to question the things around me. “How is right and wrong decided?” “Why do bad things happen to good people?” There was a phase when I believed that all people thought in the same way as me. That was what I thought the term “common sense” meant; a phrase used to describe the absolute commonality of people’s minds. I came to learn that this wasn’t true and that individual thought was the most precious thing to have and to find, especially if you find your own in another person. As I wistfully inscribe my thoughts toward what I feel constitutes a miracle, I am reminded of the old person I was once in control of. He was someone who used to believe that anything errant to the rules in life that we’ve come to accept could be explained by the things we’ve discovered and experienced in the past; explained by the disciplines of science. But what if something completely new comes along and challenges those thoughts you figured you were wasting your time mulling over? What if the impetus for your newfound optimism was a person? What if they knew all the words you have only ever formed in your head?

I used to feel choked by my own curiosity. The thoughts I had invested so much of my younger years in were at times dismissed as flotsam and jetsam and if I had let outside critiques get the better of me, I would have grown into a person different from the one you see today. Maybe if I had allowed that change to go ahead I might have turned out a better person, with less care for the things that appeared trivial in my altered eyes. I had always thought of the possibility of perhaps even just one person out there agreeing with my stance on life and the thoughts that fill it. The more convoluted one’s thoughts are, the more it creates kinks in what would otherwise be an occurrence of high probability. I never thought it would be possible to meet someone who could understand me better than I could understand myself sometimes; someone who uses the words I understand and at the same time also be able to speak to me with an emphatic but silent voice. Isn’t all we really want just someone who understands us and appreciates us for who we are? I had spent my life running, chasing someone whose silhouette matches my shadow. I thought it would have taken something that couldn’t be explained for me to be able to catch up with that person, but I realised it did happen to me. So by the same logic, what happened must have been a… hmmm. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I now believe in miracles.

These new feelings make you see the world with new eyes. Your senses morph the world into one more beautiful than you could ever have dreamed of. In fact, everything feels like a dream and you avoid the urge to pinch yourself because the disappearance of this new feeling would be inconceivable to your beating heart. In your new surroundings you also realise that you had lived your life all this time, unaware that you’d been doing so all along with a clenched heart. You only knew it was clenched the whole time before because now it has become unclenched, allowing you to experience the full intensity of the words that dance playfully in your mind and feel the softness of the cloud upon which you are perched. It it only then that you comprehend you’ve been believing all those things and had been living that way all for this single moment; this moment where you realise you are not alone in this world, and that you will never ever feel alone again.

In life, there is always a certain element of predestiny; of how things are meant to be and how things turn out a certain way if a certain path was followed. The concept of predestiny has always been a romantic notion for me, especially when exemplified by two perfectly complementary people finding each other in this short space of time that we call life. Every single day is filled with choices. When we arrive at a time where we have to make a decision, our life branches out from that point into many series of paths. Unfortunately, we can never really see where each path will lead and since we can only follow one path, we will naturally choose the path that seems best at the time. We never truly know where each path will lead or what new sets of decisions they will bring. Things happen at a given time for a given reason and they must happen this way so as not to upset the balance of all things. You may not always agree with what you are dealt, but you have to deal with it because these things must happen and must occur in a specific order. These things happen to you for a reason and you can call it karma or another hidden force with no name. We spend our lives looking for the reasons behind all the things that have happened to us and we find out the reasons why in time because by the abstract nature of things, time is the only thing that holds the answers. I’m stumbling right now to find the best words to accurately describe the scenes playing inside of my head. The only thing that comes to mind right now is a story my mother once told me about, which met me well when a variation popped up in the body of someone’s essay as I happened upon it some time ago. In Chinese folklore I’ve seen the concept of predestiny depicted as an invisible red thread that connects one to all the important people in one’s life, which over time shortens in length to bring those who are destined closer together. It’s a timeless allegory that I believe originated in Asia and each variation essentially tells the same story. It explains things as they could be and I will paraphrase it now as best as my memory will allow.

The world was never as populated as it is today. Everything starts from somewhere, or more accurately, everything starts from nothing. When the world was created, it was empty and at its beginning, there was an old man whose purpose was to create the souls of those who would populate the new earth. He was a potter by divine trade and would spend his days kneading clay, shaping it in his hands to create miniature figurines of men and women in pairs. Each pair was unique and this was symbolised by a thread that connected them together. After creating a figurine for each and every one of all the souls of the world, he passed each pair through his hands, severing their threads. As single entities, they were then sent to populate the earth to spend their whole lives trying to find the one they were once connected to. It is suggested that this is the purpose of life; to search for and find that other person.

It is true that some things are predestined. You cannot change things like the family you were born into or who you will encounter along the way on your journey. These things are out of your hands, but you have to remember that you will always have the freedom to appreciate. With this freedom, you have a choice to either fortify the connection you have with someone else, or let selfishness and neglect fray and erode away the fibres of your connection. When you make that connection with someone, everything feels right and for a moment you defy the unknown by being able to see what the future will hold for you. This connection is what makes you free in life and it’s made way for many different terms that all mean the same; the most popular in the west being “soul mates.”

I learned recently that you just cannot give up hope in finding that other person who is right for you; someone who complements you; someone who connects with you so deeply that you feel it resonating through every cell in your body. Your thoughts become intertwined and synchronised to the beat of a single heart, and you will know you’ve met them before from the thread that binds you together once again.