Reminiscing Adelaide

Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia. This is the place where I spent three and half years of my idling and just-brush-it-away life in. The first day I arrived in Adelaide, it was in the summer of 2004. It was a breezy 24 Celcius at 7 o’clock in the morning. I was greeted by a foreign ‘G’day Mate’ accent in which I had no idea what it was back then. A few days back, a very good friend of mine shared pictures of Adelaide with me which made me reminisce the times back then. It was really a good feeling being there.















A freezing 11 Celcius at the Strawberry Farm in Hahndorf, German settlement - Adelaide
















Fairies in the garden living in straw houses in Hahndorf - Adelaide
















A breezy summer morning - along the tramway in Victor Harbor - Adelaide



















An antiquated photography shop in Hahndorf - Adelaide
















Newsstand along Rundle Mall, Adelaide's busiest street - The Advertiser being Australia's biggest daily
















Nightview of apartments facing the seaside at Glenelg Beach - Adelaide


















Free Shuttle bus service, 99B & 99C along King William's Street - Adelaide


















German leathersmith in Hahndorf - Adelaide





















Charlie's Shack famous Vietnamese beef noodle in Chinatown - Adelaide

Challenging the Impossibilities of Life

People are faced with self-defined impossibilities in life everyday. Disability is one road-block which often deters human beings from doing normal everyday tasks, let alone achieve something significant.

One extraordinary human being breaks the belief. Kevin Connolly, a 22-year-old Montana native is born without legs. He often gets stunned looks from the world as he propelled himself with his hands around on a skateboard. Despite his disability, he is an exceptional photographer who traveled around the world shooting images of people staring at him. To date, he has crossed boundaries across 15 countries and has gathered 32,728 priceless images. In order not to startle people, he places his camera near his hips and looks away from them while shooting their pictures. The quality of the pictures taken can be well-assured as Connolly has memorized frame shots even without looking at the targets. It took him 12 years to be able to completely memorize frame shots according to the positions of passer-bys. Direct sunlight is another deterrence for Connolly as he needs to position his camera in an upward 45 degree to capture those images. Often enough, it compromises the quality of the pictures taken. He overcomes this by looking for suitable spots such as areas with shades to photograph passer-bys. In addition, his digital SLR with 20x zooming ability eliminates all worries of not being to capture an image should it be too far from its perfect spot.

Recently, Connolly has successfully completed ‘The Rolling Exhibition” where his photos are displayed at the Kennedy Center, Washington DC for people to understand his unique work. The term “Rolling Exhibition” stemmed from the fact that Connolly endeavored around ‘rolling’ on a skateboard while taking pictures of curious on-lookers. It is indeed awe-inspiring for a disabled person to achieve such great accomplishments. When asked for his formula for success, Connolly humbly quoted two words, “willpower” and “determination”.

It is very easy for people to give in to life’s challenges but if there is one thing Connolly has taught us, it is to eliminate our self-defined constraints. Instead we should position our thoughts towards challenging the impossibilities in life in order to attain significant achievements. As Connolly put it, having a strong willpower to get things done coupled with absolute determination is the key towards achieving great results in life. We should rise above the ordinaries and make a mark for ourselves starting from now on.

Cigarettes

[July 18th 12:30 a.m.]

Is there a moment in your life where those cancer-sticks suddenly become your best buddies? I question the logic behind it although the reason itself is already crystal-clear to me. At those times where work is a bitch, the disgruntled employee takes a puff, maybe two. A prostitute takes a puff after a session of serving those horny bastards. The chick with a curvy ass outside a mall puffed to exemplify her upper-society status. Dozens of bald accountants puff after cracking their heads crunching those god-damned numbers. That’s me, without the bald part though. I was actually embarking on a quitting program days ago. Health surprisingly became a concern to me. Breathing became easier too after cutting down. Surprisingly as I was feeling at my lowest tonight, the program was tossed to the back of mind and like those addicts above, reaching out for the stick was all I cared for. It was 11 p.m. and I had just finished my work. Without her SMS today, I was again lost in translation. The distance is killing me, again. Without any hope or agenda, I reached for my stick one after another straight after I stepped out from the office. As the wisemen said once, ‘there is always something to be gained, no matter how hopeless the situation is’. Although I felt lousy most of the times nowadays, I am more inclined towards writing a short passage everyday. It is something I look forward to after a long day of work, no SMS, diminished caring and you name it. Promises to call accompanied by delayed callings boosts my insecurity towards this relationship. I just had another 5 sticks in a chain. Quitting is only the beginning…

THE IDEAL WORKPLACE POLICY IN IBM

I was at the lift with my colleague / good friend going down to get a cigarette. The work stress is seriously burning us from inside-out and it propelled us to come up with a new set of guidelines for our accounting department. It had come to both our attention that our Treasurer had just left the department and I should be taking over to make a major reorganization.

1) Ashtrays should be placed on every workstation and smoking should be made compulsory.
2) Cigarette expenses are claimable, up to two large packs per day.
3) Liquor will be allowed once every fortnight in the office.
4) Liquor expenses are also claimable, for the fortnight only though.
5) Time-off should not be restricted to quarter-closing only. Instead an employee should have 4 days of time-offs per month.
6) Vending machines should be equipped with shots of tequila, vodka or brandy.
7) Music should be allowed during working hour, as long as it is kept to a minimal level.
8) Below knee-length skirts are strictly not allowed for female workers. Needless to say, turtlenecks are a no-no. The keyword to adhere to is skimpy, as much as possible.
9) Employees should have the authority to delegate their work to managers, especially when it is related to clearing open items.
10) Last but not least, stop freezing http://www.friendster.com/ god damn it!

WHAT IF YOU HAD A GUN?

[July 16th 2008 – 10 p.m.]

It’s amazing how human mood can change drastically in just a couple of hours. Moments after showering with cold splashing water down on my face, I felt a resurge of life, as if something divine has been breathed inside me. A bit of exaggeration maybe, for it wasn’t ‘that’ great after all. But nevertheless I did feel better after her phone call and ‘some’ activity. While I was showering, I knew I was at the bottom of the abyss as energy began to drain out of every possible openings of my body. I could feel it flowing out from my fingers. It then started its course of dripping when a certain amount had been drained dry. This was a feeling where you felt nothing above your eyes. Pupils began to contract. You feel your soul isolating itself from your body in a very slow manner. It was slow, but it was departing. The enthusiasm was faltering. The need to stay alive was wavering, to the point of diminishing. What if I had a gun? Why do people pull the trigger? Kurt Cobain, and many more followers. What does it guarantee? Does it bring you to another dimension where freedom from emotional distress of any kinds awaits? Will a combination of a perfect girlfriend with a perfect world free of miseries await on the other side? Let’s just say that the mystery surrounding committing suicide does not puzzle me as much as they did before when I was younger. Does anyone know ‘A Smile That Explodes’ by Joseph Arthur? Try listening to it and visualize my point above. Now that the mellow vibes are getting to me, I wouldn’t mind trying…

DISTANCE: DOES IT EVER WORK?

[July 16th 2008 – 9 p.m.]

Continuing from the previous writing, here I am nearing the cliff of a relapse again. The distance between us sunk my heart to the bottom of the abyss, yet again. Sometimes I wonder if the mellow vibes I had been channeling my ears to contributed partly to this sorrow. The thought of support groups surfaced on my mind these few days. It came after years of watching Western movies, where support groups are the norm in their society. The thought of being able to express out my emotions daily, well mostly the negative ones anyway, brought partial relief and consolation to me. At least, it may serve to patch up the invisible wounds inflicted upon me by myself all these years. I was traveling through my condominium’s lift where a girl stood beside me. For a moment, I tried to associate my plight with hers, having the assumption that she was a lonestar too just like I am. It did bring a millisecond of relief to my depressed self until the lift door opened. Her boyfriend was there waiting for her with a box of Domino’s pizza. There they were, a pair of lovebirds swinging hands happily marching towards their unit. Appetite was not my concern tonight. Having had just a plate of fried rice during lunch, I felt absolutely no sense of hunger. Eva Cassidy was playing before, but then suddenly ’30 Seconds to Mars – The Kill’ caught my eye in the folder I was rummaging through. Well, I thought maybe I needed rock. And suddenly the thought of popping those pills appeared again in my confused state of mind. There is a battle ensuing from within, on whether to yet again resort to such temporary measures. Damien Rice once said ‘this has got to die, this has got to stop’. I had better go for a shower now and forget about the pills.

Contradiction That Was Quite Certain

[July 14th 2008 – 12 a.m.]

I was alone in TGV watching Hancock. People were all either twins, triplets or quadruplets. I was alone there, managed to pinpoint a N11 out of the vast cinema. The seat was perfect, for no one was beside me, right or left. It occurred to me that most people are incapable of handling the idea of watching a movie alone. Anyone caught doing that would be stamped with labels ranging from a lonestar to a depressive, or even worse an anti-social bastard. Yet I decided against all the labeling, kept my composure and sank into my seat N11. Being there alone enabled my mind to levitate across numerous dimensions, beyond the prevalent one in which we are all trapped in everyday. It made me realize a few portentous thoughts about life. That some people like me are destined to lead a solitary life. Companionship of any kind has always failed to satisfy my innermost desire to own something or someone. Unfortunately, companionship in the form of friends will never satisfy this kind of desire. There is always an empty sphere waiting to be filled. Can one person truly understand another person completely? Couples? I doubt so. And so the linkage from the first thought led me to contemplate that an individual must not be feeling-dependent on another individual in any way. In my lexicon of love, speaking from previous experiences, lovebirds have every right to be feeling-dependent on each other. Passion is brought out that way. Any attempt to restrain the dependency with excuses such as ‘nothing is certain in this world’, ‘even married couples get divorced’, and ‘friends are there for life whereas lovers come and go’ will only make a relationship bureaucratic. Love is a process where feelings must be fully extracted from both parties for it to be fulfilling. Lovers should be fully feeling-dependent on each other to be able to completely garner the nectars of love.