Inquisited.com

So a lot has happened over the course of the past few months. Events that transpired included (but were by no means limited to): insomnia, heartbreak, insomnia, taking the GRE immediately after insomnia, getting drunk, and writing a song. Yes, in that order. Believe it or not, there actually is a name for the malady that I was afflicted with: oneitis.

Oneitis is something that happens when you meet someone you’re hopelessly attracted to. Somehow, you are certain that said person is “the one” (hence the origin of the term) and would do virtually anything to win him or her over. The subject of your affections becomes the focal point of your life: you lose your wit in front of her, you get jittery when she doesn’t reply to your messages, you feel compelled to check her facebook profile several times a day, ambiguous statements are taken as massive hints of her desire to be with you and so on. Because this is a one-way energy transfer, oneitis is both emotionally and mentally draining. Needless to say, it sucks.

In my case, I couldn’t let her (lets just call her Layla) go for the longest time in spite of some rather glaring personality flaws. It didn’t matter, so long as she liked me I was willing to adapt and compromise. Some might call it unrequited love. Others, stupidity. There’s a thin line always. I can’t say exactly what it was that ultimately cured me of oneitis. There isn’t a definitive incident where I can point to with certainty and say “that’s what made me stop liking her”, but there were a series of events - inconsiderate decisions (understatement) on her part - that made me feel like shit. That was the dealbreaker.

Oneitis isn’t something that can be rationalized. You can have 5 buddies patting you on the shoulder over a jug of beer telling you how she isn’t worth it but it won’t do any good. You have to feel it.

And that’s the best advice I can give to people suffering from oneitis. You have to convince yourself emotionally that you’re better off without that person. Get out of the house and meet other human beings. Specifically, members of the opposite sex. Because after you met enough wonderful people you start wondering what was so special about that one unrequited love in the first place. A serious conversation with your oneitis goes a long way, too. Sometimes, “lets just be friends” won’t cut it. Because as long as there’s still a glimmer of hope there’s always the chance that your festering chronic oneitis will become a full-blown infection again. People generally don’t want to feel that they are “bad” because they rejected you, so you’ll just have to do the dirty work yourself. Let it go because its not going to happen.

Be a man. Do the right thing.

As for me, I’ve suffered from months of oneitis with nothing to show for it. Well, actually that isn’t true. I do have my cheesy oneitis/Layla-inspired love song. At least that’s one in the bank for the band to perform.

P.S. Now that I think about it, “So long, Layla” doesn’t sound like a bad title for a new song. Make that 2 originals.

Got this in the mail from a friend today; purportedly actual posting on a dating site’s forum — and an actual reply. Not technically a joke, I suppose, but good stuff nonetheless. Check it out!

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What am I doing wrong?

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25-year-old girl. I’m articulate and classy. I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make $500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around $200-250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. $250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

Here are my questions specifically:

Where do you single rich men hang out? Give me specifics — bars, restaurants, gyms.

What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won’t hurt my feelings. Is there an age range I should be targeting (I’m 25)?

Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the upper east side so plain? I’ve seen really ‘plain jane’ boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I’ve seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the east village. What’s the story there?

Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows — lawyer, investment banker, doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out? Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?

How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE ONLY!

Please hold your insults — I’m putting myself out there in an honest way. Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I’m being up front about it. I wouldn’t be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn’t able to match them — in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and hearth.

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The Reply

Dear Wrong:

I read your posting with great interest and have thought meaningfully about your dilemma. I offer the following analysis of your predicament. Firstly, I’m not wasting your time, I qualify as a guy who fits your bill; that is I make more than $500K per year. That said here’s how I see it:

Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub, your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity. In fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain: you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35, stick a fork in you! So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold — hence the rub, marriage. It doesn’t make good business sense to “buy you” (which is what you’re asking) so I’d rather lease. In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It’s as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

Separately, I was taught early in my career about efficient markets. So, I wonder why a girl as “articulate, classy and spectacularly beautiful” as you has been unable to find your sugar daddy. I find it hard to believe that if you are as gorgeous as you say you are that the $500K hasn’t found you, if not only for a tryout.

By the way, you could always find a way to make your own money and then we wouldn’t need to have this difficult conversation. With all that said, I must say you’re going about it the right way. Classic “pump and dump.” I hope this is helpful, and if you want to enter into some sort of lease, let me know.

I was listening to music with my playlist on random the other day and an old song I haven’t heard in a while came up. “I’ve never been to me” by Charlene (its a good one, go get it). Its about life, regrets, mistakes, wisdom gained and the singer/narrator beseeching the listener to avoid the degenerate path she’s taken.

But that got me thinking: to what extent can we control the decisions we make in our lives anyway? It sounds like an awfully stupid question but the older I get the more I feel that our lives and actions are much more deterministic than we’re willing to give credit for. We humans beings are more emotional than we are rational. We’re creatures of hierarchy and social law rather than creatures of independence.

Picture the scenario of a girl who, against all reason, refuses to leave her cheating boyfriend. Or a disgraced samurai who needs to commit seppuku. Or an eager teenager surrounded by friends at a club imploring him to take his first hit of cocaine. In each of these cases, there’s the “right” thing to do, and then there’s the actual thing they somehow or another have to do, given the circumstances.

A rare few choose the “right” thing (sometimes, I wonder if we applaud those who do because it reinforces our illusion of free will) - But that belies the fact that most don’t. The hapless girlfriend goes back to her douche boyfriend, the samurai cuts into his intestines with his katana, and the teenager becomes high on crack for the first time. How much of a choice do they have, really? Its not just about being smart, being wise, or being brave. Sometimes, its more complicated than that.

So I’ve been doing a lot of travelling over the past week and something that’s caught my notice is that there is one face that’s virtually ubiquitous throughout China - that of Yao Ming’s. From various product endorsements to olympics averts, posters to Yao’s likeness can be found everwhere. In a way, he has become the unofficial mascot for China.

Humans always have an overwhelming need for figureheads, and my view is that as far as atheletes go, the Chinese couldn’t have hoped for a better representative on the world stage. As the first (significant) Chinese basketball player to enter the NBA, Yao Ming had to carry the hopes of 1.6 billion people in the face of adversity.

When he entered the league in 2001, there was an unprecedented level of nastiness directed at him. Americans, for the most part, saw him as an outsider, and an interesting experiment that somehow needed to fail. He didn’t. In a league well-known for narcissistic players, Yao never gave himself a nickname. He never gave himself excuses for bad games. Season after season he came through with the kind of class that few other players in the NBA could pull off. 

In China, Yao gave youngsters who’d never touched a basketball before a reason to play the game, much like how Michael Jordan inspired an entire generation in the 90s. Yao Ming lived and assimilated into America, but he never lost touch of his culture and always remained true to his roots.

That’s Yao Ming, a gentle giant of a man. His identity, his life, his burden.

In the 1970s, my grandfather was tortured by the Chinese communists for being a “Capitalist swine”. Not that they needed any hard proof to arrest anyone at the time, but the incriminating evidence was a picture of him at the age of 4 sweated on wooden toy horse wearing clothes that were evidently too western and too colorful for the tastes of the CCCP.

As I trodded down the crowded isle the central Wuhan train station yesterday, I couldn’t help but feel extremely… bourgeois, for the lack of a better word. The stark difference in dress attire certainly contributed to that effect. As did travelling to one of my dad’s clients factories in a rather large Audi. It certainly gives off evil-capitalist-oppressing-the-lowly-proletariat vibes. For those of you not in the know, I’m currently travelling in China with my family visiting relatives, friends, ancestral graves and all that good stuff. Its been about 5 years since I last visited China but I’m amazed at how much the country has changed - The Chinese can literally rebuild an entire city faster than it takes Singapore to build a basketball court.

People who haven’t visited China in recent years would find it hard to picture the scale and scope of the transformation that is taking place - Massive highways spanning the lengths of an entire continent (or lets just say hundreds of Singapores in length), state-of-the-art airports, hospitals, skyscrapers, and shopping malls so massive you’d consider them engineering marvels by their own right have all popped up like mushrooms after a bout of rain.

Its messy at times, and the dichotomy between the have and have-nots is mind-boggling to say the least. At Wuhan train station, for instance, you see migrant workers from the poorest provinces of China, beggars, charlatans peddling snake oil, vagrants all crammed together in destitute conditions. Just a gated doorway a few meters away lies another world, the first class lounge where students from previleged families play with their unlocked iPhones, businessmen in snazzy suits and their IBMs, chic chicks with all the latest fashion apparel who wouldn’t at all be out of place in Tokyo or Paris.

In spite of these problems, you get the unmistakable impression that progress is both real and unstoppable. The number of cars on the streets are increasing exponentially, not just the cheapo plebian-mobiles, we’re talking about BMWs, Audis, Jaguars, and even Cadillacs. The Chinese have just discovered their purchasing power. Business is booming, and will continue to do so in the forseeable future. And it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the world’s grandest display of a market economy in action is, ironically, taking place in what is technically still a communist country.

P.S. The good news is that China has free internet (Yes, for everyone). The bad news is that its dial-up. And the worse news is that Blogspot is on its banned list, which means I can’t access most of my friends’ blogs. Good thing I have my own domain, else I wouldn’t be able to blog on the fly either.

I don’t watch a lot of TV. What little time I spend in front of mine is usually divided evenly between National Geographic and the History Channel. Exciting, I know. In this day and age where shows like CSI, Lost, Sex and the City, and Desperate Housewives rule the airwaves people find it incredible that I don’t have the faintest clue what Carrie Bradshaw does for a living.

Its not that I don’t enjoy a bit of drama every now and then; I just can’t justify spending hundreds of cumulative hours sitting in front a box and accomplishing nothing productive. But there are a few rare exceptions. A few years ago, one of the shows that I did invest a lot of time in was a sci-fi series called Andromeda. The funny thing is Andromeda was hardly the creme de la creme of TV productions: the theme music was cheesy, the special effects (or rather lack thereof) was dire and the script was laughable. The only reason why I followed it for as long as I did was because it was easy for me to draw some parallels between the script and my somewhat tumultuous life at the time, having just been transplanted from Singapore to Kansas.

The story itself is set thousands of years in the future in an alternate universe, where a prosperous democratic alliance of planets known as the “systems commonwealth” rules the known universe. En route to a battle engagement, the Andromeda, a starship captained by the protagonist of the series, Dylan Hunt, is ambushed gets caught in the event horizon of a black hole and frozen in time. Dylan and the Andromeda emerge 300 years later, only to discover that the commonwealth has collapsed and a universe in chaos.

With the only world that he’s ever known gone and displaced in time and space, Dylan Hunt sets about the impossible task of rebuilding his beloved commonwealth single-handedly. Its tough. After all, he’s an living anachronism longing to recreate dead ideals and dreams that few people understand and even fewer care about. He clearly knows he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell but he forges on anyway. The rag-tag crew of the Andromeda are wonderful companions, but they’ll never see things his way. In his heart of hearts Dylan knows he’s isn’t - and won’t ever be - where he belongs.

Somehow, I could relate to all of that.

Good stuff. Check ’em out. This month’s theme: Music

Achmed The Dead Terrorist Carols

Pachelbel’s Canon in D Rant

“Here without you” acapella

In graduate school, you don’t receive a salary for teaching classes and doing research, you receive a “stipend”.

This is amusing because the only other time I’ve heard the word being used in any context was in my senior Japanese history course, where the Samurai warriors, we were told, received annual “stipends” from their Daimyo overlords for services rendered on the battlefield and elsewhere.

To put things in perspective, the Samurai, who were respected for their chivalry and placed at the top of the feudal Japanese social hierarchy (with the peasants, artisans, and merchants below them in that order), nonetheless lived very spartan and impecunious lives.

Incidentally, this is rather reminecent of grad school as a whole, where masters and PhD students technically exist in a higher academic strata than the undergrad masses, but get worked several times harder and paid miserably for research work that arguably goes further in establishing their daimyo’s advisor’s career than their own.

And as I weigh the pros and cons of getting a PhD myself, I can’t help but feel that going to grad school again is going to put me on the short end of a very long stick. It’d be at least 4 years of my life committed to solving somebody else’s problem before I can ever begin to broach my own.

Unlike the Samurai of old, you can’t just wander off to become a ronin (a masterless warrior). For better or worse, no such thing exists in the academic world.

So I’ve had friends asking me why I bothered to get a private domain name for something as trivial as a personal blog, as opposed to putting it on a free host like Blogger or Wordpress. The main reason is this: privacy.

If you’ve been online for any amount of time, you’ve probably realized that whatever you put on the internet is privy to anyone who has a computer and web access, which is to say a lot of people.

Now obviously a little publicity never hurts. But the problem is that bloggers often publish posts containing juicy bits of personal information without realizing their full ramifications. The longer you’ve been blogging, the most likely that is to be true. Remember that post you wrote years ago about your rancorous breakup with your ex? Your penchant for tongue piercings? Your profound antipathy towards zoroastrianism? Your future wife, grandson, employer and interns are all going to be reading that.

No worries, you say, because you can always just delete the blog. If you think that’s all it takes to erase yourself from the permanent records of cyberspace, you’re in for a surprise. Don’t believe me? Go to the internet archive and search for your site. You’ll find it there in its fully replicated glory, right down to the first month you started it.

The only real way to stop this is to tell archive.org to exclude your blog from the archives through the Robots.txt file on the root directory of your server, which isn’t possible if its hosted on a domain that you don’t have direct control over. Today, only archive.org keeps regular, time-based snapshots of internet, but in the near future search engines themselves will likely do so as well, thus multiplying the risks of the blog equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction manyfold.

We exist in 2 worlds - our physical world, and our digital world which consists of blog entries, facebook profiles, forum personas and instant messenging monikers. And soon enough, everybody is going to be googling everyone else. In fact, this is already beginning to happen. Your blog, in particular, is perhaps the most revealing - its like like an online tattoo of all your thoughts, intentions and memories.

Of course, there are some people who wouldn’t be the least bit bothered by this. Some might even take it in the completely opposite direction by using their blog to establish an online brand of sorts. But either path you take, you exercise far more control over the information you want (or don’t want) netizens to see with your own domain. And that, in my opinion, more than justifies 10 dollars per year spent maintaining it.

These are fundamental existential questions that have intrigued me for as long as I can remember, and ones that I want answers to (or at least some of them) before I kick the proverbial bucket. To quote a dream theater song, “where did we come from, why are we here, where do we go when we die?”

The catechisms offered by classical religions on the origins and purpose of life and the universe have never convinced me; the idea of an anthropomorphic designer is appealing and, altogether, a very human explanation of what we observe in the natural world. But science has showed us that there are other possibilities - equally human but far more compelling.

Take for instance the origins of our planet. Most of us don’t give it a second thought - the Earth is here just because it is. And while it is true that our planet has been around for the better part of 4 billion years, the details of its formation contains some rather interesting twists. Virtually none the solid matter found on the planet is native to the solar system. Heavy elements like Carbon (which is the building block of all organic matter), oxygen and Iron etc can only be synthesized via fusion reactions in stars much larger than our own sun.

Some billions of years ago and light years away from our solar system, there was a massive star that had exhaused its supply of nuclear fuel. As it finally collapsed and exploded in spectacular fashion, it returned most of its matter to back to the cosmos. In the depths of space, gravity condensed and stirred the stellar dust that gradually accreted to form the sun and planets of the solar system.

On earth, organic molecules which had been cooked and manufactured in the furnaces of stars slowly began the arduous process of natural selection. Initially, these molecules were clumsy and were only capable of making crude copies of themselves. These were not, by any standards, anything we could term “life”. After millions of years, these molecular machines became more sophisticated and better at copying themselves. Collectives of organic molecules evolved to single-celled organisms, which in turn gave rise to multi-celluar organisms that make up all the flora and fauna on the planet, including human beings.

From the dust of dying stars, to life. The take home lesson here is that we are all intimately tied to universe. Its easy to think you’re only been around for a “few decades”. But all of the physical matter that makes up “you” have been around since almost the beginning of time. In a very real way, we all are all literally made of star stuff. We are all stardust.

Increasingly, scientists believe that life is not unique on earth and that it may be very common across the galaxy indeed. It has long been known that the organic building blocks of life, complex amino acids, are virtually ubiquitous across the cosmos. So it appears that life itself is natural, thermodynamically and chemically driven process that happens naturally, given enough time for evolution to occur and according to estimates using the Drake equation, there should be many more intelligent, sentient civilizations in our galaxy.

That consciousness should arise is no accident, either. After all, there are plenty of creatures that go about their business like biological automatons without any real sense of self. So the real question that ought to be raised is: why has sentience evolved? What purpose does it serve, and how does it fit into the grand scheme of things?