Bohemia Bunny

Lucid imaginings

October 20th, 2004 by lynnylchan under Uncategorized

I returned my rental last Saturday. I was quite disappointed with it as the twist seemed a bit anticlimactic and the ending fell flat. It was a good effort, but not something I would recommend. It reminded me of when I read Sophie’s World, and the same feeling of disorientation persisted when I finished that book. However, while I would make my friends read Sophie’s World for no better reason than it might widen their minds a bit, my rental certainly wouldn’t fulfil that criteria. The difference was the ending.

Where Sophie’s World ended on an optimistic, ‘make-up-your-own-sequel’ tone, the rental just left me feeling cheated. That the whole thing was just an elaborate lie. It’s like those stories that end with “and then she woke up and realised it was all a dream”. Besides being overused, it just leaves the reader with an empty feeling.

But I digress. I was actually thinking of doing very odd and alarming things yesterday while waiting for the train, and wondering whether the other people on the platform were thinking similarly odd things.

She looked at the tracks and wondered where was the wire, the coil carrying thousands of volts that would kill you if the train didn’t.
She thought about just stepping off the platform and onto the pebbled track.

The screen above the platform gave the time as 3.29 pm and announced that the train was coming in 2 minutes.

At 3.31 she stepped off the track.

Morbid, I know. Makes me wonder where my mind has been playing that it’s picking up all these odd and disturbing snippets.

I’ve been doing a lot of research into the history of banking in Singapore, and I think that doing so many papers at least has one redeeming effecct: they make me smarter. In the knowing-more-things sense. Now I can go on at length about the early Chinese bankers and their history. This of course is not terribly useful information in the long run, but it will suffice for now. I just need it to pass exams anyway.

I am beginning to think that the Arts faculty somehow encourages intellectual frivolity. While we do large amounts of research, it’s all academic. No, really. There’s not much market demand for a graduate well-versed in early Singapore history and such not. The more we specialise in our chosen field (for Arts encourages such passionate specialization) the more removed we are from the job market. Perhaps the engineering students have got the right idea after all. At least they learn useful things.

Not that I’m attacking Arts faculties all around the world, mind you. Arts is important because they sharpen the intellect. It’s just that they get too head-in-the-clouds at times.

As an acquaintance once advised, “Seek the middle ground.”