The Bottom Line

What I'm trying to say is, the truth is not always so clear.

In Asia, this is common and rooted in the different religious/ethnic foundations. Although I am not one of those whose life depends very much on what the psychic says, I do not believe that psychics do not exist and that all of them are quacks.

As with all things, the picture is never clear until we know what the big picture is. When fixing a jig-saw puzzle, we have the actual completed puzzle within sight, so that we are able to fix the correct piece into the correct position. Life is the same - psychics may be able to tell us something, but it may not be in all clarity, since we do not have a blueprint of our entire destiny, fate or life.

Many seek the advice of tarot card readers etc when they are at the cross roads of their life. It's not wrong, but as open as we are to comments, we must be able to accept the advice at a larger level - take the advice as part of a puzzle and until we have a clear idea of the space surrounding the problem, the advice may be misinterpreted and our actions misdirected.

Sitcoms may be sitcoms, but that episode fringes upon reality i.e. a lot of people in Asia go for spiritual/psychic help.

Question, if we had the big picture, we probably won't need to seek the tarot card readers help. Wrong.

As humans in distress, we want instant gratification.

Life doesn't work out that way - time doesn't move as quickly as we wish.

So instead of instant gratification, we should (for believers) take the advice, see how that fits into the general flow of things and find the 'line of best fit'. Only then, will the advice be worthwhile.

It's like having someone tell you - oh, you're not going to be doing well in this job - do we quit immediately? Nope, we could take that advice and turn it into a job hunt for something better.

Drowning is not the preferred option since that means we have lost the battle - but is there such a thing as fate, playing it's hand?

I do not believe in fate, although I do believe in a bigger picture - I refuse to sit and accept an unwritten fate, which didn't go through my consent department for approval. Some call that destiny, not fate. Like, if a person is destined to be President, he will be and if he's not, he won't be. So, although there is a big picture, I know we are the artist but if the final product is a landscape, and we started doing portraits, then we are definately ON THE WRONG PAGE.

This is where I am at - the wrong page.

It must have happened somewhere between my taking out the drawing paper and finding the coloured pencils. The breeze could have flipped my art paper and got me onto a page, which looked like the one I was supposed to work on.

What can we do as amendments is quite limited, considering, it's an entirely different page. But being resigned to a situation is not something I digest too easily - hence my going into my dwelling mode - a period I spend just doing nothing except adopt a slow thinking process. It's the point in my life, when I choose irresponsibility over responsibility - and focus on getting my views at a more acceptable personal level. Usually it entails a mental war and ends with casualities.

My target now, is getting myself healed - it's not the appropriate time, since i have semester 2 looming - and i find myself not having the energy to continue - because of a system failure - I know, at the back of my head, that I have done the best that I can, in my present life - but i'm not satisfied - conflict within the self.

In this sense, it helps that I know me very well - but it doesn't make this season any easier because I am more conscious about what's going to happen and as such, become more troubled by it. I cannot defer my studies - I should not - but at this point in time, there is nothing i can find within me, to steer away from this route.

Isn't it always like this? We know what we should do, but we seem to be in an uncontrollable tailspin.

When all else fails, we do a RESTORE/FDISK, so that the memory is cleared, HDD cleared and all viruses cleared. I feel that until I do that, I am not able to move forward because I most certainly am not able to ignore quarantined files, neither am I able to live with pockets of dust if I have some knowledge that it's there.

People have their own way of moving forward, but my way is always getting the trash out first, good trash and bad trash. I have no way of controlling what gets recycled and what doesn't. It just happens. My mind shuts down and reformats and reboots on autopilot.

At this point in time, my studies, 6 months or one semester left is hanging in the balance. The Libran would say, let's put stuff on the other side to keep it balanced. But the dragon, who has emerged is just burning everything down. The Libran has no control over the dragon, when she's in a rage - how does an object control a mythical creature?

I do not feel helpless or hopeless - it's not a place I visit often and when I do feel like that, it's for a moment. I feel self-destructive, which is way beyond the helpless/hopeless fight/flight syndrome. Some people need a clean slate to start, I need fallow grounds i.e. burn the bushes, forget about smoke pollution and let it just sit there doing nothing.

This is where I am now. Why now? well I have kept this under control for as long as I could and yesterday, the ex, threw a comment which sparked this - he told me he couldn't get dinner because he had to pay the electrical bill - of course I could get dinner for my son, I have always gotten dinner for my son - it's not about the inability of getting dinner, it's about being bitter, vindictive and trying to assume that I am not able to buy dinner for my son just because I'm not working like a regular person. It's an attempt to make me feel useless and dependent.

Coming from someone who has depended on me for 17 years, triggered a response.

I blew a fuse and it's one fuse that doesn't have a replacement i.e. self-destruct and destroy everything in my path.

Life is basically easy to understand - but relationships and people are complex - although I have returned distinctions for Relationship Studies, it's still quite a challenge for me.

Unfortunately, not everything stems out from simple trust - it also comes from how much foresight we have, whether we are planners or not and whether we take responsibility for our actions. Relationships fail because two people are too different in how they manage opinions and responsibilities. A person could be very high on being responsible and get stuck with someone who is only responsible when told to be. This has nothing to do with a Type A or Type B personality, but dependent upon whether that person in question, acknowledges the fact that unless we take the problem in our hands and attempt to find a solution, the problem will not go away. Some people are just selfish and can only think within their personal space. Such people should not be allowed to get into relationships, simply because they are not able to follow through with their promises and they do not have the capacity to feel embarassed about not making the grade.

Therefore, it's never a matter of trust. If a person could not be trusted, then that person could never even be involved in any kind of friendship/relationship. It's got to do with how all the wrong personality traits landed into one phenotype's genepool - not a common occurance - but in my life, I have fished out 2 of these characters, single-handedly - both of whom have failed in the basic lessons of being a thinking human.

I have gone past thinking about whether the causal factor is me - because even if it is, then how does one person, magically transform another person into a being whom no society can accept by normal standard behaviour?

No where, in my studies have I come across a theory which states that when a person marries another who is more capable than them in terms of income generating abilities, they automatically slip into COMA. So, perhaps, my foundation is viral based. I am a virus which infects people so that they become totally incapacitated and useless. There is no antibiotic to cure them and usually, after they have allowed the virus to run it's cycle, they will go out there, have immunity against this illness and become better people to a new family.

Bottom line : I have two failed relationships at the 2/3 marker in my life - all temporary relationships that I had in between and prior, not accounted for. In all my relationships, temporary and permanent, was ended by me - so, I am a virus, highly infectious and ridiculously successful in getting people to exhibit symptoms like laziness, irresponsible behaviour and basically, everything underlying and recessive to transform into the dominant and create a totally inefficient person.

I believe that I should always be reaching out for new challenges, not so much opportunities, but challenges. However, because I have a good team with me, I hang on. If there is money to be made, then let's hang on. But it doesn't stop my mind from thinking about other options.

Perhaps that's what makes me more intrusive and less patient - I have this need to see a greater picture and when I get a peep and it doesn't look great, I'll move along to another pasture.

With the past 2 weeks moving at a grilling pace - simply because we were working on 3 deals at a time, I couldn't help but think about keeping the pace but exploring other areas of work - not in the same industry. Being in the real estate business, means nothing these days, it's the same shit coming out from different holes and whether we succeed or not, would depend on how well our toilet bowl functions. I can accept changing market conditions and tough calls to make, but when an owner becomes greedy and validates that with statements like BANKS DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO VALUATION, then it upsets me. There cannot be a market, if there are no financial institutions to back up the business. As with all organisations, Banks have a right to be conservative - we should respect that because if we were licensed to lend, we would do the same, when the market moves - rises and falls - in a blink of an eye.

To make things worse, this seller refuted the offer by saying he's a statistician and he's more correct.

Well, stats is stats - it's not reality when we are doing a forecast. Retrospective summaries are respected, but it cannot be used as a definate causal factor until the theory has been proven - and where market dynamics are concerned, it just cannot be done.

I am not high on using all the tools in the internet since time is never something I have in luxury, but I'm okay to just plod along to figure things out - if anything, it would give me endless hours of stress, just trying to get a whole big picture and we all need to 'upgrade' ourselves just to stay in the loop about what's going on in the world of free information exchange.

I have been looking into something I would like to do online, for a long time now, and I may just dive into it soon. People have webpages, sell stuff on ebay etc., so perhaps this is as good a time as any to get down to doing what I wanted to do - have a web-page that is useful and interactive. The idea came to me yesterday, although it was born, more than 10 years ago. Then, the internet was slow and webdesigners were far and few - only large ISPs hired them.

I suppose, for all things online, it's great for information - light and heavy - it certainly has changed the way people read, because we can do ebooks too. It may not be a total solution for us, but it's a start to share thoughts, information and perhaps build bridges towards better understanding within people of different backgrounds. An opinion is an opinion and as long as we see it in that light, we can expand our thoughts.

Most would say they prefer to have more information, so that if a decision has to be made, it would have been made based on what we term "informed" decision. However, not everyone is able to put things in context and when there is an information overload, it confuses the situation instead of making things clearer.

Whatever it is that we own, we need to think and feel and know that there is some value attached to it. We get pretty riled up when told otherwise. That's human nature - we do not wish to have made a poor investment or judgement. We feel that we are being attacked personally when told that the product that we have doesn't have as much a value that we imagined it had. We feel that people who tell us this honest fact are just not good enough to carry out their job.

What we do not see is, the problem is not with others, it's with our perception of things. As much as we want to sell something for more than it's value (because we own it), the buyer would want to buy something for lesser than the current value so that he has room to profit (in future). No one will do any investments when there is no room for appreciation.

And so, this entire weekend, I was stuck with a delusional owner - who insisted that a unit having a park view and one with a back-lane view didn't matter. I'm sure, if he was the purchaser now, he would tell me different, that watching children in the playground is much better than looking at the KTV's utility room - full of dirty linen, cooking smells and half naked men parading in a towel in the afternoon - he couldn't understand why he couldn't sell his unit for as much as the one with the park view. Perhaps he felt that his unit had live feeds and that warranted some premium.