Why Sleep Why

why do we go to sleep? human nature suggest that we need sleep because we are designed that way, fair but what about the decision of why go to sleep. There are only a few reasons that makes me take off my glasses and go to sleep,
- too drunk for the night, too tired, cuddling after sex,
never have i gone to sleep without giving me a reason
the normal (and most logical) reason "oh its 12 now and i need to wake up in 8 hours" rarely happens to me, its usually 4 hours later and it becomes "shit, its 4 now and my day would be really fucked if i get less than 4 hours of sleep"

I just find that the time I spend staying up is usually the time I spend doing something I want to do, whether that be staying up typing this blog, finishing a 3 hour movie, or spending that extra 30 minutes on video game, (long working hours is a big reason to this) but why would I give up doing I want to do just to sleep earlier and go to work again

If there is one thing i wish human anatomy work differently, it will be that i wish we could sleep less and have the same recovery (WHILE maintaining the same working hours, cos I'd much rather than shot by lightning than extending the already long working hours)

Sleep is nice and I love it whenever I can put in 10+ hours but think about it, we actually don't do anything with the time we spent sleeping (other than resting our organs and eyes). I am quite surprised that scientists havent invented a pill that can make us the same energy with less amount of sleep. What I am trying to say is that sleep itself is a waste of time, just like the time we spend traveling day and night. Assuming that you live for 100 years and sleep 8 hours per day, that means you are not doing anything with 33.33% of your life. Imagine if we only need 4 hours, we would gain 16 years of awake time and would most likely been more productive.

WIthout going too far on this, I'd like to jump back to the original point, have you ever questioned why you decide to sleep last night? or the night before? i am sure thats something you never asked yourself.

(yes we have established that i am an alcoholic by now)

IT Crowd

Technology has helped made communication easier. I still remember 10-15 years ago when I could only use letter and phone calls to call my parents back in Hong Kong. Now living in the same city, we email more than we call each other, let alone sending a letter. A twitter or facebook status update can easily let all your friends know what and how you are doing. Before? Sorry, there wasn’t such a thing. I look back and things were working fine; yet within this 10-15 years time, we have evolved into a specie that depends our lives on technology. From mobile phone & blackberries, email & word document, to Youtube & twitter, people cant imagine their lives without any of these technology nowadays. What was meant to be a tool for users is now holds the users as mental hostages. Yes the web has improved our communication and speed of many errands in our daily lives but it has also increased our lazy time and ultimately decreased our productivity. Assuming that our lifespan is 100 years old, an hour daily of aimingless browse the web / on face book / updating twitter etc results in (roughly) 4 years and 2 months total time on that. Isn’t that a bit… too much?

Next time when you go on a holiday or even on the upcoming Sunday, just try to not bring any of that technology with you. You may find that you have a lot more free time than usual.

positive thinking

I have started a new job about 2-3 weeks ago after coming back to HK and the ride hasn't been smooth. I have been assigned various tasks and my big boss pretty much hasn't been all too happy about my performance each time I gave her my work. While it is understandable for any new hires to learn a new company's system, the feedback I have been getting has been "you need to use your brain / common sense more". For a person who is pretty proud of his intelligence, these past two weeks has been a complete negative reinforcement for my theory - my personal record of most times being called a dumbass was probably broken in the process too.

Now, for those of you who are not too familiar with the Chinese / SE Asia system, bosses / mom & dads basically have a free ticket to yell at you at anytime they want. That has changed recently but the majority of the older generation still beats you down like a dog if you mess up. I was initially pretty thrown off by it to be honest and felt that I was being treated unfairly since a new hire couldn't possibly meet all the expectations set. Then as always, there is always the flip side, where you see the boss who hired me has a legitimate reason to be upset since the things I messed up is considered as common sense to the boss. It is usually a tough boss, not the one who smiles at you after you fxxk up, that trains a good worker. While I really don't have support for this theory, I think this constant push for me to better is a good way for me to get out of my work rust. On top of that, I usually do even better when the pressure is on.

...it would still be nice if some of the criticisms are not as harsh and that my salary is a tad-bit higher

A Short Story

A little story to spice up everyone's bump day

Once upon a time, there was a clown.
He laughed, he made people laugh.
He smiled when people were sad, he jumped when people were afraid to.
He wasn't rich, but had enough money to live a fair life.
Then one day, he had a change of heart.
He went to the magician and told the magician that "he had decided to sell his happy self, in exchange for a lifetime's worth of money, to get rich"

Do u see the irony?
Money isn't happiness, for him at least.
The two are complete opposite otherwise there wouldn't be a tradeoff between happiness and money. Yet, he chose money.

...That clown is me

On rumors...

rumors are funny. one of the first that I was ever involved in (10+ years ago) was started because people thought I hated someone that has the same name as me... the funny part comes in when people couldn't tell me why they thought i hated that person or how they came to that conclusion...

case number two... hkmom is close friends with one of the singers from her age. so naturally, hkmom would send her friend some good luck gifts before her concert. the funny part comes in when paparazzi found it newsworthy to use that as a sign for some good lesbian news of 2 fifty year old.

Rumors and gossips have become a big part of everyone's lives... The office (US episode 1 of season 6) actually have an entire episode centered around rumors and gossips... with the focus on what would happen if everyone believed in these rumors. It is a bit sad but everyone just believes rumors and never bother to check and see if they are real - it just seems like these gossip magazines at the newsstand has trained us to believe anything people say, regardless of how silly or untrue the news it. Granted, I am sure that a fair percentage of these gossips are true but would it really be that much of a trouble to double check if what you heard is true? directly from the people involved? and if i deny these rumors, it means its either not your right to know or it really isnt true. I for one dont spend anytime to talk about these rumors... at least not until I have some way or form to confirm it.

it just seems like the world we live in trains us pretty hard to be stupider by the day.

Luck

I guess a small foreword is needed for this topic. It has been a relatively unlucky month for me - my car broke down and needed $11k HKD to fix, my computer broke and needed to hire a guy to recover + fix my comp, then hkgirl has been beating me 5 out of 6 nights on our nightly gambling games... and all these are happening within the week that my credit card paid all the fees from our europe trip and no response from companies. I dont have any official statistics but I am fairly confident that most people would consider this past week of mine a very unlucky week and so did I. I told hkgirl that I need to stop gambling against her because it just reminds me every night at how unlucky I am.

The funny thing is... after not thinking about this for a day, Mr Logic within me started realizing that all these is just a product of my previous actions. Both my car and computer broke down because it didnt start up at all in the past few months and they both die quickly from inactivity. The credit card bill part is bound to happen every month, I cant exactly call one week in every month unlucky just because I have to pay my bill, right?

It is actually quite natural that I have found a logical explanation to my recent occurrences... since I am usually not that superstitious of a person anyway. I like to consider myself 50% logic and 50% romance (or fantasy)... but yea back onto the topic, it seems that many times when good or bad things happen we seem to put too much weigh on luck and ignore the cause of why certain things happen. I mean... if a bird shat on you X times within a day, yea we can call that unlucky, but when there is an obvious cause to why things happen (like my car and computer breaking down), we need to actually look at what made it happen and then learn from it.

NOW... WITH THAT SAID...I still think hkgirl winning my money 5 out of 6 nights is pure luck. Gambling is like 95% luck based and 5% skill based... right??? RIGHT???

P.S. - ...Luck or no luck... I need to stop losing my phone ever 8 months...

Passion, Motivation, and Success

I have been looking for a job ever since I returned to Hong Kong after my MBA. The overall job hunting process is pretty similar to my previous job search - prep CV, find companies to apply, write cover letter, and send them out. In my last 2-3 job searches, I basically just applied anything within the industries that I wish to work for, partly because fresh grads and people with 2-3 years experience doesnt really have much of a choice when it comes to who to work for... its more about who is willing to take you. So with more work experience and a different perspective on life, it is perfectly natural that I am now pickier when it comes to choosing a company that I apply for, with the biggest deciding factor for me right now is how passionate I am about the job, its responsibilities and the industry.

I dont know how much of this is common sense but it never occur to me until recently that passion is such a big factor when it comes to all sorts of things. Motivation can be caused by different reasons, but a person with that "passion fire" inside them will have sustainable motivation. Motivation gives you the energy to finish the goal but passion is a fire that starts from the roots of your emotion. You will go all out and do everything that is possible to succeed if you are passionate about something. To use my own posts as example, the Ants post is a topic that I am truly passionate about whereas the spoiled generation post was just something I was motivated to write, and I will be the first to admit that the quality of the two posts was differrred by the amount of heart I have towards the topic.

While I am not saying that passion = success (brain, experience, and luck matters too), the biggest success cases in this world started from that fire from within (or as Rocky Balboa said in the last Rocky movie "the stuff down the basement".)

...now if only the companies I want to work for accepts me

the spoiled generation

I really dont know where this world is heading towards. about a week ago, there were news saying that at least one 12-year old was caught doing Ketamine, a drug if you are not too familiar with the name, and that is probably one out of the thousandSSS who's sniffing. I am not exactly an anti-drug person but 12-year old? Really? Is it because the time we live in is so peaceful that drugs can make it exciting? I suppose this is kind of true since there never was any drug or alcohol problem when there was a war.

Our generation and the people younger than us are really spoiled with all the peacefulness around us. Financial Crisis? pffh... most people my age or younger just lived on. We wake up, go to work / school, and then go back to sleep. All the fun in the middle is just temporary - everything comes so fast and easy (especially with the internet) that we dont learn to cherish what we have. Instead... we find our lives boring and go all out for excitement. I for one, is exactly this type of person, except i am sane/insane enough to understand what I can do (a very good topic that I havent found a good angle to write about). But for many minors with some bad influence... you get a 12-year old kid snorting shit. This is something totally unheard of in my parents or grandparents time - people usually spend their time working hard trying to accomplish something. I really think we need to have a closer look and find out why kids nowadays are so bored with their lives that they would go sniffing drugs when they are not even a TEENager.

Seriously... I dont feel comfortable raising a child in the world that we live in now

Ants

(Foreword: this is actually a topic that depressed me a lot back when i was 15-18... just never expected it to come back to me, maybe i am just a bit sad now that my vacation with hk girl is over now)

Do we humans see ourselves as too important? or is our perception of the world too small? Our lives will always be focused with our own issues and our goals, our past and present, basically everything is about us. Its about what we want, where we want to be be, how we want to do it, who we meet and talk during the day. It never occurs to us that we are all just a tiny piece of the puzzle. In the grand scheme of things, no matter how important we think our issues are, it probably doesn't even have a 0.000001% significance level. (i am using this as an example and it may be exaggerating a little bit), but even global warming and earth's problem is really nothing when we look at how small earth is comparing to the universe. Its the insignificance of my life that used to depress me.

hk girl hates it when i bring this up but i really think its ok to die when we are all just ants in the universe, repeating our daily lives (work - eat - sleep) pretty much the same way ants repeats their lives. I mean, we dont moan over stepping over some ants so why should humans be different, given we are all equally insignificant. Out of the entire human timeline on earth, there are probably less than 10000 people whose lives will be talked about forever (people like lincoln, george washington, julius caesar, confucius, and even michael jordan to an extent)

10+ years after being depressed over this issue and I still don't have a true solution on how to make the most out of a human life span (without being evil), which is why I am perfectly content with being happy everyday and not worry about the rest.

The emptiness inside

schoolwork has been absolutely busy for the past month. for example, my schedule for this past week has been:
9-5 product development class
5-6 homework for product development class
6-9:30 project that was due this friday
10:30-1am other work

so you probably figure I would go get pissed drunk after the project was over right? wrong.

I was so used to slaving myself day and night that it didnt feel comfortable not having any work. Now that I have finished this big project, the purpose or drive in me for the past week is now gone and I feel empty. I didnt want to celebrate (partly because our work was average), I didnt want to eat, I didnt want to play games, I didnt want to youtube. Youtube-ing is nowhere as fun when you dont have work and the only thing i wanted to do was to either stare at the sun or sit and stare at the wall. And you know something is wrong 90% of the time when a person just wants to stare at something for a longed period of time.

This is probably the feeling people get when they retire. Empty... which is probably also the reason why people get older a lot quicker after they retire

...It took me one afternoon but luckily Camden Crawl has gotten me somewhat back to my groove

Pointing finger at MBA..???

A survey recently asked some MBA students why people like me want to take an MBA:

Increase in salary
Open new career opportunities
Extend personal network

Up until university, all of our education has been about... EDUCATION. All other masters degree are there for educational purposes. Only MBA is for something different. Is that the reason why MBAs are the ones to blame for this financial crisis?

Further reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15school.html

Dreams

Dreams is such an intriguing topic. There are some people that you can go talk to about your dreams and they can interpret the meaning behind because "our brain is a lot more powerful than we know". I also find it rather interesting that 1, i never knew what color my dreams are. Black & white, colorful, or just plain color. 2, i never "remember" my dreams 5 minutes after i wake up, and 3, most of my dreams never really have an ending. I can live with the first 2, but interesting fact 3 bothers me the most.

Maybe because of my love for food, about 50% of my dreams are about traveling the world and eating different things. The problem is, I spent 99% of my dream traveling and meeting random people en route to food but I NEVER EAT. It is like a movie building up to this climax just to have the screen goes black and lights turned on. Think Sopranos ending when you keep thinking something is going to happen just to find out that the screen goes black and the series is over. On a scale of 1-10, I would probably give this experience a 0.5 in terms of frustration goes but having the same 0.5 frustration happening 3 times a week is no fun.

If only some of these dream readers can tell me the meaning behind this...

P.S. - I never EVEEERRRR had wet dreams in my life due to the same reason too.

Another alcohol related topic

Alcohol is such a fun topic to write about. It can be 2060 now and i can probably still find new things to write about alcohol.

Alcohol brings out the best AND worst of everybody. There are people who are completely normal and classy but gets ultra slutty & horny after some booze. There are your loud and talkative people who gets louder AND more talkative. And of course, the classic case of someone quiet and calm getting all violent and picking fights.

None of the above ones are the worst. Hkgirl and I are really the worst type of drunks. We want more. The one thing alcohol does very well is that it turns off our brain. In our case, the internal alcohol inhibitor turns off and we just keep asking for more; next thing we know, we are at home not knowing how we got back. BUT (and this is a huge but) there is 1 big positive that I can extract from our drinking habits. We dont get drunk anymore. Last friday the entire MBA class (well, 95% of the MBA class) went out for drinks and I must have had like 8-10 shots of tequila/vodka. Guess what? I was only tipsy. I was surprised myself. I even got bored with the drinking and went home early.

Seriously, WTF is wrong with me?

Self-Torturing

Food and Sleep. The two most basic human needs in life. Everything else we claim we need are just things we do for better quality of food and sleep. Most people probably dont care what they eat and how long they sleep but we all enjoy doing it one way or another. I will continue on with this point later.

The invention of youtube, blogs, online gaming has made our lives more enjoyable. People rarely feel bored since they always have internet and playstation to fall back on. It is especially nice for students like me because this is the only entertainment we get after a long day of work. The only issue with all these entertainment is that they get addictive. See where i am going with my earlier point yet?

I love sleeping. I love to have at least a minimum of 7-8 hours of sleep and my problem is that I havent been able to sleep more than 6 for a while. The main issues lies within the fact that I havent been able to control my youtube / gaming time every night. I know i have to be up by 8:30am and i am just torturing myself by messing around till 2:xx.

... and I know posting this issue online doesnt help my situation either!

Be responsible

I dont quite remember which beer ad it was but the slogan was "Drink Responsibly". Most people fail to realize that they should drink responsibly not only for themselves, but for everyone else who drinks as well.

Had Van Gogh hadnt cut his ear off after getting drunk on Absentine, it would probably still be legal. Had the Hooligans think a little more because causing such a riot, we would still be able to drink and watch football at the same time. Enough examples yet?

We are much more important than we think. Every fuck-ups that we make from drugs and alcohol, every bit of inconvenient we cause from smoking, every homework you didnt hand in because of Playstation, gives the powerful people around us a reason to tighten our freedom. Simply put, if we dont mess up, we have freedom.

Its time for us to all start taking responsibility to stop tightening our own laws and boundaries.

Kind of old news by now but I twisted my ankle fairly badly 2 weeks ago. Once again, it wasnt until I was limping badly until I realized how important my legs are.

How many times have we go through "no cherishish something until its not there" (is there an actual phrase for that?), we still do it. Taking things for granted is the default thing we do.

Here is a homework for everyone. Start showing more love.

Happy New Year?!

another year has passed and its time for everyone to get a fresh start in 2009.

i am obviously the minority here but aside from the crazy partying, i am not a huge fan of new years, why? i can honestly say that i have had some quality times for the past 4-5 years. for those of you follow my blog, this is because I prefer focusing on the positive aspects of life and dont let the negatives affect me. with that said, every new year still has the potential to ruin my string of consecutive good years.

the probably is low but the chance of a lot of crap happening within 1 year is bound to happen sometime for everyone, who is to say it wont be 2009?

Happy new year~

In 2008...

Funny thing about us bloggers are that, more often than most, we forget what we wrote before and get pretty amazed when reading the stuff we wrote before. Feels just like a random blog if it wasn't for the familiar web address.

The more I think about it, the more I think this financial crisis isn't a bad thing. Hear me out before bananas, tomatoes, and shoes (lol). Did it not baffle any of you that banks were selling us shit that we never understood? Yea it went up but WTF was it?

Without bad times, we wont cherish the good times. Humans are naturally dumb - we don't learn how to tighten our pocket unless we are forced to; and when we have money, we use it all... as if the every 10 year stock market crash doesnt already teach us a lesson. Yes finance people do make a load of money but we are omitting all the people who get fired on their way up top. A fortuneteller once told me that I should go into finance and I told him the daily life of a stressful 8-6 job just isnt me.

Let's see if my feelings towards this changes in 2009.

Cocky MBA

Exams are coming up and professors do revision sessions to help students get through the exams. I am not being cocky here but while everyone is worried about their grades, I am overconfident to a point where I dont see the need of over studying.

Most of the people I talked to in this MBA thought our class and works are intense, but this is nothing new to me. This MBA is busy, yes, but it has also been a relatively easy ride for me, at least compare to the 4 years of hell I went through as a Biomed undergrad in JHU.

I have always told my parents this... "unless there is some other planet with living people, I graduated from the best biotech university from the universe and everything else in life will not be as challenging as that" Seriously, how do you top from being the best in the universe? This doesnt mean I dont treat my MBA course with the attention it needs... I just dont see the need of stressing over it, especially when its just an exam of your analytical skills (somethings you cant train in 10 days).

Why so serious?

Winter and Fashion

Phewwwwwwwwwwww

It is hitting zero and the negatives here in london... yes the stupid weather report says its 5C, but the 14mph wind takes it to like -10C, which brings me to another point - why cant those weather people just tell us how cold it is AFTER the wind here in UK? Windchill was a nice thing to have in US. Anyway, so weather is getting cold and everyone is looking for that thick jacket and scarf inside their closet. The problem is, everyone's thick jacket is either black or dark brown. How do you get fashionable when everyone is wearing the same thing?

My dad once told me "when its fxxking freezing, you shouldnt think about how you look but how warm you are"

No fashion advice is the answer. Get warm silly.