The End of Tinybreeze

I am switching journal to tumblr. Yes i know, again. Pain in the ass to relink and all. But they provide a more flexible space to breathe on arts, photography and quotes! I love quotes. Okay irrelevant. Thank you wordpress for an amazing 2 years wtf.

This time, tumblr will be permanent for a very very long time i think. Makes me wanna write alot.

As you may have noticed, i am using back my old tumblr because apparently, i have one! Long time ago. Already started on transfering some post i couldnt bear to abandon here. Shall continue transfering them slowly judging by the mood transition. 

All and all, good day and good bye. I am going to miss the tracking system of wordpress alot. They are one hell of a stalker system.

CLICK ME TO RELINK

Zheng Joo

#2

“Go be that starving Artist you’re afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what’s on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world. You’ll thank yourself for it.”

Jason Mraz

Memory Preference

The House Of Small Cubes by Kunio Kato.

Angeline sent me this animation (Best Animated Picture at Milan Film Festival, Animated Shorts of Oscar Academy Awards, etc.) earlier today and I felt the relationship between the old man and anyone of us was an especially well written concept. It was in fact, too rich with the genuine sense of lost memory that is most probably unable to be reconstruct anymore.

By contrast, the piled up house of small cubes struck to me much similar to my rockfish dream last night. I was paying more attention, I gather, to the old pipe rather than the layered house actually and like a train passing by the window with a dry clatter, only voices to be heard, the swift horn was the makeshift and best part of all. The layered house is beyond me. Beyond everyone else. Perhaps, precisely because of this indirect effect to me , I have managed to accept the devoid in exchange for a hope for more in focus and beautiful picture all this times.

After it had finished surprising me, the sequence will goes on with the same sentimental value because it will always be dislocating realities. Because the process of healing are always in a seemingly far away tone. Existing but knotted in trepidation.

Sometimes in life, all I ever wanted was leaving me behind at the same stage selfishly.

#1

[Wanted:]
Single f, under 33, must enjoy the sun, must enjoy the sea

[Sought by single m:]
Mrs.Destiny, send photo to address, is it you and me?

[Reply to single m:]
My name is Caroline cell phone number here, call if you have the time
28 and bored, grieving over loss, sorry to be heavy but heavy is the cost, heavy is the cost

[Reply to Caroline:]
Thanks so much for response, these things can be scary
Not always what you want.
How about a drink? The St.Jude club at noon?
I’ll phone you first I guess
I hope I see you soon!

I never got your name, I assume you’re 33
Your voice it sounded kind
I hope that you like me
When you see my face, I hope that you don’t laugh
I’m not a film-star beauty
I sent a photograph
I hope that you don’t laugh

[Note to single m:]
Why did you not show up?
I waited for an hour and finally gave up
I thought once that I saw you, I thought that you saw me
I guess we’ll never meet now
It wasn’t meant to be
I was sure that you saw me, but it wasn’t meant to be

[Wanted:]
Single f, under 33, must enjoy the sun, must enjoy the sea

[Sought by single m]:
Nothing too heavy, send photo to address, is it you? or me?

Stars, Personal

Swept Aside, Surprise Surprise.

I saw a picture book by Annie Leibovitz the other day at a random swarm in bookshop and it was dead gorgeous. Almost as good as Tim Walker, the picture they produced. But then what strikes me real bland underneath is that no one could ever photographed an ordinary sky scene into something violently beautiful like Max Wanger. They just strike me upon like gentle wind. They blew me away. How can you take your eyes off these shots? 

Its a palliative therapy for people like me who have outrageous love for balloons, dreamy skies and wedding. They make be happy. Like the other side of the world exist and lives a tunnel away.

 

Author Of The Storm

Holiday is not sturdy enough to break my headstrong. I just had to stayed up late all night going through endless heart wrecking drama and film and confined myself into a piece of beautiful mess. That is burrowing beneath weeping over them. At some point I am drawing over the line to stop watching for the salvation of whatever bucket liters of tears I have left.

I love the weather being windy. Making me cold. Soaking into the pond of wool cotton.

Some other afternoon, I am beginning to grapple in the dilemma of substance, as my hand glided through the crisp texture of sugar brown texture book cover, the one I recently discovered hidden in my box of delightful. There were more later on, just the right ingredients for this mellow afternoon, with a dignified silence.

From the moment I lay my eyes on a book my permutations are fixed. I am never deceived in such matters. My first impression on words and covers are invariably right. They don’t call be romanticism for zero. You, taking essence of beauty and putting them into words. I couldn’t be more please. I will want to say yes, just because sometimes everything just tunes in and I want to be enveloped in you.

Pulling away myself from the mess, I am trying god damn hard to organize pass work of art and picture. I need time before I post them up or pass along to whoever deserved and belonged. Bear with my mood transition.

I ‘ve covered most film and Greys series. I prefer the ending where George Omalley stays, when it is cloaked in the shadows of awkward lines but distant warm behind the character. I prefer a scene of Izzie conjuring up an undeniably feeling of Izzie.

Sometimes, the indulgence and familiarity to click on The Storyteller becomes so forceful, I forgot. The unsuspecting me. Then I suddenly realized the song has ended because of how quiet it has become, when the reading of the same old post, remain untouched.

Two more weeks before getting back to the lost art of walking.

More strong violent winds please. They awaken my essence.

To Those Who Finds

Transcript:

“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry.Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.”

__________

Don’t treat them as A Nice And Motivational Speech, because it was his ocean of a lifetime.

I wished the world is full of those tonight.

Ephemera

I am really no good at farewell. But this, this will be a continuous farewell. I could get used to the death of beautiful people over and over again. But it is impossible to forget shattered fragments moment after moment until they cannot find themselves again. Some mended, some broken, some momentarily abandoned and some changed permanently. I cannot be changed. You know how those people you met in life and you open up to them because they are your person, letting them in so intensely and deeply because this is all they have to offered and what they have left nakedly, nothing else, and then they are gone permanently? She completed that inside every inch of film, like there’s something in the world which nobody has seen yet. At least, I felt it that way.

I cannot understand but I will embrace them. 3 months. 9 months. Perhaps, perpetually. Because they will be more to it.

I dare not imagine of the future now. Because the past is officially an unfinished story, waiting to be deserved.

It’s not emotional. It’s science.

—

To She who left me the indelible marks on storytelling, Yasmin Ahmad.

And to Siti Nadrah who wrote beautifully, its an ephemera confession. Just like a mayfly.