Take yourself less seriously

I was reading Viktor Frankl's The Doctor and The Soul and I was particularly fascinated by a particular therapy technique called paradoxical intention, which have been successful for anxiety attack patients. Frankl describes a patient who sweats a lot when he is meeting new people. The paradoxical intention treatment advised is that when the patient feels the anxiety attack coming, he would have to tell himself, in good humour, to sweat a lot, in buckets. The patient found that when deliberately invoked, he could not sweat! And this treatment have been successful for other anxiety attack sufferers and other obsessive-compulsive disorders.

I was intrigued, not by the treatment in itself, but it just dawned on me that actually some psychoses originate from taking yourself too seriously; or in other words the inability to laugh at yourself; that's why the paradoxical intention has to be applied in ironical manner, in good humour! As Frankl himself points out, only humans have a sense of humour. This is not trivial, since the presence of humour indicates that we have higher level of consciousness: we are able to detach ourselves and observe from another perspective (theory of mind comes to mind). To be able to laugh at yourself, at all, means you have to transcend yourself.

I suppose the use of humour as defense mechanism is not new for some, especially for those in grad school, whose spirits will just break in the face of it all without a coping mechanism.We fail our experiment, drone at our workstation, wonder on the meaning of life, check our PHD comics and get back to it when we have laughed at ourselves sufficiently.

So if you are having existential crisis just go laugh at the face of the cosmos, laugh at the cosmic irony of existence, laugh at yourself for failing to pinpoint what exactly is the irony. You may look totally insane but actually that will keep you sane.     

An unfinished poem of the unrequited

My fantasies are sketchy
like the black-and-white outlines
in a colouring book
Were they be too vivid,
they might jump out
of the pages,
the beasts of reality

I caught a sight of you.
The door slightly ajar, I passed by
a glimpse of you
Pangs and twangs
tugging of heartstrings
vibrations too low to be picked up
by human ears
The frequency of emotions
guttural, deep, and low
that which sends blood coursing,
flooding the vessels,
And the vessels are like cracks
on a broken vessel.

Wordless poems

I remember I wrote a post on a swimming forum sometime ago, something about long-distance swimming. Someone was wondering how long-distance swimmers can endure the lap repetition and stuff like that. I wrote something to this effect: I don't get bored because I got to think, pondering about the problems in school, about unrequited feelings, and incubate wordless poems. The phrase wordless poems occurred to me right then and there and has stuck ever since. Wordless poems. Subconscious jumble. Primordial soup of thought. Aren't we all carrying wordless poems in our heads? That which sometimes has never found its home until we die. Those homeless hermit crabs crawling on the beach bordering the sea of knowledge. Wordless does not mean voiceless. Give it volume, construct meanings out of it, give it a home, give it wings, and let loose.

The flag of ignorance

I heard this somewhere, I think, in a Christian apologist's podcast, arguing about absolute truth:

If everything is relative, then this statement is relative, too.

That stuck with me for the longest time because it is a solid shelter in the wake of Postmodernism.

But no, it's not about Postmodernism. I found that people I talk with (or others in a certain social media) are simply using Relativism because they don't bother to find out, really. 

A friend expressed his astonishment when I was reading a book related to Zen Buddhism:

"But, aren't you a Christian?"
"Yes, but what's wrong with finding out more about other beliefs?"
(Shakes head) "My other Christian friends simply wouldn't do that."

That, I don't understand. How can you defend your own belief if you don't know about others'? Now, I can only attribute that to laziness. Postmodernism is indeed one of those terms that is bloated beyond recognition and no one can offer a succinct definition of it anymore. It's a hand-waving, sweeping-under-the-rug thing. I don't bother to find out, so to cut the conversation short, I shove it to that trashbin of meanings, Postmodernism.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is a striking parallel with God of the Gaps thinking -- I don't understand and God is the totality of what's mysterious, what I don't understand. The danger of this, of course, your God would become smaller and smaller as you understand more, like Santa Claus is becoming less and less real when you are growing up.

Seekers of Truth, don't rally under the flag of ignorance.

A Structural Biologist's Manifesto

"So, what are you studying?" Depending on who is asking, the length of my answer would vary. See, since I go to grad school, quite a number of people are asking me that; and answering 'Biomolecular NMR' would draw some blank stares.

So, go back a little: Chemistry. Ah, my undergrad major, and since my lab uses analytical chemistry technique (i.e. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) to probe biomolecular structures, this answer is not too far off the mark.

"So why are you in the School of Biology?" Ahem. Here we go again.

So, the slightly longer and my supposed official areas of study: Structural and Computational Biology. I think I shall reintroduce my clockwork analogy here. Imagine a clockwork with all its gears running inside. If one would want to know how exactly the clockwork mechanism work, one would want to take it apart and see the gears; how they are connected together, what are their shapes that fit each other so that the concerted mechanism is running. Now, every living thing is also a machine, a biochemical machinery, that, like a clockwork, consists of tiny, tiny parts that are grinding away and give rise to life as we know it. Ideally we want to map how these biomolecular gears interact with each other (i.e. the interactome). Prior to that we would want to know how these tiny gears look like. The structures of these tiny gears are then what the structural biologist would like to know.

'To know' here, as in all areas of science (or anything, really), should be interpreted philosophically. The usual limit of what a structural biologist want to know goes beyond 'having a visual representation'. Sure, it's nice to know what these biomolecules look like since we normally can't see them with naked eyes. But blobby blobs at crappy resolution (say, 15 Å) doesn't tell much. Like a blurry text on a document for example; it's unreadable. What we would like to know, ideally, is the visual representation at the resolution of individual atoms (i.e. atomistic resolution). The blurry text on your document now gains some sharpness; now you can distinguish individual letters; it's now legible. Often, this is sufficient to establish how it behaves, how it interacts with, say, water molecules, metal ions, drug molecules, or other biomolecules.

To even arrive at this point is an accomplishment (to illustrate, resolving a previously unresolved structure of a big protein and analysing its structure-function relationship may occupy the whole PhD thesis, to give you a sense of scale). Could we do better, you ask? Erm, there's actually some problems -- hitting the philosophical wall, so to speak. Let me explain.

*WARNING: TECHNICAL TERMS AHEAD*

So, there are two common techniques used to probe biomolecular structures. (Oh, when we are talking about biomolecules, we mostly talk about proteins -- the biomachinery mostly comprises them).

The first is X-ray diffraction. It works by interpreting the diffraction pattern of X-ray by electron density of the atoms that make up the biomolecule. Since the atoms are arranged in a particular way for a biomolecule, the diffraction patterns are unique to each biomolecule; and long story short, the X-ray crystallographer would be able to construct back the electron densities of the biomolecule, thus she would able build a model of the biomolecule.

Now, problem #1, for a nice diffraction pattern, you would need repeating units, so you would need crystal of your protein, and crystallising a protein is honestly a PITA. Arising from that, problem #2, you would try a lot of different conditions until you find one that is suitable for crystallisation -- who is to say that that particular condition doesn't affect the structure of your biomolecule? Still arising from problem #1, the protein in say, your body, is in aqueous environment, but in your crystal it is obviously in solid -- problem #3, who is to say that your protein structure is not altered by crystal packing, and problem #4, your final structure would be a static snapshot of the structure frozen in the crystal, while the structure in solution must be a lot more wiggly-diggly -- do you now claim you 'know' the structure? (There, your epistemological wall). Problem #5, most of the atoms comprising a biomolecule -- C, O, N, S, Se, and some metals -- have nice, fat electron densities, but that ubiquitous Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the Universe of things living and non-living, does not. As such, H atoms are not visible in the crystal structure. Problem #6, so are regions of the biomolecule that does not form regular repeating units (most likely because they are floppy).  Problem #7, when you are matching atoms to your electron density map, some are ambiguous (e.g. you can point sidechain A at this orientation, it fits ok, flip sidechain A 180° and it still fit ok, even though on one orientation it's N but the other is O -- since N and O have similar electron densities).

So your typical X-ray structure file would miss its H's and its flexible regions (the termini are usually susceptible); some sidechains may not be at their correct orientation; and there's only one frigging, static frame. Would you now consider you 'know' the structure?

Oh, then there's NMR. The laypeople would be more familiar with MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Indeed the underlying principle is the same: both exploit the same phenomenon, i.e. nuclear magnetic resonance which arises from nuclear spin (which belongs to the wonderful, you-will-understand-better-if-you-don't-try-to-understand-it world of quantum mechanics (for instance, there's no way to visualise quantum spin)). Long story short, NMR yields a set of restraints. If in X-ray crystallography one needs to fit the biomolecule to the little pockets of electron density, in NMR one needs to fit the molecule to satisfy these restraints. So you would have to know the amino acid sequence of your protein. So then you have a totally linear peptide -- make the peptide explore different conformations to satisfy the restraints, a game of Twister if you will. What you end with would be a set of conformers, which would be ranked according to their energy. Usually the first 20 low-energy conformers are deposited in public domain. The fact that there is a set of conformers, called an ensemble, is important. By aligning the conformers in an ensemble, it's usually clear which region is flexible -- the deviation for that particular region would be more pronounced across the conformers. So an NMR structure would have its H's, all amino acids visible and it's not a static snapshot (cf. X-ray structure). Also, if you do solution NMR, it's may be possible to as close to physiological condition as possible (may not be totally tractable because of limitation in NMR setup itself, e.g. NMR signal at high pH condition decays too fast).

While seemingly answering to all X-ray crystallography's woes, the NMR spectroscopist faces a totally different set of problems. First off #1, NMR is an indirect technique, unlike X-ray diffraction which directly constructs a map of electron densities. So NMR structure doesn't really have a concept of 'resolution', which makes it kind of hard to assess the quality of a structure. So, you have made your protein play a game of Twister to satisfy your restraints, now #2, the quality of restraints -- if I see a flexible region in the ensemble, is it really flexible region, or I didn't apply enough restraints, that's why it's fuzzy? #3, the game of Twister is called restrained molecular dynamics, basically a computer simulation. Of course, it's only possible to incorporate approximations and assumptions, not the whole physical law shebang, into the software. Some of those may not be appropriate and may affect the resulting structure in a significant way. There are some technical obstacles as well, like how the protein of interest needs to be isotopically labelled with NMR-active nuclei (15N, 13C). The final step of reconstructing the structure is tedious both for X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy -- so that adds to the time needed to produce a good 3D representation of a protein. 

So, for the umpteenth time, after successfully determining a structure, the structural biologist should ask, metaphysically, Do I 'know' the structure?

Science, people. 

That's it. Next time I will just reply, "I do Science."  

Delightfully Lost and Human

Onsen, yukata, tatami, futon.

Those are some of the things I knew about Japan. Most of my knowledge about the Japanese language and culture came from my extensive manga reading. You may have friends who faithfully follow scanlations the Shounen Jump Big Three — One Piece, Naruto, Bleach — but the amount I read is much more. For example, to my own astonishment, I have to spend one whole day catching up on my manga reading after a two-week trip to Japan, during which I didn't read manga that much due to the limited screen estate of my puny laptop.

My manga obsession aside, I've learned that I have nuanced knowledge of the Japanese culture that my travel companion, an advanced-level student of Japanese language, does not know. I recalled telling him that in several mangas I read, people enjoy a drink of cold milk after soaking in onsen — I was telling him this when we have just finished our own share of hot spring soaking. So I wandered to the vending machine to verify my own trivia, only to discover other bath-related stuff in the vending machine: shaver, soap, shampoo, a pair of boxers — the latter an interesting finding notwithstanding, there was, to my dismay, no cold milk. However, imagine my delight when I paced to the other hand of the changing room and found, you guess it, a cold-milk vending machine. Needless to say, we teetered gleefully to it and fed it some coins. 

There were other moments like this, when my knowledge of some obscure aspect of the Japanese culture showed. On the other hand, there were also moments when my companion has to rescue me from drowning in the verbal torrent that is Japanese speech. And there we go, two people who have some knowledge in the Japanese culture and language, and somewhat lacking in travelling experience.

--

Where one goes on a journey, is quite inevitable really, that one will sooner or later get lost. In my native language, there is an aphorism that says he who is too shy to ask directions will get lost. My companion, who was keen to apply his Japanese language and finding our own way, was averse to asking. Myself, following wisdom of the ancients and being emboldened by the fact that we were in a land of strangers, would go up to policemen or other young-looking people in businesswear (more likely to speak English), said sumimasen (excuse me) and went straight to a mixture of dumbed-down English and animated, flailing, Tarzan-and-Jane sign language. Fear of getting lost triumphs over introversion.

Towards the end of the trip, we visited the Ghibli museum. There was one sentence in the pamphlet that is decidedly stuck in my mind, namely, I paraphrase: The visitor is encouraged to get themselves lost in this museum. Indeed, if you have seen even one or two Ghibli animations, the brand of the fantastical will soon be impressed upon you; what seems like a normal scene gradations into the magical, the preternatural. True enough, for an establishment that encourages one to get lost inside, the interior of the museum is delightfully confusing so that one would be delightfully lost. Upon entering reception, one would choose to view a short animation à la Ghibli, that would jumpstart a fantastical journey; or, one can choose to view various zoetropes of familiar Ghibli characters. Real time animations are hypnotic; it sucks you in, it transcends to your plane of reality: like Hey, this is not the animations you see on your silver screen, these characters come to life; right here, right now. Only after visiting Ghibli museum, I understood that getting lost is okay; that one should wonder and wander in lostness; bringing out that childlike quality of marvelling in everything, worrying not a farthing about how to get home, because one would be home eventually, for now be hypnotised by the present and seize it, the present and the day.

The writing of Augustine of Hippo was described to be 'digressive'. Although undoubtedly this gives headaches to his translators, the commentator mentions this in the tone not of derision, but of delight, because eventually everything would tie in together and the reader is brought to the home of the argument. Augustine would take his reader to a journey with a lot of detours, just like life, that grand scheme of things, is itself a journey with a lot of detours. (If this is not obvious to  the reader by now, I'm using this digression to justify digressions. Feeling delightfully lost yet?)

--

I read travelling accounts sometimes, and now I understand why there is a whole genre dedicated to travellogues: travels expose you, force you to rethink your assumptions and prejudices, shove a new paradigm down your throat. And if that doesn't wring creative juice out of you, I don't know what will.

I foolishly only recently made the connections between manga and cartoon. During my travel in Japan, I was confronted several times with a nagging feeling. The nagging feeling that the real thing does not hold up to my expectations. We were lucky enough to witness summer festivals, where stalls of food and other amusements were set up in the neighbourhood of nearby temples and shrines. In my mind, it was a magical place — you would go to one wearing yukata, treating yourself to takoyaki, candied apples and a game of goldfish-scooping; you would pray at the shrine and give offering, buying charms and draw fortunes; you would wait until late at night when fireworks like a spontaneous field of blossoms would burst, colouring the night sky. Yes, I did witness some of this, but somehow something was lacking. The first fantasy-shattering thing: the price of takoyaki (and other treats) was exorbitant. Secondly, and this is the major source of that nagging feeling: Real people actually do this? The moment this thought surfaced, I realised that I have been treating the Japanese culture as precisely that: a fantasy. In my own imaginations, it has become glossed over, raised to the ideal. In my mind, the Japanese have become 2-dimensional, cartoon figures of themselves.  Kierkegaard would call it a repetition.

And this brings me to the second big thing I learned from this travel, besides getting delightfully lost; that we are not that different after all. Strip that shiny veneer of culture and language and fancy clothes and we are not that different after all. And of all places, I learn this at onsens.

I had an inkling of this already when I first joined the lifesaving team. We strip down to our swimsuits, which are all Lycra, which are all of similar thinness. Understandably, this would make anyone anxious: your fashionable clothes are not there, your fake mannerism is not there; everyone speaks the same language and passion of swimming while laid bare in the bodies you carry with since birth with all its imperfections and what separates you from other human beings is just a thin layer of Lycra. 

And this is also the onsen philosophy: that every man and woman is forced to shed the onion layers of labels that society and oneself have plastered upon. The onsen etiquette prescribes that, firstly, one takes off all one's clothes in the changing room before entering the bath area. Needless to say, what one should take off is not only his regalia, but also his own social status that is implied by that set of regalia, for in the onsen everyone is his own naked self. Secondly, one should wash oneself clean before soaking in the public bath. What one previously has taken off is not enough, one should go a step further and take off the dust and the grimes; and the implication is quite clear: that wickedness and prejudice should be washed off, too. Only then, one is allowed to soak in the public bath. When one has traded his regalia with a cloth of vulnerability; when one has traded his prejudices and wear a robe of humility and open-mindedness. In From A Distance, Bette Midler sang, "From a distance, you look like my friend", but the onsen philosophy asserts that we should transcend that distance and stand nakedly side-by-side and the verse would go "From up close, we are actually the same, you and I".

--  

I would close with another aphorism from my mother tongue that came to mind: "Where the earth is trodden on, that's where the sky is supported", which is roughly equivalent to "In Rome, do as Romans do". And I think most travellers would come to this same conclusion: That deep down, we are all the same. That deep down, we are all humans. That yes, we tread on different earths and burden different skies, but we stand on the same Earth and hold up the same Heaven.

Crick's central dogma: Information flows in molecular biology and scientific discourse

Following the discovery of DNA structure by Watson and Crick (as well as Franklin, the crystallographer—I'm very partial to crystallographers!) in 1953, Crick went on to construct the central dogma, stating it in 1958 and restating it in 1970.

Why the restatement? Because during the period in-between, other people have come up with responses to it; evidently, Crick is dissatisfied with those articles that 'misunderstood' (Crick's own wording) the idea of central dogma.

To be fair, when I hear the term 'central dogma' in a Biology class, I was perplexed, too. The term 'dogma' belongs to philosophy, specifically epistemology, what is it doing here in a Biology class? If the Wikipedia page is to be believed, basically, Crick couldn't find a more awesome word. Hypothesis was taken by sequence hypothesis; framework probably sounds too ordinary; axiom probably sounds too mathematics-y; truth probably sounds too epistemological. Though considering that the central dogma describes universally almost every genetic system, it may be just a little exaggeration to call it universal genetic truth or something like that.  
Your Biology teacher probably explains the central dogma like this: In genetics, there are three important macromolecular carriers of information — DNA, RNA and proteins. DNA is inherited from your parents and sit in your cell nucleus (and mitochondria); DNA is replicated in cell division; DNA is transcribed to RNA. RNA (specifically, mRNA) is translated to proteins by the ribosomes. Central dogma is thus that framework in which the genetic information encoded in the DNA is finally expressed as proteins; it's a schematic of (genetic) information flow. Understand, class? And at this point, Crick would shake his head, raise his hand, and say, "If I may elaborate?"

And that is exactly what Crick wrote in the 1970 Nature paper. He would like to "explain why the term was originally introduced, its true meaning, and state why [he] think[s] that, properly understood, it is still an idea of fundamental importance."

The abstract:

The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information. It states that such information cannot be transferred from protein to either protein or nucleic acid.

Crick would like to point out that the central dogma is a negative statement, while the earlier sequence hypothesis is a positive statement. Thus it is intentionally limiting: the genetic information ends in protein and stays there—it's a cul-de-sac.

There are 3 other misunderstandings that Crick addressed, but I will leave it to you to read for yourself.

—

This whole chronicle of central dogma—besides teaching us about information flow in molecular genetics—also says something about information flow in scientific discourse.

First, the way Crick formulated the central dogma is exemplary. Early molecular geneticists knew about DNA, RNA, and proteins; but how the genetic information flows among them was less elucidated. Crick and and his collaborators first assume that all possible information transfers exist (Figure 1, as reproduced below). 

From there, they took away the arrows. They realised that two-way arrows are improbable because forward transfers already involve complex machinery, so "it seemed unlikely that that this machinery could easily work backwards". Protein-to-protein was out, too, because of  "stereochemical reasons"; in other words, proteins that so depend on their 3D structure to function cannot simply transfer its sequential information, like the nucleic acids which possess base-pairing that make replication possible for the nucleic acid since it serves as its own template.
And if this whole process sounds like detective work, well, that's the other way round; reasoning is the basis for both science and detective work, in this case deduction in particular. I particularly like the way they dismantle the arrows that did not stand up to scrutiny, it's kind of Holmesian.
Second, the precise way Crick formulates the central dogma. Crick formulated that abstract with extraordinary precision that stood up to scrutiny. He said:

In looking back, I am struck not only by the brashness which alowed us to venture powerful statements of a very general nature, but also by the rather delicate discrimination used in selecting what statements to make. Time has shown that not everybody appreciated our restraint.

As explained in this paper, he intentionally focus on the protein and how information cannot get out from there. He remained "discreetly silent" about DNA and RNA, which he was not sure of. The astute reader may also point out about prions, aren't they protein-to-protein information transfer? Yes, but it's not "residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information", but transfer of 3D shape — Crick got that covered. And that is why scientists need to be unambiguous in their language: you may think that we of the ivory tower spoke in something akin to medieval Latin (a.k.a. academic writing), but we do need to transfer our information precisely, or else we will face... 

Third, misunderstandings. I don't know how it looked like in the 1960s, but nowadays information flow in scientific discourse seems to hit the cul-de-sac in bad journalism. Admittedly, there are a lot of papers in which the language is unnecessarily complex and only a few shine in clarity while maintaining precision. That may be one factor, but still, journalists need to put aside the sensationalism, explain our jargons, use a lot of proper analogies; in other words, transferring the information with high fidelity.

Bad journalism, like bad protein, generates more of itself. Both are not good for the brain.

Crick F (1970). Central dogma of molecular biology. Nature, 227 (5258), 561-3 PMID: 4913914

Punctilious

I've been wondering why I've never learned this stuff at school proper: the more exotic members of punctuation marks, such as en and em dashes, semicolon, colon, etc. I suspect the philosophy here is like the lion cub being pushed off the cliff: we the fledgling young writers are to fend off  in the real word of writing and out of the jungle of words we would have gained the arcane secret that a cub on a rite of passage has to find out for itself.

And indeed it is best to let soak in the ocean of words to let the subtleties percolate into the deepest of your subconscious, rather than superficially reading the rules from the guidebooks (don't get me started with Strunk and White's Elements of Style, that some linguists love to hate). That said, I will attempt to write a guide of sorts, the purpose being: 1) to crystallise and organise my own knowledge, and 2) to soften the landing for a cub I'm about to push off. Here goes.

Laughter

[I rewrote this composition from my student's 'O' Level EL Section 1 practice composition, keeping roughly the same plot]

The falling water droplets drummed a monotonous, reverberating rhythm in his mind. He absent-mindedly stared at the plates, endlessly scrubbing every inch of each plate and bowl, cleaning the spot over and over again. There was a curtain of somnolence veiling the muffled chuckle in the next room and his own wandering mind in the labyrinth of memories. Inevitably, his mind returned to her, as it had been, again, and again, and again.

He first met her in high school, when she transferred to his class. He didn’t talk much to her, since he was unnerved by her beauty and especially those lips that can launch a thousand ships: when she laughed, it came as a deep rumble in her throat, smoothly rolling out her tongue, quivering her lips a little, like deep-red blossoms in morning dew rattled by the gentle breeze. Her laughter; the pitch, the timbre, the accompanying dimples, the joy, the happiness of being that defined her so much, all these were etched in his heart. Still, his own laughter and happiness were absent. Oh, how he longed to imbue his own laughter on top of hers, making a resonant melody that would echo deep to the very fibre of existence; interweaving laughters, interlocking lips, interbraiding passions!

That was why when he coincidentally met her again in the university, taking the same class even, he was elated beyond measure. He was determined be close to her this time. He mustered the courage to utter her name after class, and she turned, her long hair making gentle waves, spiralling in the gentle springtime gust of wind. Her lips moved and out came his name, tenderly clear and resonant. He said he was surprised she still remembered him—instead of replying with words, she let out that laughter of childlike innocence and amusement and joy, that same dew-soaked field of blossoms as he knew before.

His quest of love afterwards was punctuated with ups and downs but gradually he was able to reach that harmonious chord—her happiness was his happiness and his was hers; her laughters that bewitched him so now was his, too. And to the duet choral of laughters was soon added a more harmonious depth, the ringing of the wedding bells, and thereafter, the healthy cry of a baby daughter.

Unfortunately, the sound of dissonance came. A malignant tissue was found in her breast and it already spread to her trachea. No one said the C-word but it thumped in everyone’s mind, unceasingly, ruthlessly. Her battery of chemotherapy left her weak; it robbed her of her luxuriant hair and cheerful voice and laughters, it drained her lips of colour, it sapped her will of living. It ultimately snatched her away from him. Now those etched impressions in his heart were raw wounds instead, gushing blood, seething immeasurable pain.

The rain suddenly stopped and the sunshine penetrated through the lethargic veil that clouded his mind. His young daughter just laughed upon seeing her favourite cartoon character. He saw his wife’s face mirrorred in this young life; her laughter echoes in her daughter’s — her eyes turned towards him, saying wordless “Daddy!” He hugged her young daughter as tightly as his arms would reach, and let out a wailing cry. 

Or perhaps it was laughter; it was indistinguishable.   

Castle in the sand

Today when I sit on that magical borderline
between grains of silicon dioxide and saltwater,
I dig out a little hole,
(kind of like an antlion's sandpit,
though there is a certain perversion that
the sand is the sand, but
the beach is not the desert)
I haven't so much as thought of digging a foundation
for a castle of sand, when
the waves sweep the sand level,
and the castle in the sand only becomes
the castle in the air.
But what struck me most wasn't the extinguished architecture,
but the fact that the waves gently, ferociously slapped everything even.
Castles of sand, houses, cities, happiness, sadness, anger,
well, people.
And the ancient voices doth spake:
Syrus: In the face of death all men are equal;
A Chinese sage: In the face of Truth, all are students.

(Me: In the face of tidal wave, run away.)

Frostian

Thanks to my overzealous notetaking as of late, I've found out that somehow I have inadvertently plagiarised Frost. See, I have had this fragmental verse written, unfinished, tentatively titled Saltsmith (though it really doesn't sit well with me), timestamped on March 15:

You are a salt statue

The undercurrent of the world is constantly eroding you

Step back, step back

Put the sign 'Under Construction'

And regain yourself

The passing sense of familiarity was tugging when I clipped from Robert Frost's Directive on May 7:

And if you’re lost enough to find yourself

By now, pull in your ladder road behind you

And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.

Then make yourself at home.

Now I would like to think that I have perhaps tapped to that great ocean of Jungian collective knowledge, though I'm sure there are less romantic explanations to it. Lesson #1: Some things are better left romanticised; Lesson #2: I should not leave such crumbs of verses and dilly-dally until they grow stale and nobody wants to eat them anymore.

Clockworks: The Story of Drugs — Part 1

In this installment, I will discuss why it is difficult to discover, design and develop a drug, in view of our current knowledge of physiology.

With numerous, intertwined reactions happening, our body is a complex clockwork of biomachinery gears. What do you do, then, if some gears fail—that is, if you got sick? On one hand, it is a consolation that many gears are what biologists call 'redundant', which means that it's alright that a certain gear fails, because there are other gears that can take over its function. On the other hand, due to the intricacy of the gears, it is hard to pinpoint which gear is the problem, let alone fixing it. And the sheer number of gears: ICD-10 classifies tens of thousands diagnoses — tens of thousands ways the gears can fail — and those are only the ones we know; how about those we don't? Granted, some are not caused by our own gears failing, but by interferences of other, pesky gear systems: viruses, bacteria, misfolded proteins, errant microbiome, etc.; but the sense of magnitude is there.

The Pool is Indifferent to My Mortality:

It occurred to me twice, first when my chest tightened out of nowhere,
second when I was One with the chlorine water,
having waded interminable laps on the way to two hundred,
the Enlightenment.
The pool would utter, if it can think aloud like the lake in Narcissus, with the royal plural pronoun:
You don't have a set of gills, yet you dare treading in our watery realm?
(But then, in retrospect, fishes, or other possessors of gills, would die in chlorinated water)
You could almost hear this voice resonating in the back-and-forth lapping of the surface,
guided by gentle breeze of the rain prelude.
Mind suspended in contemplation, body suspended in this sort of reverse amniotic fluid
(it doesn't give birth; it kills)
I studied my almost still shadow on the pool floor,
tangled in strands of light, enmeshed
with what looks like the very fabric of Nature itself,
Yes, in the beginning was Let there be light, wasn't it?
And I wondered if I was being brought to the beginning or the end,
the amniotic fluid or the formaldehyde,
kindled or extinguished.

Did You Know It's Christmas?

When I was on the way home from the Christmas Eve service, I heard this song again: 

Someone in the car then remarked that it makes him a little uncomfortable, asking Mary repeatedly did-you-know because she did know, albeit partially, about these things.

Well, I think that's a-little-too-matter-of-fact way of looking at it. The way I look at it:

First, I believe the questions are somewhat rhetorical -- indeed Mary knew; the angels told her some things, even though most likely she knew not the full implications of what was about to happen to her. Which brings me to the second: the tone of the question is not interrogative but jubilant. Like the chorus in a play, we are called to sing along the heavenly hosts, eager to share our own excitement, the generations down the line who have been blessed, saying Amen to Mary's Magnificat: I shall be called blessed (Luke 1:46-55). In effect, the lyricist also calls us to put ourselves in Mary's shoes, sharing her joys of being chosen as an instrument of God. In fact, moments into the song, the word that immediately occurred to me was vicarious -- in other words, we are called to take part in the Magnificat, transcending the timeline gap and experience what Mary experienced, particularly her joy, vicariously. This perspective (heavenly host singalong) is certainly unusual and as there is a dash of dramatic irony too, since we already know what is going to happen, Mary didn't. All in all, it makes you think. Literary spices are useless if the ingredients are stale in the first place. 

So ponder. Sing. Don't eat too much. Did you know you are going to have a blessed Christmas?

Caesius

Unfortunately I haven't had many chances to answer 'caesius' when asked what my favourite colour is. What I would like to tell foremost is the reason why it is my favourite. It's a soft colour and pairs quite well with any other, sure, but it is a little bit more than the mere visual quality -- it's rather synaesthetical. Caesius is foremost the colour of emission spectrum line of caesium, the alkali metal that is its namesake. It invokes the alchemist, the transformer of things. Secondly, well, it is the colour of the sky and the sea, the two great expanses that we are sandwiched between. There is a poetic quality to it -- it evokes Genesis' "the waters above and the waters under". One poet expressed this quality like this: "The dolphins that stitch the sky to the sea", and yet another. It reminds us that we are part of the firmament that stitches the sky to the sea. That we are the waters between, our hearts sky-blue expanses, transparent and vast. 

Sidetracked

Treading on the dampened track, heavy fatigue-laden steps, soft whisper of night breeze, the night sky awash with moonshine, rivulets of sweat streaming down, breath punctuated by wheezes, vast expanse of track neatly divided by white bold lines, bad timing of 14:02, roughness of the track on bare feet, cars and buses gliding almost noiselessly outside, the orchestra of crickets, low constant buzzing and intermittent sounds by tiny fiddlers, mate-calling, peering into a puddle, looking for moon's ghost, submerged mirrory watery city found instead.

An Open Letter to A Friend Whose Friend Has Just Taken Her Own Dear Life

Dear J

I'm sorry your friend has just committed suicide. I know you had just talked to her a few months back and I know you blame yourself for not talking her out of her suicidal tendencies. I cannot claim to understand your sorrow, since it has never happened to me, though a loss, a death is something that plucks the same string in all of us, playing the same rueful tune, rippling to the very core of our souls, so let me try a few words.

The first time you told me, I referred you to an article where a father struggled with the death of his son. Let me repeat a particular sentence, as it has stubbornly repeated itself in my mind: 

It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.

I know you are sick of people telling you to get over it, so I'm not going to tell you to. But you must. However long it will take, you must. And do not lash at those people. If they bothered to tell you, they care for you. Listen, J, as I have told you before, it takes a strong character like yours to be able to wear one's heart on one's sleeve, but an exposed heart gets cut more. Victor Frankl said that the sun needs to endure burning to give out light. You have a big, healthy heart, J, that's why you are bothered about this in the first place.

Channelling your grief into something else might work. I see that you have started running again after recovering from your injury. I swim, or write silly letters like this. The obliterated place is literally 'against the letter', so I would use words to construct the obliterated back. Remember the ankle injury that cripples you, forcing you to wear ankle guard like a clumsy Robocop? It has healed, hasn't it? The big gash in your heart will someday close, too, and you will be able to run again, be it on the field-track or the life-track.

I believe in a proper closure. That's why we have funerals, to mark the closing of a life. We have New Year's Eve celebration, to mark the closing of the year. I don't know what is your version of closure, but I hope you will find it. Attend her funeral, talk to her parents, write her a letter, write her family a letter, let go of a helium balloon to the vast sky, take a night walk in remembrance of her; do what you can do. Mark it as a closure to a chapter in your life -- a bitter chapter indeed -- and start a new chapter. Take your time, but do not dwell so long -- grief is like quagmire, the longer you stay, the longer you will get stuck.

Remember your big heart, J, the one with gashing wound and has to endure nuclear fusion to shine?
Glow for all to see.

Yours

Revisitation

I've come to realise that a part of growing up is to revisit childhood memories. You see, as a child we tend to be fascinated by every little thing, and our memories are glossed over, filtered through the rose-tinted spectacles. When you have grown up then, to those fond memories do revisitations, or as Kierkegaard put it, Repetition.
I'll give you an example. My mother makes really mean croquettes, and as far the child me was concerned, Mom's croquette was the damnedest thing ever to touch his palate. My father used to work out of town and occasionally brought a durian or two home. Again to the child me it was the most delectable thing ever. And I can tell you, the croquettes or durians I have since devoured can never compare to those I had, simply because I have associated Mom's croquette as the mark of a happy ocassion and Dad's durian as a sign of his coming home.

What I'm saying is you may need to peel off the extraneous layers of gloss on your memories, but then again maybe not -- why bother with that which has become the ideal, the unattainable? Maybe if factual information is important to glean, then you need to. But at least you need to recognise them as they are, and when you revisit the memories again, no need to suffer unnecessarily because the scenery isn't as magnificent as you remembered, the food isn't as delicious, the people aren't as kind, and so on; and chase after that which have become etched shadows in your mind. Because growing up includes an acknowledgement that you will never catch them.

Little Words

A little while ago, someone asked me to retract a comment I have made. I did what I was told, but behind my one-word compliance and the act of deleting that comment, was a torrent of daggers. Of pejoratives, of expletives. Like a cartoonish scene where it is calm and warm by the fireplace, but by the window the droplets incessantly knock the glass like bullets from a submachine gun. Up to this moment I still wonder why I am so bitter -- understatement -- about the little incident; after all it was just one sentence, one line. A dim, flickering light in the midst of high-flux spotlights, making no difference in or out of existence.

If I want to be brief about it though, perhaps the reason goes something like this: As someone who aspires to use words to make a living, I produce every line with careful consideration, and this one was no exception. Wordsmiths take pride in their creations, and when those flickering children die, the wordsmith die a little. The issue was what I said can be interpreted as libellous, somewhat. But exactly that was what I took pride in in that statement -- it can be interpreted as praise or scorn. For those in the know, the interpretation can mean that the person in consideration is lenient, lenient to a fault perhaps, but nothing scornful. For those not in the know, this nuance would be absent. Thus I was playing the classical ambiguous statement -- crusing along the fence -- here. It explains the situation quite nicely with a veiled nuance, without giving too much away. "Witty enough," said the self-editor in me.

Let me digress. Words and mouth are quite intertwined. The mouth, being the producer of the spoken language, is subject to a lot of metaphors. Needless to say, they are related to speaking and eating. But: speaking produces, eating consumes; isn't that antonymic? But there is an excellent example which manages to unite the above ostensible opposites:

Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"
-- Matthew 4:4

And how interesting indeed that the one who spoke of these things is also known as the Word, or Logos in the original Greek. The mouth is then a point of reconciliation. Words are bread. Words nourish us. Indeed these are true for the words from the Scripture. But we bear semblances to the Word, after all we are in his image. Thus the words we produce indeed nourish sometimes, though at most other times they destroy.

In this way our words are powerful, our tongues are tongues of fire dancing a dance of destruction. And I'm reminded of this everytime I recall that little incident.

It doesn't help to abate the internal pouring torrent of expletives, though.

How Zeus Unites All There Is

[Ms. Freedman / Sophomore English / Period 5 / Journaling prompt: Write a one-page story in which your favourite mystical creature resolves the greatest sociopolitical problem of our time.]

I can't exactly say what the greatest sociopolitical problem of our time is. And that's befitting of the title 'the greatest', it refuses to be captured in a few words. But I will try to explain it as I understand it. It probably can be summed up in one word: fragmentation, but give me the luxury to elaborate, if you please.

I would start with countries. Countries are strange -- people need to be segregated, given different identities, possessing different cultures. Ms. Freedman, I came from a third-world country. My great-grandmother travelled the rough seas to settle down there. Wars had been fought, blood had been spilled, our land had been occupied, our people had been slaves, because -- because of our exotic spices? Mr. Duma, our economic teacher, said that countries specialise and trade is beneficial. Tell that to our plundered land, to our raped women, to our children forced into labour. Tell them! Just because you happen to be born on one side and we on the other; no, it doesn't give right to you or I to treat the other side like trash. Countries need not be separated like this.

The very fabric of our economy is in shambles. I don't know about stocks and forex, probably you do, Ms. Freedman, because it seems like nowadays everybody's uncle is dabbling in stocks and forex. I am always bewildered at how people can make money based on changes in stock price and currency exchange rate. Where does it come from? Someone's gotta pay for it all: a man's fortune is another's misery. The feeling is somewhat like when how I sweat at the thought of air-conditioning -- where would the heat go? The law of equivalent exchange -- we will pay for our cool air somehow, maybe we are. Is this thing called economic structure a big Ponzi's scheme like the one cooked up by that Madoff guy? Would our children or theirs pay for the price eventually? Seriously, Ms. Freedman, how does one sleep with these thoughts? 

My mystical creature would be able solve this. I choose Zeus. Alright, Ms. Freedman I know it's cheating -- 'mythical' is not exactly 'mystical' but fussing over minor differences may be someone else's greatest sociopolitical problem ever, you know. Anyway, Zeus. As in Zeus the ruler of the gods. The one in the presence of whom all heads, mortals and gods alike, must bow. The one who wield the thunder bolts. The one causing static tingling in the electronics section... OK, that must be a different god, but I digress.

Having reigned over naughty immortals (who acted suspiciously similar to adolescents, mortal ones), he should know how to reign over us mortals. He would establish good governance, unified every country into a federation, set up a sensible economic system, etc., etc. No, he won't be a communist leader, nor will he be a fully democratic one. Before Aristotle was, he is; so I would presume he knows something about moderation.

Having said that, I would advise not to rely on him completely. After all, we are mortals and he isn't. The word devil may have its root in the Greek word diábolos, slanderer, but I am more persuaded to believe that it goes back to the Sanskrit word deva, god. It reminds us that the angels can fall, the Morning Star banished to the depths of Hades. Which fits wonderfully to Milton's Paradise Lost, where the Greek gods are cast as the fallen angels. See? I did my summer reading, Ms. Freedman.
Alright, Ms. Freedman, can we drop this farce already? I've told you how my favourite mystical creature resolves the problem. Well, the problem is still there, and it's not going to mystically resolve itself. So we've got you and me and a bunch of other people. Not mystical in any way, but that's the point.