The art of interpretation

"How are you?"
"Where are you from?"
"What do you do?"

During my socially un-enlightened years, I used to think these questions are so boring. After having hundreds of repetitive conversations like these, I thought: "Why can't people be more creative and ask something more interesting?".

Until one day, many experiences later, it dawned on me: words don't always convey what the speaker wants to express.

For example, I'm sure everyone has read/experience about the interesting fact that, what women say and what they mean are two different things. Here are some humorous examples taken from a website:

- It's your decision = The correct decision should be obvious by now
- Do whatever you want = You are going to pay for this later
- Sure...go ahead = I don't want you to
- I'm not upset = Of course I'm upset, you moron!
- Is my butt fat? = Tell me I'm beautiful

The same principal applies to many human interactions. When someone asks "What do you do?" when you meet for the first time, what they are really saying is: "Tell me something interesting about who you are in ways I can relate to, so that we may connect in some ways."

When you respond to what people are really asking, instead of being boring and repetitive, the conversation takes a different tone and becomes interesting. It's pretty simple right? But I was clueless for years.


When I travelled in India, the question "Where are you from?" quickly became an annoying phrase, because it was the first thing every tout and hawker said when they have their radar locked on you. When they said it, what they really meant was: "Give me a response so that I can continue talking and sell you something."

But when you are sitting in a friendly hostel with fellow travellers, "Where are you from?" becomes just another way of saying: "Tell me something interesting about who you are in ways that I can relate to."
Same words, big difference.


A while ago, a friend was upset because the girl he was seeing liked to play mind games with him. "I know all these games and tricks, and I'm so sick of girls who like to play them." He exclaimed.

That got me thinking, why do girls play games with guys? Isn't it just another form of indirect communication? Isn't it a way of expressing their uncertainty and/or doubt? So when us guys get upset and/or confused by them, doesn't it basically mean that we failed the tests titled "Are you man enough to be with me?" or "Are you sensitive enough to understand my feelings?"


I find it interesting that for some people, the skills to interpret what certain communication really mean seem to come so naturally to them, that they don't even need to think about what they do.

But for those who are more debilitated such as myself, we have to learn them the hard way. It's not easy, because someone who thinks "Why can't people ask more interesting questions?" has very different mindset and beliefs about themselves and others, compared to someone who thinks "I understand where you are coming from, and I can relate to that".
Mindset and beliefs are harder to change than behaviours.

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The phoenix

Only those who possess both confidence and humility are complete.
Confidence without humility becomes egotism. People who are egoistical, are actually more insecure than they wanted you to believe.

Sometimes, humility can only be learnt after one hit rock bottom and stayed there for a while.
Like a phoenix who needs to be burnt to the ashes in order to be reborn, the periods of darkness in one's life are opportunities to cleanse and purify one's soul before the rebirth can take place.

Of course, it's easy to say these from the hindsight. When the fire is burning, when things hurt like hell, you'll likely just want to tell other people to shut up about this phoenix nonsense.

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One of those days

It's one of those days, where reality felt utterly surreal. One of those days, where familiar faces felt unfamiliar. One of those days, when I started writing in my journal, the words from Hamlet's famous soliloquy intertwined with my thoughts. I wondered, how can the words written 400 years ago, still ring true today. Is the human condition the exception to this transient world?

And... it's one of those days, when I flipped open Hamlet aimlessly, the words that stared right at me, were the exact ones that had been circling in my mind.

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Turning Point

"This is nuts." After many attempts, frustration turned into anger and disbelief. What am I doing wrong? How is it possible that, after having completed other much more strenuous activities, I still could not swim freestyle strokes for more than 50 meters? That's just one single bloody lap!

After several practices without getting any improvement, at the brink of giving up, I turned to the basic exercises demonstrated in the Total Immersion video.

There's a reason why I skipped these exercises in the beginning: they looked pretty plain and boring. Instead of swimming, you repeat some very basic movements, like floating in the water, rotating your body, positioning your hands and doing some hand switching.

But once I got into it, it became an amazing experience. The moment I experienced what it meant to turn my body with the least effort, and noticed how it simply glide through the water with ease, time seemed to have stopped for a moment. Frustration was replaced by joy, and now each movement becomes an achievement in and by itself.

There's something very zen-like about it.

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Dreams

I've said this before, I'm a dreamer, I need to dream and know that all things are possible in order to be happy.

Convincing me that my dreams are unrealistic and can never be realised is the surest way to induce a depression in me. Growing up, I felt suffocated by the overwhelming pressure from the outside world, and that's a major reason why I became rather argumentative early on: I needed to protect myself.

There's a reason why Paulo Coelho remained a favourite writer of mine in the past 10 years.

Quote:
"We must never stop dreaming. Dreams provide nourishment for the soul, just as a meal does for the body. Many times in our lives we see our dreams shattered and our desires frustrated, but we have to continue dreaming. If we don’t, our soul dies".

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/01/03/the-good-fight-3

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A lesson from survivor Samoa

I've always find that certain people makes me uneasy. There's often no obvious and justifiable reasons, but no matter what I do I just find that I have the innate desire to get as far away from them as possible.

Sometimes I wonder, why my other friends don't mind these individuals, and whether the problem has something to do with me.

Well...watching survivor Samoa brought me a revelation. This is what happened: in the Foa Foa tribe, there's a guy called Russell who started a strategy of deceit from day one. On the surface, he was friendly to everyone and tried to get everyone's trust, but at the same time he secretly manipulated people into fighting with each other, causing rifts in the tribe. (This was on day one! Wasn't it a bit too early? Shouldn't you be focusing on having unity in the tribe so that you can win challenges first?)
When he talked to the camera in private, he started gloating about how stupid he thinks everyone is and how everyone is going to be his puppets.

Having a villain like this certainly made the show more entertaining, but it shows that there are certain people you just shouldn't place your trust with.

Almost everyone was blindsided by him, but some started to sense that something about him just wasn't quite right. A former police officer, Betsy, stated: "I wouldn't trust Russell", but when asked by another tribe member "why?", she couldn't explain it. "I don't know...it's just my female intuition...". Another member, Marisa, made the mistake of voice her concern about his trustworthiness to him, so he manipulated the tribe to vote her out in the first episode. Since Betsy instinctively knew that she couldn't trust Russell, true to his villainous nature, he got her voted out in the second episode. From there on, the Foa Foa tribe suffered a streak of defeats challenge after challenge. Well...when everyone who's smart enough to be suspicious of the villain's behaviour were voted off, is there any surprise that you're left with a weak tribe?

Maybe, when your instinct tells you that you can't trust someone, there's a good reason for it, even if you can't explain it (perhaps especially if you can't explain it).

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The Island

This is a true story.

My friends met an Italian couple in India, who were in their forties. They first visited Southern India in 1980s. During that time, they met a local guy, who told them about a secluded island. They were entranced by the descriptions, so they decided to go there with him. The island was so remote that it took several days and many boat rides to get there.

Once they were there, the island turned out to be everything they dreamed of. During the day, they would go fishing, swimming, picking fruits, and at night they would sit in front of the fire, listen and exchange stories with the locals. They lost track of time.

One day they woke up, and realised that 20 years have passed since they first arrived! That's when they left the island, went back to mainland India, continued their journey, met my friends and told them this story.

It is surreal.

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The Story of Germany

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. I happened to be listening to audio lectures on modern European history in the past few weeks, and thus found a few interesting facts that gave me a more in depth perspective about the whole event.

The interesting thing is that, Germany had not been a united country for much of the history. Before 1871, while there were groups of people with an identifiable German culture, the Germans were governed by several kingdoms and principalities, chief among them being Prussia and Austria.

Before the French revolution in 1789, the concept of nations did not exist in most people's mind. People were ruled by their feudal lords and monarchs, with whom they swore their allegiance to. It is not uncommon for a king to rule several, in today's terms, countries.

What happened during the 18th century was fascinating, it was the change in ideology and philosophical concepts, that ultimately changed the world. Idea is such an abstract thing, yet it's impact on the fate of societies and human beings is so powerful and profound, as demonstrated by what happened on the European continent.

People started to believe that all men are created equal, as opposed to the monarchs have the divine right to rule, and this ultimately led to revolutions. The idea that people as a nation, should have the right to determine their fate, led to nationalist movements. It is interesting to note that, instead of deposing their monarchs, as happened in France during the French Revolution, most European countries preferred to have a constitutional monarchy. That is, they don't want to get rid of their kings, they just wanted to have their constitution, parliament and the right to vote. (Note: UK, Australia, NZ, Canada, Denmark, Japan...etc are examples of a constitutional monarchy today)


So finally in 1871, Germany was united, with the king of Prussia became the emperor of Germany. Austria was left out because of political complications (The Hapsburg monarchy in Austria also ruled over Northern Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Croatia...etc).

The fate of this new nation was dramatic to say the least. In 1914, at 43 years old - the age when a man would likely to experience the midlife crisis; it started World War I along with Austria. They lost the war, and the Hapsburg monarchy simply dissolved, with the empire split into pieces. At this point Austria wanted to join Germany, but the victor nations would not allow it. There was no way that they'll allow Germany to become bigger than it was before the war.

24 years later, in the name of unifying the greater Germany, the Nazi regime first annexed Austria, Czechoslovakia, then finally invaded Poland in 1939 and thus started World War II. At the end of the war, 84 years after its birth, roughly the lifespan of a human being, Germany was divided in half, and thus marked the beginning of the long cold-war.

Looking at Europe today, where most countries are united into a single economy, is nothing short of remarkable. The forces behind these changes, are once again powerful ideas profoundly shaping people's lives and destinies. We have not reached the end of the story that started in the 18th century.

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How to backup data to DVD and find them later with ease

I just finished writing a tutorial on how I systematically backup my files to DVDs, and how I can find out which file is on which DVD in seconds.

I've posted it on my new blog, which is intended to be focused on more technical topics:
http://antarcticsubmarine.blogspot.com

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A conversation

"I can understand now how passion is important for running a business."
Me: "Yeh, passion is kind of like the counterbalancing force to fear isn't it?"
"Yes"
Me: "So without passion, you are left with...fear alone!"

Me: "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?"
"I'm slightly more of a pessimist, because knowing things aren't right makes me want to take actions and do things to change them."

"I think it's healthy to feel a bit scared; to allow your survival instinct to kick in. Many people I know who lived their life too safely ended up complaining about how life is boring; how they don't feel passionate and alive, and how they felt lost and meaninglessness."

"Feeling danger might be something that's essential to our biological system; it might be necessary for us to feel a bit scared in order to grow and achieve a sense of fulfillment."

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ARC Salon 2009

Every year, the Art Renewal Center's online salon gives out prizes to awe inspiring paintings & sculptures in the classical realism genre. Which gives me a good excuse to link to some beautiful artworks.

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Defeated

I felt defeated after today's interaction. At first I was frustrated, then as we left the interaction without any resolution, I was angry. After that, I started to doubt, maybe I shouldn't have brought up the topic at all, maybe pretending everything was normal as if nothing happened previously would've been a better choice, after all, that's how millions of people dealt with issues. Then, I felt the a feeling worse than anger - guilt. Then, finally, I felt resigned and defeated. Then something interesting happened, I started to feel a sense of relief, and I was finally at peace.

------------------------------------------------------

People always come into your life for a reason, a season and a lifetime. When you figure out which it is, you know exactly what to do.

When someone is in your life for a REASON, it is usually to meet a need you have expressed outwardly or inwardly. They have come to assist you through a difficulty, or to provide you with guidance and support, to aid you physically, emotionally, or even spiritually. They may seem like a godsend to you, and they are. They are there for a reason, you need them to be. Then, without any wrong doing on your part or at an inconvenient time, this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end. Sometimes they die, Sometimes they just walk away. Sometimes they act up or out and force you to take a stand. What we must realize is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled; their work is done. The prayer you sent up has been answered and it is now time to move on.

When people come into your life for a SEASON, it is because your turn has come to share, grow, or learn. They may bring you an experience of peace or make you laugh. They may teach you something you have never done. They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy. Believe it! It is real! But, only for a season. And like Spring turns to Summer and Summer to Fall, the season eventually ends.

LIFETIME, relationships teach you a lifetime of lessons; those things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person/people (anyway), and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas in your life. It is said that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant. Thank you for being part of my life.

Brian A. "Drew" Chalker

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I switched off my analytical mind while watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and enjoyed every moment of it.
The movie became a total sensory experience, the charming locations, the hauntingly beautiful melody of the Spanish guitars, the magnetic calmness of Juan Antonio, the longing expression on Vicky's face, the fiery chaotic Marie Elena, the flirtatious & spontaneous Cristina...etc. There's even a tinge of existential humour to tickle my intrigue:

Cristina: [Looking at a sculpture of Jesus] Are you very religious?
Juan Antonio: No, no, no, no, I'm not. The trick is to enjoy life, accepting it has no meaning whatsoever.
Cristina: No meaning? You don't think that authentic love gives life meaning?
Juan Antonio: Yes, but love is so transient. Isn't it? I was in love with a most incredible woman... and then in the end...
Vicky: Yes?
Juan Antonio: She put a knife into me.
Cristina: My God, that's terrible!
Vicky: Well, maybe you did something to deserve it.

All in all, watching this movie was like savoring a scrumptious meal, all my taste buds were satisfied.

I can tell that without some of my life experiences in the past, I wouldn't have related to the subject and enjoyed it. What's more amusing, is that for the most part of my life, I have played the role of those "clueless guys" in the movie (eg. Doug and the guy Cristina's hosts tried to set her up with on the sail boat), who were fulled of ideas and/or righteousness in their heads, but completely missed out (or intentionally ignored) those subtle expressions, emotions and desires in people as painted so vividly in the movie.

Oh mighty god, I repent for my oblivious ways.

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A crushed egg

Early yesterday morning, an egg placed next to a milk bottle in our fridge, was lightly crushed by the pressure of its neighbour. The egg remained intact, despite the fact that the shell was fractured & some egg yolk was released.

In about the same hour, I was dreaming in my sleep. In the dream, I was a child, a member of a Royal family, packing up my things for our imminent departure from the palace. The country had become unstable due to either war or revolution, I couldn't tell, but in hindsight, the setting of my dream was mostly akin to the stories I heard about the Russian Royal families.

Logic is never necessary in a dream, so for no reason at all, the me in my dream boiled an egg, pealed its shell, and found that I had no appetite for it. Food had become scarce, so throwing it away would be a terrible misconduct, and some family members were urging me to hurry up and get moving. I was left in a dilemma, but was soon relieved because the dream changed and I became someone else.

And hour or two later, while sitting in front of the computer, my mind suddenly made a connection between the two incidents. Why was I dreaming about an egg? It's certainly not a common theme of my dreams.

After years of casually reading about the human mind, I believe that we, human beings, even with our technological advances, still cannot describe the full extent of our mind's capabilities. So its fully possible that my mind somehow picked up what happened in the fridge, and brought it into my (the dreamer's) consciousness.

This is one of those things that makes you go like "woo...", as if someone had tipped over a bottle and spilled a sense of wonder all over your solar plexus.


It was not the first time something like this happened.
Back in 2007, I had a dream in an early morning, in which I was a mountain climber walking on a precarious path. The feeling of danger and the imminent threat of falling down the mountain was vivid and alive even after I woke up. Later that day, I heard on the news that two climber felt down on Mt. Cook and died.


I've claimed half-jokingly that I'm a half-psychic from time to time, and I really believe that my intuition almost always knows more than my consciousness mind does.
I've long given up my interest in explaining why or how the intuition works, I just want to use it to my advantage.

Yesterday afternoon, I began listening to the audio book version of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. "Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant." -- Amazon.com.


There was an interesting experiment described in the book. It's a simple gambling game: imagine there are 4 decks of cards in front of you, two red and two blue. You were told the rules and just have to turn over cards from any of the decks, one by one. What they didn't tell you is that the red decks contained high risk cards, which will punish you severely when you turn them over. So the only way you can win the game is to only turn over cards from the blue decks.

A group of scientists from the University of Iowa did this experiment a few years ago, and they found that most people developed a hunch of what's going on, after turning over about 50 cards.

Now here comes the interesting part, the researchers hooked the participants up to a polygraph, to measure the activity of the sweat glands in their hands, and they found that the participants started to develop stress responses to the red decks by the 10th card! That's 40 cards before they started to get a hunch of what's going on consciously.

The excerpt of the book can be found here: http://www.gladwell.com/blink/blink_excerpt1.html


Our body (ie. our subconscious/unconscious mind) knows what's going on before our conscious mind does!

What surprised me was that, I came to this same conclusion after learning how to interact with people in more direct & natural ways! People can lie, or even you can lie to yourself, but in either case, responses from your body can't.

To be more intuitive, means to listen to your body, or more precisely, to be aware of the feelings or hunches in your body.

It's long been my belief that whether you're happy, sad, angry or nervous...etc, other people can sense it instinctively.
From the body's point of view, you can say that their body can always sense how you truly feel, whether their conscious mind can register what they are sensing or not, that depends on how much awareness they have to their own inner responses.

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Personality & communication

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is probably by far the most popular personality model out there. I have seen its application in many different places, from casual personality quizzes to sophisticated studies to help people find their potential partners.

There are 4 pairs of personality functions (or dichotomies):
1. (E)xtraversion/(I)ntroversion
2. (S)ensing/i(N)tuition
3. (T)hinking/(F)eeling
4. (J)udging/(P)erceiving

While my preference for functions in group 1,2,4 is ambivalent, fickle and changes depend on the situation; when it comes to the way I gather, interpret and understand information(ie. functions in group 2), I'm a clear cut N.

This means that the way I process information is based more on my intuitive feelings, I can only get a clear sense of what facts and data mean, when I understand their relationship with other things (ie. how they fit into the big picture), and that I tend to skip unnecessary details.

Only about 26.7% of people are N's, and the majority are S's: people who like facts and details, who tend to pay attention only to things they can observe through their 5 senses.

This difference in personality trait, is the one thing that caused the most trouble in my communication with others.

Being the minority means that you have to deal with lots of S's, who, since they are the majority, have little or no awareness of the fact that people with a different thinking/communication style existed.

To be fair, not all S's are the same, some are less extreme than others, some are more observant of their audience's reaction than others, some are pretty good listeners, and some knows how to calibrate their communication depend on who their audience is.

On the other hand, some of them are seemingly...how do I put it...living in the ivory tower of obliviousness.

It's been quite a journey for me to learn to communicate with people in problems caused by this N-S clash. The Myers-Brigg model is really handy, it allowed me to understand what the fundamental problem is, and explain it to the parties involved.

It's funny though that so far I've not been able to do this verbally very often. When it comes to explaining these intricate things in details, writing proved to be much more effective.


On a side note, one study at UCLA indicated that up to 93 percent of communication effectiveness is determined by nonverbal cues (eg. tonality, expressions, body language...etc). My interpretation of this statement is that, if the other party doesn't get you, meaning that they've missed out on all the subtle signal & messages you are sending, then no amount of talk is likely to change the situation.

It was an interesting epiphany for me to realise that verbal words really are just a small part of a communication, and nowadays I find that I will generally have a more enjoyable time, if I tone down the seriousness of the conversation, and focus on making it fun, fluid, interesting, exciting & engaging.

My focus had shifted from worrying about what to say, to paying more attention to what the other person is communicating non-verbally, and respond to these non-verbal cues. There's a learning curve involved, so sometimes it makes me wish that someone had taught me these things when I was younger. Why didn't they teach these in school?

Anyway, enough rambling, time to end this post.

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Pine Gun - conspiracy

Finally the 48Hours animation our team made is online.

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48Hours Auckland Finalists

We made it! Our team is one of the fifteen Auckland finalists.

After watching our animation on the big screen along with 7 other films last Sunday, I wasn't sure if we can compete with the traditional live-action films, especially after seeing how well made one of them was ("Fanatics"), from plot, acting, cinematography to lighting.

And consider there were 207 films handed in in Auckland, I say we did pretty well.

Now it's going to be screened in the Civic Theater.
link: Finalists
link: screening at the Civic
link: some screenshots

Go team Half Full.

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48 Hours of Madness

Yes, that's what I was up to last weekend, making an animation in 2 days for the 48 hours film competition, in a team of almost 40 people.

Being the Technical Director, my job was to make sure that everything ran smoothly, so that the animators & artists can put all their attention on pumping out their creative juice.

Everything went relatively well, the pipeline we designed worked like a charm, the software scripts I wrote didn't break, the only hair raising moment came 1.5 hours before the deadline, when we realized there wasn't enough time to render all the images. All the computers were running at full power, and there was no way that they can go any faster.

The director had to made the call, he canceled the re-render of several shots with problems (crazy reflections in a character's eye, wrong camera angle...etc), and focused only on the missing shots, so that we can at least have something to deliver. Finally at 20 minutes before the deadline, our tape was out of our door, and was delivered to the organizer 10 minutes before they shut their doors.

Now I can't wait to see it on big screens on Sunday.


To find out more, go to this link: 48HOURS - Pure Belter Madness

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The Daily Show - The Stockholm Syndrome

This is why I love the Daily Show, they made current issues fun to watch.

Wyatt Cenac travels to Sweden to wake them up from their socialist nightmare.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
The Stockholm Syndrome
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

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Surfing in autumn

Today at Muriwai, I had the best waves since I started surfing. Finally it felt more like "surfing" rather than "getting beat up by the waves". I'm so glad that I decided to go despite the fact that summer is over and there are no more lifeguards at the beach. It turns out that the temperature in the afternoon was still very comfortable, and with such a good sea condition today, who needs lifeguards?

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