Just like an old-time movie, our time already is on the cutting board.
It’s the living and intriguing that really matter.
Old-time friends met yesterday.
We mentioned briefly the passing away of our friend’s brother: nerdy, good old boy and ATM machine service man and family man. In short, the least likely candidate to die young. Yet, he had been long gone (by now 3 years).
Earth, Wind and Fire used to have a song out called “Time is on your side”.
I don’t think so.
One can conjure up various scenarios for end-of-life, but it will end regardless, without credits roll (perhaps we should start a digital acknowledgement page for our lives).
Feature-length movies, by convention, last one hour and a half (same way Twitter limits a tweet at 140 characters).
Except for Costner’s and Cameron’s (Dancing with Wolves and Titanic).
Life happens while we are busy planning it (John Lennon).
It came concurrently and not sequentially: a brief sunset, a nagging child, a teacher’s stern look.
Happiness is time and place independent.
One can find happiness in confinement (Life is Beautiful) or at the last moment (Mozart’s Requiem).
It’s not over until it is truly over for you.
I once saw neighbors carry out a dead man (I was 4 or 5 years old at that time).
He had lived alone in a house in the alley.
I did not know his name. Only learned later that he had died without any relative around him.
By all measures, he died unhappily.
Now, having passed some time of my own, I realized that it’s not quantity, but quality that matters.
Biotech has extended our “feature-length” narrative, from one-hour-and-a-half life story to that of Titanic’s and Dancing with Wolves’.
What are we going to do with all those extra hours? Amusing ourselves to death while waiting for it? (there hasn’t been a playbook for seniors – Paterno for instance has just passed away at 85 after getting sacked by the BOD at my school).
In Silicon Valley where Steve Jobs started out, the motto was “trust no one above 30″.
Yet, Sculley and other investment banking CEO’s pocketed huge severance despite their poor performance.
Time is on whose side?
Of course not on the side of the poor or the pure of hearts (keep the faith).
Even with director’s cut, a feature-length film still needs to be trimmed down using time-lapse, cut aways etc…
As creatures of selective memories, we often edit out undesirable incidents in our own biography and to convince ourselves that best days are still ahead (our own version of self-campaigning 2012). Speaking of 2012.
The Year of the Dragon has finally arrived. It roars, dances and puffs out fire.
We invent myths and materials that turn around to define who we are (he is a Lexus owner, she is a LV zealot).
Vietnamese people once known as descendants of Dragon and Angel. To understand Vietnam, you need to understand its literary life.
Vietnamese honors duty above death, sacrifice above love. These tales of heroism are the baseline. “Time is on whose side” is an irrelevant question. Happiness defined as personal fulfillment is also out of the question. People here see themselves in transit, with Earth another station along the way. Home is where dead people are waiting, provided you had fulfilled your filial obligation and honored them by courageous living. Try to work that in the State of the Union address, and see its impact on American society? (You lied!). On the CEO’s on Wall Street. On the armed men who preyed on the vulnerable on US campuses.
America needs Vietnam as much as Vietnam needs America, since time is on neither side.
