Rant 913 / Art Is Money

And I thought Malaysian movie trailers were bad.

Then movie trailers from Ghana surfaced on Youtube.














Perhaps things aren't as bad they look. Perhaps it's just my mentality.

Perhaps I just need to find ways to make things more enjoyable for myself.











It doesn't matter what I do anymore regarding my mother, I think.

I wonder if the doctors can raise the dosage and bring her back again.

All she does is stare at me when I visit. She recognizes me but her short term memory doesn't seem to work very well anymore.

She responds once in a while but mostly, she just stares at me as I describe my work to her in my daily monologues.

I wonder if she remembers her short stay at home on Christmas.

She thinks I joke when I ask her whether she recognizes me.

How can I tell if she does when she doesn't react to most of the things I say?

For all I know I could be a total stranger to her.

There would have been too many things that I regret if not for the fact that I wouldn't have known nor learnt if this isn't happening.

Things that one can regret are the mistakes made after the lesson was already learnt.

They aren't these.

Her memory isn't completely gone - she still remembers her phone. She asked me for it today after I forgot to hand it back to her when I accompanied her back to the hospice after the home visit.

But she is confused. Contrary to what she recalled to me, my bro never visited her yesterday.

I wonder what my bro is thinking.

He seems to be thinking that as long as I visit her, it's ok that he doesn't.

Does he treat this as some kind of chore?

Or is he such an escapist?

If the doctor can't revert her condition by raising the dosage again, I don't think she will be conscious by Feb.

There aren't many opportunities for us to talk to her anymore.

Why does he visit her only weekly at most?

He fears too much.

I fear too, but I've long come to the conclusion that not thinking about something will not make it go away. In most situations, ignoring an issue will only make it worse.

One of the volunteers asked me why he rarely comes.

I couldn't answer her.

Neither do I want to talk to him about it.

It is a bad idea to strain my relationship with him because we live in the same flat.

I remind him to visit her once in a while, but I do not want to push.

I'm hoping his girlfriend would do it for me, although I have a feeling that his girlfriend is as much of an escapist as he is.

I wonder if he understands the magnitude of the sorrow he will feel when it finally hits him that he will never be able to talk to her again, and that he never did even when she was around.

For me, I have the rest of my life to feel sad about how I barely know anything about my father's life.














His mother is lonely. We spoke to her at length about some things after the Christmas dinner, but one topic stood out in our conversation - her marriage.

The overall feel I get by the end of the discussion is that she is lonely and unable to let go of him.

It may not be his fault that his heart changed and he got bored of this steady marriage, but it is his fault to act on it despite their mutual trust not to break the matrimony.

On one hand, it is the rest of his life that we're talking about after all.

On the other hand, it also concerns the rest of her life.

In such a situation, the fault lies in the person who acts first for his/her own benefit.

If one had acted in favour of the other's interest, then can one say that nobody is at fault.

The reason is that the root of the problem is the ability of both parties to let go.

If either side is unable to do so, neither should do it.

That she is so eager to talk about such private matters with people she sees only once or twice a year shows how much she needs someone to talk to and how much she needs to release her frustrations.

I wonder if she will become depressed like my mother did.

She probably shouldn't be left alone. If she's anything like my mother, she's going to arrive at strange conclusions after thinking too much on her own.

In the years following my father's death, my mother came up with all kinds of reasons to explain it, including the feng shui of his usual dining chair.

That, IMO, definitely wasn't normal, but I didn't know what to do then.

By the time I realized she was passively suicidal, it was already too late.













What one wants and what one gets are not always the same.

It's like a river - one can try and shift it but one cannot just stop it wherever one wants it to.

Hence, compromise.

I don't want to work but I have to. So I compromise by spending more to make it more comfortable for myself.

Everyone makes compromises in life.

It's like Rule 34 - no exceptions.

People just can't live without compromising. It's as simple as that!