HIV/AIDS awareness day

I have some new pictures of the HIV/AIDS awareness day that I attended last Sunday:


http://carletoncanada.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2116220&l=d1e89&id=90405089

And yes, that is me in a condom suit.
nk

Good laughs

Check this out:
http://www.thecoolnews.org/?cat=2

These are some of the funniest 'perfect moment' pictures in sports you'll see today.

Propagandilicious-

I've got some awesome examples of 'The Party's' communisto-socialist propaganda posters that brand the cityscape with their delightful flavour.

See them here

A week end in Ninh Binh

I wanted to post a bunch of pictures from my week end trek to Ninh Bing on blog itself, but I figured it would be easier to post the link to Facebook. It's all I use it for anyways-

Check it out, got some neato little captions to go along with the pics.

Click Me for Pictures

No work at the office = Nietzsche philosophy time

Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there are an infinite number of processes which elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.112, Walter Kaufmann transl..

Leave it to Nietzsche to point out the hidden within the obvious. This passage strikes me particularly strongly, as the questions I ask myself about this strange country have mostly to do with what I deem to be incomprehensible. How can something be incomprehensible though, when approached form the right angle? I am constantly 'isolating a couple of pieces' of this life I live in Vietnam, I can never get a full picture of what I see... this is not due to my limited vision or closed mind, but rather I am limited by my humanity, by my inability to transcend the boundaries of my body and mind.

Everything has a beginning, but what began the beginning? Every row of dominoes must have a force that knocks over the first, be it a finger, a gust of wind, etc. The problem is that the row of dominoes is so long that we cannot see the beginning nor can we see the end. Each human being is limited to a momentary view of the bigger picture of life, and, as such, we cannot help but be stunned at all the falling dominoes.

I think what Nietzsche was trying to say is that because we clearly see or define the beginning or end of any series of events, that we are trapped into thinking that each moment we experience is independent of other moments. That's why, when we suddenly get caught in a freak rain-storm, that we are shocked by the sudden appearance of clouds on what had otherwise been a blue-sky day. Perhaps, if we could have seen the beginning of time, and if our senses allowed us to understand the seemingly infinite combinations of factors which would lead up to a storm cloud forming on a specific day at a specific time, we might have been able to predict it.

This is why being human is so wonderful. Even though being able to predict a rainy day would do wonders for picnickers around the world, it would mean that our sense of discovery and wonder would not exist.

It's great to know the cause of a certain effect, but to be unaware of the true effects of your actions allows for that dynamic aspect which adds to the unpredictability of life.

Nietzsche wants to point out that our vision of the world is limited by what we see of it. I want to point out that it seeing only moments and not always the big picture allows us to retain beautiful wonder about the world we live in.

I would like, however, to know what force in the infinite past triggered the moment in the hopefully near future that will see me buy my very own car...

Time to think

Seeing as things have gone to shit in a lot of ways over the past few days, I figured it was time for some perspective. When everything seems to be going bad, it has to be for a reason, and I think that I need to figure out what exactly this reason -which has been relentlessly beating me down since wednesday-is.

When I consider what a bad day consists of, I tend to play a bit of a blame game, and point my finger at something or someone else, external from myself, who is tinkering with my perception. For instance, my work and the people at work have been getting me down. Complaining about my 'irrational' way of going about my business, when I myself see their lack of any sort of work habits as being quite irrational. My living environment has been annoying me, as the director of my 'home' seems to take great pleasure in poking his nose into my personal business and trying to control every aspect of my life. And finally, I simply am not happy with what I am doing with my days at SHAPC, at my NGO... it simply isn't what I imagined, and all the efforts that I have been making to improve it are proving to be useless.

This general unhappiness that has suddenly burst my bubble has led me inward to find a solution to my problems. The fact of the matter is this: I am unhappy because I am not doing what I want with my time here in Vietnam. I wanted to get hands on work in the field of HIV/AIDS, I wanted to learn how to work in a professional environment, I wanted to take away and contribute all which my optimistically driven energy could muster! But, alas, I find myself spending days in front of my computer with nothing to do, I am given shit jobs like editing documents from bad english into english.

Perspective! Perspective...
I'm sitting here in this little room located on the outskirts of Hanoi. After sitting outside and recounting one of the most influential dreams I've ever had to 2 girls who live in this building, I suddenly realize the importance of putting everything into a wider perspective. I'm not happy because I can't find a meaning within the every day activities which occupy my life. I have lost contact with the big picture, I seem to have stepped too far into my life and have been unable to account for the unreasonable distortions which my common sense rejects about this country. But it came back to me tonight, after a day of rest and contemplation. I simply needed a jolt, and this is what I found:

My work, my coworkers, and this building where I live: they piss me off. This is an unavoidable fact - I could attempt to justify it to myself, to say 'oh whatever, living through this will make me appreciate blah blah blah'. I could. But I won't.
Instead, I would like to approach this life problem from the side, instead of head on.

I went outside at around 11 pm. I sat down and I thought about the meaning of simply being able to recognize that I am alive. I am here, I am now. This sentence, though simple, is extremely powerful when used in the right now. I have been feeling a mental and emotional discord in my life, with my work and living conditions. However, I have been in a greater discord with the very aspect which connects me to this larger reality which work and home are simply a part of! I am alive, god damn it! I am in a foreign country, I am learning a new language, being exposed to a new culture, living within a very complicated and headache inducing political structure (which I had up till now only read about in books - thanks Marx), and I am in the process of planning out my life. Life is GOOD! How can I let work and my home get me down when there is so much else going on in this picture? I don't want to be brought down by others or by my work... I want to be the dynamic human being who looks past the small instances of discord and be at one with everything else. Sure, I am not doing what I thought I would, but who has the nerve to think that anything they predict will actually ever happen? Leave the precise predictions to the physicists and mathematicians, I say.

Seriously though, if my organization has no work for me, I will have to find something to occupy myself with. Maybe attempt to learn something new every day, maybe work on my Vietnamese, maybe even catch up on some Nietzsche or Wittgenstein. Something, anything, to help me move past and see beyond the everyday images which occupy my vision, so that I can move beyond mere sight and into the realm of the pure potential of being.

Sounds lofty, but life is such that if you get too caught up in the very instant, you risk loosing sight of the marvellous colours, sights, and sounds which occupy so much more space than your narrow vision allows into your brain.

I think my own vision had been narrowed for a while, and it's time that I rediscover the wonders of being alive. To hell with work, to hell with not having any running water this week end - I'm going to do what I want and walk to my own beat.

And you know what? I feel better already!

More Frustration

After 3 months of learning XHTML from scratch, after having spent hours and hours building a website for this god damn organization, after asking for feedback, information, and receiving none of it... after having finished a final copy of a basic shell for a website for this place that had nothing to begin with - they decided that my work wasn't good enough and that they would pay the ridiculous price of 10,000,000 VND to a private firm to create their site.

I am so angry and frustrated. I know that this is a lesson for life (or some shit like that) - that people will not always appreciate, or even recognize, my efforts... but that doesn't remove from this feeling of pissed-off regret for having given enough of a shit to read 3 books on web design, to have learned a whole new programming language on my own, from taking the time to ask for feedback and receive a load of nothing in return!

The director made the final choice. She never even looked at my website. She only listened to what her son said. Her son, for the record, is a douche bag. He tampered with my site while I was making it (I know it was him, only he had access to the FTP's login and password), and he told his 'mommy' (as he calls her) that the work I spent all this time learning on my own how to do could have been done in 5 hours or less by himself.

hoanclc@yahoo.com
I am so tempted right now to write this bastard a really mean email. At this point I don't care of the consequences of such an act.

But I can't say that I don't care about not being given a chance to finish this work. How many people would come and work for this organization and learn, from scratch and on their own, a whole new skill... for free?

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me not want to try anymore. I am not producing anything, nor learning or accomplishing anything any more than if I were at home laying in bed. Where is the impetus to work?

The worst part is that this website has kept me busy at work when I've had nothing to do. Now I have absolutely nothing to do anymore.

I don't want to whine, I just need to vent. I take the bus for an hour and a half to get here, only to be treated as a 'volunteer'.

Anyways, time to put a smile on my face and to look for a new job, screw this place.