false prophet

Just had my second hokkien lesson. I have nothing but respect for teacher's linguistic ability. Empirically speaking, it is super hard to acquire more than one language at a coordinate level, and acquiring more than one language at non bi-coordinate levels seriously screws up your mind and here we have a dude who knows English, Chinese, hokkien, Cantonese, Japanese, and Malay and he actually appears intelligent. Amazing.

Midway through the lesson he started giving out postcards proudly in large obtuse type flaunting these gems:

- the way to be happy is to make others happy.

- happiness is a by-product of an effort to make someone else happy.

- one of the deepest secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.

What utter bullshit.

I think it is supremely irresponsible of him to be going around propagating such truely false falaehoods.

All my life I do nothing but give. If everything I've given could be converted into some common currency, it would probably be enuff to take over citibank more than one time. I've given time, given money, given effort, given love and gotten absolutely nothing back in return, let alone happiness.

Fast forward today and I am seriously out of things to give or even the will to give, or at least the will to struggle to keep what little deficit I have left. So I just wasted a year or so, much of it involving ridiculous trips to redundant lands, and this new year looks to be no different. While people cheerfully and nonchalantly move on I'm left with a lingering phantom pain, that type of indignant pain where you feel you have to rip out an appendage or two, and ownership of said appendages is not an issue.

But maybe hokkien teacher could be right. That must mean the people that I know must be dementers, those things in harry potter that suck you of happiness.

The thing about dementers: they don't let you let go.

means testing

Sniffy the Virtual rat is a rat where cohorts of hordes of insincere psych undergrads administer electric shocks or feed food to Sniffy in order to get him to behave in a certain way. No rat deserves such a fate.

People get so many flavors/treats/services/gifts/education from me, favors/treats/services/gifts/education they so don't deserve. No one deserves such a fate.

I should do means-testing on all the stuff I give out. No-one who was mean and callous to me should deserve anything other than a well-aimed, well-timed and well-executed roundhouse kick.

Means testing is really cool because is prevents people who don't deserve anything from getting what they don't deserve.

Alot of my job is means testing, which basically involves finding out how many children my client has, and getting their total income then divide by something which I shouldn't go into too many details about. So clients who have children basically don't deserve any subsidies. Fair enough I think.

I'm not very good at means testing though.

I find it hard when in a stuffy, dark and dank one-room flat where the electrical appliances are as liveless as the occupant, in front of an elderly person, ravaged by age and society, whose todays were just like yesterdays, and the tomorrows are no better, to even consider that this person might not deserve what meagre solace I can provide.

The only way I can find out how many children uncle or auntie has is to -gasp!- ask them.

Sometimes uncle gets so excited because I am the first bit of civilization he comes into contact with in such a long time, and such a fine bit at that, that they forget how many children they have exactly. I'm a social worker, not a FBI lie-detector.

Or I could be fixing the washing machine and as we all know water pipes have a mind of their own and this mind includes deciding to burst and gush out unexpectedly usually when me and my notebook is in the way, and we all know how paper takes to water: so well that the ink smudges and the $200,000/year income uncle's son earns becomes $20.

Generally, half of all my clients speak Hokkien only. The other half are just lying that when they say they know other languages. My Hokkien is totally non-existent. I have this skill where I can tell how many children uncle has by looking at his eyes. It's way cool.

So yeah. I'm not very competent. Good thing in this country, incompetence earns you millions.

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And so as the earth moves mindlessly on, Sniffies will continue to be shocked and stuffed in ignorant pursuit of redundant knowledge and I will continue to give stuff out to those who don't deserve anything more than anything.

How wonderful life is.