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.