Author / Eileen 配仪

by Eileen 配仪

I just happen to know the answer to this trivia.

Are you superstitious?

Superstition developed as a form of risk mitigation practice. It helps us deal with the unknown & unforeseeable in our daily lives. The rituals are more detailed & elaborate as the sense of risk increases.

Details could be read here and this article describes superstitious  in football.

It is going to be difficult for anyone to denounce superstition totally given most societies have some form of superstitious beliefs. What doesn’t help: our pattern finding brains have a preference for pattern finding.

This means it can be as silly as “making it rain by washing my car ” or as elabourate as a ritual for ancestral worship codified by a Chinese emperor from ancient past.

I’m in risk management. Of course I’m going to veer towards superstitions. As with any other average persons, I will not rank very high, nor very low on such practices. I do have an odd one, due mainly to my scatterbrain than anything else. When I travel, if I missed out packing a minor thing, for instance, floss,  or face wash, it means no bad horrifying thing will happen to me.       

by Eileen 配仪

The Making Of a Fiscal State in Song China, 960 – 1279.

William Guanglin Liu

The Economic History Review Vol 68 No. 1 (Feb 2015)

I have never read about Chinese economic history assuming the lack of data. I was surprised & convinced by the arguments put forward in this article. It had a clear step by step explanation of song dynasty move into a fiscal state.

1. Song dynasty moved a significant & large portion of fax revenue from direct taxes on land to indirect taxes (ie excise). Indirect taxes were collected from tea, salt & alcohol trades.

2. The state developed tax professional and processes to deal with tax collection across the land.

3.The state began to use promissory notes.

The thing I have been wondering is, why China, who had rather obvious developements in the past sort of forgot all these advancements. What if technological advancements were not born out of need but of intellectual curiosity? Need may not be a practical need – it could be for the desire to brag as well. If there was no need for the country to brag, to compete, to fight, to show off in general, the desire to innovate won’t be much supported.

So bragging has its benefits for a nation.

by Eileen 配仪

Notes: Freedom within boundaries

A retirement advice thrown about is one needs to retire to something.

From Will Storr’s book, The Status Game:  Kids, raised by parents who treat their kids as precious and equals of themselves, lack sense of security, respect, humility and were delicate and fragile.

Sole proprietors tell me that it is hard to be self disciplined and structure your day. Self studying is harder because of the lack of discipline.

In my own parenting experience, too much freedom from expectations creates bad behaviours in my kids. 

Creativity and innovation is a response to boundary testing. Structure in our lives is a type of boundary. Is boundary what we crave? 

by Eileen 配仪

Dwelling on status

A status non winner – by that I mean average persons who wins some and lose others – may deal with the whole thing in a sour grape manner: “Not playing that particular game because it not my kind of game.”

A status winner will strive for greater grandiosity to elevate his or her position from the other winners. Their requirements of others and themselves get more and more specific bordering on ridiculousness. He also includes religion as a status game which makes sense from his perspective since his belief appear to be just status games.

I don’t know. His view he paints is strangely depressing.

The players of status game also never ever feels satiated by the amount of status earned which sounds a lot to me like plain ol’ suffering. The kind of suffering that is depicted in Haw Par Villa, of neverending hunger.

by Eileen 配仪

The Status Game by Will Storr

The full title of the book is “The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It: On Social Position and How We Use it”. This is a fabulous read. Highly exciting and intensely argued by the author. I was very much persuaded by his theory that status games are a basic need. If denied of status in a sudden manner, we implode.

I have been wrestling with humiliation and envy these few weeks. Wrestling is a big word that brings up imagery of two giants hugging each other. My wrestling is more like a parrot shouting long paragraphs of curse words at inappropriate moments. Like when I am in the middle of a flux of instructions coming at me left and right. Or trying to learn my presentation. (“Stop it! Concentrate!”, I would admonish myself.) Humiliation and envy are also big words. My feeling is more like rage against my circumstance and wishing I was lying down somewhere else.

Reading this book it worked for me to figure out why I was having these feelings. Humiliation is just a louder volume of the kowtowing that we engage in at home, school or at work. It is a means of socialising to ensure alignment. Envy came from wanting to receive a high enough status to avoid having to kowtow. What totally blew away these feelings was my recognition that I didn’t actually want to be a high status person. All I wanted was to drift away and disengage.

The book was very well argued, thick with terrifying examples of how the lack of status creates killers and the role status plays in the world stage. As I read the book, it felt that the world he writes about are only filled with extroverts who desire to engage in the world they are in and have people know and react to their actions and decisions. As an introvert who drifts in and out of conversations, my world is quite small. I don’t aim to influence my friends and when I want to influence them, my influence is quite weak. I lack the desire to make someone do something. I know that after a while, I prefer to be by myself, doing my own thing.

挥一挥衣袖，不带走一片云彩

by Eileen 配仪

Primary 6

I had a horrible revelation that my oldest is taking PSLE this year. The kind of revelation that involves a friend kindly advising me that I need to schedule block leave during PSLE. I search for some advice on study timetable. I was shocked by the timetable to study for 5 hours after school with dinner and 15min breaks in between. I honestly don’t recall studying that much in primary or secondary school. I did work through assessments but it wasn’t 5 hours of working. I don’t think that is feasible to burn out at primary school level.

Looking through the school’s instagram account, I saw they gave the P6 张德人 a wonderful send off on results day regardless of their results. It was a nice hurrah for the hard work they put in.

by Eileen 配仪

Making the effort to connect

Over the New Year, a friend moved back home to UK. I feel a great miss – she enjoys going to restaurants and she would make us all meet up once monthly. Now that she is gone, I feel that I have to step up so that I still have friends. To organise a day to go out requires a lot of to and fro discussion and a possibility of rejection. Perhaps I am just worried about rejection – I don’t know the depths of my despair.

by Eileen 配仪

Scared

Had a grisly moment today in which I lost my daughter in the thronging crowds.

I called & called her pet name. Nothing. My head stopped functioning. I despaired, I was broken. It was a struggle to remain present.

We crossed a road. She was right behind me. My son & I shared my raincoat in the light drizzle. She had her own… She has a streak of randomness. I can’t figure out her logic. She could be ahead, in the shopping mall. She could have run back across the road. She could have walked back to the train station. She could be anywhere. She was no where.

My son suggested that we try to move a little further ahead.

And there she was. Standing, looking for us.

And my world & self functioned again.