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Published: October 2nd 2010
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Ni Guang Lah! My pops and I have just travelled all over the beautiful Inlay Lake. The lake is massive with an amazing mountain backdrop. The culture here is very special because everybody is living a care-free lifestyle, kind of what you would expect a lake-culture to be. We stayed at nice resort where we were able to fish off of a balcony. We caught some nice fish! The other highlight would have to be the floating market. They have this market where it's just boats and we travel from one boat-shop to another on our motor boat. There were two boat-shops who latched onto our motor boat and tried selling us stuff while we were speeding ahead! The people are wonderful here and are always so fascinated by foreigners. But at the same time, they are afraid to be seen with foreigners because the government here has a lot of undercover spies who would lock them away if they seem to be doing anything democratic. The people are crying out for liberty but also have to control themselves because they don't want another repeat of what happened in 2007 where monks were massacred. Watch a movie called Burma VJ and
Floating Market
Wasn't that full that day, which is good because it could get so crowded your boat won't move you'll understand how much help they need from the outside world! Anyway, Eat Meditate Love!
No Backspace So here’s the thing… my backspace button on my netbook is officially broken. Complete malfunction. Haha, the consequence of taking this baby everywhere in my travels. I didn’t realize how precious this silly button meant to me until nlow. (I wanted to say “now” but since my backspace doesn’t work…) So what I have to do instead is carefully highlight my mistakes or words I spelt wrong and write over them. Madness. You can’t imagine how incredibly slow it is for me to write my blogs now. My initial idea for this blog entry was to write the whole thing without correcting it at all. Screw editing and let you see how ridiculous it is to write without using the backspace button. To let you openly see all the flaws in my writing for what they are. Thankfully, I’ve decided against it. If I had followed through on it, you would have realized how insanely stupid I really am. I would have made George W. Bush look like the genius of a 5th grade class. (hehe, my first
political joke! Even though it was a cheap shot)
I always thought the pencil was one of the greatest inventions by mankind because it allowed us to pass down the knowledge of the wise beings for generations. And I always thought the second greatest invention was the eraser because even the wisest people in the world know that they make mistakes.
I feel that smart people use their intellect to come up with a final conclusion, whereas a wise person discovers truth by using experience. More specifically, the wise person uses the
failed experiences to gain better insight on what works and what doesn’t. For me, I’d trust an illiterate boy to navigate me around his hometown than a smart tourist with a map. Why? Because like Confucius said, experience is our greatest teacher. While a smart person prepares himself to avoid mistakes at all cost, a wise person understands that mistakes will always happen and is prepared to learn from it.
People tend to think that the eraser is a tool to correct an error. But I like to think of it as an instrument that allows us to refine the truth over and over
again until it is perfectly clear. It’s a function that allows me to go back and keep trying until I succeed. For example, even though you can’t see it, I’ve ‘erased’ the last two sentences dozens of times before I finally settled on the right explanation. The eraser teaches me to rewrite my sentences so that they are simpler to understand. It teaches me that I write stupid crap when I write the first thing that pops into my mind. But most of all, it teaches me the beauty of leaving things blank.
The eraser or backspace is really underrated because we pay more attention to the words than the blank spaces. We focus more on things that were said than the things that were left out. If we could only see all the things that were deleted, then we could truly appreciate how everything was worded. But it is the nature of human beings: we give more importance to the material things than the intangibles in life. We have a nasty habit of believing that the invisible objects can’t contribute as much because it isn’t there. But this isn’t the truth and this missing backspace has helped
me realized that. The truth is, I’ve deleted more words than I actually wrote in this entry. Those words don’t exist to you, but they were very much alive to me. They were all a stepping stone to make the vibrant combination of words you see here.
When I come back to read this blog entry in the future, I will only see these 1,046 words that I chose to use. I won’t be able to remember the lost words that were sacrificed to produce the words that are seen. I will take all these sentences for granted as I quickly skim through everything in less than 2 minutes, even though it took me hours to complete it. I may forget all the struggles behind the work, but I hope I will remember to appreciate all the times I had to fail to pave the way for me to succeed.
Some people have suggested that I publish all my blogs into a book. Which is a good idea, but they also suggested that I go back and properly edit all my entries so that they are presentable. I should go back and delete all the swear words, all
Kalaw
This was a small town with a good charm to it. Only stayed one day the “…”, all the “hehe” and all the misspelled words. I only have one thing to say to that: Fcuk that… HEHE. It would feel wrong to do that because I would feel like I’m trying to alter the past to make myself seem smarter than I really am. And I’m not trying to be smarter on this journey, I’m trying to be wiser. What I said during that time represents all my emotions and knowledge at that time and I should appreciate it, not correct it. I may disagree with some of the points I made earlier in my journey, but it's still interesting to see how my mind has progressed.
In the end, maybe not having a backspace isn’t that bad at all. It’s more similar to how things are in the real world where we can’t just backspace our mistakes from the past. As much as I would like to go back and delete some of the angry things I’ve said to people I love, it can’t happen. Those mistakes are a vital part of me and I need to learn from it. So I guess life is a little bit like my ‘backspaceless netbook’, I
Pyin Oo Lin
Went to a town near Mandalay after my dad left Burma. Used to be colonized by British need to be more mindful of the present moment otherwise I’ll commit the same mistake again and when mistakes eventually do happen, I have to find a new solution to get around the obstacle.* Thank you netbook, for breaking down on me so that you can teach me this valuable lesson.
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. -John W. Gardner
*Tips for getting you around when your backspace breaks: Highlight things you don’t want and write over them. Press ’insert’ and go behind your mistakes to start writing over them. Press the left arrow key and press delete. Finally, if you’re not in a remote village, GET IT FIXED.
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Nina
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eraser
I really like this blog post, fatty. Made me think about what's not there as opposed to what is. Good stuff. Hope you're doing well :) Mis you lots!