#well I am a frustratingly(to myself) humble God if nothing else

[whereisthedamndaddymanual]

It is one of those times I am glad my own Spirit resides in them.

[kitschcats]

The Cynic v. Astrology v. Faith v. More Astrology v. All Other Forms of Alleged Bullshit

I’m going to be reposting some older pieces that never made it here. (1/9/2019)

Astrology? Bullshit.

--or so I've been predisposedly conditioned to believe, at least. It might just be my skeptical side, being an all-hatingly pessimistic INTP (at least according to the last 20 times I retook the same MBTI test over and over just to make sure?) in all my sunshine-and-rainbows-and-happiness-allergic, rationale-above-all glory and everything, but astrology Twitter could never quite sell me the idea of the positions of the constellations and the retrograde motions of the planets having any kind of influence on the state of human affairs. The cynic in me could dismiss the idea as too wishy-washy for my tastes, but I think part of me must have thought it was bigger than just that, much bigger--the stars themselves, as well as the very idea that they could directly interfere with our lives. The stars just seemed too far away for that. Wrapped up in bigger, more important dealings of celestial bodies, too distant and too pretty to bother helming such pivotal positions to humanity, and for centuries since, at that.

Perhaps the thought of having someone, or something, so transcendent have a say in our lives in ways we don't, perhaps carving for us predestined paths we can do all but nothing about; the very idea of something bigger than me having control, absolute and unquestioning, over me--over us as a collective species--scares me. A little like faith. (It's curiously ironic--I always thought I'd never be able to rest easy if I didn't die working for or working towards something bigger than I was. A cause, a movement, a fight, a revolution, I just know I'd toss and turn in my grave if it were anything but--and that I'd rather die before I willingly let myself get caught in the rat race and submit to the corporate world so highly favoured by our capitalist society--yet here I am, cowering in fear of the governance of something bigger than me, over me.)

God--if she/he/they/such an entity exist(s)--and I have had a complicated relationship ever since I was told by my ustazah to keep the questions I had about dinosaurs in the Qur'an to myself. There was a lot of questioning of my faith and even more committings of blasphemy, and to tell the honest-to-God-capital-G (ha!) truth this seems like the perfect spot in a sentence to interject a "but," but there is no real but. Sike. We use "but"'s as conjunctions for when what we're about to say contrasts with what was just said prior, but in this case there are no contrasts, no opposites, no contraries, no nilai-nilai murni, no pesan moral cerita, and there is no happy ending to forgive my unpious doubts.

A good chunk of my time I find myself questioning what I believe in and what I don't and why. Suppose I be a good Malay-Muslim girl, get lots of pahala, and masuk syurga, where it's sunshine and rainbows and happiness forever--and then what? Is the promise of forever all there is to it, to drive believers to do good deeds and not commit sins and continue to fear God? Hollywood clichés may be a stale comparison to this, but we've seen it in movies, it's a painfully repetitive trope: poverty, suffering, Miracle Magic, fame, wealth, drunken indulgence, wear-tear, boredom, dissatisfaction, greed, The Big Mistake, followed by The Bigger Crash, regret, The Retribution-and-Subsequent-Begging-for-Forgiveness Arc, then Sudden Wisdom-Beyond-One's-Years, and finally, a lackluster ending--and this is one's reward for painstaking worship in the mortal world, but for all eternity? How many lifetimes worth of promises of forever can you endure before you're driven mad by all the happiness in the world? If the only thing slower and more painful than being condemned to an eternity of dosa-induced punishment in Hell is being rewarded a pahala-blessed eternity of happiness in Heaven down a gradual descent into insanity, does that make being sent to Heaven a form of punishment of its own?

And suppose I traverse the path less trodden here in totalitarian-Islamist-Malaysia, are we to assume that we've all got one shot, and that lives we're living now are the only ones we'll get before dissipating into universal matter at best, nothing at worst, priests and rapists, CEOs and pedophiles, pastors and serial killers, believers and non-believers, men, women, children, all things in between, good, bad, black, white, grey, all alike?

(After pressing enter here, I stared blankly at this document, half-written and half-formulated and not a word proofread (as if I were planning on it!) for the longest time, my fingers hovering over the keyboard and doing that funny little ritual dance of hesitation, unsure if it would be right to break the paragraph here, seeing as my word count has been very (clearly) unevenly distributed thus far. I decided there was no right or wrong, and carried on writing, no line breaks backspaced in the process.)

What an optimistic thing to think about.

My natal birth chart tells me I'm a Pisces sun, Virgo moon, and Libra rising. At first completely foreign terminology to me, a little bit of digging had me finding out that my sun and moon signs were at complete odds with each other; polar opposites; and that I, in other words, am very much susceptible to constant internal struggle. "Blessed" with the wishy-washy, flip-floppy nature and escapist tendencies of the Pisces sun and the critically anal-retentive groundedness of the Virgo moon, the strange combination most definitely makes for a walking contradiction, i.e. me. (Fun fact: Kurt Cobain, too.)

(And, completely contrary to my fear of the divine and unknown as mentioned earlier, Pisces suns tune in to higher purposes and have dreams that transcend individuals, avoiding the harsh realities of otherwise by indulging in escapist self-delusions. I wonder if this sounds familiar?)

I still don't quite know what to make of the concept. I've heard stories of individuals feeling more in sync with the universe after getting in touch with their starry sides, but the idea of it all but makes me fear the universe all the more------but there must be a reason as to why astrology, for millennia upon millennia, in every culture, every great era, every ancient civilisation worth its salt, spanning continental boundaries, has been so closely intertwined with human lives; why the history of the celestial calendar dates so far back yonder; why it had always borne such significance to generations of nobles, to highly-revered priests, to merchants at sea, to humble farmers, to lost travelers, and to ordinary peasants alike; why the stars have always been our milemarkers and the constellations our compass and the sky our map to the entirety of our tiny, observable worlds; and who was it who first looked up and sensed the presence of something greater than them, whispering answers from the sky above? What did our ancestors, spread out across each far corner of the earth in a time of isolation and the unknown, know that we didn't?

Perhaps it's just too infinitely all-knowing a concept for me to be able to properly wrap my head around. In short: the universe is a great, big, incomprehensibly mysterious thing, and it fucking terrifies me. As I write this, sitting in the quiet of a 3AM night and in the darkness of my room, illuminated only by my night mode-tinted laptop screen and by the lights of neighbouring windows outside, I wonder: do I enjoy the possibility of being at its (the universe's) merciless whims after death, as with everyone and everything else I had ever come to know of in existence during this lifetime, as opposed to a fairytale God and Devil and Heaven and Hell? Possibly.

All irony aside, I do feel optimistic about one thing. An enthusiastic "update that damn blog" has been on my to-do-list for the longest time, and finally no longer in vain. I've been simultaneously feeling a lot of things as well as none at all--both at once, curious as it is--which is what I blame for my frustratingly stubborn inability to put thoughts to words to document this past year, as well as my horribly demotivated self. Dramatic as it seems, the year-long dry spell (I mean, a year? Togashi Yoshihiro, anyone?) had me thinking I'd never be able to write again. But here I am now, writing about it. Writing and translating my thoughts into real, letter-by-letter words. I feel strangely light. Perhaps all I needed was a little faith.