for Love of Scandals

Q: How doth love show its greater force by making the fool to become wise, or the wise to become a fool?
A: In attributing wisdom to him that has it not; for it is harder to build than to pull down; and ordinarily love and folly are but an alteration of the mind.
~ Aristotle’s Book of Problems, Qs and As on Love

The need to be right, the sign of a vulgar mind.
~Albert Camus

It’s a scandalous week. So many outrageous things happened, I wouldn’t know where to start. I sat for dinner at the mall with two lovely ladies who ordered fish and chips without the chips.

The first third of dinner they were both acutely glued to their Blackberries and other gadgetries. The second third of the evening they talked about some Blackberry etiquette – the immediacy and urgency of an incoming BB message, aka. the Acceptable Response Time. It’s a Pavlovian experience.

The last third of the evening they were discussing Blackberry chargers.

I wasn’t paying much attention. In malls my sensory space became strangely alerted to all sorts of distraction and sometimes I find it overwhelming and uncomfortable. Alice is highly radioactive too and so I suspected that I was either a mush or noncoherent for most of dinner. Or both. I didn’t think of it much.

There were rumors of the youngest Malarangeng getting involved in sorts of scandalous debaucheries at the residence of a billionaire baroness. The second round of rumors mentioned the same name with a different set of debaucheries and offended parties.

I thought it was curious. Two nasty rumours within the space of 48 hours: which one of them was true? Are they both? Tempo and Detik both reported it but couldn’t confirm anything but the fact that the Police was indeed alerted to some shenanigans happening at the mansion.

There was a small council a few nights ago at the Ritz. Lots of things were thrown about and we randomly chatted many sillier stuff but I realized something at some point. A tiny little detail that nobody else would’ve spotted. The only reason I spotted it was because I quite literally wrote it. The revision was mine too and I wasn’t fully comfortable with it. I didn’t say anything and enjoyed the mango platter instead. It wasn’t important enough.

So often, we’re desperate to get to the ‘truth’. We wanted to know what it is so much that the rush – the urge to know – got over ourselves and we no longer recognize what truth is. History is most often the convenient account of an event, acceptable and acknowledgeable to all the participants. Accuracy is never a priority for recorded history.

The only real problem with this approach – Urge to Know – is that we often suspend the usual scrutiny we impose upon our sensory faculties - momentary lapse of judgment and common sense - potentially contradictory to the sought after Truth. This is the X Files lesson.

The way we human deal with it is we minimize the input. A quasi social denial, a collective short term memory lapses. We pretend things never happened. We speak of things in whispers. We passed messages in riddles. We argued on political correctness. We put the makeup on.

We’d like to believe the world do go on.