This, as casual as it may seem considering it is after all only a blog/journal post, was commissioned by a dear friend of mine(Whom I suspect would be the only one reading this) who just can't stop quoting lines from the movie "The Four Lions". After a lengthy drafting effort spanning the length of quite a number of days, I decided to bin it and start at the very beginning to a time where my life actually took some shape and began to pan out to become what it is today.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, for a guy who seems rather impulsive and sometimes just plain reckless, I seem to have my life pretty rigidly planned out. It begins (as with everyone else) with my education from the tender age of 7 all the way up 11 years till we turn 18.
Upon turning 18, whilst we stand at the precipice of manhood (womanhood for the ladies), our lives begin to take on different paths. This is when it becomes clear to some of us who hadn't had much sensible or healthy communication with their parents about what they've had planned in store for us. I was never really the sort of person who liked to think too far ahead because I just can't see the point at most times. As such, my idea of the future when I was 18 was pretty vague. Finish my SPM exams, do some shit, do my higher education, find a job. Simple as that.
Then came the time when we began to understand what it actually meant to decide upon your future. What you wanted to study, what you wanted to do, etc. You think had it all figured out in school and all of a sudden, there are all these options and levels of education and qualification you could choose to do provided that you had some intelligence (I had my fair share). Immediately after school, that period of time while you're waiting for your results and before you enter university, we have what seemed to me at least, to be the last ever proper holiday one would ever get. This is usually when your parents tell you about the education insurance or the money they saved up to send you somewhere to study, it could be the moment that you realise they spent it all on buying a car and you had to go to a government institution, or they just had nothing for you and you're on your own.
It is at this time that Westerners and people of a similar culture send their children off to do various things (could be just one or more and it could involve a paycheque) for about a year to allow them to discover a little bit of how the real world is like. To allow them to find out what they want to do. To let them troubleshoot upon the matters that may have been an issue to them throughout their childhood and for them to reconsider their direction in life. To allow them a chance to re-examine their original career choices (One of the few career choices I selected when I was younger was farmer, construction worker, or fisherman).
Then the time to choose a career path or a study path would eventually come and students go off to pursue these newly-discovered ideals.
I never really had that option. If anything, my parents were really happy of my original choice of being an industrial designer or an engineer since I seem to have a knack for these things considering outstanding showings with the sciency stuff in school (fast forward 6 years till today, the same cannot be said about me as it is no longer the case), and a rather unrestricted approach I've always had for ideas. In fact, the few reasons why my train of thoughts usually end up in a horrific derailment are mostly because I tend to overdo the thinking or they weren't very well thought out to begin with rather than caused by obstacles. My parents, they never really forced me into it though.
To be fair, I was always given a choice. However, they were always bringing up the subject of designing and engineering as they believe that it was a rather stable career choice that I could excel in.
With the little time I had, I discovered that I liked driving cars and toying with the concepts instead of actually engineering them. After a bit of research, I left my most likely dream of becoming a designer dabbling with automobiles after discovering the incredibly unfulfilling life of design and engineering (at least with the motor industry). It was at this point that I began receiving study offers from a few institutions (some for free) to send me overseas and I was more hardly pressed than anything, to have had to reject them all. Those were not my parent's happiest moments. And my list of missed opportunities was only extending at this point.
I took it as a blessing. Allowing me to reconsider my goals and re-evaluate the kind of life I wanted to lead. After months of working an unfulfilling part-time job, I only knew that I would never ever find myself in marketing if I could help it. Ever. I don't care if times changed. If times changed then I'd just have to find a way to travel back in time and change the past.
Now music has been a way of life for me for quite a while. I could actually say that when I first got my Discman (I still use it extensively today), I have been doing pretty much everything I've had with it ever since. Music became a way of life. It became a drug. I started associating different periods of my life with certain songs even if they weren't anything that I liked or genre-suitable.
After much consideration, I decided that noise was probably what I needed. I hear lots of people describing the growl of the V8 or the scream of a V12 to be like music to their ears. Personally, I never got that. I love the sounds of "V" configuration combustion engines immensely. But only music is music to my ears. I would much rather listen to a hypothetical Led Zeppelin show rather than the hypothetical amazing car that I could hypothetically drive to it.
However, after much research, I find that there was no music course that would accept me. There just wasn't any space in the world of trained ears, virtuosos and certified musicians for a ham-fisted, completely untrained, former engineering major student with no musical history or inclination whatsoever.
Some of my colleagues, knowing my deep interest in music, put me on to sound. Having had some experience in the field, they put it to me that I should be playing around with sound designing. After a few weeks of dabbling with it, I had found a way to do what I loved most. The crafting of sounds. This to me was a direct window to music as it essentially involved music and every other kind of media involving sound. It was my first choice and my back up all at the same time. Perfect to my post-adolescent-pre-matured mind. At the tender age of 18, I was given the power to make a 100k ringgit, long term decision and that was the entire process of consideration and thought that went into deciding upon a direction in which to aim my life at.
In the space of four months, I had made up my mind to study sound, music and its many components. I was to dissect it to its simplest forms and attempt to understand its many singularities and structures before attempting to reassemble it back together as systems that can be understood as a part of its unique, respective systems in an effort to investigate and make sense of every substance (if there was any) that I may consist of.
The news was broken to my parents, who weren't convinced at all about this sudden change of heart. I on the other hand, was adamant, to maintain this newfound, retarded romance. Unwittingly, I had fallen right back into designing and engineering, albeit with a completely different trade. Two months later, after a lengthy argument, I moved out of the domestic, protected bubble that is the family home. Moved into a life of a constant three-way (as with all three-ways, it's always unexpected) between sound, music, and I whilst at the same time, toeing the line between art and design. Between envisioning, and engineering
