Limits

"If you never say your name out loud to anyone,

They can never ever call you by it"

Better (2006) by Regina Spektor

Sleep comes effortlessly to me these days after I joined the labour pool. I used to think of myself as a habitual insomniac, but all it took to cure me all along was simply a day of honest hard work. Yesterday, I woke up at 7:00PM from a work-induced coma, wasting my half holiday in one those little slices of death. The alarm clock on my cellphone had been mysteriously switched off by whatever agent that animates me whilst I hovered in the limbo between sleep and death - I have no memory of performing the act at all.

I did a twin of what we call in the biz as EOD calls, or "every-other-day calls". It meant that I was on-call both on Sunday and Tuesday, totaling 64 hours in 4 days. What more, in my stuporous post-call state, I initially assented to taking a third call today but ultimately managed to backpedal in time to escape it. I am, however, on-call tomorrow again.

I need a recess, not necessarily from work but from people. The nature of my job requires me to treat with other human beings on an almost constant basis and I'm feeling an ache of longing for a bit of me-alone-time. The other ache I'm feeling comes from the constraints - the limits, if you will - of my life. I ask myself often: is this all there is to it? The answer is no, but only if I dare. In the 25 nascent years of my life, I already boast a lengthy string of bad life decisions, and I suffer daily under their sovereignty. I heard of a story of a house officer working in my hospital who recently did a disappearing act but he was eventually tracked down and admitted for a bit of shrinking. I've been following his blog for awhile now, not knowing he was the Notorious Vanishing Houseman but realised today that the two are one of the same. Why, I even unwittingly spoke to him in the Malaysian Atheists, Freethinkers, and Agnostics page a couple of weeks ago.

They think he's nuts. Does it make me nuts too if I think that what he did made perfect sense to me?

Last month, a 24-week-old child was born, only to die almost immediately after. It's as if the sole purpose of its mayfly life is to mock everything we do in the medical profession. I must never forget that haunting look of impotence etched on the face of every doctor in that room that day.

There,

k0k s3n w4i

Superstitions in the Sarawak General Hospital

"The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other."

Sir Francis Bacon

The man created the scientific method. Represent!

Twice or thrice a week, I would be put "on-call", which means that I would start working at about 6:00 am on one day and finish at 5:00 pm in the next. There are "bad calls" (in which the doctor on-call would get little to no sleep because of the glut of patients to attend to due to unforeseeable complications) and "good calls" (when one gets paid for sleeping mostly). So as you can see, there are many unpredictable elements which ultimately dictates how good or bad a call can be - and when there's a situation in which a lot of variables lie outside our control, superstitions would mushroom precipitously on its moist, slutty soil.

"That is what prayers are for," the Long Suffering Girlfriend™ once told me. "After doing everything you can, you pray that those things that you can't do anything about would go your way."

I've been working in the Sarawak General Hospital for little more than a month and already have I learned a sizeable number of silly superstitions associated with being on call. One of the first ones I learned is to avoid wearing anything red in colour - not even red undies. I can imagine how that started: a house officer must have had an especially bad call at some point in the past and was looking for things to blame that could have caused it.

"I am wearing a red shirt! That must be it!" he declared (perhaps even jokingly), and thus this particular bit of bunkum get passed on as oral tradition amongst the medical staff of the hospital forever after. It's a pitfall of human thinking to try and turn something inherently undivinable, like bad calls, into something that can be easily manipulated like the colours of one's attire - and many who aren't given to thinking rationally would readily fall into such stupid exercises. We are pattern-seeking animals, and that particular mental faculty have served us well throughout the history of our species. It's what allows us to engage in higher brain functions like planning, predicting and innovating. Imagine if our ancestors did not realise that seeds would grow into food crops, or that seasons come in cycles - we'd still be hunting gazelles on the savannah. I'd even go as far as to say that recognising patterns is the very cornerstone of modern medical practices because that's pretty much how we diagnose diseases and treat them. However, our tendency to seek patterns can get overactive sometimes. That is why we think that clasping our hands together and mumbling to an invisible deity helps to make our wishes come true. That is why we see divine faces in pizza pans and grilled cheese sandwiches.

Of course, after the colour red had been banished from the hospital on call nights, people realised that bad calls still happen. A right-thinking person would immediately realise that not wearing red does jack squat in determining the nature of one's calls - but right-thinking persons are frightfully scarce in the medical field. Another bright penny of a house officer who had a terrible call (but was wearing blue at the time) must have thought to himself: "I'm not wearing red, so why am I still having bad ca... I know! I did not take my shower as soon as my call started! I must shower as early as I can from now on!"

Showering early is in fact a real superstition in the Sarawak General Hospital Unquestionable Guide to Having Good Calls, I shit you not. If you ask the senior nurses (which are literally old wives), they would even recommend that you shower with flowers for extra bad-call-repelling effect. This is why superstitions grow in number rather than decrease when they don't appear to work - people just keep making up new variables to control. The doors to the ward must be kept closed. If you're having a good call, you must not comment on it or you'll jinx it into a bad one. The in-tray for new patients must be turned upside down, so as to avoid inviting more. Women in labour must not wear anything circular in their hair (hairbands, scrunchies, etc) or they will have a difficult childbirth. Blah, blah and blah. The funniest one I have encountered so far is the condom I see taped to the Labour Ward's double doors at night - the rationale being that since it protects against anything sexually transmitted, it will protect the ward from impending babies.

Every time someone drop me a new pearl of superstitious wisdom, I always ask: Do you seriously believe in it? Some would sheepishly say that they don't - not really - but they were just playing along for fun. Mostly, the answer I get is, "Well, sometimes it's very true."

Holy mackerel fucking a pair of daschunds on a hotdog bun! Are they even listening to themselves? Sometimes it's very true? How about sometimes, bad calls just fucking happen? Ever thought of it that way?

Imagine that instead of bad or good calls, we are talking about the head or tail sides of a tossed coin. According to their brand of magic logic, if you avoid wearing anything red, shower early in the evening, and fulfill the thousands of other superstitious commandments, your coin will sometimes come up heads. Doesn't it scare you that the people whose job is to save lives have such a poor relationship with reality?

The Sarawak General Hospital, where superstitions are born but never ever die.

Besides that, pretty much every doctor working in the Sarawak General is assigned with the labels "hot" or "cold" (the terminology may defer in other centres). A hot doctor is someone who attracts difficult, rare or complicated patients and emergencies, while a cold one doesn't and is therefore a desirable person to work with during calls. The funny thing is when someone who was designated as hot gets a good call night, people wouldn't notice - or simply remark how uncharacteristically relaxing the call was for him or her - rather than realising that the hot and cold thing is just a lorry of manure.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a colleague right before my call, and I asked her if we are equipped to perform deliveries in the maternity ward - y'know, just in case I couldn't get a patient sent down to the labour ward in time. I also expressed worry that a couple of rather complicated patients will be giving me headaches throughout the night, and joked (in private) that maybe one of the twins in an expectant had died in utero because I was having trouble monitoring the little pipsqueak on the cardiotocograph.

"You shouldn't say things like that!" she chastised me. "Now that you said it, those things may actually happen. Haven't you heard of the law of attraction?"

Oh brother, Fuck Rhonda Byrne and that fucking Secret of hers. Yes, I've heard of the so-called "law of attraction", and I've experienced that same bollocks throughout my life in its myriad versions. You see, I'm given to indulging in black humour and I frequently joke about people dying or getting hurt in gruesome manners. As a result, I have always received shocked rebukes and beseechments that I should touch or knock on wood right that instance, young man. I'm pleased to say that I have never complied with such moronic requests. By the way, no one ever met their demise or gotten hurt just because I fucking said so. If the law of attraction is a real thing, everyone would be zooming around in ridiculously expensive cars, no one would be starving in Africa, and every football team would be winning every game they played in ever.

"Do you really believe in the law of attraction?" I asked.

"Yes!" she said. "It's very true sometimes." There's that word again: sometimes.

"You'd think that if it's a law, it would be always true - like the laws of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics - instead of being true sometimes. Shouldn't that be true of all real, predictive, scientific laws?" I commented drily.

"Kok, why must you always be so scientific?" She laughed, as if I just said the silliest thing she ever heard.

That night, no one deposited their babies in the maternity ward and both the twins came out screaming and kicking into our very overpopulated world. It was also the best call I ever had.

Only sane man,

k0k s3n w4i

Life in Progress

"Hold the city to your ears

You can hear the winds come in"

Believe Me (2010) by Ellie Goulding

This blog has not been abandoned - the ghost of its former blogger still resides here. I apologise for the famine of new posts, but I had been cruelly separated from the teats of the internet by completely foreseeable circumstances. You see, I had finally moved out of the spare room of my former college mates (now coworkers) and now resides at an address that shares a name with a very posh property on the British Monopoly board. I have yet to reestablish a permanent, devoted connection to the One True Goddess, the World Wide Web, so expect further spotty updates.

I'm loving my new place. It's got an automatic gate, double doors, two-storeys with an obscene amount of square feet, a compound that is big enough to park three cars, and a backyard which is half as spacious. It's located five minutes away from the heart of Kuching town, the hospital where I work, and the least embarrassing mall in the state of Sarawak. It also has a burglar alarm system, a four-piece sofa set, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, a gas stove, a washing machine and a broken telly which no one wants to watch anyway. I live with two other doctors who I did not know a month ago and each of us got our own private bathrooms attached to our fully-furnished, air-conditioned bedrooms. Most importantly of all, my shower has one of those fancy hotel faucets that magically rains hot water when you turn it one way, and cold when you turn it the other way. I have yet to solve the mystery as to where the hot water originates from, and I suspect I will not bother finding that out until it stops coming on demand.

Anyway, I'm only paying RM 400 a month for all that (RM 300, if we can rope in another tenant). The moment I found this place, I stopped looking. True story.

My new room. I stitched this from two pictures - the photo, not the room.

Another accessory to my new life is my new car - a freshly baked Myvi filled with that inexplicably gratifying new car smell. The plate has letters which will score 19 points in a game of Scrabble followed by four numbers that I have yet to memorise. Then again, I still have not memorised my girlfriend's phone number either even after seeing her for two five four some years.

My father did most of the liaising with the car sales-bloke owing to how little time I have to spend outside of my new job - which I was completely grateful for except for a few hilarious hiccoughs. Initially, the Dad suggested that I purchase the car after the Chinese Hungry Ghost Month, and my response was basically a blasé declaration that I don't believe in the existence of spirits except those that make me uncharacteristically happy when I consume them in immoderate measures.

After that, I found out that he had asked the salesman to avoid getting a car plate number with fours in it (because they are homophones of the word "die" in Chinese). I immediately voided that weird little request and told the salesman that if he can get a plate that is all fours, I'd totally want it. Or thirteens, because I have a soft spot for unloved numbers.

I wanted it in orange actually, but Perodua hates happy colours.

Yes, orange is my favourite colour. That, and electric blue.

I'm seriously considering repainting the bonnet, the roof and the hatch at the back at some yet undetermined future date (y'know, to differentiate it from the bajillions of Myvis currently on the road and to make it easy for me to spot it in a crowded parking lot). To decide which colour that would contrast grey most strikingly, I inverted the colours of a picture of my car and found out that the opposite of grey... is another shade of grey. My palm met my face followed my the marriage of my forehead with the desk at my own stupidity. Of course it is!

Anyway, does anyone have a colour to suggest? I'm thinking of a blindingly bright shade of orange, but I'm not known to be a great thinker at the best of times.

Playing The Sims for realsies,

k0k s3n w4i

The Mind-Soul Gambit

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Stephen Hawking

According to one of the smartest genii in the world, if you believe in the afterlife, you are a gullible coward.

In my few short years as an outed outspoken atheist, I have encountered all manners of asinine arguments for the existence of God, gods and the general incorporeal, but one which struck me as particularly groan-worthy is the assertion that the human consciousness is somehow proof that all of us possess a soul. I've seen this hoary old chestnut printed in how-to-debate-atheists pamphlets and proselytisers' edition Bibles, and I suspect that when a theist uses this argument, he probably expects to fluster me with what he considers to be an exceptionally clever "gotcha".

On the contrary, it only signal to me that I am dealing with an utter lummox a particularly inexperienced god-botherer who is profoundly ignorant on how the brain works. I usually get this line of argument from Christians but on the rare occasion, I have also crossed words with Muslims who want a slice of the stupid pie too,

Why do some religious people believe in God but not in prepositions?

I have brought up most of the main talking points in my comment above, but I like to cover a bit more ground here in this post.

Dualism.

The belief that our mind is a separate phenomenon from our material bodies is called mind/body dualism and it's a really antiquated idea which had been around since the barmy old days when the Earth was still flat and diseases were still caused by malevolent ghosties. The manifestations of this concept ranges from those who claim that all our mental faculties (consciousness, the conscience, our ability to do sums, et cetera) is a product of spirit stuff colloquially referred to as the "soul" - to people who merely think that this soul substance is just the seat of our consciousness. While I have always enjoyed struggling with the philosophical underpinnings of the Platonic theory of Forms (which I first encountered in the momentous sci-fi novel Anathem as the Hylaean Theoric World), dualism is probably the least fruitful idea to have been inspired by it.

I'm baffled when this unproven, hypothetical, immaterial mind or soul was simply declared by religious people to be "immortal", but I really shouldn't be surprised since they frequently skip inconvenient steps in their logical reasonings anyway. Then, they make an even more stupendous leap of logic by saying since this immortal soul exists, therefore there must be a God, a Heaven and a Hell, and they are exactly as described in the Bible or the Qur'an. This is what a lot of them consider to be a sophisticated argument for God, but look at it: it's just an assumption built upon an assumption built upon an assumption built upon yet another assumption. Holy crap! Holy crap indeed.

The less "sophisticated" apologists simply use dualism as a rhetorical wedge to try and get unbelievers to admit to believing in an alleged supernatural construct, when the mind is anything but. They somehow think that God would be less hard to shove down someone's throat after they've jammed this funnel into their mouths. No doubt, some just swallowed their garbage like a bitch, but anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of basic neuroscience will not be impressed. Read my points in the picture above; for all intents and purposes, there is no mind or consciousness without the organic brain, and there is no evidence which implies that we need anything more than our organic brain to generate all of our mental functions.

Religious Experiences as Mental Phenomena.

I think that attempting to use the human mind as a proof of God and the supernatural is a rather self-defeating strategy because it is actually a rather powerful argument against the spiritual leanings of religion.

Physicians have known for decades that epilepsy (especially temporal lobe epilepsy) can induce strong religious experiences, even causing an increase in religiosity in between seizures. This suggests that psychic phenomena such a the sensation of "being touched by God" (which have actually persuaded more than a few patients to convert) are far more likely to be malfunctions in brain rather than anything genuinely ethereal. Such seizures have also been known to cause subjective experiences of feeling like one is outside of one's body or the presence of powerful unseens entities like gods and devils. What is even more damning is that such experiences can be replicated in the lab using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Furthermore, evidence have shown that some individuals are simply more susceptible to being magnetically fooled into feeling spiritual and uplifted compared to others (having more "talent for religion", so to speak) and this is reflected in society where there exists both theists and atheists, and everything in between.

In other words, it's really all in your head.

How many times have we heard believers say that they are convinced of the existence of God because of some "transformative personal experiences" they once had, even when they have no concrete proof that their religion is true? It turns out that what they felt can easily be explained scientifically. They probably had a few cerebral "hiccups", that is all.

One of the most striking evidence for the organic basis of consciousness is the sensation that we reside inside our own body. Most of us take it for granted and does not even realise that a mental process is required to maintain that illusion (yes, you heard me). By using TMS on the temporoparietal junction, scientists have managed to successfully interrupt this process, resulting in the test subjects feeling like they have been displaced outside of their own bodies. That's very, very cool science.

Even something as highly abstract as morality (traditionally a domain claimed by the religious) have its basis in the little grey cells. The brainiacs at MIT have found out that by using TMS, you can even affect a person's moral and ethical judgments. Is the goodness of heart from our eternal soul bestowed by God himself so easily hijacked with a weak magnetic field? Are magnets God's kryptonite?

I don't know about you but it seems to me that the more we learn about the human brain and its mind, the more we realise that it's really nothing more - and nothing less - than an unimaginably sophisticated computer. There are a great deal of wondrous, unexplained things within our material world, and we are learning more about them all the time. I wonder how believers ever learn anything if they think they already have all the answers in between the pages of some ancient texts written by pre-scientific yahoos?

Oh, and how unimaginative it is - how unsatisfactory! - when their answer to everything is "Goddidit."

Soulless but not mindless,

k0k s3n w4i

Good News, Everyone!

"There are no men like me. There's only me."

Jamie Lannister in A Clash of Kings (1998)

For my 25th Name Day, I ordered the present I have promised myself earlier this year from a bookstore here in Kuching.

Hell yeah!

It arrived just a couple of weeks ago and I'm already about a quarter of the way through it. I would very much like to take a two-day leave from work and meditate on the tome cover to cover in one long unbroken marathon - that's the best way to digest an epic, if you ask me - but that would also mean I would sooner have to start weathering another few years of waiting for my next fix of A Song and Ice and Fire while hoping that George R. R. Martin remains hale and would not pull a Robert Jordan or a Terry Pratchett. So far, the book is burning rather slowly and that's a bit uncharacteristic for the series in general, but it remains just as engrossing as ever.

Oh, when will The Winds of Winter blow through my life?

I also just finished watching the Game of Thrones HBO miniseries based on the first book before I relocated to Kuching and I must say it surpassed all expectations I harboured for it. I will not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who have not read the books, and to everyone who had.

On a completely unrelated note, I was apparently named the "Blogger of the Week" on DiGi's myInternet homepage last week - something I was unaware of till quite recently. How dare they award me accolades without informing me?!

The important question is: did I win an iPhone 4 or iPad 2?

The bloke or sheila charged with cooking up a cookie-cutter introduction to my weblog clearly hadn't a clue what he or she was talking about. For example, I am no longer a medical student from Malacca but is currently a house officer in the general hospital in Kuching; a major oversight on his or her part considering that most of my recent posts orbited around the renovations in my alleged life. Also, he or she evidently only read my latest post at the time of writing, which was the one about Eddie Izzard.

Um, if there is a good, non-stupid, gender-neutral substitute phrase or word for "he or she" or "him or her", please let me know. And no, I will not consider "shkle", you crazy Futurama fans.

Anyway, I confess that the half-assed measure by which my personal site was described did not feed very effectively into my delusions of grandeur. Besides, any description of your truly is not complete without the inclusions of words such as "godless" or "can be a bit of an asshole". I certainly approve of and appreciate the comparison of my person to a delicious sundae, though.

P.S. I was never one for promoting my blog since I mostly write for my own amusement, but if you like what I'm doing here and think that more people should know about it, do kindly +1, tweet or share my posts on Facebook. These buttons at the bottom of my every post are begging to be clicked on.

k0k bL0k's Blogger of the Forever,

k0k s3n w4i