In Continuum.

She lives on the seventh floor, and she drives a Mercedes out for groceries and nothing more important than those most of the time. We see her sitting in the void deck every once in a while, just sitting there alone and watching the little children in the swimming pool all afternoon. I've never really seen her with anybody before, no families or friends whatsoever. Anybody would have dismissed her really, but the part of her that I noticed was always her badly disfigured face, though that is an overstatement by itself. You see, it doesn't take an expert to see that she has been through way too many plastic surgeries in her life, not because she was born with some deformity, but probably because she was a little too greedy for this one time. So she made a mistake with lifting her eyebrows up way too high, or maybe the double eyelids were done too far away from the eyes themselves. So to cover up those mistakes, you make more mistakes by going through more surgeries, and that is pretty much what happened to her face. She is a bad permutation of bad plastic surgeries, a living and breathing example of what could happen if you take your beauty too seriously and too far. There isn't a doubt that she is a friendly person, always giving me a smile when we meet in the elevator. But the swollen face and the crooked nose, the strange eyebrows and the awkward looking nose, they all make me think about how sometimes trying hard, may be trying too hard. 

We all want to be prettier than we when we were born, that's the way we are. I mean, despite the fact that our hair serves no obvious purpose to the human body, we still spend so much time and money on tending to it every single day, and why is that? Because our hair makes us look good, because it is a part of our "image". Even if you decide to shave your hair off and turn yourself into a rebellious looking skinhead, it is still technically speaking, a hairstyle. The perception of beauty may have changed over the years, but the efforts to make ourselves look more beautiful to other people hasn't. On this side of the world, it is all about thinness, while in some tribes in Africa it is all about fatness. The fatter you are, the more beautiful you are and thus, more suitors. Looking at these "African Beauties", some of us may not be able to relate them to our conventional view of "pretty". But what is the difference between the steinways and the greek pillars anyway? One starved herself to be beautiful while the other stuffed herself to do the very same thing. It's the same story around the world, the same old one. 

It's day three of the Olympics games, day four if you want to count the opening ceremony. Months and years leading up to this event, the government in China has been trying their very best to beautify their city, to build the best stadiums, to leave the best impression of the country in the minds of the tourists. Just like how we spray deodorant to cover up our odor, or we put on make-up to make ourselves look prettier, the city of Beijing has went through a makeover on such a scale that no other countries has ever seen before. If only they started with the whole air pollution problem earlier, they would have scored better on the result sheet for sure. Still, there is no doubt that Beijing is now prettier and better to live in than before, at least for most people living there of course. Most people are going to enjoy the less congested roads, the mildly cleaner air, and of course it is always comforting to see a policeman around the corner wherever you go. That applies to most of the citizens of course, but not to some of the more unfortunate people out there. 

I saw the picture above over at Digg.com, something which most people in Beijing are not going to see just by walking down the streets. Why would they see such a thing anyway, these things aren't supposed to be seen by the tourists. In an effort to make the city look nicer, the government has decided to put walls around less developed and more rundown places in Beijing just to make the rest of the city look, well, more beautiful. So on one side of the wall we have the skyscrapers, the nice upper class citizens, the first-world standard of living. On the other side of the wall, we have the remnants of the past, the poorer population in the city who cannot afford a better housing. They live in shanty towns, or slumps that are crammed in between modern buildings, not because they want to but because they haven't got a choice. It's just saddening to see how, in view of this global event happening in the city, these poorer people have to be marginalized, that they have to be segregated from the rest of the world just because they don't look good enough in contrast with the rest of the world .

The truth is, no matter how much we try to pretend, we always end up being so much less. You know, there is a time when we all have to take off our clothes, when we all have to shed our make-up, when we all have to wash our hair. That is when we go back to square one, when our efforts to make ourselves look more presentable in the day goes back to the beginning by night. It is a cycle that people go through everyday, a cycle that begins again an hour before we step out from the house, everything from picking out what we are going to wear to inspecting every inch of our face in the bathroom. It is normal, there isn't anything wrong with that. Vanity is genetic, I feel, there isn't anything we can change about that. In fact, I always feel that it is a form of disrespect to show yourself up in public wearing your pajamas (it happens a lot in Singapore). Looking good, or at least decent in public, is something that we all do, and it is perfectly normal. But if you are going to take a step too far, if you are going to be consumed by this insatiable urge to make everybody out there love you, then we have a problem now. 

It's like that lady who lives in the seventh floor, she probably didn't know when to stop. She could have just lived with how she looked like, or maybe the first few surgeries helped her boost her confidence just a little bit, and she felt good about herself and probably had a lot more sex than before. Then she made one mistake, then she made the second mistake, then she goes down the slippery slope and became uglier and uglier. There are times when how you look like on the outside affects the way that you feel on the inside, that is very true. But you don't go to an extent whereby you forget who you are underneath those layers of chemicals festering underneath your skin. You lose yourself, and you build walls in your head to block out who you really are. It's just that, when you have such a major event happening in your city, and you know that it is going to draw an incredible amount of revenue, then shouldn't you also remember these people who are rightfully a part of the city? Sure, they live in uglier houses and they wear uglier clothes, but shouldn't the measure of a country be how the poorest are treated instead of the size of the stadium that they can build? 

It is like those idiots on the internet who bought the "I Am Rich" iPhone application through the App Store that costs one thousand dollars and does absolutely nothing. OK, so there is a red gem that flashes on your screen when you turn on the application, but it does absolutely nothing more than to show off to your friends that you were rich enough to buy something that useless. I wonder what those people were trying to prove when they decided to click on the "buy" button, if they thought that there social status would jump a few notches just by being one of the few people in this world who has that application. But these are just things, they are really just stuff that we have. We pick up a top here, we pick up a pair jeans there, then we find a hat that we like and then a pair of shoes that we love. Or, we build a stadium that we want to show off with and then we showcase the best opening ceremony ever - and then what? They are also things, just stuff, they don't last very long. What happens when you decide to put them aside, then, what happens when they are no longer needed any longer. Do you expect to tear down those walls and expect to make peace with old friends, the same ones you segregated the world away from? Very optimistic, very idealistic too. Let's see what happens when your lose these stuff, let's see what you are going to do with your "one dream" then. 

It really isn't "One World, One Dream" during the Olympics now. I mean, just look at that picture. It's more like "Two Worlds, the Government's Dream". That's more like it, at least it is more honest.