Your Mirror
11/02/2006
Hands
I got a haircut yesterday, and it occurred to me that perhaps I should’ve taken up something like that for a living. How cool would it be to work with your hands all day. I do to, but the extent of which is mostly to tap incessantly on a keyboard and hope stuff happens.
It would be cool to use your hands for something other than the intangible.
I wanted to be a dentist, but I was lazy and just couldn’t be bothered to what was necessary to qualify for the right courses in school. I really like working with my hands, although a career like could be quite short lived seeing how my mom and grandma both have arthritis.
What would I do if I can’t type anymore? Dictate?
In a way, we all work with our hands. Sure my hands don’t really play the central part in my career. But it’s the same as being a dentist, or a hairdressor, or a gardener – you decide what you want to do, and your hands bring you to the end point. Your job determines what kind of control your hands learn. A gardener gives each snip some thought, although just by looking at him it probably isn’t apparent.
Even though it’s probably the grossest thing I ever did, looking back I enjoyed working at the dentist, because watching my dentist work the probe, the mirror, the drills, the bits, it was fascinating. The difference he made in a session was always so amazing, whether it was cleaning someone’s teeth, or extracting a tooth. The thought, the extent that he went through to exact each detail with such meticulous precision – it’s why I shudder to think about the day he retires. It isn’t all his hands, he has his way of doing stuff, his hands are simply a demonstration of how perfect he wants things to be.
And people like me, we sit around and (pretend to) think. And when we’re ready we move our hands around the keyboard and type a few keystrokes on little pieces of plastic and voila.
We process mounds of information. We manage, index, present what someone else wrote for someone else to read. We create ways for people to pass information to each other, email time, real time, all the time.
It’s fascinating not because of what your hands did, but what your mind intended. Most times, people don’t even realise what we have to do to make things simple for them.
And the special skill my hands have learnt over the years is not to draw a lemon out of an ear, but to be able to type this sentence with my eyes closed. Typo-less.
And what brought us to this topic? The haircut I got yesterday. It was so good, it looks like I didn’t get anything done, yet I feel all different about it. No, it’s not a phantom haircut, or the nice time at the hair place. It was the detail the dude paid, how he accessed the candidate (me) before he proceeded to thin my hair out.
If it’s anything, the devil’s in the details.
I was going to turn on commenting
After a year, I thought what the heck. But I realised that the lazy bugger I am, I completely removed the commenting variable on the template. Ah well, too bad then. You know where to reach me anyway.
To Logam
Yes, I was grumpy in the TV ad post. I had a meeting yesterday and completely missed your questions, so here are the answers, I think.
Three Bears: Olinda, Sly and Taufik. They’ve been all over the telly in different shapes and forms talking about how being on Idol changed their lives, and stuff. Olinda even said she lost a lot of weight. KF and I find it hard to believe and think she should ask for her money back or switch brands.
Taufik tells a sweet story about how his mom told him to follow his dreams or something. Oh wait, how he has a gift. Or both. Don’t know. Cos it makes me gag so much, and I can’t hear the TV from the bathroom over the sound of me vomitting.
I don’t know if Little Baby Bear has his own story, but I probably won’t know what he’s saying anyway. He needs subtitles.
Bad Infocomm Ad: can’t bring myself to describe it, though Howard Lo from Eye for a Guy (aka my favourite geek for now [who's really nothing compared to my all-time favourite geek in the www KF who might or might not be reading this]) delivers the first two lines. Suffice to say I swop channels whenever he stops talking.
There. In a nutshell.
