Today is my birthday and I am swamped with work.
It’s okay because I don’t celebrate it anyway. 🥲

But I will drive to every store in the city that gives free birthday rewards when I get off. 😏

Goodbye my children.

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Just want to say…

Thank you all for stopping by. I appreciate you! I always try to respond to my emails, so feel free to say hi if you like! It doesn’t have to be about philosophy or anything. I am on track to beat my last year’s site traffic record. I know it’s not accurate because many people don’t get logged. I would show you if I could, but the graph that highlights my annual traffic since I started this blog looks like a global warming chart. 😂

I just like to write when I’m bored at night before bed time. I feel like my mind is 200% more active at night than during the day. 😅

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Mindfulness and Meditation

I won’t say I “meditate” as in sitting there and doing spiritual chants Lol. But I certainly do “think deeply” if that counts as meditation. I think I am definitely much more self-reflective and introspective than most people. I also practice mindfulness. I think it’s important that we become more mindful of other people’s words, how they communicate and feel. It definitely helped me understand other people better.

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I don’t disc golf as much as I used to

It’s true and it’s mostly due to busy work schedule. But I still try to play a round or two a week if I have time off. It is usually by myself because I enjoy the peace and quiet. It’s also a nice meditative walk—especially in early morning. Other times it’s with friends when I can find the time. But they like to play during inconvenient times for me and often in large group which takes too long.

I stopped buying discs because they got more expensive. I also have no room for them anymore Lol. But I kind of wish I would clown at new discs instead of clowning at new car parts. 😂 The price difference is significant.

Me: “Disc golf discs are so expensive, they cost $30 each!”
Also me: “These Remus catback exhausts are sick, it’s only $4000!” 🤡

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Finishing Carpentry

Some people are always curious on what the trades are like and wants to get into it. Personally, I think it’s not all that interesting which is why I almost never talk about it on here. I don’t let work define who I am or take over my life—even if the latter happens more than I like.

I am what people refers as a “finishing carpenter” or more specifically as a “trim carpenter” (often referred as “finisher”). My job consists of hanging and adjust doors, install window and door trims, baseboards, bifolds, bipass, and other door related stuff. My job is to make a house look good after it gets drywalled and primed (this is known as “Stage 1 finishing”). It is dusty, physically demanding, and sometimes requires long work hours depending on how efficient you are (this is where you must learn “trade secrets”). Finishing is also one of the more difficult trade skill and takes years of experience to get proficient at. You also have to be careful to not cut your fingers off with power tools. The job also keeps me fit.

My work schedule can be unpredictable. Sometimes I get super long weekends which is more common during winter. Other times I work 7 days a week with random weekday afternoons off. I’m pretty dead by the end of most work days and prefer to stay home. Though I occasionally take my car out for a spin and run errands along the way.😏 I always try to take Sundays off. During my busiest months, it is usually the only day I have for myself, and it is often a chore day.

Finishing is not easy. No skilled trades are in general. It is also essential and foundational work in society. Most trades don’t get paid enough for what they do. The industry has done a terrible job at catching up with inflation. In fact, many piece work prices has gone down a lot over the years due to over competition. As a finisher, you often have to fix and work around all the problems that other trades leave behind—especially bad framers loolllll. Most framers can’t frame a wall straight these days. I think construction is one of, if not the slowest industry to adopt to technology, for better or worse.

I can definitely see why people keep saying how the construction industry’s lack of young workers has become such a big issue. From personal experience, there are almost no young people in the trades—and I’m not surprised, given how the industry works. I am usually the youngest person around the block on most days. The only young people I ever see are doing the easy jobs installing closet shelves. Everyone else are between 40-75.

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Car Updates (Clown content alert)

I was leaving the coffee shop after a short early morning reading sess to pick up two moms for breakfast on Mother’s Day (mom and sister). As I walked to my car which was parked right beside the patio, a couple who were sitting next to it told me they were admiring my car. 🥹 Too bad the damn windshield is already cracked LOL. I should get it replaced soon.

Despite its sedated looks, the car has been getting more attention than I anticipated. I got quite a few compliments from random people. I had a Mk7 GTI driver give me the Korean finger hearts on the highway. A 7.5R driver who gave me a thumbs up at the red light which I returned kindly (she had a really nice set of BBS rims). A Honda Accord giving me a thumbs up proceeded with a middle finger then sped off….??? Lmfaoooo. I also had an angry looking Subaru WRX STi follow me on the highway all the way to the parking lot where he waved at me. Then there was an old man in his lifted truck who tipped his cowboy hat at the red light. Not sure if he saw, but I smiled back. 🤗 I should’ve just waved Lol. I always forget my windows are tinted.

A blacked out 8R also stopped next to me at the red light where we had a nice side by side moment. I was going to get mine in black initially. But having owned a black car before—never again LOL. They are one of the hardest colors to keep clean and shiny because they reveal imperfections easily. But they are really nice when you can maintain it. A well kept clean ceramic coated black car looks like it got dipped in molten glass. I think the black Golf looks menacing if you black out the entire car (tinted windows, black wheels, etc.). But nah. I’m tidy white R now. It’s way easier to keep looking clean. Not that I slack off on maintaining its looks.😊

I recently bought a set of Continental VikingContact 7 as my winter tires during spring/summer sale. I want to drop $2000-3000 on a set of black HRE FF21 or Vossen HF-3 rims as my summer wheels next year. It’s a terrible idea LOL. Don’t do it Bobby.😒 I’ve also been looking at Remus and AWE catback exhausts. 🤡 Right now, I want to get a Maxton bodykit. I’m also thinking of maybe lowering it by 1″. But the car’s ground clearance is already 4.7″ (I want to get rid of wheel gap). The European tail lights will likely happen in the near future, along with the side mirror signals. I want some black side mirror caps too—maybe in carbon fiber. 🤡

My car is a bird poop magnet. It might be because I keep it pretty clean. I think it’s their horny season, so they poo a lot?????? 🤔 That’s very attractive for sure. I’d be turned on if I was a hot girl bird. With this said, I think the one product everyone should have in their car is Optimum No Rinse (ONR). During warm seasons, I always have a spray bottle in the trunk with two microfiber cloths (dilute ratio of 1:16). You can use ONR as a quick detailer, drying aid, or to clean your entire car without rinsing with water (good for water restrictions). Most importantly, you can soak bird poop with ONR and blot it off with ease. Same with bug guts. You can even use it to clean your car interior.

Speaking of detailing, I stripped the dealer’s paint sealant and recoated my car with Gyeon Syncro EVO. The finished coating gave the white paint more depth with a noticeable sheen and mirror like finish. Looks like candy in my eyes. 😍 It also makes the paint feel silky smooth to touch. Now I just need to get a foam cannon, some good car shampoo, and drying aid/detailer with ceramic content in it.

I want to personalize the car a bit more. Maybe I should put a holographic cat sticker or a funny egg sticker on it. The Golf is often referred as the “Egg” by the VW community due to its ovoid like shape.

Egg 🫡

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My Approach to Lacanianism

A lot of my interpretations on Lacan are influenced by my studies on deconstruction and others. This means that much of my readings on Lacan are never strictly Lacanian, but are sometimes half philosophical (i.e. Death Drive, Reality, and Beyond; and Metaphors of Love). I’m not much of a stickler of being a hardcore Lacanian or Derridean where I concern myself with remaining a faithful to each of their thinking styles. I’m not writing an academic essay, so I don’t care about making sharp distinctions between how Lacan defines “Otherness” different to Derrida, for example (there is a huge difference).

This means that I will sometimes do a bit of “hybridization” of ideas between different thinkers. But I will usually mention it in my writings. I think it’s part of the creative process for me. I’m also kind of a free spirit and not a big stickler on traditions. Not to mention that Derrida had a complex relationship with psychoanalysis. There is (used to be?) an academic journal that is devoted to deconstruction and psychoanalysis. I forget what it was called. My Derrida is a bit rusty. 😬

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Good Places to Start Reading Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Before you start, you should know that Lacan is extremely hard to read. But due to his influence, he is almost a prerequisite if you are studying 20th century continental philosophy or psychoanalysis. Even people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida sat in Lacan’s lectures.

People sometimes compare Lacan’s difficulty to G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a book which is often considered as one of the most difficult philosophical texts ever written (I only read 3 chapters of it lol). No one reads that book unless you plan on becoming a Hegelian……or go to the ER with a brain stroke. 😂

Lacan’s works are extensive, ambiguous, subversive, and obscure. I remember Bruce Fink once described the motto of his lectures and writings as, “The more ambiguous the better”, which I think is really true. Lacan does it intentionally to shake people out of their conceptual knowledge about themselves and world. Some people who I recommend before Lacan would be Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, G.W.F. Hegel, Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson. Freud is definitely a prerequisite who was a very good writer. Lacan basically applies Freudian ideas into structural linguistics while inventing his own school.

For beginners, I would start with Seminar 6: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. I’ve already been showing you some of these concepts throughout all my psychoanalytic posts in different ways (desire, transference, repetition, and drive). You need to get a good understanding on the fundamentals of the mirror stage and the relationship between the ego and the Other before you can move into more complex ideas such as transference, perversion, psychosis, and sexuation.

Here are some really good Lacanian seminars with its official English translators in parenthesis:

Seminar 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (Sylvana Tomaselli)
Seminar 8: Transference (Bruce Fink)
Seminar 10: Anxiety (Adrian R. Price)
Seminar 11: Identification (Cormac Gallagher)
Seminar 16: The Logic of Fantasy (Cormac Gallagher)
Seminar 17: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Russell Grigg)
Seminar 20: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (Bruce Fink)
Seminar 23: The Sinthome (Adrian R. Price)

Seminar 2 is a classic that gives a good intro to Lacan’s schema L diagram. If I remember right, he also talks about his stance against ego psychology. Seminar 10 is an essential piece on anxiety. There is a reason why anxiety is such a big concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan was known for his ability to reduce anxiety in his patients.

Seminar 17 is important where Lacan sketches out the discourses of psychoanalysis. 17 is also important if you want to read Slavoj Zizek who fuses Lacan, Hegel, and Marxism together. Seminar 20 on feminine sexuality and love is likely one of Lacan’s most famous and influential lectures. It is one of the most misread seminars due to its difficulty where he introduces the graph known as “sexuation” which highlights sexual difference. Lacan refers to it as the “love letter” Lol.

There is also Lacan’s only published essay collection called Ecrits, which contains 1000 pages of psychoanalysis and fun! In it, look for the essay, The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious which is another good intro to Lacan. I should mention that all of the translators I placed in parenthesis are Lacanians who also publish their own works. Out of these people, I think Bruce Fink, Russell Grigg, and Cormac Gallagher are superb writers of Lacan. Though I would recommend reading primary source before secondary. Don’t be a wimp bro. Reading Lacan is like going to the gym and bench pressing 1000 lbs with your brain.😂

(Primary source = the main scholar/researcher; secondary source = people who writes about primary sources)

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Thoughts on Marxism

A lot of people don’t like Marx due to his ideas on communism blah blah blah. But these people also tends to be the ones who never really studied his ideas on a deeper level. My personal opinion is that Karl Marx was a genius in his own ways. Although he wasn’t right about everything, the insights he had on how capitalism functions as an unstoppable authoritative system is absolutely groundbreaking. And it’s not just your usual popular Marxist narrative where people are like “Oh the rich is exploiting the poor!”, or “People are getting more poor because the rich took all the wealth!”. Karl Marx was famous for saying that he was not a “Marxist”. And for a good reason.

More on this in the future.

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What is Hong Kong like?

Hong Kong is a city that is separated by the Victoria Harbor which is well known for its stunning views at night. The harbor is very deep which allows big ships and even aircraft carriers to enter the city. Tbh, the streets are kind of ghetto looking depending on which district you’re at. But it is a small high tech city that is overpopulated. There are people everywhere with a very vibrant night life. Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers in the world and is the one true “concrete jungle” (New York City? Nahhhh). It is known for Victoria Peak which is a huge tourist destination that overlooks the entire city. Same with Victoria Harbour, the Hong Kong Observation Wheel and Ocean Park. There is also the famous Big Buddha and Disneyland. You definitely get a lot of UK vibes there which is not surprising since it used to be a British colony. Those damn colonizers man.

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“She is so hot”

The other day, I was doing my Sunday morning reading/writing ritual and met this muscle man who I sometimes talk to. We were just chatting where he commented on the portions of his coffee. Then he whispered to me, “That girl who made my drink….she is sooooo hot!”. 😂 I giggled and said, “Dude, you should tell her”. He was like “Ok I will next time”. He was very serious about it too. I hope he doesn’t because I was joking LOL (I told him). I’d feel bad if he made her uncomfortable because she seems really genuine and sweet. She is also super pretty for sure.😊

She rarely serves me except for this one time. I remember I saw My Melody on her name tag and thought it was cute. So I asked her about it. Then she got really excited and showed me her My Melody phone case. It was fancy. I bet she is the car that sometimes parks beside me and takes my favorite spots because it has a really big My Melody doll hanging off the rear mirror…I think? 😂

Some week later when I saw her again while waiting in line, she randomly turned to look at me with gigantic laser beam eyes like she just saw a unicorn. I think she wanted to say hi (or was hoping I would), but was a bit shy. She totally caught me off guard and made me nervous. So I looked back at her like 😑. Whoops LOLL.

….Or maybe she was thinking to herself, “Ugh, it’s this ugly child again?”.

Very likely.🤔

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Object a vs Lack

In early Lacan, object a was known as the “object of desire” where the “a” stands for “other” or “autre” in French. Though he often avoided translating the term and left it ambiguous. Initially, the term was used to denote on the Imaginary and how we project our ego and specular image onto the other person. In late Lacan, object a took on a new meaning which became known as the “object cause of desire” that got closely associated with the Real. Whereas “lack” (“manque” in French) is a much more ambiguous term that had various meanings in different contexts. But it is known that lack causes desire, just like object a. It also produces anxiety that is often unconsciously dealt with by the subject through various ways, such as developing a phobia.

Therefore, we can say that object a is a form of lack that is produced through castration and repression. They are pretty much the same thing. Only that in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the letter “a” is used as a substitute via symbolic language to represent a lack in the Real. “Lack” is a term that can’t be represented through language (i.e. this sentence) other than the use of the letter “a”, because it is beyond the symbolic (-1). Lack is not just a form of “nothing”. Rather, it is more appropriate calling it “less than nothing”; or the erasure/crossing out of the word nothing. This is a good example of applying psychoanalytic concepts back into symbolic language.

While I’m at it, it is important to understand that object a is the object cause of desire. It causes desire, but does not satisfy desire. I hope this clarifies what I meant when I pointed out how, to love is to locate object a or lack in the other person which causes our desire for them—a desire that always misses the point (desire circles around object a and never reaches it). I was in no way implying that the split subject will ever find satisfaction through their desires for said person (or anyone for that matter)—other than the lack of one, or partial satisfaction. And it is this lack of satisfaction which produces the experience of love; which is to give what we do not have.

Our attempts to achieve satisfaction by unconsciously repressing that one Thing is a neurotic trap. It is the source of the subject’s symptom and what analysts refer as our “primal fantasy” that we unconsciously develop at a young age. As I tried to show you in Clinical Context, Theory, and Practice, the analyst’s goal is for them to function as object a where they play a part in the subject’s unconscious primal fantasy. And from within such position, reorient the way the analysand experiences their symptoms through clinical manoeuvres (this is famously known as “traversing the fantasy”). Some of these techniques are quite advanced which will be seen as strange to the analysand’s ears when the analyst intentionally says specific sentences, words and phrases to them.

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What if she still reads my blog?

I won’t be surprised Lol. But this is not a question I need an answer to because there is nothing I can do even if she does. Honestly, if she wanted to show up and talk to me, she would’ve done so by now in the last 2 years. 😞🥹

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“You drive a Golf R and the fastest you’ve gone is 10km above speed limit? I don’t believe you.”

I don’t believe me either. 😅 I don’t blame anyone for thinking this because 50% of all the Golf R and GTIs I see on the road are either cutting traffic like an asshole, or bombing down the highway like it’s the Autobahn. The other day, I read about the Golf R in Australia that got clocked at 280km/h. Dude should lose his license for it. But 280km/h is quite impressive.😂

I admit it. I’ve occasionally downshifted when I know I shouldn’t. But 95% of the time, I just like to give the car a squirt from a stop/slow roll while staying within speed limit (we don’t talk about the other 5% on here LOL). I’ve also chucked the car into empty highway ramps or turns that I’m familiar with at higher speeds. It’s fun. The new AWD torque vectoring system makes the car feel really planted. The racing seat does a good job catching your body as you fight the cornering inertia. But I’m careful to not push too hard. I think the highest I’ve reached is 0.75G on my car’s G-Force meter. I’ve seen people push over 1G on this car, but it’s dangerous on city roads. With this said, I drive much more careful when I have passengers.

There is something about this car that makes you want to drive like a hooligan. I think I need to forever put it in Eco mode. But for some reason, it is always in race mode. 😏 Who buys a Golf R to save gas? 🤷‍♂️

P.S. Don’t tell the popo. 🙃