This is Winston's page.
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I wrote that line above in August of 2003 when I was in Singapore, showing an intelligent, sensitve man in his late thirties or early forties how to make a web page. He was working as the night watchman in a hotel. I was trying to help him see that he could do something more with his life. He was definitely smart enough to learn how to make web pages or write computer programs, but he had almost no self esteem. Here are a few notes about him. It brings a tear to my eye to think of him now. I am writing this in January of 2005. I was working on something else when I started to think about him.
Here is one thing I started writing before I found this page by doing a search on my whole hard disk for "Winston"
Winston was working at a hotel in Singapore around the corner from the backpackers hostel I was staying at. He worked the night shift. I would see him whenever I went out for a walk in the middle of the night. I spent a lot of time talking to him. Learned a lot about him. Here are a few things. Winston once sold drugs. He nearly got himself killed doing it. He showed me a long scar on his stomach he got in a drug related knife fight. He told me it was a stupid thing to do, but he did it for something to keep him busy. He said he was always bored in school and that gave him something to do. He was exceptionally smart. But had exceptionally low self-esteem. He was always putting himself down, didn't believe in himself. He was also always labeling people. He also often visited prostitutes and called them all kinds of names. He invited me to his home one day. He was always trying to help me and everyone else. But he was very sensitive. If someone disrespected him in the smallest way, he would feel very offended and swear about them as soon as they had gone.
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Here are more notes:
this the first time I wrote about Winston...
then i passed by a hotel entrance with a person sitting outside. it was the same place i found someone (later learned his name was winston) who walked me over to lee's travellers club. i asked the person if they knew where the hawaii hotel was. i had just seen a business card from there at the desk inside lee's, and i remembered reading about it being another cheap place to stay.
he got up and said "I will show you a schematic." I wondered why he said "shematic" instead of map. Maybe he was trained as an electrical engineer or something. He looked too intelligent to be sitting outside a hotel at five in the morning. I asked him how he liked working the night shift. He said, "There's not a choice. You just do it."
i feel sad when i hear people say something like this. he did have choices. but he didn't feel free to make them. he felt forced. i have seen a lot of dead looking people in the past few days. in malaysia i saw people sitting in small shops. just sitting, staring. i smile at most of them as i go bye. some smile back. some just keep staring.
this person was reading a book while he sat outside the hotel. i regret not asking him what he was reading. by the size of it, it looked like a fiction book. one of those books to help you pass time, or kill time, however you want to say it.
but is this what we want in society? people sitting around killing time by reading fiction books? or just sitting staring? (this is from my notes from singapore -aug 24, 2003