7.15am

the chinese have the tradition of stopping the clock after someone in the house has passed away.

so i guess for the past few days, my biological clock kinda of stopped at 7.15am too.

and i was still sleeping in the hall when she sneezed... jeez. haha

den throughout the 4 days where u were made to hold joss sticks and kneel, stand, kneel and den walk ard her coffin and den kneel again. u kind of numb urself to the pain of losing her and instead find the rituals increasingly humorous. good thing was i didn't burst out laughing or else i cld have gotten killed. haha.

den e pain of losing her again hit me again when she was cremated. i guess she was close to me after all. rmbering how widely she smiled when i told her i was going to a uni and how my sis got this president guides award. she wld just say good good and den insisted that we eat something even though we're damn full. and den we'll just sit beside her and watch her sleep.

i supposed if she knew how sad we all were when she passed away, she wld have felt really really happy. and all e big bombastic rituals and ceremony that were held for her wld have made her very proud. den i wld try to imagine her sitting somewhere amongst us, healthy, smiling, with the semi-present white smokey shape like those corny ch 5 drama serials.

den she wld stand up and leave or float wadever it is, happy, forever happy & peaceful. =)


~~~~

i wondered who really understood wad e fuss was abt behind all this? what did it meant? if it's supposed to guide her soul to afterlife, what were the processes like? so for those ppl who cldn't affort the thousands spent to bring monks to the deceased's graves, it means their soul is crossing over less peacefully? like wad my dad said, this whole thing is so commercialised... and some ppl were so anal abt rituals. if they were so insistent on the correct way, it is supposed to be frugal because that's wad buddhism is supposed to be abt... isn't it?

23 oct 2008 thursday 7.15am jalan rajah block 107 =)

~I would have you smile, not grief for those whose time has come

i watched u sleep & my heart was at peace

speak less and observe more.

5 days of hearing the same chant.

here's one less religion i have to consider i guess.

i always wondered if they really understood wad they read.

i dun feel peaceful at all. i get migraines.

maybe i have no affinity with "god" or buddha or wadever e case might be.

maybe i'm just frustrated.

maybe i shld speak less and observe more.

thinking

Adoramus te Rex Gloria
Cum gaudia infinita
Adoramus te infinita
Rex Gloria

Jubilate Deo omina
In saecula infinita
Jubilate Deo omina
Rex Gloria

Sancto Spiritu Gloria
Jubilate omnia
Sancto adoramus
Rex Gloria

it's this little thing weighing down on u

that blames u for not being there when she left

that blames u for not being there for being quite a long while

that little thing is called guilt...

when u're gone

when someone just leaves

it leaves u so empty inside.

i'd just hope u'd be happy where ever u are.

sian

i dont know how to make sense of events that are currently happening in my life rite now

i've been pretty aggressive towards ppl, stubborn, irritating and loud and i'm sure e list goes on.

and i'm started to hate myself for it. i dun like e person i'm changing into... or maybe i was already like tt in e past?

maybe i'm too self absorbed... thinking that everything was alrite when it wasn't.

i'm currently playing with fire. and i think i'm going to get burnt

and i don't think i'm making any sense.

i shld shutup, i shld be a good follower and accept e leader, i shld keep things to myself and not be loud cus it pisses ppl off. i shld be more responsible...

i dun like myself... how?

change lor.

what we cannot do alone...

"No human relation gives one possession in another... every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship and in love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone." Kahlil Gibran


taken from flickr, u think i so pro ah, hahahahaha

GAME

it's nt just abt playing mind games

it's nt just abt the other sex being a jerk (except in NIE)

maybe it is.

u shld see the bags of tricks they have up their sleves. but honestly, it's tiring. why control? why the game? why can't it be simpler? am i thinking too much into things?

hey suddenly i'm seeing a lot of light here.

and honestly, the novelty of supposedly having security and a sense of companionship is wearing off.

i'm tired of anticipation. i'm tired of trying to find out more. if it comes, it really comes so why worry.

so let's say even though i dun believe in the guy up there having plans for me. affinity is just enough. i've already met a lot of wonderful ppl so i guess there'll always be more wonderful ppl for me to meet in the future.

~~~

i'm glad i finally had e courage to tell someone, just someone what happened. it falls into place when u put it into words. it means that u've stopped trying to run away and finally admit what u've done. that u're a stupid idiot/bastard. lol

i'm still carrying alot of hate with me. i dun noe why. i tot i've finally manged to let go but i guess there's just a lot of fear and hatred for people who make me feel as if i'm a failure or that i don't deserve to be there. it's as if i was reeling back from my "depressed" days in that friggin sch, but maybe i'm just being depressed for no damn reason all the time.

and i had a very interesting conversation with my friend.
life's like game, u level up, kill e friggin boss and den level up. lol dun run cus the boss will be after u.
so lame but it makes sense.

wadever. LOL. thank u lovelies for making my day

M-U-G N-O-W

Screw u Bs, i want As.

and i'm nt working hard enuff for it.

M-U-G N-O-W

Notice to all

I'm getting increasingly fearful that people who are not supposed to read my blog is reading my blog so....

Just a notification to all

Please, if you want to link me, kindly ask me for permission first before you add my nice link on your blog.

Also, if you feel uncomfortable with your link being publicized on this blog, do drop me a msg as well.

Thank u.

of backstabbers

the whole point is not why i'm irritated because it's happening to me
but rather, i think it's rather lame how people are settling this problem
here's someone who has no leadership skills trying to tell us what to do
then there's someone who feels emotionally imbalanced because of the changes made.

no one is at fault, and it's not in my ability to judge what the past was like then from the present.

but things happened, and the person i/c did not take any blame, but rather smiled and let things pass. how can one see and manage the big picture when one is unable to take responsibility for blunders. of course out of everything bad that happened, there are good things too but is the good you're focusing on of any importance for future improvements?

it's called AFI's btw, aka areas of improvement aka feedback. not area of praise, not how well we've done, not how we can celebrate after this, not how pretty he/she is.

dun push e blame to what was done in the past or the higher ups and portray urself as being a helpless victim of the opression by the authority. so what if approval was not given, what have u exactly told them that we don't know. if things r good, why aren't they approved? humans being humans will make ur job easier for u if they like u.

that being said, i think it's so much difficult to trust someone now that all this has become a game. if my paranoia is getting better of me, i really don't care because i rather not trust u and ur smile den sccumb to letting everything out and screw whoever is involved.

all e best & good luck. & screw u.

shit

i am in dead shit because

i spent $41 bucks for cab fare

i continuously spent $60bucks for my phone bill cus i dun have free outgoing call from campus

i suxed in my paper

ARHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

money is flowing away frome me!!!

I"M HAVING A ECONOMIC DOWNTURN HERE!!!

Life and How to Survive It

Adrian Tan's speech to the graduating class of 2008 at an NTU convocation ceremony.

Life and How to Survive It

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

You’re going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there’s no life expectancy.

taken from Mr Wang's blog.
http://mrwangsaysso.blogspot.com/2008/08/life-and-how-to-survive-it.html

吃喝玩乐

guess i haven't been reflecting about life as much as i'm supposed to.

stupid damn computer game.

lol

it's an addiction, wearing sexy fighting gear, holding two swords and slashing at lame animals and mummies or mummy warriors. that's e only time when u feel really impressed with urself, that's the only time when u have control and u know bloody hell what is going on.

thus my continuous obsession with internet games... childish huh.

hope i didn't screw up my presentation too badly cus i was holding on to my paper while i was talking. i was promoting earth awareness ok!! recycle recycle! yar rite :P i'm lame

my aim is so save up enough money to tide me thourgh before i start working
my aim is to finish my 4 yrs in education w/o screwing up
my aim is to stop worrying abt my family because it's not my business and it's not a big deal

guess there are times in life when u're so sick of being very philosophical, contemplative & just wish to hold on to materialistic wants and needs and hope and pray hard all this will tide u through whatever there is to come.

u r strong. be true to urself & those u love. that's all u need to know.

onnli euuuuuu

F lying
A round
lI ke a dodo bird
T he only
H omosexual partner i'd like to have


HAHA WAD DA HELL IS THIS FREAKING ACRONYM POEM!!!

just lame. love u darling! XD

take care & JIAYOU!

回忆

我曾经很傻，
曾经很迷茫
曾经很寂寞
曾经很自卑

也许是因为自卑，才会无形中变得很彷徨
才会做出一些不可理喻的事
感觉好像走火入魔。

只是希望将来不再会那么的痛苦。

只希望你懂事点，
有多点责任感，
多为他人着想
别让他人为你流泪

未来还是个
未知数