The Lovers and the Dreamers.....

Summer's over

2007-03-03T21:49:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile so I'm going to be boring and mundane and just make this post about ME and what I did over summer vacation.

For those who don't already know, I had an internship that was an extremely interesting learning experience. I learned that legal work isn't all THAT bad and that I MIGHT wind up in the legal field in one way or another. But I also learned that what makes a workplace good or bad sometimes doesn't have anything to do with the work but it has everything to do with the people. Let's just say that some of the managers I met in the workplace make Anna Wintour AND her literary alter ego look like angels. Seriously.

So that was the bad. Now onto the good news.

I got my driving licence!!! I feel super grown up now!! I'm legally able to drive a car!! And I'm so happy about it I don't even care how many exclamation marks I use!!!

Okok, back story behind the happiness is that I failed my driving test the first time and I was pretty high strung and nervy about taking the driving test again because I'd heard so many horror stories about people who'd failed it multiple times and I thought I might be one of them. My poor instructor kept having to calm me down and tell me to take deep breaths and I kept hyperventilating. So when I found out I passed, I was more relieved than happy really.

Apart from that and the pigging out over Chinese New Year, there isn't much more to tell really. Still in Melbourne, only now it's to get my Victorian practising certificate and still at my cosy little apartment.

Oh and summer just ended so there's just this little bit of sadness there. I love long,warm days so thethought of the cold starting again makes me sigh a little.

Quote

2007-01-07T07:06:00.000-08:00

"Our imagination flies;
we are its shadow
on the earth."
- Vladimir Nabokov

I'm begging

2007-01-02T02:44:00.000-08:00

Does anyone ANYONE have the complete episodes of Inuyasha? Seriously, I saw the VCDs last night and experienced a severe need to buy and watch it all except it would wipe out whatever meagre savings I might have.

If you do have it please please pass it to me on a weekend because I'm doing an internship now and have no leave whatsoever so I can't just stay home to watch all 140 episodes.

Two Thousand and Six Things

2006-12-31T12:31:00.000-08:00

It's 4am on New Year's day and as far as I know, most people are either asleep or still partying.

I'm neither so it seems like a good time to ponder the the year that has passed and to look toward the year ahead. This blog's been unattended and neglected so long I almost hope no one reads this. 4am ramblings are generally not the best place to showcase one's imagination and writing. Leastways not for me.

My favourite things( so glad they outweighed the bad this year)
1)Leaving my past behind behind behind. The 2006 me felt so free.
2) Eating and running around Melbourne with my beautiful "Fatfat" club...all those nights we spent dedicated entirely to eating our way through masses of food and then going for dessert after...they were the best.
3)meeting and making friends with some of the most honest and decent persons I've ever met. They set the bar high and I hope I'll always have people like that by my side.
4) Running 15km at a charity run. The high is unbelievable, the mental strength you gain, invaluable. If you can do this, if you can push yourself beyond your limits, you can do anything.

When the dogs bark and the bees sting:
1) leaving the past behind....that hurt. Alot.
2) Being reckless with my health and wellbeing....
3)Being tired alot. I hate that, I hate it when I get tired easily and can't do all the stuff I want to do.
4) Knowing that I'm looking at an uncertain future and then being terrified into paralysis by that idea.

This year I want to do more, think less but more wisely, run farther, sleep and eat more, have more discipline, save more, spend less on frivolities and yet be more frivolous because frivolity spices life and love more wholeheartedly and wisely the people around me.

I don't make resolutions; I never have. All those things people resolve to do, eat less chocolate, diet, exercise, quite smoking, quit drinking....I don't bother. If you want to do something, do it now and not wait for the end of the year to pretend that you're going to do it.

But the list, is just a list...of hopes for myself. That this year, I will be different, I will be strong, that I will learn something, that I will be better.

We can only hope.

All girls should see this

2006-10-23T18:21:00.000-07:00

Dove is currently running a great ad in the US as part of their Real Beauty Campaign. I liked it and I think all girls, particularly the constantly dieting sister of a friend of mine should watch this. ( I mean, seriously, " But I don't look like the models in the magazines!" is a really dumb reason to go on diet)Kid, open your eyes when you walk on the streets.NO ONE looks like the models in the magazines.

I wasn't really surprised by this ad, but I do think that alot of girls who aspire to look like models have to try and remember that these days, not even models look like models.

Deal or no deal?

2006-09-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to point everyone over to this blog, Dooce.com where she has an entire post dedicated to relationship deal breakers. It was so funny and so real that I remembered the whole reason I started reading blogs to begin with. The comments that everyone else posted on their dealbreakers? They were hilarious; I spent a whole half hour today giggling at them.

Here's an excerpt:

"It was just all the stuff that happened after the kissing that made the relationship more and more difficult to rationalize, and here is where I experience a lot of hand-wringing for all my Mormon girlfriends who got married without ever having slept with their men. It’s admirable, very admirable to enter into the covenant of marriage as a virgin, but what if smack dab in the middle of that first-night passion he starts quoting Al Pacino in Scarface? Or starts yodeling? Or says, “Do you mind if I turn on some Yanni?” IT COULD TOTALLY HAPPEN."

Oh and by the way, in case I totally forgot to mention, its Spring in Melbourne right now. The days are warming up, flowers are blooming, fruits are getting cheaper and generally I smile alot more now. The sun does that to me.

Enjoy Spring break everyone!

Too rich or too thin

2006-09-12T21:46:00.000-07:00

This is interesting. Spain has apparently just passed legislation banning models considered to be "too thin". Amazing and potentially far reaching because of the impact on the Madrid fashion shows and because it's entirely possible that Italy or France (both huge fashion powerhouses) might move to do the same thing.

I'm frankly amazed. The super tall and super skinny models models have always ruled our billboards, magazines and thinking...and I doubt this is the end of their era somehow. But then again, in the last decade, I've seen the desired weight and height of models and girls around me drop by at least 5 kilos below what was considered a healthy acceptable number and it's a phenomenon that is at least a trifle disturbing. (I went and looked up Kate Moss's weight in a diet and nutrition book and it was so far below the acceptable weight figure for her height that it was scary). That, plus the last time I was home in Singapore, a friend told me that the ideal weight for height scenario for teenage girls was to be 1.65m tall and 45 kilos...and does anyone have any idea how thin that is?

It can't really go on that way. There is only so far weight can drop before you get scary skeletal cases like Nicole Richie running around. But I'm a pessimist at heart. I don't really think that the tide of waif thin girls has really turned. And sadly, I know I'd give almost anything to be one of them too, because they seem to have it so easy. Just be extremely thin and it will cover up any number of other physical/character flaws.

Can a girl be too thin? Actually yes, but its not going to stop hundreds of girls from trying to become dangerously underweight anyway.

Maybe there is too thin...the African refugee look is so not chic

The wheels on the bus go round and round

2006-09-04T04:49:00.000-07:00

After something like seven years of procrastinating, I've finally done it.

I've finally started driving lessons.

No I'm not sitting for the driving test anytime soon. Yes after all of two lessons, I still kind of suck and yes, as of right now, I am definitely a road hazard.

God alone knows what made me delay my driving lessons for so long. I think it was at least partly because of my fear of losing control of the car and being in a horrific accident. All those years of playing Daytona only to have one's simulated car crash into barriers, go onto the grass and finally flip over really scared me into thinking I could probably never ever learn to drive.

BUT, lucky for me, I have the world's nicest and most fatherly driving instructor. He speaks with a charming accent, tells me everything slowly and nicely and never yells at me when I make mistakes. He totally validates my decision to learn driving here instead of at home.

To make things easier on myself and also because I get confused by machine parts and having too many gears and levers, I decided to learn auto driving instead of manual. Yes I realise most people think that it's a mistake because while manual drivers can drive auto cars, the reverse isn't possible. But I got the feeling that manual driving would drive me crazy, what with the extra clutch to deal with and the confusion of having to move the gears in a certain way.

I really hope I pass my driving test before the year is out. I just heard about a friend who failed hers because she nearly drove into a lorry that suddenly reversed into the road and suddenly, all my optimism about driving just evaporated.

Wish me luck!

Quote of the day

2006-08-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

The computer is the best partner for those with a God complex.

It never asks 'why?'

Only 'how high?'

Exhaustion

2006-08-08T23:50:00.000-07:00

I'm officially suffering from exhaustion due to some personal problems that had to be dealt with last week.

If you don't see me for a few days or hear from me, I'm probably in bed trying to catch some shut eye.

I hate having low energy levels; if any doctor out there hears this and has advice as to how to remedy that, please leave a comment. I'm willing to take vitamin supplements if i thought they'd help but right now not even coffee helps that much.

There and Back again

2006-08-02T07:36:00.000-07:00

The title says it all I suppose.

Went home and came back to Melbourne already and in the meantime, I took a hiatus from blogging and reading blogs.

Which is how I missed the recent turmoil and confusion in the blogging world.

But no more on that. For now, I just want to mourn the passing of the Knight of Pentacles who used to blog here. He was found dead by his housemates in Perth recently and I was beyond shocked when I read about it via Tomorrow.sg.

Life was just getting good for him. He was on the cusp of a new life in Australia with the love of his life and for it all to end now...and in such a sudden and premature fashion is such a waste.

May he rest in peace.

Welcome to my world

2006-06-13T21:11:00.000-07:00

I took Corporations law this semester and expected to be immensely bored by it. And in some ways, my expectations were completely fulfilled.It is horribly dry, even the exciting bits weren't really that interesting.

But to my own surprise, I found myself taking an interest in it, if only because I suddenly started recognizing terms and phrases within the course that I had been hearing my entire life. My parents are vaguely involved in the financial sector and they routinely discussed their work at the dinner table with one another. Terms like director's duties and insider trading that were like some foreign language during all those years, suddenly made sense to me.

Every child waits for that day when they can be all "grown up" and for me I always felt like that day would never come because of my utter indifference and blissful ignorance of the working life of my parents. My previous degree was In Eng. Lit and the workings of the financial world were obviously not on the syllabus...and I hadn't the motivation or interest in finding out for myself, even though I could have.

It was like I had suddenly been given the key to their world; that I finally understood what they did and what they talked about. I mean, that class on share buy backs and reductions was akin to an epiphany to me, it really was.

And then I also understood why it is that so many children follow in their parents footsteps into the same professions or industries. It has to do with your understanding of the adult world, of what it means to be "all grown up". Corporations law was worth taking just for this understanding, even if I was bored by some of it.

"I want to grow up to be just like Mommy one day"

Foggy Melbourne

2006-06-11T16:20:00.000-07:00

It's been unbelievably cold and foggy in Melbourne lately; Saturday was apprently the coldest June day on record in the past ten odd years.

The picture above is my exam hall and it's pretty much the view that greeted me when I went for my Equity and Trusts law exam on Monday...and it's been like that nearly every other day since. On Friday, on my way home from the gym, I could literally see the fog creeping along the river and settling over the city.

The city's been a stranger to me lately, what with the fog shrouding the trees and wreathing about the bushes. Some nights, the visibility really isn't more than ten metres or so and I get so cold even indoors with my heater on.

Then I remembered this poem I read at 14 and loved...only now I see it so much better.

When you can't beat it, you can always romanticize it I suppose. Here's Fog by Carl Sandburg.

Enjoy.

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

By Carl Sandburg

Short and completely ecapsulates my housekeeping philosophy

2006-06-08T04:55:00.000-07:00

Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

By Kobayashi Issa

Nice Song

2006-05-31T21:08:00.000-07:00

I will be Here

Tomorrow morning if you wake up
And the sun does not appear,
I will be here.

If in the dark we lose sight of love,
Hold my hand and have no fear,
‘Cause I will be here.

I will be here when you feel like being quiet;
When you need to speak your mind, I will listen.
And I will be here when the laughter turns to crying;
Through the winning, losing, and trying, we’ll be together,
‘Cause I will be here.

Tomorrow morning if you wake up
And the future is unclear,
I will be here.

As sure as seasons are made for change,
Our lifetimes are made for years,
So I will be here.

I will be here, so you can cry on my shoulder;
When the mirror tells us we’re older, I will hold you.
And I will be here to watch you grow in beauty,
And tell you all the things you are to me;
I will be here.

I will be true to the promise I have made,
To you and to the One who gave you to me.

by Steven Curtis Chapman

Like a thief in the night

2006-05-30T05:14:00.000-07:00

That's what exams are like you know. At first you're all happy and smiling and it's sunny and the start of semester.

Next thing you know the sun's gone out and you've got this monster on you, breathing down your neck and generally going about making your life difficult.

I'll be back when I've fought off this beast.

Random links

2006-05-22T22:10:00.000-07:00

Calvin and Hobbes- 10 years worth of Calvin and Hobbes ought to be enough to while away a rainy afternoon. I was sick last week and this really helped my boredom of being stuck in bed.

I am Fashion- Fantastic fashion website from a girl who obviously ought to be working as a stylist or personal shopper. Great picks and analysis of current trends.

Photoblogs- These are two that I love and visit over and over again because the photo quality is just beautiful; they make me wish I could appreciate the art of good photography more. They also make me wish I could take photographs like that. The two are Chromogenic and Chromasia.

Time magazine features an article on what it considers to be the 100 greatest novels from 1922 onwards. I personally disagree with many of their choices and I'm completely flabbergasted that they left out certain writers altogether. But it's an interesting list all the same and a good guide for anyone trying to catch up on some serious reading.

The last link, but arguably the one with the best writing is one that I've been reading for some time. A Babe in Toyland is the blog of a girl living in Hongkong and it contains detailed posts on her adventures in the bedroom and out, all written with charm, wit and panache. It's difficult for me to categorize it as merely a sex blog when she writes so cogently and intelligently about so many other issues as well.

Here's an excerpt:

"Recently, I have been getting acquainted with my inner demons. Readers, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Pettiness. Suspicion. Greed. Selfishness. Jealousy. Cynicism. And yes, they're pleased to meet you too

....

I do not underestimate their power and their capability to consume me. They are dark, suffocating passions with vice-like grips that all the girly lunches and retail therapy cannot shake. They are afflictions with the ability to eat me up from the inside.

They are adversaries of the night. They need to be fought, exorcised, beaten off with the fiery stick of courage and conviction. If not to preserve the dynamics of my relationship, then for my sanity...."

Have a read, you may blush at some of her more liberal escapades but above all she writes and lives with a passion that so many of us could only dream of.

To the one I love- Happy Mother's Day

2006-05-15T06:48:00.001-07:00

I'm often told I look a great deal like my mother. But I often wish I had her strength of will and fortitude and I hope one day I will.

When I say I miss home. I really just miss her.I wish I could come home and hear her playing the piano or just bustling around the house.

Payback time

2006-05-10T04:49:00.000-07:00

I've always joked about the fact that I never seemed to have gone through that hormonal, I have a mad crush on boybands and the cute guy in class stage when I was 15. In fact when I was 15 I was dreamy and preternaturally solemn and also somewhat depressive.

Ok I'm still dreamy and somewhat depressive but that's really a story for another time.

Anyway, recently I think I must have finally hit that stage where one gets mad obsessions about pop stars with floppy hair and nonsensical crushes on random boys.

For one thing I went through a stage earlier this year of swooning, yes, really, swooning over Jay Chou much to the horror of all the sane logical people in my vicinity.

And now, NOW I have apparently decided to have mad crushes on random people I meet.

Today on my way home from school(actually it was the supermarket but school sounds less aunty) this dark haired medium tall guy got on and sat across me and started gabbing on his mobile in french.

And I swear, he had the most adorable smile I had ever seen in my life. He was on the phone chatting volubly and amiably with his friend and occasionally smiling at a joke and I swear that the charm and general good naturedness contained in that smile made the stars dance.

He had these impishly crooked teeth, you know, the kind that only serve to make a smile ever more boyish and full of mischief and dimples that flashed and winked every time he moved his lips.

It made my day, it really did. I mean, all those glum looking city slickers around me and you get this guy in a grey coat and green scarf who smiles like the world is this great wonderful place and I just wanted to beam back at him in return. As it was, I sat there with my lips twitching in an effort not to start grinning like a mad stalker person and only let myself smile when I got off at my stop.

Whereupon he sailed off on tram 8, still on his phone saying unintelligible things in french,still smiling his adorable smile and probably never to be seen again.

Isn't it mad? And isn't it so 15 years old and feeling faint because the boy you liked breathed in your direction today?

Ah well. I knew my adolescence would catch up with me someday.

Bonjour to all!

On the election

2006-05-04T21:07:00.000-07:00

Word: Gerrymandering

Definition(Courtesy of Merriam Webster) :1 : to divide (a territorial unit) into election districts to give one political party an electoral majority in a large number of districts while concentrating the voting strength of the opposition in as few districts as possible
2 : to divide (an area) into political units to give special advantages to one group

Too much spin, too many ghosts of elections past for me to believe in ruling parties, crazy opposition party figures and slightly sinister ministers who hint at possible retribution that could befall one if one doesn't vote their way.

It doesn't matter who wins.

We all lose in the end anyway.

Books to movies and back again

2006-04-28T03:06:00.000-07:00

I read with much amusement Wannabe Lawyer's post on V for Vendetta and criticism of the way the material was handled by the Wachowski brothers.

I have this policy about book to movie transitions and that is to treat the book and the movie as completely separate entities that have nothing but the title and maybe a germ of an idea in common(sometimes not even that).

The reason is simple. What makes a good book does not always make a good movie and what makes a good movie probably won't make a good book either. And when one enters the realm of the graphic novel, the issue is complicated by the movie makers having to translate the comic artist's aesthetic into film as well.

Sometimes, it works well (X-Men 2 is a good example) and sometimes it just doesn't(The Incredible Hulk comes to mind). But for myself, I have always found that watching the movie without having ever read the book/comic ensures that I go in without preconceptions and that I'm therefore less likely to be bitterly disappointed by the show.

All this is, unfortunately, an onerously long winded way of politely disagreeing with Wannabe Lawyer's assessment of V for Vendetta.

I quite liked it. I haven't read the graphic novel though so I suppose my theory on preconceptions leading one to harbour unrealistic expectations probably stood up to this test(not that it proves much).

It wasn't fantastic in the oh my god that was the best movie I've seen all year kind of way but it was an interesting watch. I liked Hugo Weaving's acting and the way he fleshed out a character whose face could not be seen with just his voice and body language. To make a man seem graceful(when fighting) and gauche (when trying to talk to Evey) at the same time, to bring out the pathos and the strength of V with his body and his voice; I thought that very few actors could have brought it off as well as he did.

Natalie Portman turned in a performance that was far less nuanced than what she is really capable of(try watching Closer) but she seems generally incapable of doing a really bad job and I thought she brought off the change in the pre imprisonment Evey and post imprisonment Evey fairly well.

Perhaps the Wachowski brothers overdid the drama more than a little, particularly at the end, but in all, the way the story was told, the scenes with the ordinary Londoners in front of their TV sets, the way that they attempted to tie them all together wasn't that badly done.

But yes, I'll agree that the politics behind the movie were awfully simplistic and more than a little Americanized. But for a Sunday night movie where I wanted just a little entertainment and not too much thinking, it was okay.

Which is of course, the most powerful critique one can make of a purportedly political movie.

Just a bad day

2006-04-26T02:20:00.000-07:00

I went to a church thing on monday night that involved having dinner with a bunch of girls and then some bible study after.

Have you ever sat somewhere and felt totally alone despite all the people around you? That is essentially how I felt on monday.

It wasn't their fault; it was mine. There were just things going on in my life, things that had been happening that day and the day before that had nothing to do with them but conspired make me feel weepy and irritable.

And while they shared and giggled together, my secrets both great and small rose up before my face and I could barely breathe. I could not tell, but holding it all inside got so hard at that point.

I said little but nodded along and tried to paste a concerned/studious look on my face when all I really wanted to do was to run home and hide under my quilt and shiver.

I'm okay. But I think it's going to take alot to persuade me to get out of bed for the next couple of days while I wallow.

Sometimes, a girl just needs bed and a tub of decadent ice cream to help soothe the nerves a little.

Hit me!

2006-04-17T21:47:00.000-07:00

It's very odd but I had to wait to come to Melbourne before I finally indulged in some terribly Singaporean activities.

Over the past few weeks, if you asked me on any random Saturday morning what I'd been up to the night before and then carefully noted my dark eye rings and exhausted demeanour, I'd have blushed and looked slightly guilty.

Strange but true that I came to Melbourne and learnt to indulge in both mahjong and blackjack.

I don't know why I never learnt to play either of these games in Singapore. I mean, one reads about housewives/tai-tais playing mahjong all the time and I'd always subconsciously assumed that once I reached a certain age I'd automatically end up with a bad perm and an addiction to a game played with white tiles.

But then here I am before my mid twenties have even been breached, already with an incurable itch to "wash tiles" and play somemore even after a weekend of indulgence. Or perhaps I finally started hanging out with the right crowd of Singaporeans with whom I could indulge in these guilty pleasures.

As for blackjack, somehow my family never really took up the hoary tradition of having blackjack games during Chinese New Year. It may seem amazing to most Singaporeans but my Chinese New Year celebrations principally consisted of much eating and tea drinking rather than participation in any particular sort of gambling.

What's next?

Perhaps I should hop down to Singapore Pools the next time I'm home and buy my first ever 4-D ticket?

Just kidding! I have no intention of wasting my time(and money) in that way. But I'd give anything to see the look on my sister's face when she reads that line.

Testing the Limits

2006-04-10T04:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took part in a 14.7 km charity run. Needless to say, I'm in much pain today from waist down. Before yesterday, the furthest I'd ever run was 7km and that was on the threadmill in the gym under controlled circumstances. I honestly found it hard to comprehend trying to run more than double that distance. After all,it was only 5 months ago that I started to jog a little at the gym and at that time the furthest I had ever run was the 2.4 km run that is a compulsory component of the Singapore school's fitness regime.

The run itself was so weird in some ways. It was both harder and easier than I thought it would be. Easier because the distance went past faster than I thought it would. Before Sunday I'd never even run out of doors in Melbourne before so the scenery flashing past, the people running by actually helped keep me interested and distracted from the pain in my butt and thighs.

Harder, because running outdoors is so different from the threadmill in the gym. One has to sidestep obstacles, cope with the sharp rise toward the bridge we were to run across (believe that steep slope almost killed me) and slow down the pace in order to deal with the crowd.

The first three kilometres went past faster than I thought and I hit my stride somewhere around 4.5 km into the run. All went pretty smoothly until around the 11km mark which is when I really began to tire. My legs hurt because I'd stupidly played 2 hours of badminton on Friday and had gone into the run with already achy legs and somewhere around that point in time I really had to persuade myself to keep going and not just stop and give up.

But then the route turned into the main part of Melbourne city and there were people all lined up in the streets and shouting encouragement and oh my god you have no idea how much that helped me. There were people clapping and yelling for us to keep going and I was somehow motivated to just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

All the same, the last 3 km of the run was horrible going for me. My thighs were protesting and my butt really hurt and I kept wondering if I was absolutely crazy for doing this.

It wasn't until I finished the run that I realised that running is really all about pushing the limits. Now that I know I've done it before, I know I can do it again.

I know 14.7 km doesn't sound like a big deal for loads of people who run regularly or for guys who have had to do the army half marathon. But for me, this is the furthest I've ever run in my life and I never thought even one year ago that I could do something like this and (sorry for this bit of arrogance) but I feel so darned proud of myself for going for this alone and finishing it.

If anyone is interested, here is the website for the run which includes a map of the route and contains more information about the Good Friday charity appeal for the Royal Children's Hospital.

Sound and Fury

2006-03-30T14:06:00.000-08:00

Because I love good writing that strikes a chord within me, here's a link to Mercermachine's latest post.

Ironically, I too, read it on a day of "leaden sky and turgid waters", except that being in Melbourne there were gusts of southwesterly winds buffeting the building I sit in as well. A day that sets the stage for Autumn's act.

Oh, bring back the halcyon days of summer past.

I could brood but instead, I'll post up excerpts from his post that struck chords and more than chords within me.

" It should come as no surprise to you (or me, for that matter) that I have loved before, that I have felt passion that brought down all my reason"

A passion that brought down my reason? Yes, yes and yes again.

"You've loved the wrong person or the right person in the wrong way or at the wrong time. You have, at one time or another, felt the very core of you being ripped away, be it in passion or sorrow or, God help you, both at once. You have known the coffee spoons. You have dared to eat a peach. You have heard the mermaids singing each to each, and you have learned what it is to drown and yearn for drowning, for the cessation of breath. You have learned that both passion and loss will give you an appetite for annihilation… and if you are reading this you have, one way or another, turned away from that siren's call. The dead don't read blogs."

Wrong person, wrong time, wrong everything. Yes again.

And to yearn for cessation of breath, to yearn to wander the country from whose bourn no traveller returns.

Yes and yes to all of the above.

A toast, to all who have loved and lost and lived through it all to tell the tale.

Truth or Dare

2006-03-29T04:15:00.000-08:00

I always chose Dare. Because I'd rather do the most embarrassing and stupid things than risk dredging up bitter memories.

I started this blog last year partly out of boredom and mainly because I needed somewhere to vent during the cold winter of discontent. I've always kept the content light, a socio- political discussion here, an odd poem there, the usual I'm bored/lonely/unhappy navel gazing type post sprinkled in.

But I rarely speak here with frankness just as I rarely speak my heart to anyone else in my real life.

There are so many people who put their personal lives online for all to see. Their loves, hates, boyfriends, pets, girlfriends, break ups, sex lives, mental breakdowns....it's all there. All online for the whole world, including their friends and family to see.

I doubt I could ever do that. I have too much to hide, and mainly, my skin is just too thin. Anything at all that goes wrong in public makes me want to shrivel up inside and hide under the covers for the rest of the week.

But my silences usually mean my questions go unanswered. It gives power and control to people who hold my secrets because they know how much it means to me. It means I never get second or third opinions when faced with sticky issues in my personal life. It means I have no vent, no place to go, no one to turn to because I close off this avenue of release.

There are times I sit down and think to myself that I can't go on this way forever. That Donne was right; no man can be an island.

I came across the blog of someone I once knew, a long time ago. In it he wrote about his past failures, his lack of success in his career, the loss of his girlfriend...all the sad under currents of his seemingly placid and fulfilling life suddenly bubbling to the surface of that little blog. And I wondered if maybe one day I could do that with my own blog too. Write all the nonsense in my head and heart out onto my blue and cream corner of the web universe.

I could but I probably won't.

In the end, as Billy Joel once sang, my silence is my self defence.

Life is just easier this way.

Pamela

2006-03-28T18:12:00.000-08:00

I've got an absolutely adorable tutor for corporations law this year. She's blonde and slightly chubby and has such nice smiley,friendly blue eyes. Plus she's so intelligently ditsy(was that an oxymoron?) she makes the entire class fun just because it's so cute to watch her.

Most really smart people are so awfully inaccessible because they seem so clever that trying to talk to them is an utter headache (plus stressful because I'm not particularly smart) but she really tries to make corporations law accessible which is good because corps law is insanely boring.It ranks second to civil litigation which was so crushingly boring I wanted to claw my eyeballs out and stab myself just to relieve the mind numbing boredom of the class. Seriously, I started cutting class just to avoid mutilating myself.

Anyway back to my corporations law teacher, I just found out that she co authored some book on Corporations law which judges quote from and that she's apparently really well known in corporations law circles. All that and she can still give this ridiculously silly but cute! imitation of a seal barking in order to explain the difference between a real seal and a company seal.

You know how in chick lit, you often get well meaning but ditsy and lovable protagonists? Well she reminds me of the heroine in the Shopaholic series of books. Except that she's obviously quite together and in control of her life despite being ditsy in some ways.

I guess it just goes to show what a huge difference a good teacher can make to any subject however inaccessible or boring it may be. Plus, it really helps that she's so approachable, I never have any qualms about approaching her with silly questions. (In fact, once when some one asked a terribly basic question, she actually turned around and apologized in her lovably flustered way for not teaching well enough so we understood the topic. )

I mean, which teacher actually apologizes for not teaching well enough??!!!

Every woman's fear

2006-03-27T03:44:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I to go and read through some thoroughly neurotic and depressive poetry just for the kicks.

Makes me feel better about myself; I mean, compared to them (many of whom killed themselves before the age of 40), my problems are nothing.

Here's one I've loved for the longest time. Read it when I was 17 and it struck a chord. Re read it at age 24 and now it more than strikes a chord , it tugs at every hidden fear that women's magazines have fostered in me through the years.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

By Sylvia Plath

Commonwealth Games

2006-03-20T00:43:00.000-08:00

I've known since early last year that the commonwealth games were going to be held in Melbourne. But even when people were anxiously balloting for tickets to various games events, I remained unmoved and uncaring.

You can so tell that I'm not a sports fan.

But when a friend from church called up and offered a free ticket to the opening ceremony, I finally started getting completely excited. The day of the opening was so cool, the lights display and enormous light up fishies on the Yarra, the promised fireworks and lightshow....all conspired to make me as high as a little kid at the carnival.

There is no point to this whole post except to say that I totally love living in a city where stuff like that happens. I've gone for several of the games in addition to the opening ceremony(which was awesome by the way!) and I'm now broke but thoroughly happy.

The Vagina Monologues

2006-03-13T23:10:00.000-08:00

One of the Melbourne university theatre groups did a production of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues last week and I managed to catch it on its opening night. I went in with very low expectations; it was after all, a college production and I thought that perhaps they might not do its controversial subject matter justice. But it turned out much better than I thought and several of the actors turned in virtuoso performances despite a few hiccups in the delivery of the lines.

This isn't a review, just a post on some of the questions raised by the play and the ways in which it gave voice to many of the taboos and fears society placed around female genitalia and around women in general.

The play was feminist in character; I am a feminist. That being said, I disagreed with its premise that women and womanhood could be represented by the female genitalia alone. But I did like that it brought into the open so many of the fears, myths and taboo that surrounded the vagina.

The vagina, unlike the penis, is hidden away from view all of the time. So unless one makes a special effort to bring out a mirror and take a good look at it, it is possible for most girls to just forget about it. As such, a woman's relationship with the vagina, is also fundamentally different from the male's relationship with their penis. I have known many men to nickname their genitals, to consider it their partner in sexual conquest, but I know very few women who have had any kind of openness about her own sexual organs. I'd go as far as to say that I know a great many women who may not even know the names of the different parts of her own genitalia. Most women tend to have an attitude toward their vagina made of equal parts self loathing and denial.

As such, the vagina can probably be said to be a good metaphor for female sexuality and the way it is marginalized as compared to the openness with which society treats male sexuality and generally the male sexual organ. There is a veil of secrecy, and of shame, that surrounds female sexuality and the vagina and the menstruation cycle is part of it. They are spoken of in whispers, referred to subtly through coded words ( most girls in Singapore still refer to their period's arrival amusingly as their "auntie's visit") and not at all spoken of in polite society or at the dinner table.

I wrote about Tammy, the unfortunate and unwitting porn star in my last post and one of my main grouses about it was and is still that she was the one being lambasted and villified for her sexual escapades. Amongst my friends, most would talk about her in disgusted tones but laud her yet unnamed partner for his sexual conquest. If one is to condemn anyone at all, why not condemn them both? Why confine the shame and the publicity to her and her alone? You see, that is the great and terrible unfairness of male and female sexuality that obviously still exists despite vociferous protests by my male friends to the contrary.

It doesn't matter that shows such as Sex and the City have managed in recent years to foreground female sexuality; at the end of the day, the girl who does act on her sexual needs is still labelled as cheap or slutty. The men still get away with anything and everything as evinced by Tammy and her boyfriend. Tammy was and is not a slut; she and her boyfriend might have acted foolishly in deciding to film their sexual shenanigans for posterity but apart from that they were two consenting adults who decided to have sex. But I could say this till the cows literally came home and she'd still have a horrible reputation in Singapore from now on.

Perhaps that has been a slight paradigm shift in societal attitudes toward female sexuality in recent years, particularly among the better educated, cosmopolitan types; but among the more traditional families, nothing has changed. Many of my personal guy friends still want (and think they can obtain) virgin wives and at the same time, sow their wild oats liberally before marriage. The double standards that existed in my parents' time, still exist now.

Women are not devoid of sexuality, and the vagina does not exist merely to serve as a tool for male sexual pleasure. This was the theme for at least two of the monologues in the play and I wanted to stand up and applaud them for being brave enough to come out and say it. I only wish I could make every single guy I've ever known watch the play and try to come to some intelligent understanding of female sexuality and to clear away all of the taboos that exist in their heads about the vagina.

Most feminists are painted as bitter, men hating harridans and I'd always felt this to be untrue. I've always felt that most women are feminist on some level, whether they like to admit it or not. After all, the essence of feminism is the belief that women deserve recognition for their work and that they should have equal standing with men in terms of political and social rights. Despite many women who deny that they are feminist, I don't actually know any woman who would rather be treated as a second class citizen and consent to be condescended to all her life. We make up half the population; what we do, how we think and our contribution to society at every level, politically or spiritually, is essential. It pains me that great literature is often only the work of men and that almost all religions sideline women and their contribution. The political and legal arenas of even the most developed countries continue to be dominated by men and I truly believe that unless more women are represented in these areas, our society always be missing out on something great.

I may not agree with every premise in the Vagina Monologues, but I respect the woman who wrote it and the women who worked on producing it. There is a gap in society, in literature and in the arts that needs to be filled in and this play is an invaluable contribution toward filling in some more of the vacuum that existed.

The play also asked two questions that I'd like to post up on my blog as a way of finishing off this post. Not because that I thought they were terribly profound, but because I'd really like to get more girls/people thinking about their attitudes toward their own body.

1) If your vagina could wear something, what would it wear?

2) If your vagina could say something, what would it say?

Dangerous Liaisons on Camera

2006-03-08T05:20:00.000-08:00

About a week or two ago, a friend of mine sent me the infamous Tammy video that had been making its way around the Singapore internet circuit. Forums, blogs..they were all swapping the video.

I'm no saint. I have encountered porn before (who hasn't?) but since most porn is geared toward men, I tended to get bored by it more than anything else. But this, this was something different.

I could not bring myself to watch the entire video and midway through it, I ran to the bathroom and nearly threw up. Don't get me wrong, I don't think sex is gross. But as an intensely private person, I could not bring myself to watch the violation of someone else's privacy without feeling sick to my stomach.

This kid didn't sign up to be an instant porn star and have everyone, her neighbours, friends, previous classmates, everyone who had ever known her, see her naked and making out with her boyfriend. Sex is the most private, intimate act there is and even though they filmed it, it was obvious that they never meant for it to garner the audience that it does today.

Nearly everyone I know has had that nightmare, where you appear in school or some public area suddenly naked and people point at you and laugh. I can only imagine, that for her, she wakes to this nightmare every single day.

Singapore is a hard enough place to live in when one has made mistakes, much less a mistake on this scale and regarding something as taboo as sex. Where ever she goes, what ever she does, there will always be someone who will recognize her, realize that she's no innocent and there will always be the whispers behind her back and the snide comments sent her way.

Please stop passing the video around. Forget the morality of it, the rights and wrongs...just stop.

I'm a very thin skinned person, and I know...that if I had been in her shoes, I'd have killed myself or left the country for good by now. I don't know what she looks like, I refused to look or remember and I'd really rather not know anyway.

Porn is one thing, but this isn't porn and this girl is not a porn star. Let her be. Whatever mistakes she may have made, she didn't deserve a comeuppance of this magnitude.

This was boredom induced....

2006-03-04T01:20:00.000-08:00

You are a Brainy Girl!

Whether you're an official student or a casual learner, you enjoy hitting the books.
You know a little bit about everything, and you're always dying to know more.
For a guy to win your heart, he's got to share some of your intellectual interests.
A awesome book collection of his own doesn't hurt either!

What Kind of Girl Are You?

Because I'm a Narcissist

2006-03-02T03:13:00.000-08:00

Here is my Johari personality thingy for whoever wants to fill it in. Or if you don't feel like filling it in, you can just go take a peek at what people think of me here.

Yes, I am sorry that the list of personality words do not include "ditsy" and "anal retentive" which several of the people who tried filling it out have already highlighted.

Here Comes the Sun

2006-03-01T22:17:00.000-08:00

It's now March and officially the start of Autumn even if the leaves are still stubbornly green.

I'm kind of glad I stayed in Melbourne for the summer even if it meant missing Chinese New Year at home. The Melbourne I usually come back to is grey; dull grey skies, grey pavements and people huddled in big coats.

It was so nice seeing another side to the city and to the people. In summer, there is this explosion of colour and life that I never really expected. Living in sunshine all year round in Singapore has made me completely spoiled. Here, once the sun comes out, the people emerge all tanned and long limbed from their trench coats and spill out into the sidewalk cafes and beaches. They lie beneath trees in the park sunning themselves and indulge in the fantastic Italian gelati that one can buy from so many places here. There is an air of desperately trying to take advantage of the long sunny days whilst they last.

To be honest, the long, hot days here really alleviated my homesickness. It's hard to miss sunny Singapore when the sun sets at 8:30pm and you can take long walks around the gorgeous city parks.

There were so many activities I indulged in over the summer, eating ice cream on 40 degree days(you would not believe how good ice cream tastes on a day like that), roller blading on St Kilda Beach, watching the sun set at 9pm in the evening and watching many many great art house/indie films at the art house cinema on Lygon Street. Despite my friends' gloomy predictions that spending the summer here would be draggy and boring, it turned out to be such a thoroughly cool time (pardon the terrible pun)!

I wish summer didn't have to end and I really really wish for the winter chill never to set in. But at least I've stopped associating Melbourne with just the cold and the chill of autumn and winter.

My Funny Valentine

2006-02-13T07:58:00.000-08:00

The funniest thing?

I don't believe in Valentine's Day.

It has never meant as much to me as certain other terribly traditional festivals such as the mooncake festival which I adore and not just for the mooncakes. To me, a festival, a day of celebration ought to have some kind of interesting story behind it and I found the St Valentine's story mainly boring and came to the conclusion the whole thing was a clever and evil marketing ploy thought up by Hallmark.

So when I looked at my take home exam deadline and realised it was due on Valentine's Day, I felt nothing.

But now, having finished the darned paper, I'm so happy(and high on caffeine!) I could kiss the sky and make out with the stars.

So Happy Valentine's Day to all!

I promise I'll be back to my usual self next year, muttering about Hallmark conspiracy theories and of the commercialised crap they make us buy.

But for now, I've collected a few cool links and slightly mushy stuff for everyone to enjoy.

Found this series of posts on Popaghandi- on life, love and her relationships past and present. I was deeply moved by some and felt oddly connected with others. Also, I loved the way this part sounded

" We lit types — so obsessed. With symbolism, coincidence, signs, literary devices. Pregnant pauses. So obsessed with tragedy, and obsessed with obsession. You’re in love with the idea of being in love with me. And I’m in love with the idea of you being in love with me. Another lifetime perhaps, another place. Am I just a friend to you? It stopped being simple, the moment we kissed...."

Postsecret again, but then they have a series on love and relationships for Valentine's Day.

Slate Magazine has compiled a small anthology of poetry for Valentine's Day. Some clearly not of the gooey variety. Witness this short poem by Louise Bogan.

PACKET OF LETTERS

In the shut drawer, even now, they rave and grieve—
To be approached at times with the frightened tear;
Their cold to be drawn away from, as one, at nightfall,
Draws the cloak closer against the cold of the marsh.
There, there, the thugs of the heart did murder.
There, still in murderers' guise, two stand embraced, embalmed.

Finally, ChubbyHubby has this excellent menu for people who want to celebrate the day by cooking for their loved ones. I was literally drooling over my keyboard.

To round things off in the spirit of general schmaltziness, here's a poem I read and totally loved when I was an emotional and tender hearted 17 year old.

The White Rose by John Boyle O'Reilly

THE red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
Oh, the red rose is a falcon
And the white rose is a dove.

But I send you a cream-white rose bud
With a flush on its petal tips;
For the love that is purest and sweetest
Has a kiss of desire on the lips.

P.S For the record though, roses (of most shades) really are my favourite flowers. I love the way they lean up toward you in this gentle, almost trusting manner and slowly unfurl their secretive petals.

Link for all Mac Lovers

2006-02-12T00:45:00.000-08:00

Please go to this site and read the entry dated 3rd February 2006.

You will feel so validated.

Walk the Line

2006-02-08T22:51:00.000-08:00

After I watched this show, I'm now totally convinced Joaquin Phoenix should get the Academy Award for best actor. Not even Philip Seymour Hoffman's squeaky voiced performance of Capote could measure up.

Reese Witherspoon gave a good performance but I thought there was no way her performance measured up to his in terms of emotional resonance and power.

But then maybe I shouldn't speak too soon, I've yet to watch Capote after all and the trailers did sound promising. Also, the Academy has a habit of giving away prizes to those who portray people with disability/deformity which a squeaky voice might just qualify as.

But of course to a sucker for romance like me, the movie where the guy chases the girl for something like ten years accompanied by his smokin' hot voice will always beat the thriller.
Before, Johnny Cash died, Coldplay actually wanted him to sing one of their songs from the album X&Y and it would've been incredibly appropriate for him and for June Carter Cash. Sadly, he died before he could do that which is a huge pity, especially since it could have been even better than his cover of Nine Inch Nail's Hurt.

Still, here are the lyrics to Til Kingdom Come by Coldplay just because I felt like it.

Til Kingdom Come

Steal my heart and hold my tongue
I feel my time, my time has come
Let me in, unlock the door
I've never felt this way before

And the wheels just keep on turning
The drummer begins to drum
I don't know which way I'm going
I don't know which way I've come

Hold my head inside your hands
I need someone who understands
I need someone, someone who hears
For you, I've waited all these years

For you I'd wait 'til kingdom come
Until my day, my day is done
And say you'll come and set me free
Just say you'll wait, you'll wait for me

In your tears and in your blood
In your fire and in your flood
I hear you laugh, I heard you sing
I wouldn't change a single thing

And the wheels just keep on turning
The drummers begin to drum
I don't know which way I'm going
I don't know what I'll become

For you I'd wait 'til kingdom come
Until my days, my days are done
And say you'll come and set me free
Just say you'll wait, you'll wait for me.

Just say you'll wait, you'll wait for me.
Just say you'll wait, you'll wait for me

Sugar and Spice

2006-01-21T04:59:00.000-08:00

Been a little busy, what with organizing get togethers and assignments being due. But still found the time to trawl around the net, looking for cute sites and reading up various blogs. Here are various titbits from around the 'net. Enjoy!

Somewhere is a lovely, if sad poem commemorating the death of the poet's wife. I don't really want to reproduce something quite so personal on my own blog so please take a few moments to read it and savour the gentle ache it can bring.

And this is a sweet(literally!) poem written by floots on love and desserts. I found the word play and use of puns so amusing.

Joy is a cool site run by an Asian American girl who has great taste in fashion, furnishing and whatnot. I love the designs and photo collages(of fashion and other bits) that she posts up regularly. A sunny, cheery blog that should light up your day a little.

"Bridging the gap between species" is a post by the American blogger Dooce, on the odd and funny way her dog protected her toddler daughter from falling down the stairs.

And for those who haven't been there before, Postsecret is like our collective conscience, a virtual reminder of our common humanity. Go and look. Be prepared to laugh and maybe tear a little.

Best moment of the Golden Globes was when...

2006-01-18T23:43:00.000-08:00

Ang Lee gave his thank you speech while accepting the award for Best Director. Not only did he give the speech in flawless English but he also wished all the world a happy new year in Chinese.

By doing that, he acknowledged the chinese audience and foregrounded to a worldwide audience the biggest Chinese cultural celebration of all.

I'm now living in a country which does not and probably will not acknowledge this holiday despite the enormous chinese immigrant population in its midst. Australia's public holidays remain stubbornly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant in nature and for the first time, because I will be here during Chinese New Year, I really feel the sting of being in a minority racial group.

I miss garishly red Chinese New Year crap being sold in every other shop and hung up everywhere.

I miss the pineapple tarts and pussy willows and my grandad.

And I even miss helping my mum out with the spring cleaning.

It feels all wrong to be here during Chinese New year; the one moment in the year when I truly acknowledge my cultural roots and draw a little closer to my family.

The God of Prosperity

2006-01-13T20:25:00.000-08:00

This article in The Economist is an interesting addition to the on-going debate over the prosperity gospel as preached by several charismatic churches. Instead of taking a theological perspective, Jonathan Gruber, an economist from MIT has instead conducted a study which empirically measures the economic well being of church goers as opposed to non church goers. For the full text or summary of his paper, take a look here.

Apparently the results seem to support the view that religious participation can and does boost your income/economic well-being by a certain percentage. But I’d caution the prosperity gospel fans from using this article as evidence to back up their stand that God does bless them with material wealth. The article itself suggested several practical reasons behind the apparent percentage difference in the economic well being of church goers as opposed to non church goers of a similar background. As I recall, the Weberian discussion of the Protestant work ethic was brought up as a possible forerunner of this study and other suggestions that church itself fostered an ethic that led to a higher likelihood of completing higher education and therefore better financial well being bears a great deal of merit.

And the study itself only looked at a very narrow segment of American society; in that only white Americans were included within the study, a decision I find problematic. It is entirely possible that the survey results could have turned out differently if applied to African Americans or Chinese in Asia.

For a good theological discussion of this view, take a look at this blog post and for an example of a church that practices this doctrine, go to this site.

Personally I find the prosperity gospel itself a little difficult to swallow. The suggestion that God intends to bless everyone with material wealth seems to smack more of the Chinese Money God than the Jesus who commented on the difficulty the rich would have in attaining heaven.

So I'll end off here with a terribly snide but appropriate quote from The Economist: "But given that Jesus warned his followers against storing up treasures on earth, you might think that this wasn't the motivation for going to church that he had in mind."

Here's to all of you

2006-01-04T04:25:00.000-08:00

Found this poem on another poetry blog and decided to reproduce it on my own.

For everyone who reads or stops by.

Especially for P.S. because his own blog reeks with so much sadness and resignation sometimes.

May happiness
pursue you,

catch you
often, and,

should it
lose you,

be waiting
ahead, making

a clearing
for you

A. R. Ammons

Sorrow's Hymn

2006-01-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

Earlier last year(how strange it feels to write that), some of my friends and I had a discussion on music in which we agreed the best songs were the sad songs of heartbreak and despair.

Triple Period just posted up James Blunt's Goodbye My Lover which has to be one of the champion heartbreak songs of its time and it reminded me the list we(my friends and I) came up with that night.

Sometimes when life is all screwed up, all you really want to do is listen to some achingly beautiful song to help yourself out of it. And sometimes, even when life isn't screwed up, the poetry of loss helps you remember the things that are precious to you. It's probably the same reason people watch sad films; we need the catharsis. And maybe we need the reminder that we're not alone in our grief, that others too have gone this way and survived it.

Here was one that made it to my personal heartbreak song list and as I recall it, at least one of the other guys had songs by the same singer songwriter on his list too. The line " I'm so tired but I can't sleep/ I'm standing at the edge of something much too deep" always resonated deeply as rhyming couplets often do.

I Will Remember You

By Sarah Mclachlan

I will remember you
Will you remember me?
Don't let your life pass you by
Weep not for the memories

Remember the good times that we had?
I let them slip away from us when things got bad
How clearly I first saw you smilin' in the sun
Wanna feel your warmth upon me, I wanna be the one

I will remember you
Will you remember me?
Don't let your life pass you by
Weep not for the memories

I'm so tired but I can't sleep
Standin' on the edge of something much too deep
It's funny how we feel so much but we cannot say a word
We are screaming inside, but we can't be heard

But I will remember you
Will you remember me?
Don't let your life pass you by
Weep not for the memories

I'm so afraid to love you, but more afraid to loose
Clinging to a past that doesn't let me choose
Once there was a darkness, deep and endless night
You gave me everything you had, oh you gave me light

And I will remember you
Will you remember me?
Don't let your life pass you by
Weep not for the memories
Weep not for the memories

Second chances

2005-12-29T17:42:00.000-08:00

I suppose it is just the time of the year where everyone stops to take stock of what they've done for the past 360 odd days because I've come across Top Ten lists and review lists on almost every blog I've been on.

I'll always remember 2005. Some of the reasons are too personal to be posted up but I thought I'd just post on one significant shift in my interior landscaping.

I'm trying to re learn chinese.

For those who know me in real life and who do not know yet, I realise it comes as a bit of a shock. I've always been the biggest anglophile around and until 3 months ago, I had no idea who Jin Yong, Gu Long or Jay Chou were, which just goes to show my utter disconnection with the Mandarin cultural universe. I could barely read even the simplest words in Chinese and I think I had trouble even writing the easiest sentences. I had and still have the Chinese linguistic abilities of an 7 year old.

I don't think I could read Jin Yong and Gu Long yet...because right now, I'm trying to read my sister's Secondary One Higher Chinese textbooks and I seriously cannot even get through ONE chapter without running into a gadzillion unknown words. It sounds so ironic, after all those years of hating it and wishing it would go away, but right now, I would give anything to have chinese tuition again.

All this just proves God has a huge sense of humour.

There were a great many reasons for this shift. One of which is the fact that I've finally grown out of my hatred for my secondary school and the language I associated with it. Another is that the usefulness of being fluent in written and spoken mandarin was discussed by several bloggers I greatly respected such as Mr Wang and being a practical person, I grasped the fact that it made no sense to refuse to learn just because of petty old hatreds. Besides, it helps that every other magazine I flip open talks about China, the economic powerhouse and I'd hate to think of myself missing out on career opportunities just because I was too stubborn to back down from my Sinophobia.

The final reason is a sentimental one.

I'm chinese. And I'd really like to at least try to reconnect with my culture.I don't know if I will be reading Tang poetry anytime soon or ever. But I'd like to at least try not to be so enormously handicapped at even basic reading and writing of the language.

So if anyone out there has any practical hints/ suggestions/offers to give me free tuition, I'll gladly listen. But please keep in mind that I live in Melbourne and I may not have as many Chinese language resources at my fingertips.

And hey, just to throw in another shocker for my friends out there... I'm now a huge Jay Chou fan! I have succumbed to the charms of the chief mumbler of Mandopop! I hope Jay Chou learns to enunciate soon because trying to figure out the words from his singing is proving almost impossible. Of course the upside is that it forces me to read the lyrics and improve my reading so I suppose it all works out

Uh, and if anyone would like to suggest other Mandopop singers who don't quite mumble as much, that would be helpful too. I'm hoping that if I play chinese music night and day, by process of osmosis, at least some of it will soak in and my chinese language abilities will magically be raised in a matter of months.

Well, it could happen...

Happy New Year everyone! May 2006 prove to be a fruitful and interesting year for you!

On devils and whatnot

2005-12-28T15:04:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to feel as though the Australian tourism board should pay me for ruthlessly promoting their country so much but my trip to Tasmania was so good, I just have to sing it from the rooftops.

I have to state at the outset that Tasmania's not a place for those who travel solely to shop; there is practically NO shopping there. 20% of the country is made of National parks and at least another 40% is farming land and various big empty looking plains and several scary looking non national park forests.Its two biggest cities are Hobart and Launceston and trust me, there are suburban centres in Melbourne bigger than each of them.

What Tasmania has got is something for every nature/activities enthusiast. Hiking,bushwalking, fishing, rock climbing, kayaking, surfing, you name it, they've got some remote beautiful spot that's perfect for it somewhere. It also has something for every gourmet foodie out there. Fantastic vineyards, gourmet cheese farms (the Camembert was fantastic, I'd recommend it to anyone), oyster farms, strawberry farms...you get the picture.

So the trip went roughly this way. We'd drive up to some farm, pig out on the fresh and delicious produce then feeling guilty, we'd go find some national park to walk it off in. It was the perfect combination of sinful indulgence and at least some concessions to a healthy lifestyle.

I took loads of photographs on this trip but most of them involve myself or my family standing around and grinning and besides, my skills at photography are basically non existent so please go there, there and there for some websites of award winning Tasmanian photographers that specialize in taking landscape photography of one of the world's most remote and unspoiled islands. It's basically a goldmine for landscape photographers; it is just that beautiful and varied.

Thing about going to Tasmania is that one has to really stop and take a minute to appreciate its unique flora and fauna. It's no use going there just to take a photo at one of its beauty spots and declare yourself to have been there. It's home to some really unusual creatures like the Tasmanian devil and the platypus. For an explanation as to why the platypus is so special, take a look here.Besides that, the wet and cool climate has produced some of the world's last remaining temperate rain forests where certain species of trees take 500 years to mature. I saw so many thousand year old trees and found myself actually feeling angry at the thought that people wanted to cut them down for the sake of the timber industry.

Let me just describe just this one scene for you. My family and I were driving through Cradle Mountain National Park one evening and we decided to stop and take one of the short walks. And that walk was almost ridiculously storybook-like in an Australian way. Around us, wallabies sat around munching thoughtfully on grass and glancing at us warily every now and then. One of them even had a joey in its pouch which was so Roo in Winnie the Pooh I nearly died of happiness right there and then. The setting sun was low over Cradle Mountain itself and everything was bathed in this odd golden light. There were even wombats rooting around the bushes and sniffling at little streams. It was remote, Arcadian and I felt like I had fallen into some bush ranger's paradise.

Australians do get alot of flak for their racist and white supremacist attitudes, but they at least got one thing right eventually, which was to try and protect the indigenous geography and fauna of their country. To my mind, they're still not doing enough but at least they're trying. (As opposed to the Americans who seem to have stopped trying. If Bush gets his way, more of North America's National Parks will be open to the timber/logging/oil industry which is criminal)

I don't usually gush this much and I promise to do it less from now on. But I've taken two trips recently to some very beautiful and protected areas and now I can't get over how much I've been missing out my WHOLE life. I'm already promising myself another trip to Tasmania and at least one to Kakadu National Park up in Darwin. I really hope I get to do all that before I graduate or at least before people go out of their minds and decide to destroy it all.

Some Perspective

2005-12-23T16:06:00.000-08:00

I've been fielding alot of questions from concerned friends lately regarding the race situation in Australia.

So I thought I'd just post this up to say- it's not quite so bad as everyone thinks.

Yes I know about Cronulla and the problems between the Lebanese Australians and white Australians there.

But I also know of complete strangers who went to Nguyen Van Tuong's memorial and cried for him, more specifically, white strangers who had never known him and yet mourned for him.

I've been in Melbourne for close on two years now and I have never really encountered outright racism in any form. I did have some drunken strangers drive past yelling incoherent and possibly racist taunts but I get the feeling they were doing that to everyone on the street and that it wasn't a particularly unusual thing for drunk boys to do.

Generally, the local Australians do tend to keep to themselves and to some extent exclude the international students. But I find that once you take the trouble to chat with them and make some friendly overtures, they're actually pretty friendly and perfectly willing to help you out in class. Trouble is that most international students tend to stick to their own little cliques and avoid the local Australians (including the Australian born Asians) almost completely.

Even among the international students, people stick to the crowd they're most comfortable, which will usually consist of people from the same region/country. It's for that reason that I've never gotten anywhere with the mainland chinese because they stick so tightly to their own and because I really cannot keep up with their fast paced mandarin.

On the whole, Australia is a pretty insular and xenophobic country. But the situation is generally getting better, particularly in the larger cities. This is especially so for the Asians rather than the Lebanese, I suspect, because the Lebanese Muslims have that other religious hurdle to cross.

Or perhaps I just struck it lucky in that maybe Melbourne is just simply a kinder, gentler and more understanding city than Sydney.

Who knows? Or maybe the fates could conspire to prove me wrong and Melbourne could riot next week.

Boredom Meme

2005-12-12T05:36:00.000-08:00

Recent upheavals in my personal life have left me pretty much too drained to really write or post up anything interesting. Out of boredom I shall do this meme which I picked up on this blog.

At any rate, it has to be better than sitting around listening to truly depressing music.

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
1. Blur Queen
2. Silly Girl
3. Jie

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
1. Adina Haes
2. Shine
3. Mesaana

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My eyes
2. My ears- nice flat against my head ears
3. My hands

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:
1. My thighs
2. my thighs
3. My calves

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
1. Chinese
2. Teochew
3. Indon Chinese(sort of)

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:
1. Death
2. Heights
3. Being unloved

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
1. Milk
2. sleep
3. Internet Connection

THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
1. My glasses
2. A large T shirt
3. Undies

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS (currently, anyway):
1. Shi Jie Mo Ri by Jay Chou
2. Angel By Sarah Mchlachlan
3. An Jing by Jay Chou

THREE BOOKS YOU ARE CURRENTLY READING:
1. White Apples by Jonathan Carroll
2. Death: The High Cost of Living by Neil Gaiman
3. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle

THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP:
1. Intelligent conversation.
2. someone I can be alone with without feeling invaded
3. safety

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE (in no particular order):
1. I've never been to Canada
2. I read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables in one day
3. I dance horribly

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE PREFERED SEX THAT APPEAL TO YOU:
1. nice hands
2. a deep mellow voice
3. straight teeth

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
1. reading
2. cooking
3. sleeping

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:
1. Go Home
2. Figure out my life
3. Figure out what I want to do with my life

THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING/YOU'VE CONSIDERED:
1. stay at home wife/mother
2. Journalist.
3. Banker

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:
1. Hawaii
2. Vancouver
3. New York

THREE KIDS' NAMES YOU LIKE:
1. Lynn
2. Grace
3. Joshua

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE (at least, not immediately BEFORE):
1. Have and raise kids.
2. Find a job I actually -like-.
3. Get a Masters degree in Eng Lit

THREE WAYS THAT YOU ARE STEREOTYPICALLY A GIRL:
1. I love reading celeb gossip
2. Shopping should count as a sport
3. I like the toilet seat put back down

THREE FEMALE CELEB CRUSHES:
1. Nicole Kidman
2. Monica Bellucci
3. Jennifer Garner

THREE MALE CELEB CRUSHES:
1. Edison Chen
2. Tony Leung
3. Viggo Mortenson

I'm not passing this on to anyone. I'm just out of my mind bored and trying to distract myself from other problems.

Only This and Nothing More

2005-12-06T22:05:00.000-08:00

Just this odd old poem that I loved when I was a kid. Something about it always seemed so mysterious and romantic even then.

Yes, it is Yeats again, just wait till I start on Tennyson and then everyone will be drowning in saccharine and sighs.

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

By William Butler Yeats

P.S I know, I know, I posted up a Yeats poem with an Edgar Allen Poe line as the blogpost title. Somehow I feel like there should be a rule against it...the two are SO different.

Grim indeed

2005-12-04T12:12:00.000-08:00

Caught the show Brothers Grimm sometime last week and was sorely disappointed. I thought from the trailers that it was a show with great promise; I don't know what I expected- something a little more magical/fantastical perhaps?

All the same, I couldn't help but feel that the script writers tried too hard to incorporate elements of the Grimm Brothers stories without any coherence or thought to how it would complement the story as an organic whole.

I know of so many great writers who have successfully rewritten the traditional fairy tales( Neil Gaiman comes to mind) or who have managed to incorporate elements of traditional stories and myths into great stories. In the Brothers Grimm(movie), the incorporation makes so little sense and detract rather than add to the already thin storyline of the two brothers.

The greatest pity is that it could have been so much more than what it turned out to be.Some parts of the story really were rather decent and Monica Bellucci does a reasonable good portrayal of the evil witch/queen but a great deal of the script involved the scriptwriters trying too hard to include stories that had no place being there(the Gingerbread man scene comes to mind).

As it was, the movie seemed confused as to whether it should have been a comedy or drama, and the net result was that it did neither well.

For Nguyen Van Tuong

2005-12-03T01:19:00.000-08:00

Psalm 121

" 5 The LORD watches over you—
the LORD is your shade at your right hand;

6 the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.

7 The LORD will keep you from all harm—
he will watch over your life;

8 the LORD will watch over your coming and going
both now and forevermore."

I'm glad you're finally home in Australia.

Beautiful Australia

2005-12-01T15:38:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about studying overseas is the long lazy road trips that I take with my friends. This picture was taken at Wilson's Promontory National Park, its not one of the most popular or famous parks in the world but it should be; it was that gorgeous.

Think of one of the most beautiful beaches you ever seen, white sand stretching on endlessly. And the sea and sky meet and marry in a glorious harmony of blue. All this, and all to yourself.All the beaches we managed to visit on this trip, were almost completely or completely empty. Some were accessible only by a dirt track which we hiked.

We played frisbee, ran around taking photos because we were so breathless with the beauty of it and splashed one another in the rolling surf.

In the few days we were there, we hiked past gum trees and semi tropical forests, saw wild snakes(which nearly made me faint!), wallabies, wombats and two cute little echidnas. Fought off swarms of drunken flies and got back to our motel room exhausted every night.

This is the life.I feel so bloody lucky to have seen all this and experienced it with friends who turned out to be tons of fun.

Good bye to Idle Days

2005-12-01T15:20:00.000-08:00

Rest in peace, Idle Days.

Living Dangerously

2005-11-26T18:24:00.000-08:00

This is probably the year blogging became (in my head anyway) a dangerous hobby.

You could get sued for it, kicked off your job, arrested or worst of all, become a victim of a witch hunt.

I wasn't blogging during the time of the Dawn Yang saga due to my exams. But I followed it pretty closely, or as closely as my study schedules would allow.

Thing is, apart from being foolish enough to draw attention to herself in that Xiaxue type manner, she didn't actually do anything wrong. Her plastic surgery(which she was an even bigger fool to deny) was her own perogative. As long as her parents had the money and were willing to pay for it, they should be the only ones concerned. As it is, most celebrities are tweaked to some extent anyway; one has only to take a look at this site to realise that.

The image conscious society we live in demands nothing less. Xiaxue's a pretty enough girl, but she has had tons of her detractors make snide and cruel comments about her looks, her weight and her use of photoshop.

Why turn on these girls in that manner? So what if she had plastic surgery? So what if XX uses photoshop? So do most celebrities (and by most I mean something like 98%).

Next thing I knew, yet another pretty female blogger(Daphne Teo) had decided to put an end to her blog. This too, was due to the amount of cruel and uncalled for comments she'd been getting in her comments boxes and apparently in forums as well. Again, the only thing she could have been guilty of, was flaunting her father's wealth and ability to purchase myriad designer handbags and electronic accessories. Again, the only people who should have been concerned about that would be her parents (and perhaps her future husband who may need to support that lifestyle).

Perhaps the main problem is that Singaporeans just cannot stand people flaunting their wealth or assets or success in any way. I've often noticed that it seems to be part of Asian/Chinese culture to deny success or downplay it in anyway. Response to any praise is almost invariably a slew of self deprecating remarks to show one's modesty and humility. Any other response would make the person seem 'proud' or 'arrogant' and that seems to be the crux of the problem with these bloggers.

Or maybe, in these sorry economic times, when most people find themselves financially challenged, watching these girls go out and spend money and time heedlessly just got to be too much. And for them to sit around and say after the fact, that they were not rich, merely got to be the proverbial straw on the camel's back.

The problem is that whole point of blogging is to draw attention. It's a platform for many things, a social diary, fashion, current affairs etc. It's the adult version of the poser's game for many people( like the 3 bloggers I highlighted). It's the online "hey look at me, look how pretty/knowledgeable I am!" scenario. And I guess the main problem with that is that most lifestyle type bloggers are unwilling to admit that this attention seeking type behaviour brings with it the downside of celebrity as well. Not only are they unwilling to admit it, most (with the possible exception of XX) don't know how to cope with it as well.

Singapore's not a place for revolutions. We all know that. But as the gap between the rich and the relatively poorer widens, we may get more witch hunts like these if people unwittingly decide to flaunt their successful lifestyles online and off. Perhaps that's why the government chooses to keep the lifestyles of its ministers quiet and under wraps.

After all, unless what you post is really inflammatory( or illegal), blogs that discuss current affairs and other intellectual matters tend not to be attacked in quite the same way. It is true that they don't draw the numbers the same way, but at least they tend not to draw the same amount of flak.

In these times(and with regards to our culture), blogging is a dangerous hobby, not for the fainthearted or timid. Those who thought that the Internet was a harbinger of a world without censors, some utopia of freedom of expression were fools. There will always be censors, official or unofficial. Even if freedom of speech is guaranteed, no one can protect you from the nastiness that envious minds breed.

All that live must die

2005-11-19T06:09:00.000-08:00

There's been a great to-do lately about the young Australian sentenced to death row in Singapore.

There were the requisite demonstrations in front of the state library in Melbourne, angry letters to the press and scathing articles about the barbarism and inhumanity of the Singaporean justice system.

Online, various bloggers such as Mr Wang and Singabloodypore made their comments and others began angry impassioned debates on their comments pages.

The oddest thing that struck me about the whole affair? The fact that the Australians I spoke to and who commented, really believed that they could change matters with their campaigns and letters and leaflets.

The Singaporeans were merely resigned. Even those who did oppose the death penalty were careful to be quiet about it and to make it clear that they could do little to change things.

There's something rotten in both the countries, if you ask me.

Australia has definitely got fairly awful drug problem going on amongst their youth, both in consuming and trafficking. There have been so many cases just this year alone, although only one was turned into a media circus. Obviously some measures (draconian or not) have to be taken before it becomes even more rampant than it is now. There is also a distinct possibility, that unlike Singapore, their drug laws are far too lenient.

And Singapore? A country where social and legal change come dropping slow. Our legal system is literally decades behind everyone else in terms of social reform and I'm not just talking about the death penalty. It is true that we inherited our legal system from the British, as did Australia, but arguably, in certain areas of legal reform, they're streets ahead of us.

Among my friends, I take the stand that the guy broke the law and should pay according to the law.But deep down,I feel enormously sorry for him.
I've never really supported the idea of the death penalty for anyone, mainly because of its irreversibility; any mistakes made by the system, the DPP or the police and a man will die just like that. (Yes, I do realise that it's a very simplistic view of things)

And death has this awful finality to it.

I suppose it helps keep out streets safe and all that. But I look at the face of the young man about to die and I sometimes wonder, if the price we pay is too high.

But perhaps it would serve to remind the world(and I); that in Singapore, there are no second chances.

Anansi Boys is out in Australia

2005-10-30T22:04:00.000-08:00

I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over.I must not buy that book until the exams are over........

ARGH.

Murphy's Law: Books you've been wildly anticipating will always get released in the middle of your exams.

I can't wait till the 14th November.

You might as well live

2005-10-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

It's the Melbourne universities exam season and I'm facing a particularly tough year.

Blogging will resume after November 15, assuming my brain isn't melted by then.

I leave you with a poem by the incomparable Dorothy Parker who has provided me with much dark amusement over the years. This is one of her longer poems; most of her pieces are simple, pithy, short and dagger sharp. For a good example of her poetry and possibly reasons I relish it so much scroll down a little further and read the piece that I'm really fond of.

Truly, there is no better entertainment while struggling with morass of contradictions that is the Law.

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the simplest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick. I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore:
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men.
I'm due to fall in love again.

Résumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Am so going to turn into a muttering old singleton/witch with many black cats around. Anyone need an extra for Macbeth, just call me. I'll even provide my own hooked nose.

Note to self

2005-10-07T05:54:00.000-07:00

I realised about a year ago that some of the worst decisions in my life were made at the instigation of my parents.

Don't get me wrong, I love those parents of mine to bits, it's just that they seem to have this uncanny ability to pick the very things that are the worst for my spirit and mind.Even worse is the fact that despite this awful track record, I still consult them about most major life decisions.Because if nothing else I can always count on them to tell me which route looks the most practical, economical and stable. Unfortunately, the route picked out usually turns out to be all wrong for me as a person, despite its otherwise sterling qualities.

See, when I was 12, I went through the nightmare most people know as the PSLE exam and my parents set their heart on my going to a particular school that was not only decent( as in well ranked) but also very strong on chinese traditions. In short, they sent me to a chinese school, all because my chinese grades were poor and my father thought that it would be a good idea to improve my language abilities.

Please note that my spoken chinese was so poor at that point that I could barely string one or two sentences together. The four years there rank as possibly the lowest time in my life. Especially the first two years when I had to struggle with the fact that:

a) people thought I was a snob because I tended to speak english with a mild american accent( I had several speech lessons with an american)
b) Hokkien was literally a foreign language to me
c) Chinese was also a semi foreign language to me
d) they had seriously bitchy and dysfunctional chinese teachers who became my form teachers, hated my guts and picked on me in class.

To my mother's credit, she later realised the enormous disjunction between the way I operated and the way the school operated. Perhaps the clue that gave it away was the fact that I started flunking EVERYTHING and came home in tears all the time.

My not quite as observant dad still thinks it was a brilliant idea because it improved my chinese to no end.Which I have to admit it did. It was sink or swim and I learnt to swim only just in time. But the cost? Enormous hatred and scorn for all things chinese and asian.

I realised yesterday in a moment of unusual self reflexivity, that despite the fact that I'm a mostly mild and even tempered being, the thought of that school still makes my blood boil. I used to sit in class and think very hard about burning the school down or setting off a bomb in it.( I didn't because I sucked at science and couldn't figure out how to waste the whole place) And I pray that I might never run into some of those awful teachers again, because being the terribly irreverent and linguistically able person I am now, I will be able to curse them rather fluently in 4 languages in total, including Hokkien, our national curse language.

I got over the hatred of all things asian and chinese. I am chinese after all, and there is only so much self loathing one can take. But I never got over the hatred of that particular school and some particular teachers in it.

I'm posting this up as a blatant reminder to myself to grow a spine and not to take my parents' advice anymore except in their areas of technical expertise. Because I'm not 12 anymore and I don't have that many sets of four years to throw away being miserable and angry. That decision about secondary schools was not the only one to go awry, there were many other pieces of bad advice, including a well intentioned but misguided suggestion from my mother to study chemistry in university.

Some kids are lucky enough to follow in their parent's mould, in their ideology and spirit. So the general advice their parents dish out to them can be followed to the letter and it will usually work out.

I'm not one of those kids. And I cannot keep letting them run my life because the difference in expected and actual outcomes will kill me one day.

More Yeats

2005-10-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

By William Butler Yeats

So true. And probably the reason the "I'm the guy" meme took of so well.

Commentary without pity

2005-09-29T18:27:00.000-07:00

I was recently given a mild reproof for the supposed meanness of the comments I make. Not on this blog but at other times, once most notably while watching a Rob Schneider movie which was playing during a house party.

During the movie's one and only love scene, Schneider attempted to win his lady love over by saying " I know I'm not the most perfect guy in the world..." , the movie's stupidity finally got to me and I blurted out " No kidding man, you're a gigolo for God's sake".

The entire roomful of guys turned on me with horrified expressions on their faces. I was soundly reproved for the cynicism and meanness of my comment. I was also told( amazingly), that it just shows that girls these days were hardhearted and un feminine.

I didn't know which was worse, that a roomful of people actually wanted to watch a movie that coined words like "he-whore" or that they took offence at my making some acerbic comments about it. Come on, it was a Rob Schneider movie; it had giant women, made politically incorrect fun of Tourette's Syndrome and featured various other inane gags. It is not to be taken seriously, not even the love scene. It is there for you to make fun of and laugh at, not with.

Plus this is coming from the girl who cried watching Braveheart 5 times and cried all through several Chiong Yao( Taiwanese author who write sappy love stories) serials when she was in her teens.

I am not mean, I just think Rob Schenider makes movies so bad that they deserve a free for all when it comes to cynical and bitchy comments.

And if they think that my comments were mean, they need to read this site.

Spring

2005-09-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

This was taken at a lavendar farm I visited recently. Sometimes, the nice thing about living here, is that less than an hours drive away, you get rolling green fields and the fresh country air.
It reminded me of the various anime series that involved a central female character standing sadly while a confetti of cherry blossom petals blew across the screen.

I think I have been watching too much tv....

Seven Things: Another Meme

2005-09-24T06:09:00.000-07:00

This meme came via LimeGreenSpyda.

Seven Things You Plan to do before you die:
1) Learn another language
2) Own my own home/property
3) travel around the world
4)Get a Masters in Eng. Lit
5)learn to make truly excellent kueh lapis
6)understand James Joyce
7)Pray more

Seven Things I can do:
1) cook a reasonably decent basic chinese meal(rice, veg, soup etc)
2)play mahjong
3)read and appreciate most Shakespearean plays
4)sleep for 10 hours straight at night and still take an afternoon nap
5)Read legal cases 5 times and still not figure out who's suing who(which is very bad)
6)daydream
7)make a budget and stick to it

Seven Things I say the Most:
1) What the Hell!!!!?????
2) Huh?
3) Life's like that
4)I'm so tired
5) I want to sleep now
6) Do we have to do this now????
7) Just five more minutes ok?

Seven things I can't do:
1) drive
2) bake a cake from scratch
3) watch a war movie without crying
4) stay away from bookstores
5)look down from a great height without feeling dizzy and terrified
6) watch a horror movie
7) understand math

Seven Things that attract you to the opposite sex:
1) kindness
2) a sense of humour, especially an irreverent sense of humour
3) straight teeth
4) a deep and mellow voice
5)intelligence
6) common interests
7) a firm handshake

Seven Celebrity Crushes:
1) Edison Chen
2)Neil Gaiman
3) Guy Pearce
4) Kakashi( Well, he IS kind of a celebrity)
5) Richard Gere
6)Sean Connery ( I like old guys, so sue me...)
7) Michael Buble ( Yes the voice works)

Seven People I want to tag:
1) Koala
2) Enuwy
3) my boyfriend
4) Shianux
5) Jeff Yen

... I ran out of people and I got bored, so there!

I'm that Girl

2005-09-19T05:06:00.000-07:00

I'm the girl who doesn't believe on fairy tales anymore and who feels empty all the time. I'm the girl who fell in silently love with you even though I knew you were happily attached. I'm the girl who has never known herself, who is often surprised by the unpredictability of her own emotions.

I'm the girl who misses her boyfriend but screams at him on the phone all the time. I'm the girl who can be kind on the outside but makes cruel and bitchy remarks to herself in her head.

I'm the girl who bought extra food for you because you were writing your thesis and I thought you might need supper during the late nights. I'm the girl who likes talking to people on the phone because in person feels too invasive.

I'm the girl who's afraid of heights and the boogey-man and yet went on a mountaineering camp and nearly got stuck on a mountain ridge and who will never never ever do that again.

I'm the girl who can't watch horror movies because of terrifying nightmares and who lies awake at night frozen in fear, believing that any minute, long spindly fingers of zombies will reach out to grab her .

I'm the girl who couldn't stay awake in class because the nightmares kept her awake at night and who couldn't explain it to the teachers why she was so tired.

I'm a girl who dreams of writing but never gets round to it. I'm also the girl who goes into bookstores and eyes books the way some girls eye shoes.

I'm the girl who thinks of suicide everyday and would like a chance to live her life over again. I'm the girl who flunked chinese all through school and would now like a second chance to learn the language again.

I'm the girl who once dreamt of marrying Neil Gaiman and now thinks she'll never get married at all.

I'm the girl who loved you and stayed with you when most other people would have left.

I'm the girl who keeps your home stocked with food because I love you even though I know you'll never really appreciate it or me.

I'm the girl who doesn't like people to get too close but gets lonely when people stay away.

I'm the girl who would go for liposuction and rhinoplasty if only I had the money even though I know its shallow and will hurt alot.

I'm the girl who thinks that she'll never be forgiven for some of the things she's done.

I'm that girl. Who are you?

A Question of Language

2005-09-14T00:17:00.000-07:00

I have been a secret reader of Rockson's blog for some time now. Of course now that I've blogged it, its no longer a secret. I have so much fun reading that blog; he says all the politically incorrect things I secretly think and he says in the most politically incorrect way possible. You won't believe how thrilled and amused I was by the NKF post.Given that I'm probably the most un-streetwise person most of my friends will ever encounter, the blog was a real eye opener, language wise anyway.

I still recall the look on my boyfriend's face when I first asked him what "knnccb" stood for. Poor boy, he laughed until he literally had a tummyache while trying to explain it. But having now heard the full expression and also many many more from Rockson's terribly educational blog( all of which I had to ask my friends the meaning of), I now think that Hokkien is the best language ever for swearing. Its phraseology and enunciation carry the greatest impact and communicates the maximum amount of malevolence. There is this visceral strength to its vowels and it somehow even manages to be alliterative as well.The Cantonese "tiu lei *****" doesn't quite cut it, in fact, beside the vituperative might of hokkien insults, the cantonese ones sound almost genteel.

Which is why I was mildly perturbed by Ephraim Loy's letter complaining about the blog and the way it was featured in Lime magazine. With all due respect, if one is old enough to read Lime, one probably already knows how to say "sh*t' and 'F***' so adding a few hokkien words to the stable probably won't make a whole lot of difference. Besides, I happen to like the thoroughly Singlish way in which Rockson writes and the vulgarities give it a flavour it wouldn't otherwise have.

Rockson writes exactly like the way alot of people on the street speak and while its not pretty, it is significantly more interesting than the blandness of politically correct and pure english/ chinese. A couple of decades ago, the government made a move toward 'encouraging' Singaporeans to speak more Mandarin and less dialect and until the recent SARS problem, I'd literally never heard dialect spoken on national television.Same goes for the move to eradicate Singlish from television and radio as speaking 'good english' is supposed to be encouraged.

Thing is that languages tend to evolve and develop. There aren't many places in the world where supposedly pure English is spoken; everyone who adopts the English language adds their own stuff to it. An easy example is the Aussie word for a quilt which is a 'doona' and their word for some kind of outdoor toilet is a 'dunny'. That's how a language like Creole evolved into being, a mix of French, English and African. The mixture is what makes the language so interesting and varied.

But I do know that my saying all this makes no difference. Rockson is likely to go on being lambasted in certain quarters as being low brow, ah beng and vulgar anyway. But in case Rockson ever has to justify himself and his language before our loving men in white, I've come up with a brilliant idea for him.

You see, I've noticed recently that certain Hokkien swear words are actually perfectly innocent in Japanese. "kani nabe" is suddenly shorn of its vulgarity when one realized that it actually means crab hotpot in Jap!CRAB HOTPOT! So go ahead, scream it from the rooftops if you like, just tell people that you're ordering crab hotpot extra large and loud. There is also the additional dish called "Nabeyaki Udon" if you're interested; the name sounds bad, but the dish itself is pretty yummy and you get the added pleasure of ordering it and saying 'nabeh' legitimately.

Oh, and there is an actual Japanese subway station named "Shite". Really, I'm not kidding! You can go look it up! I was so impressed by the significance of the station. I realised that Japanese is a language just filled with possibilities. Why, every other swear word could have its lovely innocent Japanese counterpart! Its the perfect reason to go learn the language!

So excuse me while I go and watch more Naruto. (Watching anime is sure to help me learn more words and besides even the Jap word for idiot sounds cute) After all the shite I had to go through in school today, I really need some R & R.

Oops, did I just say shite?Must be lapsing into Jap already!

My goodness, those Japanese lessons are definitely coming along. I just knew watching Naruto was a surefire way of picking it up!

Home

2005-09-11T02:18:00.000-07:00

Mostly the hardest thing about living overseas is missing all my friends and family at home.

Another friend got married and I didn't get to go. One has to be honest and admit that it wasn't a terribly close friend but I still feel the ache of missing out on it anyway. Two good friends were the bridesmaids and a whole gang of friends from the past were there too.

I guess in the end it all comes down to community. I might not see my friends all the time in Singapore, but I'd definitely see them at gatherings like this and I hate not being there. A couple of weeks ago, a friend played me this song by Michael Buble called 'Home' and I just started crying while I listened.

I'll be away for the next 3 years at least because I want to try working here and in that time, all these people I knew will get engaged, attached, married, have kids, move and do all kinds of life changing things and I won't be there. If I ever go back to Singapore, circumstances would have changed us so much that I don't know if some kind of reconnection is possible.

Trouble is that when I do go home for the holidays, I've found that my family and boyfriend demand the greater part of my time.

I guess the answer to all this is: I need to learn time management.

In the meantime, for all the friends I didn't get to see this holidays, here's a song for you. And I promise to try and see all of you guys next July.

Home by Michael Buble

Another summer day
Is come and gone away
In Paris and Rome
But I wanna go home
Mmmmmmmm

Maybe surrounded by
A million people I
Still feel all alone
I just wanna go home
Oh I miss you, you know

And I’ve been keeping all the letters that I wrote to you
Each one a line or two
“I’m fine baby, how are you?”
Well I would send them but I know that it’s just not enough
My words were cold and flat
And you deserve more than that

Another aeroplane
Another sunny place
I’m lucky I know
But I wanna go home
Mmmm, I’ve got to go home

Let me go home
I’m just too far from where you are
I wanna come home

And I feel just like I’m living someone else’s life
It’s like I just stepped outside
When everything was going right
And I know just why you could not
Come along with me
But this was not your dream
But you always believe in me

Another winter day has come
And gone away
And even Paris and Rome
And I wanna go home
Let me go home

And I’m surrounded by
A million people I
Still feel alone
Oh, let go home
Oh, I miss you, you know

Let me go home
I’ve had my run
Baby, I’m done
I gotta go home
Let me go home
It will all right
I’ll be home tonight
I’m coming back home

The new man in my life: I Heart Kakashi

2005-09-07T01:39:00.000-07:00

I have a major Con and Admin assignment due tomorrow but I can't stop thinking about Naruto.

What is to become of me??

When shall we three meet again?

2005-08-30T04:17:00.000-07:00

Well, I don't know about the witches, but the weather was perfect for a setting of Macbeth. Thunder, lightning, rain and unbelievably strong winds; folks, today Melbourne had it all.

Has anyone noticed that it only takes one thing to go wrong before the whole day starts to fall apart? Today, I came home to burn some photographs into a CD for a friend who's leaving for Kuching tomorrow. And Nero refused to work.

Then I discovered that my camera USB cord was missing.

After I made all the necessary calls and determined that some other friends had memory card readers and the requisite equipment necessary for burning the CD, I then tried to leave the house.

Bad idea.

Bad bad idea.

The wind literaly blew me back into my apartment building. I didn't get more than ten steps away before I fled back into the building. I swear that the rain was hitting my face horizontally and every step was a struggle against the damned wind.

Shelter never seemed so important before.

So here I am waiting for a friend to pick me up, listening to the wind howl and thinking some very dark thoughts about Macbeth, witches and computer screwups.

Hopefully, if bad things do come in threes, my three are done for awhile.

Tristefemme

2005-08-14T04:05:00.000-07:00

I was watching the events unfold with some sadness. But towards the end, I mainly grew annoyed. For all those who haven't been following the saga, go read this blog and then the subsequent reactions and replies at this one.

Both parties involved seemed to be determined to behave as badly as possible. At first I felt immensely sorry for the girl; it is after all a terrible situation to be in, pregnant and alone. But there have been many others in her shoes who have handled themselves with a great deal more dignity and courage. I refer particularly to Loveris in particular who was still in her teens when she had her daughter. Some of my own friends have been through similiar situations and I respect them a great deal for their strength and courage in facing up to the truth and having to inform all the relevant people involved.

I am old fashioned. And in some situations I believe in the maxim of not washing one's dirty laundry in public. Informing the whole world of the predicament, to the point of describing individual encounters and providing personal details of both parties was absolutely disgraceful. The argument that the blog was only for the consumption of her and her close friends( 15 of them!) just does not wash. If she absolutely needs to keep her friends up to scratch about what is happening she could get a blog that is password protected or with privacy settings. In any case, one fails to understand why she needed to let that many of her friends know the intimate details of the situation.

The same goes for her rash and thoughtless actions in emailing everyone on her erstwhile boyfriend's social network. Why let the whole world know about the awful fix you have gotten yourself into? This can only reflect badly on you, especially in the eyes of the father of your child and eat away even more at your own self respect. I don't blame the editors of Tomorrow.sg for posting her blog up; if she doesn't try to protect her own privacy, why should they protect it for her?

The final straw must have been her action in emailing the guy's superiors and Minister in a fit of anger. It was probably the most stupid and self destructive thing she could have done. A vindictive act such as that closes off the possibility of a reasonably amicable resolution to the whole matter. Even if the guy could not be persuaded to come to terms with the pregnancy, he would at the very least have less cause to resent her and her child. In time, after the birth of the child, he might even come to accept it; babies are cute for a reason after all. This last action can only serve to alienate the guy and his family irrevocably.

Let me put it this way. From now on, she will be known in his family as the One who Destroyed his Career and Shamed him. Since he comes from a pretty traditional family, I'd say that she's just shut out any possibility of their help and support. Which, given her circumstances and their resources, she's probably going to need some way down the line. Pissing them off will just about make her life even harder and I really don't know why she doesn't see that.

Frankly, I neither of them are ready for a child. Both lack the maturity and TF in particular, lacks the self control.The sad thing is that the kid is practically a miracle baby given her fertility problem and the fact that she was on the Pill.

To the both of them: Grow up. You have a kid now and it needs you to be calm, semi-sensible and rational. This is not the time to freak out or hide behind your mother's skirts. And for God's sake, stop with the posting retorts online for the whole bloody world to see.

Musical: The Lion King

2005-08-13T06:55:00.000-07:00

It was abso-fucking-lutely fantastic. There was NO attempt to recreate the movie which meant that the musical had an ethos and aesthetic of its own.

I wasn't taking notes, although I will if I get to watch it again but the best parts were probably the inventive use of puppetry and the breathtakingly gorgeous costumes. Oh, and Julie Taymor deserves a medal just for her lighting design.

Go watch it if you can. It's worth every penny. It's not just some lighthearted song and dance; theatre is rarely so life affirming, particularly modern theatre.

Some Light Entertainment

2005-08-11T18:42:00.000-07:00

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

The Female of the Species

WHEN the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other's tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man, a bear in most relations—worm and savage otherwise,—
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger—Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue—to the scandal of The Sex!

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

She is wedded to convictions—in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!—
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

Unprovoked and awful charges—even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons—even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish—like the Jesuit with the squaw!

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice—which no woman understands.

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern—shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.

My First Neruda

2005-08-04T05:25:00.000-07:00

XVII (I do not love you...)

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Translated by Stephen Tapscott

By Pablo Neruda

Neruda has this way of fusing images and ideas in a way that goes straight to the heart and essence of the thing he is trying to ecapsulate. Most of his poetry goes straight to your heart and mind and you just have to catch your breath at its perfection.

The world is filled with things I did not know. I stopped posting up poetry earlier because I was morbidly afraid of copyright infringement. But having since come across a few more poetry blogs, I've realised that everyone seems to be doing it. I suppose it must be perfectly normal then.

Silly me.

All the same, I think I won't be putting up any poetry written by modern poets. At least, not the ones still alive. They might mind.

Everyone needs a happy place

2005-08-03T00:26:00.000-07:00

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

By William Butler Yeats

I guess this must have been his.

The truth is, when it comes to poetry I like reading the traditional kind. With rhyme and meter and proper stanzas. I recall reading somewhere that Gilbert Kohdidn't really take to traditional poetry as opposed to the more modern types of free verse and blank verse. He once listed a whole bunch of poets as his favourite and I recall not recognizing alot of my own favourites in that list. This was starkly opposed to another friend who declared that English poetry after WWII wasn't really worth reading.

I posted this up because I was having a particularly sad day a few days back and this cheered me up enormously. I've always loved that line "for peace comes dropping slow" and I really love the way it sounds when this poem is read out loud. Although I'd be the first to admit that the bees didn't really appeal to me; somehow the thought of all those buzzing sting laden insects gives me the creeps.

There are a few other "happy place" type poems that I have an especial fondness for. This wasn't really one of them because I've really only recently started reading Yeats. Most of them do have one thing in common which is to transport the happiness of the place with you, in your heart, in your mind's eye. So instead of fleeing to another place to find happiness, sometimes its a good idea to look inwards.

A difficult path

2005-07-31T04:39:00.000-07:00

The new Recovering Christians blog by Jeff Yen is a good read and I was mildly surprised when he mentioned thatthe comments on one of my earlier blog posts started him down the track.

Having said that I must respectfully disagree with Jeff's remarks on the topic of christians marrying non christians.

I don't know if I can agree that love will somehow solve all problems between a couple.This is especially since I've seen for myself the ruckus that different faiths can cause in a marriage, particularly where there are children involved.

For all the possible non christians reading this, one has to state at the outset that it is true that the church and the bible frown upon marriages between non christians and christians. I doubt it is meant to belittle non christians; all the monotheistic religions have rules similiar, if not harsher than this.

I had friends who dated non christians and I've known older married couples of different faiths. I've also considered dating a non christian myself although that fizzled out for reasons other than religion. And in the end I still came to the conclusion that it just wasn't a good idea.

Putting aside the biblical directive for the moment and just looking at relationships in general, I found that most couples had to work through myriad differences already present in their personality, family culture and general attitude towards life. With religion being the sensitive and loaded topic that it is, a difference in faith usually means that a fairly large gap opens up between them right at the beginning.

There is great merit in what Jeff said about love overcoming a multitude of differences. And in most other circumstances I'd agree. But in a relationship, particularly in a marriage, the two people must be joined as one eventually. They have to share a life together, a home and a family. Any minor differences between the two in terms of family culture will be exacerbated by any gap in terms of religion. It is also difficult to see how the two lives can be joined as one when there is such a fundamental and troubling difference between the two.

There are differences that can be overcome. But in general, your religion does dictate your world view to some extent and this is probably the most difficult to overcome. The biblical directive may seem onerous, overly strict and even arbitrary to some but the truth is that there is a great deal of common sense behind it.

I'm attached to a very lovely man who, happily for me, shares a great deal of my passions and pastimes. I don't know what I'd do if he turned out to be someone who hardly ever read or shared none of my hobbies. More importantly, we have the same general outlook on life which helps in understanding each other.

Perhaps this is an overly narrow view of relationships. But it is difficult for me to comprehend how two people with great differences in,what is after all, a very fundamental part of their lives, can work out a relationship, let alone a marriage. Their marriage would be built on very shaky ground indeed and would pave the way for greater conflicts to come when children enter the picture. Issues such as which faith the child is to be brought up in can lead to major problems and as I've personally seen it happen, I don't think this is an issue that can be dismissed in an offhand manner.

Perhaps Paul's reasons for the unequally yoked rule seems harsh and arbitrary. But one has to admit it does make alot of practical sense.

So no, if one of my own friends asked me about this question, I wouldn't say the same thing Jeff did. Because I've through fire and water with my own relationships and I know how hard it can be to work out differences of any kind, much less something so tricky.

I'd ask my friend to think long and hard about it. Particularly to think about whether he/she could live with differences of that kind. Besides the spiritual aspect, I'd ask them to think about the practical ways in which it could affect their lives.

Love has a tendency to involve a certain amount of hard work and sacrifice so I'd caution anyone against dashing into a relationship that forebodes so much more pain and difficulty.

For me?

2005-07-31T03:42:00.000-07:00

This came all the way from Singapore, from a girl I haven't met up with or spoken to for at least a year.

So few people send snail mail type cards to me any more that this is something to be treasured.Especially since it came from a friend whom I thought had long disappeared into the ether.

Be careful of what you wish for

2005-07-28T03:11:00.000-07:00

The trouble with studying overseas and having to come home at regular intervals is that one ends up having two lives,neither of them complete.

I'm back in cold, rainy Melbourne.

The tail wags the dog

2005-07-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

My own grandmother died of kidney failure when I was 7 and ever since then my family has supported NKF by donating money every single year.

I don't feel like we should anymore.

It seems that they not only overpay their CEO, they also overstate the number of patients in order to generate more donations.

This, coming after the recent NKF Cancer show in which various celebs performed all kinds of nonsensical stunts in order to raise money, just hurts. For the people who put in time, effort and risked injury to themselves, this piece of news will always leave a bitter taste in their mouths. After all their heartfelt pleas to the public to call in and support the charity, I wonder if any will look back in sheer embarrassment and rage.

There isn't much else to say. Except that their CEO watched recession struck Singaporeans donate money year after year and continued to perpetuate this fraud. His house, car and lavish lifestyle, all paid for by decent hardworking people who believed they were doing the right thing.

This must be how people feel like when they finally wake up after years of having been brainwashed by some cult group.

Intelligence

2005-07-11T22:54:00.000-07:00

I actually started writing a post about this awhile ago but got derailed when my flu medication kicked in.

Recently, I've been reading alot of blog posts evaluating the Singaporean scholarship system. Reading them made me feel like I wanted to add on to it a little bit more.

Last night I spoke to a friend of mine from school who was enormously sad about his semester's exam results. He was so depressed he told me he even doubted his own intelligence. He talked about the smart people he knew who won scholarships, got straight As and were doing really well now.

My own problem with PSC scholarships and the scholarship system has always been that they tend to view academic achievements as pretty much the only way to measure an individual's capabilities and intelligence. The entire Singaporean education system is geared toward that view.

As Mr Wang Zhen stated, generally scholars are favoured over non scholars for promotions and high ranking posts. To me, this simply defeats the whole purpose of a meritocracy. There are many many straight A students who seem intelligent on paper but who may turn out to be complete duds in a workplace. Academic qualifications, even with a good CCA performance cannot be a complete measure of an individual's intelligence or capability.

It is true that looking at paper qualifications are an easy way of pinpointing potentially capable and intelligent people. But it cannot be the only way. To blindly promote scholars over non scholars, to keep going back to one's 'A' or 'O' level results without considering actual, on the job performance is a huge mistake.

Some people mess up in school, some are just poor in certain subjects while being extremely talented in others( I believe Mr Wang's example was a brilliant economist who got a D for Literature) and finally some are just late bloomers.

In order for our system to be truly meritocratic, we should be promoting people based on how well they can do the job, not on the basis that ten years ago they happened to do well for their A levels.

This is why I love Mr Wang's 1st Brilliant idea (which I read days ago but was too sick to say anything about). In any industry, on the job performance should be the most important factor to be taken into consideration when hiring, firing or promoting. ( Disclaimer: He called a brilliant idea, not me. I'm NOT trying to suck up to him by over praising him.)

Aside from the civil service, I honestly think that we're missing out something when we overlook people who don't seem to perform in school. History should have taught us that many brilliant people didn't seem to be great performers in school either. Roald Dahl was criticised in school for his essay writing skills, Einstein once flunked an entrance exam to a school of engineering(!) and Thomas Alva Edison's first schoolteacher thought he was 'addled'.

( Although, history should also have taught us that men just don't learn from history.)

Academic success is usually a good predictor of intelligence but not always. Its just that in our system, we take it as the only indicator which is a mistake. Being exam smart is not enough if you have zero interpersonal skills or find it difficult to think on your feet.

(Update: Wow, Mr Wang not only linked me but also carried on this discussion in far greater detail than I could ever have. Go read his discussion on the different kinds of intelligence and how PSC has got it wrong. )

Stars shining bright above you

2005-07-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

This is Neil Gaiman at the Borders signing. I absolutely have to apologize for the dearth of blog posts recently but I've been down with the flu.

All I can say is it's been a holiday of mishaps. But blogging will pick up once I break free of the sleep inducing cold medication.

But the good news is that I finally figured out how to post photos.( Yes I am really that technologically challenged)

Neil Gaiman

2005-07-06T10:09:00.000-07:00

For all those whose eyes have been trained on the IOC meeting, here's an update on an even more important event happening on this lil island of ours.

Neil Gaiman came here!!!!!!

But the poor man, I think he had to sign autographs for like 2000 people. I went both his Kinokuniya signing and the Borders signing. Both basically attracted such huge crowds that it was insane.

The upside is that while I had to wait for over an hour each time, I got to take TWO photos with him!!!!!I was so elated I nearly jumped up and down and in a minute I will be explaining why that would not have been a good idea.

I sprained my ankle on Saturday. Heh.

No I wasn't supposed to go to the signing. (Or move about too much...or put too much weight on my ankle)

Yes I went anyway.

Both times I had people who helped me out immeasurably. At Kino I ran into a JC classmate of mine who happened to be standing VERY near the front of the queue and she let me join her. ( Must buy her a drink/chocs) In case I did not articulate this clearly, THANK YOU ADRIAN!!!!!!

At the borders signing, my sister's friends who also happened to be Neil Gaiman fans very kindly let me join them. So there was this enormous gaggle of girls from RGS and me standing there.(Cannot buy them drinks, all underaged, chocs will do).So thanks to ALL of them who helped me out so much even though they didn't know me.

So both times I managed to save my poor ankle from too much strain.

I realize there aren't many other authors I'd do this for. For Neil, it was just that I had to go just to meet the great man face to face even if it was for all of 2 seconds.

You see, the type of fantasy he writes so closely mirrors the kind of stuff going on inside my internal daydreams all the time. He writes the stuff of Dreams.He single handedly turned comics into something more than childish, brightly coloured power fantasies. He turned it into literature. He brought in Shakespeare, Marlowe and the other great figures in the western canon of literature. In doing so, he assured himself of a place amongst them.

There was a vacuum that really needed to be filled and his stories filled it beautifully. The western literary canon would be so much poorer without him. (I'd say the same for Terry Pratchett and Isaac Asimov and many many others)

But its the Sandman fans that were the truly fanatical ones. There were people there dressed as Dream, Desire, Destiny and Death. I saw so many goth girls with an ankh all trying to look like Death.(pardon the pun)

I've noticed that novels tend not to give rise to the same sort of fanaticism,barring the Harry Potter phenomenon. Perhaps the pictures do help flesh out the imaginings a little more, give shape to our febrile fantasies. If so, I look forward to a graphic novel of Neverwhere as well, my favourite of his novels. And if he had another signing, I'd go dressed as the Lady Door(complete with contact lenses to mimic her opalescent eyes).

My Own Stupidity

2005-06-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

I have often noticed that the first few days back in Singapore tend to be a huge daze for me. The sights, the smells, the crowds....I just get confused.

But this time I stupidly forgot all about buying tickets for the Neil Gaiman movie screening thing at Orchard Cineleisure UNTIL TODAY. And yes, they were SOLD OUT.

The registration for the talk at thw Library@Orchard was also closed.

GAH. Am still going for the signing at Kino and Borders but given the crowd....I think I should try to go a few hours earlier.

Somebody, anybody who wants to sell those tickets, I'll pay $20 for them.(Original Price was $8)

Actually, never mind $20, I'll pay $30 just for ONE ticket.Argh....if anyone has a ticket, mail me and name your price.

P.S But please keep in mind I am a poor student with limited pocket money. VERY limited pocket money.

The Aquarium behind the Shangri La Hotel buffet table

2005-06-24T08:28:00.000-07:00

They drifted lazily among the dead crustaceans laid out
so prettily on the blocks of ice
stopping every so often to peer
and nibble

Over at the corner a school of fish darted
hastily, this way and that.
Often moving with barely contained excitement toward
particularly tasty morsels.

Across the room, we saw
a very pretty angelfish with hard bright eyes
her jaws busily moving
as she chewed on shellfish and intrigue

here and there, were some very fat ones
beady eyes staring out of puffy faces
on the constant lookout for the newest titbit,
the juiciest cut; whose corpulence seemed

Vast and unmoving, until food appeared
then they turned into fast moving tigers
a blur of fins and toes and grabbing fingers
till the haze of food and blood died down.

Most diners never noticed the aquarium till after the meal
when bloated, they'd turn and watch
the peaceful sight
of shiny fish in an artificial sea.

Some never saw the aquarium at all,
because of the lights
you'd sometimes only see
the room reflected in the glass

6 degrees

2005-06-24T08:11:00.000-07:00

One is constantly reminded of how small this island really is and how circles you thought far apart actually do intersect at some point.

I read Scarlett Ting's blog every so often, just like I read many many blogs once in a blue moon. But today, staring out at me from her blog was a photograph of a friend of mine.

So in her case, less than six degrees.

It often makes me wonder, looking around the people I see everyday in law school; which of them could be the face behind a blog I read.

Too Little Time

2005-06-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

I've been resisting the urge to blog for a couple of days, mainly because I don't really want this to turn into a "personal diary" of sorts. Or at least not the kind that lists down and gives a blow by blow description of my day.

But over the past few days I've come to the realization that despite the fact that I'm halfway through my law degree, I'm not actually that keen on practicing law. I don't hate the thought but neither am I truly excited/interested in it. Although I have to say that I probably should try to get some internship experience before I make any huge decisions. For now though, I'll still take all the right classes and keep my options open.

The truth is that I'm going to be 24 in a month's time and I'll be 25 when I graduate. I just don't want to spend that much time mucking around in a profession I don't want to stay in. There is a pressing need to figure out what is it I really want to do and which industry I'd want to work in without wasting too much time.

God, life is so short.

You don't know what it's like

2005-06-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

This post at Commentary Singapore accurately reflects a lot of what I truly feel about the ministers having completely lost touch with ordinary Singaporeans.

The minister did not seem to feel that there was anything wrong with an old man being charged $64 for treatment of a common cold and fever.In fact he pointed out to the old man's son-in-law that it was his duty to take care of the old man.

In other developed countries, most people expect some kind of a pension when they retire or get old. In many of them,health care for the elderly is free or heavily subsidised. Here, we have neither despite the fact that we pay comparable taxes.( Yes we do, not in terms of income tax but we pay so many hidden taxes on everything else.)

If one is expected to take care of one's aged parents, support a wife and a young growing family of three (which is the government's current magic number for kids), all this during a time when the country's economy is frankly not doing well then one is inclined to think that the government is asking for too much.

It's something I've noticed for awhile now; this growing ministerial insensitivity to the needs of ordinary families in Singapore. It was not so long ago that the Public Transport Council found that the “ordinary Singaporean family” only spends less than $150 a month on transport. And when I saw the calculations behind that figure, my eyes nearly fell out.How many Singaporean families fit into that strange model they gave us?

Also, very strangely, that report only included the transport to and fro from work and school. Tell me this, what happens when children fall ill or if the family goes on a trip to the zoo? Or do they expect us to only work and go home?

What on earth is happening? How is it no one in a government chock full of hyper intelligent scholars noticed the lacuna in that calculation?

The truth is I've always felt that the million dollar ministerial salaries were a mistake. Or that the government tended to recruit from the high flyers in the private sector. Ten years of making 5 figure monthly salaries would tend to make one feel that $64 for a doctor's visit is reasonable and that our transport system is really very cheap.They've just been at the top level for so long they've completely forgotten what it's like at the bottom.

I can understand if a CEO of an MNC doesn't understand the needs and concerns of ordinary people. His job is to make money for the company. In return for that he gets a huge salary and the ability to live a lavish lifestyle.As part of his job, he does a cost benefit analysis of everything the company does and makes sure it stays in the black.

Maybe paying our ministers CEO type pay makes them think exactly like CEOs too.It gives birth to a Cabinet of ministers who apply cost-benefit thinking to everything to justify raising transport costs when the economy is still not doing well and an inability to even imagine what life is like supporting a family on one medium sized pay cheque.

And maybe it trickles down to a nation of people who like to apply cost benefit analysis to everything too.

Which is probably one of the biggest reasons so many people are refusing to have more children or even any children. Children just don't fit into a cost-benefit equation.

24 little hours

2005-06-17T08:35:00.000-07:00

Just a short note to say that I'll be flying back to Singapore tomorrow by the earliest SQ flight.

Am so excited to be going home this time!!! I've got so much stuff I want to do like the blogger's conference and most importantly NEIL GAIMAN IS COMING TO SINGAPORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!I am SO going to go to his autograph session.

God, I never showed the remotest interest in boybands at any time but plop a writer I like in front of me and I turn into the most shameless groupie. I think if someone like Diana Wynne Jones came to Singapore I might just do the infamous thing all boyband fans do and go wait for her at the airport.

Ooooh and I might get to meet mrbrown and mr miyagi et al at the blogger's conference too!!!! *turns a cartwheel*AND Gilbert Koh, want to see what they all look like in real life. Being here made me miss all the TV/radio/newspaper stuff they've all been doing.

Theme song of the moment: What a Difference a Day Makes by Jamie Cullum

P.S Its 2 am and I still have to wash a week's worth of dirty dishes before bed. Sigh....I missed my maid SO much.

When the going gets tough

2005-06-08T21:16:00.000-07:00

I think of home. The only thing keeping me going is the thought that in less than ten days I'll be arriving in Changi Airport with a huge grin plastered on my face and my hair sticking up from the long plane ride.

I miss the funniest things about Singapore. Most people just miss the food but strangely that wasn't such a huge problem with me.

I missed the places I'd walk around with friends. I missed the bright shiny shopping malls where you could get Japanese titbits( Bugis basement, Taka basement, Plaza Sing basement) and where there'd be annoying people handing out flyers at your face and shops having offers on all the time.

I even miss the crowds of aunties and kids in school uniforms and the dull uproar a Singaporean crowd makes.

And when I slept I sometimes even dreamt of Suntec Shopping mall where I used to go every weekend with the bf. ( His church is there)

In the dream I was walking past Mango and going up an escalator to this little San bookstore where I used to buy my weekly fix of books , comics and magazines.

In other dreams, I'd be at home at about 5-6pm when the sun slants in through the windows and there's this really good smell in the air cos the maid and all the other families in the neighbourhood would be cooking dinner.There'd be screams and shouts of little kids emanating from the playground opposite my house.And it would be warm but not too hot the heat of the day having already been spent.

At this time of the day I sometimes went and sat at my porch and watched the kids play. Or took my bike out and went for a ride around the neighbourhood. It was just the best time of the day for being outdoors and enjoying life in the sun. ( Doesn't help that I'm never in Melbourne during summer of course)

Once when I was lying in bed daydreaming, I heard this dull thud from my neighbour downstairs and my heart gave this sudden leap. It sounded so much like the way my mum's car door slammed shut when she got home from work. I wanted so much to get out of bed and go downstairs to find her getting out of the car juggling her handbag, keys and work tote but smiling and asking me about my day.

The next week is exam week and I am still not doing great on the revision bit.

So every now and then I take a break and I dream about home.

Marriage and babies

2005-06-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

For a few weeks now I've been quietly brooding over the fact that one of my oldest friends in world has gone and gotten married and is now extremely pregnant.

I haven't even wrapped my brain around the fact that friends my age are married, let alone accept the fact that they might be making babies soon. God, the government should be so happy.
Seriously, the people around me are dropping like flies. One by one they flounce up and flash pretty pretty engagement rings at me while I stare at them with my mouth agape.

I honestly never expected the whole wedding parade to begin so soon. In my secret fantasy world somewhere, I always imagined that we'd all go through a nice long period of singlehood together before succumbing to the marriage institution.

The worst is that very few of the couples I know seem financially ready to stand on their own two feet, never mind support each other and pay off a housing loan. I'm watching with this sense of horror partly because I know that once you go down that road, you're just stuck forever. I want to scream at them to slow down and save a bit more money first before plunging but I can't. ( This is especially so for this couple I know who don't even have the cash for a public housing flat downpayment yet and are going to end up living with his parents for quite awhile, which is what happens when you decide to get engaged right after you graduate)

You can never decide to just quit a crap job to try out new things, never take on an overseas posting because you're tied down. You're stuck in Singapore for the rest of your life, raising children in a crowded flat.

It's difficult to say which aspect of the Singapore dream strikes so much terror into my heart. Perhaps its because I feel that once one takes on the burden of supporting a HDB flat, one is forever at the mercy of the government. Perhaps because once one is married, one has more to lose. With children, even more is at stake.

Plus in Singapore, life just seems to keep getting tougher. Its not just the economical woes, its the loss of space and freedom. And it doesn't help that I think small children and public transport were just not meant to go together which seems to be the idea behind the rise in ERP charges.

I guess I'm just not ready to grow up yet. Not really ready to take on the full mantle of adulthood and definitely not ready to make huge purchases that I'll have to spend the rest of my life paying off.

I know, intellectually anyway, that there isn't anything wrong with the whole marriage + babies scenario. But there's just something about being stuck in that rut for the next twenty years that really scares me.

It makes me resolve that now, while I'm relatively young and carefree, I want to go and do all the things I've always wanted to do first. The suburban nightmare can come later when I've hopefully accumulated a little more cash andwisdom.

The exams are upon us

2005-05-29T03:58:00.000-07:00

Blogging will be sporadic and infrequent until June 18th when my papers are over.

The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.

No,not really a curse, but I do like my dramatic poetry and Tennyson definitely dramatized this story to the hilt.

For all those having to go through exams, good luck!

musical chairs

2005-05-26T03:58:00.000-07:00

Heh. I got passed the musical baton by Limegreenspyda ( hope I spelled it right) and despite the fact that my exams are in two weeks I sat down and did it anyway.

Total Volume of Music files on my computer:
1.99 GB

The Last CD I bought was:
Come Away with Me by Norah Jones

Song playing right now:
Hao Xin Fen Shou by Candy Lo

5 songs I listen to alot or that mean alot to me:

Angel by Sarah Mclachlan

Mozart's Turkish March( My mum used to play this when I was little...just reminds me of home)

Beethoven's Symphony No 9

My Favorite Mistake by Sheryl Crow

Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell

5 people to whom I'm passing the baton:

Wannabe Lawyer
Blubbering Nonsense
Enuwy
shadownova
Jeff Yen

Crown casino in Singapore?

2005-05-25T01:08:00.000-07:00

After hearing my last assignment of the semester fall with a satisfactory thump into the assignments chute at Law school, I headed over to Crown Casino for some dinner and to watch my friends play.

I don't know why is it I cannot seem to gamble. I can't even play pokies without sweating and feeling stressed so I eventually gave up gambling as one of many vices I am just temperamentally unsuited for.

It was a good evening though ; my friend eventually won an a fairly large amount of money( around $1000) and decided to spend some of it on a treat for us.

We headed straight for Margo's, this restaurant on the casino floor that has half priced oysters every Monday and Tuesday and had ourselves a lovely dinner:steak, calamari and lovely fresh oysters.

But while they were playing, I looked around the casino floor and felt this odd sensation. It was just difficult to believe that in a few short years, this glittery hedonism would make some kind of appearance in Singapore.

I didn't bother getting much into the whole debate of casinos; mainly because I just knew deep down that no matter what people said, the government would go ahead and do as they thought fit anyway.

Here in Melbourne, I'm a regular patron of Crown Casino. I go there to watch movies, eat and shop. In the time I've been here, I've spent less than $10 on the actual gambling and more of my time watching friends blow their pocket money at the tables.

The thing about a casino is that most of the time, people get drawn there by other things first. Very few casinos focus only on the gambling. Crown has a cinema, shops and lots of really good restaurants within its walls, but its when you're there watching other people play that you really feel the itch.

My friend won but she's been here for three years. In that three years she's been a regular at both the gaming tables and the pokies. Last night she won a large amount of money but her boyfriend lost easily $100 at the baccarat table before she even started playing.

I've been with this bunch awhile now, and I know that $1000 is a small reward for the kind of money they've thrown at Crown over the years. Sometimes, they're lucky and sometimes they only just manage to get their seed money back. But more often than not, the casino won.

I've read Down Under, a travel book by Bill Bryson. And in it he commented that he was shocked that Crown Casino tends to draw such a predominantly chinese crowd.

He was right. Despite the fact that asians are a minority in Australia, they're the majority at Crown.Around me crowded Hongkongers, PRCs, Singaporeans, wealthy Malaysians and Indonesian chinese...all with a fevered look in their eye.

I thought of Singapore, where people already spend thousands going on cruises just to gamble and who think nothing of blowing a few hundred dollars on mahjong and 4-D and I had to suppress a shudder.

Much more than the Malays and Indians, the chinese tend to be terribly susceptible to gambling. It forms a major part of chinese new year festivities and local films even show scenes where people (usually chinese) take down numbers from car accidents and suicides just to try their luck at 4-D.

I don't really know if the whole casino idea is a good one. I'd be the first to agree that a casino really can generate tons of revenue and jobs. But the social cost may be one that we cannot pay;addicts frequently turn to crime and drugs after all. And there are other reasons.

Melbourne is a large place. It's the capital city of a state that is easily a hundred times larger than Singapore. If you want to get away from all the glittering, flashy neon strobe lights and congested crowds of people, you can. You'll only be a couple hours away from gentler, quieter towns like Bendigo. The same goes for thrumming cities like New York or even London. But this just isn't the case for Singapore.

We forget, when we want to compare ourselves to them, how much more room they have to fit in things. Here, if something isn't absolutely essential, it tends to get discarded. Which is where all of our green spaces and clean water has gone,of course.

Which is why we're going to have the room for a casino but not really the room for more green spaces where people can just relax and wind down.

Be Right Back

2005-05-22T00:42:00.000-07:00

I'll be back in a couple of days once my essay is in.

It's a monster of a paper on a part of Constitutional Law that I don't really get, so wish me luck!

But I somehow still found the time to surf through this fantastic site . Got it via Cowboy Caleb.

Like him, I hope those particular graphic artists get bored more; those were so cool.

Blogs vs MSM?

2005-05-20T03:36:00.000-07:00

While I turned my back to rush an assignment,this post was causing a stir in blogging circles. The remark that sparked off outrage amongst politically minded bloggers such as Wannabe Lawyer was :
"The final quirk in this is that the bloggers are really not journalists. And so while it is a laudable fight, surely Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières) cannot defend those who do not measure up to the standards of professional journalism. To defend these bloggers as if they had the same standards as a professional journalist is an insult to the industry from which the organization draws its membership."

It was all rather exciting really, what with its comments page being filled with arguments against this disastrous sentiment. Most took umbrage at its placing 'professional journalists' above supposedly amateur bloggers.

I would agree with Wannabe Lawyer and Gilbert Koh's comments on professional journalism not being what it seems. But I would respectfully disagree with the possibility of blogs taking over MSM(mainstream media).

Wannabe lawyer highlighted the fact that a website like Craigslist which generates a gazillion hits everyday and blogs as sounding the death knell for MSM.

I doubt it.

This is my reasoning.( At least listen to me before attcking)To us, the people who can't survive without the Internet, who are used to scanning blogs and online newsites everyday, the mainstream media may seem dispensable. But the reality is that bloggers and their readers belong to a very small sector of society as a whole. Most bloggers and blog readers tend to belong in a specific demographic of fairly young and well educated people. ( Even Mr brown for all his purported 'uncle' claims, isn't actually old at all)

I've been reading blogs for some time now and I realized that at least 75% of blogs I read were written by either university students or university graduates. The blogging community itself, tends to be confined to those with a bent for reading and writing which also a small percentage of the tertiary educated demographic. ( For the purposes of this post, I would include polytechnics within this category not only because they're tertiary institutions but also because I sincerely believe that the wider society underestimates poly grads)

We forget, as many educated people do, the rest of the teeming population out there who do not have the time, education or inclination to read blogs. We also forget that they make up the majority of the population, not the minority.

It is true that not all blogs or bloggers fall within this narrowly constructed demographic. But I believe it is safe to say that a very large percentage of them do.

When I was in NUS one of the courses I took studied the socio-political impact of the Internet in general.Most people wanted to believe that because of the promise of anonymity , the Internet would usher in a new age of democracy, where everyone could finally get their voice heard. In the end the articles I read debunked this myth effectively.

The truth is that when it was really studied, most people tended to zoom in on sites whose name they recognized and were familiar with. This included mainstream newsites and the shopping sites of big named departmental stores. In the online world as in the offline one, big names dominate.

There are enormous sectors of the population who would never be comfortable with the Internet simply because they weren't brought up with it. I would say not many of us have parents who read blogs or write blogs. For the older generation( some of whom might even be illiterate), there is only the mainstream media because the Internet is a foreign land to them.Needless to say, those who live below or near the poverty line would not even have Internet access, nevermind about reading blogs. The Internet can marginalize just as much as it helps certain marginalized groups speak out.

Aside from obvious demographic issues, there is the fact that we look for the same things online that we look for in real life. The religious minded will surf religious websites and set up their own religious websites, the politically minded would look for sites like Thinkcentre or read blogs like Wannabe Lawyer and Singabloodypore.Those with a wider range of interests will naturally seek out a wider range of websites which will reflect their spectrum of interests.

The difference between the internet and MSM is that online, you have to actively seek out the sites you're interested in. Flipping through a newspaper or watching TV will bring other things to your attention, even while reading/watching things you're primarily interested in.

It is true that the internet allows a proliferation of publications and online stores that would otherwise have never existed. But the people who search them out belong to a minority rather than a majority. And those who search them out would most likely be people who already had an interest in them to begin with.

This is not to downplay the role of blogs in anyway. As demonstrated by the whole Acidflask debacle, blogs can be like the mythical Hydra, unstoppable because of its ability to grow two more heads where one was chopped off.

Just because one blog was sued, twenty more blogs wrote about it and spread the word.(Plus they got to it before the mainstream media did too! )But I would also say that there would be many whose first inkling of the debacle would be through some sanitised and biased article in one of Singapore's newspapers.

I do not believe that professional journalists are any better than many of the bloggers out there.Singaporean media especially can never claim any form of neutrality or even any professional standards, it seems. But one has to admit that they have a tad more credibility than some bloggers( the racist scholar incident comes to mind). And it is true that journalists muck up just as much or even more than some bloggers.

But blogs, like the rest of the Internet, reflect the world we live in. Just as there are intelligent, thoughtfully written blogs like Singapore Angle or MrBrown, there will also be blogs out there with completely inane and facile posts which cannot hope to measure up to even the crappiest tabloids in terms of writing and thought.Perhaps these blogs will never get Tomorrowed or Browned or merit a mention in MSM, but they will exist never theless, and will have their own limited audience.

I'm not trying to shoot down blogs. I'm an inveterate blog reader myself. But one has to try to be fair and give the devil its due. MSM reaches people that blogs( in this point of time anyway) can't. Not yet at least.

chosen paths

2005-05-19T02:49:00.000-07:00

I've never made any secret of the fact that I'm a christian, despte my deep misgivings about the modern day church. But today I read a blog post that really crystallized some of what I felt about the church. I've been reading Tym's blog for some time now, enjoying the vignettes about her life and work but today's post really made me sit up and think.

She's right in some ways though. I may be christian, but I'm not blind. I quote from her post

"Then there's the plain fact that the moment anything gets institutionalised --- education, social assistance, healthcare, exercise, religion --- it tends to go straight to hell in a handbasket"

A sentiment I thoroughly agree with. Everything always starts out well in terms of ideology, its when it comes to applying it to real life that mucks it up completely. Anything that becomes systemised or institutionalised just basically seems to calcify and rot from the inside eventually. There was so much bad press about communism that I didn't find out what it was really about until I went and read Marx's manifesto and realized the dream had nothing to do with the reality.

I left church for very much the same reasons she did. I was in university receiving a liberal arts education and all those new ideas just led to the questions no one in church could or would answer. In fact, one tended to be villified for asking too many questions. Churches, like all other institutions, need tame followers, not potential trouble makers. For me, the end was when a cell leader openly declared her admiration of President George W Bush as a christian leader and voiced her support for the Iraq war. As I recall, she could not answer even simple questions about his other policies and grew annoyed when I harped on about the Kyoto Protocol.

I doubt I'll ever resolve my problems with the current stance of the church over contentious and possibly incendiary issues such as gay rights, gay marriage and abortion. I hate the fact that christians are associated with abortion clinic burnings and small minded homophobic men.

But all this being said, I still went back to church in the end. I can't quite bring myself to abandon my faith altogether and most of Jesus's actual teachings still have as much attraction for me as they did when I was 14.

I'll never be able to swallow everything churches tell me wholesale, because that's who I am. But I know that with all institutions, you have to accept the good with the bad. I survived three years in NUS after all.

I'm back in there because despite what everyone says, I really do believe in God. No matter what evolutionists tell me( and yes, I have read their arguments) I refuse to believe in a non creationist view of life in general. I suppose for me, God and the church will always be separate in my mind. The church can go ahead and claim it speaks for God, but I for one, will never really buy it.

In the end, my view is that everyone has to find their own way to God. I'm glad I took my time with it and didn't cave in to well meaning but pushy friends.

I'm generally still meandering my way around, having come to the conclusion that I want to stick with being a christian and I won't claim to know "the way, the truth and the life".But I guess that finding out your own raison d'etre is part of growing up, part of the experience of life itself.

All I really have to say to non christians who like trashing christianity( and no, Tym's not one of them) is for them to just leave it alone. Trashing it won't make it go away and there are more constructive ways to spend your time. I don't feel the need to apologize for pesky evangelizing people, having never been one of them, but I do have to say that pushy, annoying, no-respect-for-boundaries type people exist in every race, culture and religion. I've frankly met just as many pushy annoying atheist 'evangelists' and except for a slight difference in phraseology, they're both equally irritating.

Personality test

2005-05-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

Your #1 Match: INFP

The Idealist

You are creative with a great imagination, living in your own inner world.
Open minded and accepting, you strive for harmony in your important relationships.
It takes a long time for people to get to know you. You are hesitant to let people get close.
But once you care for someone, you do everything you can to help them grow and develop.

You would make an excellent writer, psychologist, or artist.

Your #2 Match: INFJ

The Protector

You live your life with integrity, originality, vision, and creativity.
Independent and stubborn, you rarely stray from your vision - no matter what it is.
You are an excellent listener, with almost infinite patience.
You have complex, deep feelings, and you take great care to express them.

You would make a great photographer, alternative medicine guru, or teacher.

Your #3 Match: ISFP

The Artist

You are a gifted artist or musician (though your talents may be dormant right now).
You enjoy spending your free time in nature, and you are good with animals and children.
Simply put, you enjoy bueaty in all its forms and live for the simple pleasures in life.
Gentle, sensitive, and compassionate - you are good at recognizing people's unspoken needs.

You would make a good veterinarian, pediatrician, or composer.

What's Your Personality Type?

Law Ball

2005-05-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

Was filled with pretty girls dressed in extremely varied clothing. Some looked like they really were attending a ball, some just looked like they couldn't wait to tear off their clothes and have hot sex, some forgot their bras and some just forgot to apply common sense to their dressing.

Witnessed

- a guy being taken away by paramedics for alcohol poisoning

- a fairly classy 37 busily courting a not terribly classy and adenoidal 19 year old

-two girls passed out on the floor

-at leat 15 sets of erect nipples poking out at me from beneath thin chiffon dresses. For God's sake, haven't they heard of nipple tape?

- asians stayed at their own groups and ate quietly while aussies were loud and got massively drunk.

- a girl with 70s beehive style hair.....in a dress that I mistook for being a top.

The world is filled with things I fail to understand. But it seems the law ball gave me a chance to view them all in one night. A sort of confusing microcosm of life itself.

And yes, according to Douglas Adams, the answer to life, the universe...is 42.

The city of loneliness

2005-05-15T04:13:00.000-07:00

I think its time to come clean. For the past week, I've been sitting around doing nothing while my workload has accumulated to terrifying proportions.

The exams are less than a month away. A 3000 word research paper is due within a week. I am behind in readings.

I have started preparing for neither of these ordeals. I have not even properly read or understood the research paper question yet.

Instead I've been wandering the city like a lost soul,( and indeed I might well be a lost soul given my uncertain spiritual beliefs) sitting in quiet cafes staring into space and imbibing massive amounts of chocolate and desserts.

In the meantime, my non friends have attended a sleepover, gone shopping, eaten several meals together in happy camaraderie.

I sometimes wish I had a mirror to watch my face all the time, everytime. What is it about me that manages to shut people out so easily? Why is it I always find out about outings/meals/etc after the fact rather than before? I know people who join groups later than I do and yet have managed to successfully manoeuvred themselves into the centre of things where I have, as always, stayed on the fringes. Instead of participating in groups and doing terribly social things, I ended up alone at home reading Lord of the Flies by William Golding which frankly didn't improve my mood much. ( It was an eye opener though)

Reading is in itself a solitary activity. Sometimes I feel frightened by the fact that I take so much joy in being alone in my room reading. There has to be something wrong with someone so flagrantly and defiantly antisocial. ( Am so tempted to quote Donne on men and islands here)

The thought depressed me so much I felt immobilised by it. So much that I didn't want to go anywhere on Saturday and Sunday and now I don't even feel like going to school tomorrow.

"I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me:" Richard III Act 5 Sc 3

I know Richard was a despised murderer and all, but there is something to be said about words that ring so true to the soul even after several hundred years.

I'm not someone who absolutely needs to be with people all the time, but as a person and human being, I need more companionship than my books.( Also I want to watch Kingdom of Heaven and those wretched people watched it without me when they knew I wanted to watch it)

I must get out more. Unfortunately, this week is now cooked cos I have to rush through my Constitutional Law research essay.

I don't think I'll get a chance to watch Kingdom of Heaven. *sob*

For now I'll just go eat some worms.

HOW2

2005-05-13T21:12:00.000-07:00

Is a literary journal whose most recent issue featured a section on Singaporean women poets. The introductory note by Grace Chia gives a succinct, yet thoughtful explanation of Singapore's modern history and its impact on the Singaporean literary scene. ( it explains the paucity of the literary scene as well.)

My personal pick of the lot were the three poems written by Wendy Gan which to my eye, best reflect certain modern circumstances in ever changing Singapore. The poems "Drone" and "Mapreaders" would best be described as poetic renditions of the problems associated with young, upwardly mobile Singaporeans.

Grace Chia described Wendy Gan as being 'economical' with her words; a condition I like in poetry. Rather than overly verbose pieces, I personally favour crisp, tightly written short poems that nevetheless convey an array of themes and emotions within their framework.Part of this is also a belief that in a short poem, the choice of each word becomes more loaded as one has to decide which exact shade of meaning to pick. In all forms of writing, I personally believe that it is the writer's short and tight pieces that really display his technical prowess and skill at word manipulation; they have to say so much with so little space.

Some writers do manage this with longer pieces of work; notable examples would be Jeffrey Eugenides' debut novel, "The Virgin Suicides" and most of Ernest Hemingway's work. There are just some books where the dislodgment of just one word could change the whole mood and tone.

Which is why I sometimes view my long blog entries with a critical eye. I feel I could say more with much less if I could just pick the right words.

I broke my fridge today

2005-05-12T04:26:00.000-07:00

No not the whole fridge! Just one of the shelves in it.
After blogging about all that stuff I learnt when I came here to study, it seems that I still have a looong way to go.

I cooked a big pot of yummy soup last night and placed the leftovers in the fridge. Unfortunately I stupidly put it on a glass shelf ( the one above the drawer for veg) and when I opened it this afternoon to take the soup out, I discovered that the shelf had broken into four menacing looking pieces and my vegatables were squished and dead.

I literally froze in panic when I saw the broken shelf. in a complete daze I took the two of the glass pieces out and placed them on the kitchen counter. Then still in a daze I took out a huge tub of vanilla ice cream and started to eat it while still staring at the glass.

(Hahahaha, I just thought of something, I was probably staring glassily at the glass pieces. Geddit? Geddit? Lame joke I know, but I can't help it. Its been one of those days and I need all the humour I can muster up. )

It wasn't till halfway through the tub before I snapped out of shock and called my bf in Singapore. That maniac laughed and laughed while I shakily whispered my story. He laughed even harder when I asked if I could super glue the shelf back. What???? I still think it would have been possible!!!!!!

Then he asked me what brand my fridge was.....and I realised I didn't even know.*sheepish grin* So I ran to the kitchen and checked...my fridge brand is Westinghouse!

And, get this, the repair place for Westinghouse is in Ballarat!!!! Ballarat is ONE HOUR'S DRIVE AWAY!!!! I have NO car, I have NO driver's license and I have NO idea how to get there by any form of public transport!!! When I realised that I just started giggling hysterically and uncontrollably at the thought of going all the way to some warehouse place in the god forsaken suburbs and trying to buy a new glass shelf. It would take me at least 2.5 hours to get there by train and tram and bus and I might even have to take a cab. The cost of getting there would be higher than the shelf.

At times like these I really miss how small Singapore is. I mean, in Singapore, the repair place would have been like in Jurong or something and not only would I know how to get there, I'd also know at least where it is. Also it would not be ONE HOUR"S DRIVE AWAY. Because almost no place is Singapore is THAT FAR AWAY.

I ended up going to the supermarket to buy a plastic storage box to put my remaining unsquished vegetables in and rearranging my whole fridge. I wrapped up and threw away the glass pieces cutting myself in the process. Then I went to the gym to burn off the ice cream.....

Now I'm just dead exhausted and blogging.

More lessons from Melbourne:
1) Do not put heavy items on glass shelves...(*sob* I can't believe it couldn't support the weight of that pot!!!! It had only soup in it, not lead weights!!!!!!)
2) Super glue will not fix the glass shelf( I don't know why, my boyfriend says so)
3) My fridge brand is Westinghouse and its warranty has expired
4) It doesn't matter if there's a warranty cos the repair place will be somewhere like Shepparton(2.5 hours drive away), Frankston or Ballarat......
5) Australia is a BIG country; you NEED a car unlike teeny tiny Singapore.

Falling into Autumn

2005-05-10T23:02:00.000-07:00

Just to start of with, I'm glad Acidflask isn't going to get sued. And even more glad that all this whole debacle has ended. But I guess the threat worked. Gilbert Koh shut down his legal blog because of it and Knight of Pentacles seems definitely nervous. Even I heeded Gilbert's advice and took my photo off this site even though in theory, where I am now might be beyond the reach of the gahmen.

I suppose its as good a time as any to mark a new season.It's now completely and irrevocably autumn . This autumn was so unseasonally warm up until two weeks ago there were still people going around in singlets and skirts.Last month still had enough warm days to convince us that maybe summer could be stretched out just a little longer. The last few days have put paid to that lie though;I woke up this morning cold to my bones.

I'm one of the heat loving creatures. In Singapore I just absolutely soak up the sun whenever I can. Despite the humidity, the heat just always feels good, like a blanket you have on all the time. Here, at the first sign of cold, I start pulling on jumpers, coats and wrapping up with scarves.

From a heat loving girl, here are some ways to deal with the cold:

1) invest in a good heater. in fact, if you're anything like me, invest in two good heaters. I place one permanently in the bathroom for the moments when you step out of the shower shivering uncontrollably. Trust, you'll fall in love with that hot air blasting machine right there and then.For the girls, (teehee) try heating your bra cups in front of it every morning. It feels darned good when you put it on.....nobody ever tells you stuff like that, I had to find out myself.For guys, I suppose you could always try heating your jeans? heh.

2) similiarly invest in a good quality down stuffed quilt. This is not like SG where you could just buy any old blanket. A friend of mine did that and he was so cold all through his first winter, before he realised his mistake.

3) Learn the value of buying clothes with material like wool, cashmere, fleece and angora. Winter clothes should not be skimped on no matter how much of a Singaporean bargain hunter you are.

4) eat alot. Dieting in winter is not a good idea, you won't believe how cold you'll get if you go hungry. Don't have to overeat, just eat plenty of warm meals and load up on hot drinks. Hot chocolate on cold days tastes sooooo good and will release endorphins so you'll be both warm and happy. ( For me, I get high on hot chocolate..teehee, always makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside)

5) Exercise. It will rev up your metabolic rate and you'll come out feeling all warm and sweaty. Plus it'll help in burning off all that food.

6) if all else fails... find a lover and have lots and lots of hot sex. The endorphins released will replicate item 4 and the workout will boost your metabolic rate even better than item 5. And, there's someone else to keep you warm under that quilt!

( You'll still need the heater and the quilt though.....otherwise you might not want to even take your clothes off....pity to waste all that passion)

For all those here, have a great winter! Hope I'll get to go skiing this year *grin*

*Disclaimer for the sake of my bf(who's in Singapore and who might get understandably nervous):Dear,I never actually tried item 5. I just hear about it. Muahahaha...in my bed, the only thing keeping me warm is my beloved, trusty goose down quilt.

P.S The lover thing does make alot of sense though. Its the reason supposedly alot of people from temperate countries have birthdays in October and November. All those loong, cold winter nights.....heh. Though if thats true, Russia ought to be the most populous country in the world....

The Canon of Blogs

2005-05-10T06:46:00.000-07:00

I was just reading through Tomorrow.sg earlier when a thought occurred to me.

See, in English Lit classes, one of the first things they teach you in that writers like referring to other more established writers. Its called intertextuality and its a semiotics concept that has always interested me. One text builds on another and yet another until you get a work like T.S Eliot's The Wasteland which would probably not make sense to most people without a background in the canon of western literature.( It actually still doesn't make alot of sense to me). All the texts are so interrelated that not one piece of work can stand alone, one needs the proper context and references in order to read and understand them.

The reason people do this is partly to lend them credibility, the other it to allow them to evoke certain moods and themes with fewer words.

A prime example would be Shakespeare.Every one knows about Shakespeare even if they've never read his plays. He's been referred so and talked about so much that he's entered into people's cultural consciousness.His plays have so permeated the canon of English literature that it may be impossible to read through a course of lit without coming into contact with at least some Shakespearean references or language.( Its one of the reasons I loved studying Shakepeare, his plays were so fun to read and you could go around and really spot all the ways in which his language shaped ours)

So maybe all this inter blogging linkage is really another part of intertextuality at work. The big people are the guys like Mr brown and his 'bloggerati' and I have a feeling, the day may soon come when no blog will be completely without links to the blogs of these blogging pioneers.Just like Shakespeare invented words that are still used in the English language today, phrases like being 'browned' or 'tomorrowed' are now being coined and passed around by the bloggers.

*Disclaimer: I don't know a great deal about semiotics since it was only briefly discussed in class. I never managed to take a lit theory class like I wanted cos I ran out of space in fitting extra lit classes. But here is where one could find out more. It talks about concepts like 'death of the author' and alot more about semiotics in general, plus some interesting post modernist theories.If I've made any glaring errors, someone please let me know cos this is a topic I'd really love to learn more about.

Poetry Connection: Poem of the Day( The First Surveyor by Banjo Paterson)

2005-05-08T19:19:00.000-07:00

This one just made me smile.

It a homey, folksy piece written with alot of colloquial slang thrown in. The poet,(Andrew Barton Paterson aka 'Banjo' Paterson was the most celebrated guy in Australia at one point. He wrote and set to music that iconic Australian folksong ' Waltzing Matilda', which very nearly became the raw young country's national anthem.

There's been so much discussion online about Singaporean Blogs that I'd really like to talk about something different now.(And I'm not the only one who thinks so, Nicholas Liu does too)After all, if the purpose of the defamation suit was to defend its good name, then I think we ALL know that it has failed miserably. Even if he took AcidFlask to court now, there wouldn't be a point. Too much bad press online and off has already been generated.

So for today, I'd just liked to talk a little bit about Australia instead. The poem, folksy and simple as it may be, celebrates the unsung courage and pluck of early Australian settlers. It is also an unsubtle reminder of how good the later generations had it.

In a country where the climate and geography is so harsh, the ordinary bloke's ability to challenge and conquer the elements is still much celebrated today. Australians readily identify themselves with the land they fought so hard to cope with in the early years. ( There are statues of the first explorers in the Melbourne Town square for heaven's sakes)

Hence the immense popularity of Banjo Paterson's poems. Even Aussies who are complete city slickers have this fixed ideal of a typical Aussie bloke as being a country guy who's tough, straight talking and fair. His poems celebrated those guys....and turned them into fictional heroes of the Australian past;the colloquialisms he threw in only served to reinforce the idea of an idealized Australian identity.

All the same, the fact that this country nearly turned a song about a sheep stealer and law breaker into their national anthem warms the cockles of my heart. It just shows their ability to not take themselves too seriously; something the Singaporeans should definitely learn.

Jesus and His women

2005-05-08T04:32:00.000-07:00

Today as I sat in church listening to the pastor's wife preach a Mother's Day sermon, a thought suddenly struck me.

Why is it only Two books in the whole bible are named after women? And how come none of the books are written by women?

And..

The Bible is a book written by and for men.....

As soon as I'd thought these things I realized that it was true. Christianity is essentially a patriarchal religion. This was something that had always bothered me, as a christian and as a feminist.

Every time I read christian or non christian articles calling women to take the 'true' place at home instead of working outside, it made the bile rise in my throat. While there is nothing wrong with the job of a homemaker, there is everything wrong with the perception that women are only good for that. In fact, the work of homemakers is often overlooked and underpaid just like many of the jobs associated with women.

This call for women to stay home and mind the children is really only a half step away from ' Why educate my daughter? She's only going to grow up to look after kids and cook anyway'

And yet another half step away from' Of course she can't vote, she's so stupid. She can barely read or write.'

It just keeps going downhill from there onwards to' women are property and not quite as intelligent or able as men'....

All the freedom we take for granted today, the right to vote, to leave an abusive husband, the right to get a job, all were won after hard fought battles with men in authority.

Women make up a moiety of the world and yet the Bible, supposedly the greatest text of all time, is strangely lacking in their stories.

I grabbed my friend's bible in church and started flipping(yeah, forgot to bring mine again.heh).I found that there are 66 books in the Bible. Only two are named after women, the book of Ruth which is all of 4 pages long and the book of Esther which gets*gasp* 7 whole pages. All the others are named after the men who wrote them or the men who featured prominently in them. As for authorship, I suspect even the book of Ruth was written by a man. In any case, the book of Ruth is ultimately about a good woman who still has to be rescued by a man, confirming the subordinate status of women during that time.

There are no stories written from a woman's point of view. There are certainly stories about women. But no stories by women.

Just take the story of David for instance. King David was a legendary character and one of the most pivotal characters in the Old Testament. His story was literally infamous, seriously, those gossip mags are nothing compared to this.

His affair with Bathsheba was one of the most scandalous and sordid of all the biblical stories. The story of a king who slept with Bathsheba then sent Uriah, her husband, to die that he could marry her. In most versions told of this story, their romantic entanglement was described as an affair. A word that implicates Bathsheba as David's partner in bed and in crime. In reality, Samuel, who chronicled this, said nothing of Bathsheba's feelings. He states factually that 'Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her”(2 Sam 11:4)

In fact she could easily have been his hapless victim, taken by force. Which would make the most revered man in the Old Testament not only a murderer, but also a rapist. Samuel is silent on this,but given that David was a king, and that one did not say no to kings at that time, it is very likely that she was taken by force. After all, that line could have been, ' Then David sent messengers and she followed them, and they slept together'.( Yes I know this is conjecture, but hey, it really could have been that way since she never got to tell her side of the story and Samuel was so ambiguous about it.)

Where is Bathsheba's story? David's story is told over and over again. His pain and suffering at losing the child Bathsheba bore himwas recounted in a famous psalm(Psa 51), where he begged for God's mercy and acknowledged his own sin.The prophet Nathan's warning to him was recorded and his misery at the illness of his child was also recorded.

How did Bathsheba feel? She had been forciby taken to David, raped, gotten pregnant and then watched as her husband was sent to his death so that David might marry her and legitimize their child.But Samuel doesn't talk about all that; the psalms do not carry a poem with her feelings of contrition or grief.

This woman was recently widowed and just watched the baby she carried for nine months die. Samuel took two whole books to recount David's military exploits in detail. But he says nothing of Bathsheba's maternal grief and precious little about all the rest of David's wives or daughters.Where is the recounting of Bathsheba's grief and pain? There is only one line for that, 'When Uriah's wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him. '( 2 Sam 11:26).

There is no mention of her grief at her only child's death, we are only told that David comforted her and then proceeded to sleep with her again.She was husband to David and mother of Solomon, giant figures in the Old Testament world and yet there is no book where her side is told.

It didn't end to badly for her in the end. Perhaps David felt truly sorry; Samuel did say that he tried to comfort her. Maybe he was kind to her after that. And in the end, out of all his wives, he picked her son to be his successor which probably means something.All the same, she probably regretted bathing with a window half open in the middle of the night.

The other women of the bible tend to suffer the same sort of treatment at the hands of the Old Testament authors. One suspects Ruth must have been an extraordinarily determined and plucky lady for the author to have written it in at all. Otherwise it might easily have been a liner, ' Ruth was the wife of Boaz who was the father of...'.. The same would probably apply for Esther, who only got a few pages more because she got to be queen.

Why is the bible so silent on the mothers and wives and daughters? Why are none of the books written by them? In those days where women were not taught to write, could their stories have died with them for the lack of literacy?

Fast forward about a thousand years to the time of the New Testament, one can see that it is even more silent where women are concerned. Nothing has changed. The cornerstone of the new testament, the 4 gospels, were written and named after the men who wrote them. After that, the only other major writer was Paul, who was a chronic bachelor and rabble rouser. The other books are short accounts of the rest of the apostles.

And yet, glancing through the the 4 gospels one is struck by the number of women that actually did feature in Jesus's life and works. Where he could be kind, He was kind. He helped not only blind men but also crippled women(Luke 13:10). He was compassionate toward a woman's obviously female ailment of constant bleeding(Mark 25:5). He took no umbrage at an 'unclean woman' touching His robes but instead called her daughter and praised her faith(Mark 25:34) where other holy men of that era might have screamed.

The women in Jesus's life were just as devoted followers but very little mention is made of them.At his crucifixion, Mark said that a group of women were watching as well and that they had 'followed Him and cared for his needs in Galilee'. Only three of all those devoted women were even mentioned by name, Mary, Mary Magdelene and Salome. What of the rest? Where is the story of the woman who cooked for Jesus, served him meals and washed his clothes? Where are the women who 'cared' for him and left their homes to serve and follow him?

In fact, during the crucial times of his crucifixion, death and resurrection, his women followers stayed faithful. They were there when he was dying(Mark 15:40), at his burial(Mark 15:47) and his recurrection(Mark 16:1). Where the other 'stars' of the new testament like Peter or Matthew fled or lost faith, his women followed him.

Despite this, their stories died with them. What we know is from a paltry few lines in each of the four gospels. Of his 12 alpha-male followers, one betrayed him, one denied him and others had to be convinced of his resurrection. (Although granted, they did pretty well after that). But their every exploit is recorded and lauded, while the female followers died in silence and passed away into the unknown.

Jesus himself displayed many traits traditionally attributed to women today. He was compassionate, understanding, tried to help society's delinquents(Mark 2:15) and placed interpersonal relationships over work commitments(Luke 10:38) and actually seemed to understand the disadvantaged status of women and the sacrifices they had to make. He was after all, the embodiment of an all seeing, all powerful God.

The male authors and editors of the bible may have excised or excluded the women who played such important roles. But the fact that they saw fit to tack on a few lines here and there, may attest to the importance of their involvement and role.

Jesus may have treated women with compassion and respect. But the men who followed him later did not, at least not in writing. Their elision of women from the new testament leaves a glaring lacuna which cannot simply be patched over.

Perhaps in the end it comes down to the story of the beginning. Where God made woman to be man's helper. I doubt that God had much hand in the abuse of Eve's descendants. One must also doubt the theory of women as an inferior race, or that God meant for women to only stay home and mind the children. After, careful reading should yield up the realization that God never actually specified what it was Eve was to help Adam with.

As far as He was concerned, they were both equally punished for their transgressions but there is no mention of women's inferior status in the opening chapter of the bible.

Maybe my reading of the bible is spotty at bestI I'll be the first to admit that). And given that I am not exactly a biblical scholar, it is possible that I have made mistakes.

But I refuse to believe that God only made women to submit to men and bear children. If that were the case He could just as well have created some curvy organic robots without souls or minds or feelings. But He did not. He made men and women for a reason. And that reason has to be that they are meant to work together.

Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code may have made many spurious and specious claims(underlined by bad writing), but he was right on one score. Without the input of women, men are found lacking. The two were meant to fit and work as one unit.The current wreakage of our world may suggest that a sole patriarchy was not meant to be.( well men have made rather a mess of things you know)

It has been said that history is written by the winners. The silence of the bible reflects the silence of women over the history of mankind.In some unspoken gender war, women lost and allowed men to create society in his own image and tell his own stories.

In this world, many stories are told through male eyes. For women, the ones who got beaten up, the ones who got left behind when husbands and sons went to war, the ones who got sold by their fathers and the ones abandoned on hillsides to die because they were born the wrong gender, their stories died with them. And story telling is the backbone and buttress of cultural beliefs. Without their stories and ours, this chauvinistic culture can never change.

Today is Mother's day. A day for mothers and the women who will become mothers. In the end, a day for women.

There is no prayer in the Bible that is really written for women. Even so, it is with great humility that I say this,

May God ease the pain of childbirth,
May he grant us wisdom in our children's years of rebellion,
May He bless us with husbands who understand and respect us,
And please God, let us speak,let our stories be heard.

Could I ever reconcile the christian and the feminist? Maybe one day. After all, there is evidence to support the fact that this sorry state of affairs wasn't in His original plans.

Maybe the men just lost the plans along the way and decided to go their own way and blame it on us.

Typical of them don't you think?*grin*

Disclaimer: No I don't speak for God. Yes this is all just my own opinion.