How to Be Good

Just read Nick Hornby's How to Be Good and was doing some thinking about stuff I want to improve on in my behaviour. It's not depressing stuff - completely understand how God's grace will see me through and help me be a better person. But I find it is always good once in a while to muse about one's shortcomings and force yourself to buck up.

Since I was a kid, I have always wanted to be the Good kid, the one that sits on the side of the angels - who is naturally polite to her parents, does all her homework, always has an intelligent answer, always has perfect manners, smiles alot, is never burdensome and always winsome.

Now as an adult, it is hard to look at the gulf between what you want to do and what you actually do. I feel even more like a louse when I have walking, talking specimens of humanity who live up to the ideals that I aspire to. Witnessing their lovely sides makes me wish I could be as Good as that.

Here is my current Wish List of Good Behaviour right now:

I want to be as consistently friendly to strangers as D - hospitality is such a gift and I realise while I have a little bit of that talent, it is no where near what I think hospitality ought to be. I want to be the type of person who leaves behind a trail of cheeriness everyday and sometimes back in taciturn Singapore, it's easy to slip back into the culture and put on the deadpan pedestrian face.

I want to be as inspiring as Y - who keeps tabs on all his students and knows all their names, silly fears and mundane thoughts. I want to live up to the ideal of what I think a teacher ought to be and some days, I let work and just selfish desire to retreat into personal space stop me from reaching out as much as I should.

I want to be as neat as L. My table is such a mess and my room has devolved back to its primal soup stage.


Current mood: musing, optimistic, hopeful, trying to keep the faith and impatient for things to happen
Current music in room: my students yakking about iPods while I cling onto the last few minutes before class starts

We Have a Wiener!

We Have a Wiener!
Originally uploaded by thejacksons.

this is so hilarious.....what is it about plastic googly eyes that appeal to us? i mean stick a pair on practically anything and it will reduce even a grown man to giggles - okay , at least a smirk of repressed giggles.

Comedian and cook, Amy Sedaris organised this craft contest - i think that is SO brilliant. we should all have a googly plastic eye craft party. so cute.

Visit the rest of the competitors entries at
http://www.flickr.com/groups/sedariscraftchallenge/pool/

Signs that people are truly bored :)

1) there actually is a website dedicated to people who are zhng-ing their favourite snacks.....into MEGA BIG versions. ha


PIMP THAT SNACK!

2) here's another gem with a nasty name that says it all:
GO FUG YOURSELF

dedicated to running down the ugly dresses that Paris Hilton and all other celebs inflict on us poor mortals.

i confess: i read them! guilty pleasure! bolded, underlined, italicised guilty pleasure. lol.

sigh. i am so easy.

My So-Called Life

In the virtual world of Stormreach, you get to run around with a whoopin' flaming longsword and wear pretty silver armour. How can ya not love that? Yes, I am vain enough to be indecently pleased that I found armour that actually matches my hair. *end bimbo moment* This is why I cannot be a legit power gamer - I make dumb girl choices like refusing to wear ugly helmets which make my character look like some rugby player. :D

Ashara is finally a Level 10 cleric! (Whoo! goes all 4 of my gaming friends and "...." goes the rest of the world.)

Meanwhile, my poor halfling paladin is still stuck at Level 5 and unlikely to advance with the A level Exam Onslaught on the horizon.

Ugh.....can't wait till November. No. More. Lesson Prep!

how can a lump of cotton be sooooo cute?

I HEART these ridiculously useless but OH SO CUTE dollies.
Come on, doesn't the lil stuffed tofu and lil stuffed jiaozi make you go awwwwwww?
SO cute. SO uselessly cute.
even if i bought them i would not know what the heck to do with them.

If you are taken by these lil cuties, go check out
http://www.etsy.com/shop_sold.php?user_id=268

Conversations with Psycho Cabby

Was taking yet another 1am cab ride home and I flagged down an innocuous looking red taxi. The cabby was a 40 something year old chinese man with pale-as-a-fish kind of skin. The whole cab smelled of baby powder which should have signalled to be his innate psycho-ness......(cue scary music) We drove past Suntec City where a lot of spring cleaning has been taking place in anticipation of the big IMF meeting coming up in Singapore.

Me: (attempting to be friendly) Wow, they are really putting up a lot of new plants on the road for the IMF people ah?

Cabby: Ya, every night they are paving the roads. Very inconvenient. Cause traffic jam.

Me: Aiyah, must make things look nice for the important people what.

Cabby: (slowly working up a steam to turn into Mr Hyde) Ha! Important people? You know the cab company send me letter telling me I must be nice to the IMF people who get into my taxi?

Me: Is it?

Cabby: (starting to sound really pissy) Yah! The IMF people ah - get this taxi gift certificates that they can use like money like that. Then the company say must be like tour guide to them you know? If they want electronics, must bring them to Sim Lim. If they want good food, can go Newton....WHAT!!!!!?? Like They so BIG SHOT is it?

PSYCHO CABBY: (his other personality is out!!!!)
If they tell me they want girls, I give them GEYLANG ah! Like all the tourists come ask for girl, I say GEYLANG ah!
The taxi company is so BLARDY big shot is it?? WAHHHHHH! THOSE F****ING BASTARDS!!!!!! You think I got a lot of money bring BIGSHOT to go out is it?? WAH WAH, Lee Hsien Loong very big deal is it???

WAH IF I GET THAT IMF GUY IN MY CABBY, I TEEEELLLLLLLL HIM EVVVVVEEEEERRRRRYTHING BAD ABOUT SINGAPORE AH!!!!

Me:........(thinking 'just get me home, just get me home')

(brief awkward silence in cab while I keep quiet and cabby deflates)

Cabby: ...So Miss, you work very late ah?

Me: No lah. Its ok.

Cabby: Ha. Last time I work for other people, I also work very late. Now I am cabby, I am much happier.

Me:.......!!!!!????!!!!!!!......


Geez. IF this is him much happier, i don't really wanna see him in his last job. LOL.

I love my new G5

Last week I finally caved in on 2 years of waiting and bought a new Mac - I am now typing this on my disgustingly beautiful, hedonistic-looking 20 inch G5 desktop. Ahhhhhhh so satisfying. :) I have been masochistically walking in to AppleCentre everytime a new Mac is released, thinking to myself, "This time I will buy it. This time I will buy it."The last Mac I bought was was beloved, second-hand, war-battered G4 Powerbook in 2001 (which I bought for a ridiculously cheap price). It has been hanging on to its last legs together with its elder brother, my G4 PowerMac desktop I got in 2000.

I swore to myself that 2006 would be the year of reckoning: if the school was doing better than I expected, and if I worked hard, I deserved to get a new Mac for Christmas. By March, it looked like a shoe-in. My partner in school rolled her eyes when I mentioned this, and said, "If you already know you are going to buy one at the end of the year, then why don't you just buy it now?"

So here I am, staring with great pleasure at something I have waited so long for. I think its the story of my life.
I think I just like that concept: Good things come to those who wait.
Somehow it makes the thing so much sweeter.

btw, the fact that the new Macs have Intel chips that allow them to reboot as Windows XP? SaAHHHHHHH-WEET.
It feels a little wrong to see Gates' software on Jobs' machine but if it allows me to play Tomb Raider, all power to the Gates!

A Good Book I am Reading Now (courtesy of pretty Photobooth function on G5):
God Talk - Cautions For Those Who Hear God's Voice by Ruth Tucker
very interesting read on how so many of us in Church misunderstand or abuse the term "God spoke to me", "God wants me to..."
I have not reached the conclusion yet but I think it's a pretty honest look at a phenomenon not many of us address in church.
I like it that she specifies the potential stumbling blocks for both the 'Spirit-led' Pentecostals and the 'Word-led' Evangelicals.

Kids say the darndest things...

had the funniest conversation with this 2 year old girl last night - who is REMARKABLY articulate for her age. I love talking to kids. They can make the most rubbish of topics sound cool. Best of all, they have not started to develop any form of self-censorship, layers or impressive airs. Its just therapeutic and pretty relaxing talking to them....you need almost no effort to engage or draw them out. They are just dying to talk.

Exchange one:
Kid: Yesterday I go zoo.
Me: REALLY?! I love the zoo. What did you see there?
Kid: Monkey.
Me: What did monkey do?
Kid: He fall down. He say ooh ooh ah ah.
Me: Wow. DId you see birds?
Kid: Ya.
Me: and what sound did bird make?
Kid: Ooh ooh ah ah.
Me: That's the monkey sound lah. Birds sound like this.
(I start to make ah-beng chirping sounds from side of mouth. Kid stares in astonishment)
Me: (in conspiratorial whisper) Shhh. Don't tell anyone. I am a bird. Do you believe I am a bird?
(Kid nods and stares in wonder, grinning like mad)
Me: I am not a human. I am (pause for dramatic stage whisper) BIG BIRD. GASP! you believe?
Kid: Ya.

Exchange two:
Me: So what school do you go to?
KId: Yakult School.
Me: Yakult school? You mean they give you Yakult to drink there?
Kid: (nods happily)
Me: Wow. you are lucky. You really like yakult huh.....Do yoooooou like Yakult better than......hamsters?
Kid: Ya.
Me: Shall I give you a Yakult...or a RABBIT?
Kid: Yakult.
Me: Yakult.....or ELEPHANT?
Kid: Yakult
Me: Yakult.....or GIRAFFE?
Kid Yakult
Me: Yakult or......CAT?
Kid: Yakult
Me: Is there ANYTHING you possibly want more than Yakult?
Kid: (thinks seriously for a while) Sugar.

heh. the sugar industry has successfully indoctrinated this kid. What is it about yakult that obsesses every kid?

Bella Italia!

italianman
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

ITALY WON THE WORLD CUP! WHOO! :)

I admit I am not much of a soccer fan but I do love watching people watch soccer. Have always tried to make it a point to catch the final match for World Cup.

Avidly gaming to stay awake, at 2am I met up with L at the National Library to watch Italy go up against France on a BIGBIGBIG Sony sponsored screen. :) It was pretty cool - hundreds of Singaporeans were there (including many school age kids...me thinks there will be many absentees today on scholl registers). Hans stayed open all night and the library threw open its toilet doors. Best public screening EVER.

How fabulous was those final penalty kicks? Everybody was screaming away at the library. Couple of German tourists were waving a big German flag for kicks. :)

Me loves Italy even more after the match. I luuuuuurve Buffon. That's one hot goalkeeper. And i dont mean his looks, k. (Although tis quite true that I find the dark, swarthy Italian look much hotter than the blond Gaellic look - In fact, P and I were musing this afternoon about the merits of Luke Skywalker vs Han Solo, Legolas vs Aragon, Cyclops vs Wolvie - I always ended up picking the swarthier, darker eyed of the two. LOL.)

Poor Zidane. That headbutt will go down in football history. and he was so cool in the first half too. :_(

Meanwhile, whoohoo! Italy rocks! So looking forward to Italy trip part 2.

And now for a cute break...

why, hello you
Originally uploaded by waterside.

Am lazy to find photos to load into flickr. But I think blog is in bad need of a cute picture break. Thought I should blog first cute (non fluffy animal) pic I could find in archives. AND well....who can say no to a cutie wutie coochie coo like Baby Naylor? :)

awwwwwww....me likes the little heartbreaker.

Babies are God's way of telling us He doesn't think we are that screwed up yet. Apparently its still worth it to keep that human baby factory going. :)

Cutie Cutie cUTIE! Pinch yer chubby cheeks then you know!

Confessions of Ashara Stormborn, 4th level Cleric of Stormreach

Over the weekend, I was reminded that I had not been updating my blog for the longest time. Its kinda flattering to know people are reading your scribblings, so easily flattered goof that I am, I shall be suckered into trying to update again.

Anyhow: The reason why I have been offline on Blogger is pretty prosaic - I have been disgustingly obsessively playing Dungeons and Dragons Online, which launched in in April. It's my very first MMPORG - Massive Multi-player Online Role-playing Game. Within 30 days, I have racked up a shameful amount of gameplay into the wee hours of morning. But hey, anything to pry that +1 Flameburst Morningstar from the cold virtual hands of the evil Minotaur Priest right?

So in a short bunch of weeks, I have become one of the subculture of gaming nerds that sit in the LAN gaming centres at 3am, yelling, "RUN! THE SPIDER IS BEHIND!! WAH LAUUUUUUUUUUU." I have become well-acquainted with the bursts of virtual gunfire from Counterstrike ("Lock and Lode!" "Terrorists Win!") as well as the grunts of hard-working orcs from World of Warcraft ("workwork").

Apart from fulfilling my persistent need for gaming, it's a really fascinating phenomenon to dissect psychologically and sociologically. Ok, ok - so it sounds like yaya papaya justification for an insidiously time-consuming teenage-boy hobby but REALLY, I think the applications of MMPORG technology and thinking in other fields would be interesting to explore.

Darling Wikipedia informs us:
"MMORPGs have existed since the early 1990s. However, they have a history that extends back into the late 1970s. Over 25 years ago, players would connect to an entirely text-based world (no graphics) called a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) which was usually hosted at a University, sometimes without the knowledge of the system's administrators. The gameplay and community of these games was similar to the MMORPGs of today. MMORPGs have begun to attract significant academic attention, notably in the fields of economics and psychology that study relationships between real world economies and societies vs. synthetic economies and societies...."

What I think is interesting is how we take our real life personalities and ethics into the virtual world as well. Gaming - like sports - presents insights into people's motivations and character. I read somewhere that the cleric class tends to attract certain types of people - either the person wants to be really independent and self sufficient (able to fight and heal himself at the same time) or he does not mind using his own resources to help other people (spending spell points on healing other people instead of conserving for himself) Sounds more or less like why I keep playing the class.

Now based on that little tidbit of human psychology, we tested it out in real gameplay. My friend played a wizard and she got herself cursed and blinded - essentially useless to the party. I was too low level a cleric to have the spell Remove Curse/Blindness. So we sent her to a tavern in the game where other players from all over the world hang out and had her send a virtual shout-out, "Alms for the blind? Help the blind and needy". In-game, when you are cursed it is obvious to everybody as there is a gigantic ugly red and black light above your head. Sure enough, a total stranger helped out.

She, being Christian, could not resist sending out another virtual shout-out, "I was blind but now I see! Thnx."

Heh. Ok, Shall go find more serious topics to write about soon.

Meanwhile, I am officially a geek.

But you know....even The Geek shall inherit. haha

h@te!

I REALLY REALLY REALLY h@te the overuse of "@".

I get severe heartburn (akin to when I hear timmy thomas' Dying Inside To Hold You, but that's a rant for another day) when I see it! So was superduper amused when I found someone had already written a diatribe on it. I particularly love his analogy about the 50 year old man - it really really hits the spot! :)

BadBranding@Singapore by Imagethief

"I keep thinking that the brand developers of Singapore will outgrow "@", and they keep disappointing me. I was scandalized five years ago when the glamorous, new office tower at Dhoby Ghaut was named "Atrium@Orchard". In 2006 using "@" in a brand is beyond unforgivable. It's the branding equivalent of a fifty-year old man with a pot-belly and severe male-pattern baldness growing a pony tail and getting his ears pierced in a futile attempt to stay youthfully hip. It reveals a failure to grasp contemporary style that is so final and absolute that it obliterates by definition the very sensibility that it was meant to create."

literary memes?

Literary Meme #1: Stray Thoughts
"1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences (#5,6,7) on your blog, along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it. Just grab what is closest. No cheating."

My nearest book was in my bag "Soul Survivor - How 13 Unlikely Mentors Helped Me Survive The Church" by Philip Yancey. The sentences come from the chapter about Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky. Two authors I keep feeling inspired to read but never actually getting down to it.

"As I look back now on the cloister of Southern fundamentalism in which I grew up, I wonder if perhaps I suffered from a narcissitic disorder. I saw the world through the shuttered windows of church and family, with no ability to project out of myself and comprehend the viewpoint of, say, a sharecropper in rural Alabama or a Polish immigrant in the Bronx, much less a member of the aristocracy or a peasant in 19th century Russia. Tolstoy threw open the curtains, beckoning me into a world I knew nothing about."

Great book! The opening chapter about pastor turned controversial civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. and the closing chapter about Catholic priest Henri Nouwen are truly moving. The last paragraph in the Nouwen chapter is just....phwoar.


Literary Meme #2: 6 Writers who Shaped Your Thinking (and their book that meant the most to you so far)

1) Louisa M Alcott - the Little Women quartet (Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men and Jo's Boys)
2) Anita Roddick - Business as Unusual
3) Paul of Tarsus - First Letter to the Corinthians
4) John Zebedee- The Gospel of John
5) Philip Yancey - What's So Amazing About Grace?
6) C S Lewis - Mere Christianity

dream dream dream

this post is triggered off by Orangeclouds' posting about her strange angry dream. Suddenly made me recall that i had the oddest dream last night - one more to add to my collection of strange movie-dreams.
________________________________________________

I am hustling through a dark neighbourhood filled with confusing side-streets and poorly marked signposts. I am obviously hurrying "home" - wherever home is in the dream. A group of strangers run past me at one point carrying parangs. I am momentarily freaked but glad that they ignored me. Feeling tense and scared, I finally find the compound I am looking for.

In front of the compound, a guard says, "Quick, get in , get in, they are looking for people." He resumes sitting on his wooden stool, pretending to slump casually so he does not alert anyone of the tension going within the compound.

I fumble at the crusty old wooden gate, wondering where the latch is. When I finally find it and step in to the courtyard, I see a man being tended to by a woman. He sees me and says, "They chopped off my fingers."

I look at his hands - indeed, they are a mangled jigsaw of flesh. Some fingers are foreshortened, some have been crudely sewn back. His hands are an angry red colour.

I wake up.
___________________________________________________

bizarro. This goes down in the books, right next to my "Conversations with Hitler", "Japanese Samurai Household Dies in Symbolic Glory and "Attack of the KIller Cartoon Shark" dreams. They are just so way out there beyond comprehension.

My recurring dreams are simpler to understand - "Going To Europe And Discovering I did not Pack" is about fear of not being prepared. "Chinese Exam Day And Discovering I did not Study" is about fear of not being prepared (again!) and old chinese exam anxiety (yes, it still haunts me), "My Room Turns into the Temple of Doom!" is about my childhood paranoia about snakes.
I have yet to figure out what those dreams about losing all your teeth mean.

Best recurring dreams I have had would be "Travelling in Europe for a month and only waking up when plane touches down" (desire to go on more holidays) and "Cute Guy Shares Umbrella With Me in the Rain" (desire for cute guy to share umbrella with me in the rain? cheeeeem.)

Someday, it would be nice if God could tell us why he gave us strange dreams. Freud's answers just cannot make it ah!

boob tube

So on the 1030pm bus ride home, I lug myself up the double deck. Sit down and lo and behold, TV mobile is beaming the Victoria Secret show. The wonders of technology - Free Boob-Show across hundreds of buses across Singapore! LIVE! In Technicolour!

I am not exaggerating to say almost every single male on the upper floor could not keep their eyes from wandering towards the flickering images of boobsy supermodels struttin' their stuff in the flimsiest of bra and panty combos. Even I had a hard time stopping myself from giving the models the once over. After all, those ubiquitous angel wings and bling-blings Tyra Banks and Heidi Klum were sporting weren't exactly doing a great job at providing cover.

Quite funny to see how the Victoria Secret show tried to 'intelligent' up their show by having industry experts comment on how talented Miz Banks was, how she brought 'a certain something' to the poses and runway strut. Okaaaay.

Anyhow, its definitely a mildly disturbing experience to sit among a whole floor of guys - young teens and old uncles - so obviously hypnotised by the boob tube. Ack. It parallels the time I went to a comic convention and saw a whole ARMY of guys camcordering this girl dressed up as Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider. You could tell from their expressions what they were trying to capture. Ew ew ew!

hello, TV Mobile! what's up with the boob parade!?

silly conversation

guy: Eh you want to eat cake? W just passed this to me. He got it for me while he was on holiday with a friend.

Me: Oh that's so sweet that he thought of you while he was overseas!

guy: Sweet? Wah lao, that's what you girls would say lah. We men don't need that kind of thing.

Me: So what did you meet up with him just now for?

guy: oh he wanted to pass it to me and just chit chat.

Me: Aw. That's nice of him. He wants to be your friend!

guy: Ah talktalktalk that's all you girls are interested in. Everything also wanna talk. We men just meet up, don't need to talk, just do things. Like that friend friend enough what. W must be gay lah. always want to Talk talktalk.eh how come you girls can be total strangers but meet up then can talk talk already?

Me: dunno. wired like dat lor. we like the company. anyway you guys will play basketball with strangers also what.

Guy: That's different. No talking involved. Just game.

Me: Then after game, if the stranger guy tries to start conversation or asks you to go out with the rest of them to eat dinner, will you go?

Guy: That depends. If I won the game, then yeah I will go. If I lost, no way.

Me: Hah?! This is why you men die earlier, right? You drive yourselves crazy. You guys are crazy.

(Note: No guys were harmed in the making of this blog. Also this conversation was totally tongue in cheek.)

mambo revisited

Last week I had agreed to accompany these 2 kids to Zouk's infamous Mambo Night. They thought it would be good to get 'exposed to the happening things'. Ha. So standing in the uber long queue to get in, surrounded by gaggles of teenyboppers, I wondered if I had made a mistake. I was obviously in a whole other age bracket from the rest of the crowd. :)

People-watching at Mambo Night as an Old Fogey yields great fruit. Unlike a regular club with people my age, you can go really invisible here. Nobody wants to check out or chat up the Lao Aunty after all right?

Things to note:

#1: Many Mambogirls like to wear that hip-bone shearing, low-cut denim skirt as popularised by Mischa Barton of the O.C.
Team it with long straight hair and lashings of plastic beaded jewellery. A popular runner up look - the evergreen lowcut cami and low-slung jeans combo. Sure-fire combo to get people staring at you especially when one has drunk too much, passed out on Jiak Kim Street itself and Zao-geng for the whole world. Nice.

And SCENE - "SAndra! Do NOT Slide down on me! Get up. Come on STAND up!" Girl trying to hoist up friend who had slithered off a bench and onto the road, said-low slung jeans sliding dangerously half-down her bum. Her valiant friends
had to struggle with simultaneously hoisting her as well as her jeans back up the bench. She thanked them by throwing up. Friends loyally held her hair back and rubbed her back. Ah....undergraduate friendship! Those were the days.

#2: Mamboguys are a lot better dressed and dance way better than mamboguys from my era. Gelled up Japanese street hair is de rigeur, teamed with polo tee with collar turned up (preppie look), or t-shirt with some nutty graphic (street look). Adventurous ones added on a funky jacket.

#3: Mass Dance is in. Gone is the one-finger in the air, shake your booty like you just don't care male undergrad dance.
Apparently everybody has studied the same library of dance moves and do it together like some kind of Dance Dance Revolution or Para Para thing. And they do it with frightening intensity! You ain't seen nothing yet till you have seen the moves to Sqaure Rooms. The action for the chorus is reminiscent of the moves I used to make with my fingers for Itsy Bitsy Spider. Brrrr.

#4: Zouk is like the new Church for the kids. When Michael Jackson's Heal the World came on, this wierd hush came over the crowd, everyone sang in unison as if it was some great hymnal. They did it for Black Eyed Peas "Where Is The Love as well". It was kind of bizarre. I still hate the MJ song I realise - "There are people dying! If you care enough for the living, make a better world for you and for me!" Come on....Gah the sugariness! the empty goody-goody lyrics!

#5: They play some one-kind of bizarre songs - techno Dancing Queen anyone? GhostBusters?
Oh and they played Timmy Thomas 'Dying Inside to Hold You". Ten years has not been enough to kill my hate for that song. Gah!

All in all, had a pretty good time actually. But like the Old Fogey that I am, the nicest part was the post Mambo, go Geylang for cold soya bean drink bit.

"So would you go back again? Did you have fun?"

"Ya maybe. Did not recognise many of the songs. I don't get out much. Swakoo."

"It's ok, lah. Not important to fit in to the culture. You got a lot going for you already. It's fun, just go with a bunch of good friends you can trust but don't need to keep going back. Enjoy the fun parts but don't go looking for the darker side of it."

"Got darker side meh?"

"Ya....its stuff you only notice when you get older lah. It was all happening right in front of you but you were too busy looking at the ParaPara platform dancers."

"Ya you know like that horrijible Pussycats Dolls song? Dontcha wish ya girlfriend was HOT like me? Dontcha wish your girlfriend was WRONG like me? DONTCHA! All those girls trying too hard to be sexy to get the attention of the guys."

"Gross. Mmmm soya bean."

:)

While a file uploads...

am stuck in an internet cafe while the rain is pouring outside. I have got two 2.7MB files to send out and yahoo mail is taking centuries to attach my files to the email. Oh the wonders of the Internet age. Takes me less than a minute to access my email but almost much more than that to get the mail sent out. grrr. At least the damage is minimum - $1.50 for 30 minutes of use. Cannot complain.

Shall write List while waiting....(love lists...another reason why I love High Fidelity)

4 Sites that I just surfed while waiting for Yahoo to do its work:

1) Bioware.com: To see progress on Neverwinter Nights 2.

2) my own school of thought mail server - which apparently is doing a much faster job uploading my fat files.

3) Rottentomatoes.com: to check out reviews for Harry Potter. Loved Goblet of Fire!That has to be the best cinematic dragon I have seen so far. Also, those kids are really really growing up fast. Those are man muscles on Harry and Ron..scary.

4) TuxedoDiplomat's recommendation: a nice little animation about love lost and gained again on
http://www.cube-creative.fr/site/html/nt/nt_lc/akoa_hd.html

Okay Down to my last minute of time before I have to pay more than $1.50. Logging off now like the miser that I am. :)

Thou Shall Not Commitee

neonangel
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

interesting find on the web:

Funny article about Civil Servants and Waste-Time Meetings : "Civil servants spent an enormous amount of time attending meetings or generally doing things related to meetings, like drafting minutes, or begging people to attend. I think if we combine all the time we used for meetings, we may have enough time to build an aircraft carrier for Singapore.

Vanity Thy Name is Blogger

Blogging has become a Singaporean phenomenon not unlike bubble tea, pork floss buns and portuguese egg-tarts.

Bubble tea was fun, novel and tasty when it first arrived. People who discovered it first felt proud to have found a delicious new treat. But a good secret cannot stay secret for long - Word spread, popularity caught on and whoosh before you know it, bubble tea everywhere! Happy Cup! Yummy Cup! Bubble Cup! Etc. Cup!

The inevitable problem was 2 pronged :
One, in a bid to jump on the bandwagon, many vain people started selling crap-tasting, cheap rip off bubble tea, which put off lots of people who were curious late-comers into the phenomenon.
Two: many people who were always put off by the idea of bubble tea got even more peeved because the disgusting stuff was actually getting such attention. Adding fuel to the fire was that landmark report about ho bad bubble tea was for ya...those teeny black starch balls apparently were hyper calorific! Disgruntlement and diatribes ensued. The backlash of bubble tea hit - and tons of bubble tea shops found themselves closing. People moved on to Roti Boy. But the truly yummy bubble tea shops remained, as did those who always loved it for what it was, and genuine bubble tea lived on forever, quietly ever after.

ok my starting point, is that....that's what I think about blogging.

The medium is not the message: There are vain bloggers, wannabe bloggers, prejudiced bloggers etc. but there are genuine ones, honest ones, and entertaining ones. Intrinsically, blogs like paint, pixels, poems, songs are just repositories of people's personalities. One cannot judge the medium by the message. They are separate.

But is blogging a vain thing?

why of course, yes, it is!

But so is one's entire existence, every action, every word, every breath we breathe is vanity, vanity, vanity. Blogging, acting, singing, making music, writing poetry, having intelligent conversation, playing games, playing sports etc. etc. - all are mediums for Vanity to rear its nasty head.

Pride haunts everything we do because of our earthly, ungodly predisposition towards sin. So what are we to do?

Recognise we are intrinsically vain, pray for humility
Never let your guard down. Always be prepared to edit what you said.
Always be prepared to admit a wrong. Be responsible.
Know that with blogging, you intrinsically give up privacy and like it or not, you gotta balance the need for self-expression together with the need to edify and encourage.

As Mad Eye Moody would roar," CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!!!!"

My cybername is neonangel. I am a blogger. I am vain.
I like an audience. I like being patted on the back. I like seeing comments on my pages. I try to curb it but vanity taints my every post - sometimes 5% vanity, sometimes 90% vanity, but aiyah, always got vanity one lah no matter what! When will my blogs not be vain? Wellllll, if God decides to be funny and sets up blogging points in heaven, then yeah, maybe Post-2ND COMING then....no more vanity in my blogs.

meanwhile, just as I love bubble tea still...so do I love blogging. It has brought me new friends, new insights, and new openness with old friends who open up in the blogging medium in ways that they never did in the normal talking-in-real-life medium.

It's a cool medium, but one fraught with many responsibilities to consider.

Blogs are not private things. They are by nature public, exposed and tied to an outside world that calls for an answer to what you say and what you do.

But then again, so is the entire Christian life. :)

PS: Red Milk Bubble Tea kicks so much ass on a hot day. Peach Yogurt Sunrise Bubble Shake also macham shiok.
My fave bubble tea takeaway is the one just outside Orchard Emerald. $1.90 goodness plus free tissue. whoo.