Bad Boys

corto1
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

since i have been having so many wordy entries, it's time for a silly picture break. Me in Florence, playing besotted bimbo to Hugo Pratt's legendary Corto Maltese. (There was a Corto Maltese exhibition on)

Corto is pretty much everything that Pastor Chris warned us women to stay away from over the weekend - dashing, debonair, wealthy, exciting and ambitious. Plus Corto's wicked "Mr Darcy " sideburns and pirate-y earring are just dead giveaways that he is one Bad Boy. (In the comics, Corto has a trail of international girlfriends...the fiend!) I admit - the stylishness of the character blew me away. Pratt really pinned down the suave sailor archetype he was going for.

ah well.

too bad not all bad boys are 2 dimensional paper creations so that women can stay smart and stay away from them.

Actually, you know, ... bad boys are truly two dimensional flat things. They are not that complex at the day - love them, leave them, blah blah blah angst, repeat cycle. The bad boy is not called a bad boy for nothing....he never really grows up. Their cultivated air of "deepness" is really nothing much at the end of the day.

I say give me the complicated workings of the man of God any day! Now THAT is a real 3D, REALLY deep type of man. His angst at least will be well founded on the angst to do God's will rather than angst over goodness knows what.

And as the Venerable Pastor Chris reminded us so sagely, boys and girls, ....when you see a wise man or woman of God, GRAB THEM YOU IDIOT...why let a good thing slip by for a chance with the pseudo exciting Corto-s around (and Corto-seans for that matter)!

July Is the Hottest Month

July is lined up with exciting stuff!

Project Timothy Bible Conference (July 15-17, 2005)
God's Sovereignty, Our Assurance
www.projecttimothy.com

SONIC FEST 28th to 30th July (Thursday to Saturday)
Fort Canning Green
with Sonic Flood and PLanetShakers performing.
$20 - $30 for a 1 day ticket
Singapore's annual cutting-edge Christian music and creative arts festival
http://www.sonicfest.net/programme.html

Two Evening Lectures: organized by Eagles
Ravi Zacharias "A Life that has Lost its Focus"
and Peter Mouw "Godliness in an Unspiritual Workplace"
July 28 & 29, 2005
7.30 - 9.30 pm
Orchard Hotel, 442 Orchard Road
http://www.eagles.com.sg/lectures.html

Retro partayyyyyy

in anticipation of ChromoDomo's retro party this sat, have been trawling my sister's massive collection of MP3s for good old 80s golden oldies.

it's a blast hearing StereoMcs do "Get Connected" and "Step It Up" again. Makes me remember KLF's 3am Eternal and 2 Unlimited! Must go find my old Cathy Dennis album now. heehee.

milestones

Walking in Christ starts you on a crazy journey of change. Major milestones in my little walk with Christ include:

- the first time I realised I was selfish and self-centred
-the first time I realised Love (in the agape sense) was difficult.
- the first time I took leadership and Christian service seriously
- the first time I understood "The Gospel is Alive"
- the first time I had someone tell me my worth in Christ
- the first time I had someone tell me thank you for sharing Christ with them

so last weekend marked a major turning point in my Christian walk.
It has been one coming for a very long time.

the first time i prayed together with my mom.

and if you know me and my mom, that is really really a big big thing.

Funny thing was that just earlier in that week when I was talking to J. about how tough it was to be a godly Chinese daughter, she challenged me to pray with my mom. My first reaction was simply horror. Horror at how good and simple and sensible J's suggestion was. Horror at knowing now that I heard it I had to do it. I told J plainly, "It's a good idea. But frankly it freaks me out. I don't want to do it." J. prayed for opportunity and for God to help me. I did not give it much serious thought after that.

But things work out in mysterious ways and somehow, in the most weirdly natural of ways, driven by events I did not prepare for, J's prayer worked.

For the full lurid story in all its full blown drama-mama, look for me, the horse's mouth.

Suffice to say, God really amazes me. When they say He transforms and changes you, they were not kidding. It sure darn well was not Me that was doing the praying and talking with my mom on Sunday. It was defintely the Holy Spirit doing His thing. No other explanation for that.

Floored man, abso-freakin-lutely floored.

"Joshua raised the bar!" and other funny conversations

Post ARPC mass meeting, a bunch of us went for drinks at Adam Road hawker centre. Amusing table talk centred around what guys should do to get girls interested in them (hint: it may not be the ability to carve salad bowls and candle-sticks. Or worse, crying while being moved at how well you carve the bowls).

Which led DaMooMan to joke, "It's all church camp's fault. Now every girl in ARPC wants a guy like Pastor Joshua Ng. What hope is there for the rest of us now that he has set the bar so high?" Apparently, Joshua's much lauded choking up when talking about little son and his little Star Wars reenactments with said son had endeared him to many women at ARPC.

I thought about it - I definitely must have thought "awwww....look at how sensitive and sweet the guy is." But that was not the big thing that moved me most. It was more like a "look at how much God matters to this guy." What some of us girls found really moving about the whole thing was he was not just crying about missing his son, but more because he was moved that his little son knew why his father had to sacrifice family time to spread the gospel. That last heart wrenching plea for us to live for Christ and live out His ways sacrificially in all that we do, spreading the true gospel was amazing.

for a man (or woman for that matter) to be attractive, and assuming he/she is going for a godly partner, all he/she really has to do is to seek God first.

It seems to be a simple win-win situation actually. If in becoming more godly, you end up attracting a very godly man/woman, you hit the jackpot - a walk closer to Christ and a new ministry focused more on your spouse and children. If in becoming more godly, you end up still not getting attached, you also hit the jackpot - a walk closer to Christ and an abundance of time and freedom for opportunities to minister . In both cases, you get contentment and joy, albeit in different ways.

But the source stays the same - God supplies the joy.

Singles like me can live on that hope. Joy comes in many forms and singlehood and marriage are both equally lovely gifts because they come from a lovely Giver.

As an odd postscript, I just got my first clandestine inquiry if i minded being "set-up" with some mysterious guy. heh. guess it was just a matter of time before the "setting up" phenomenon came my way. i hear it's catching on in our little church post church camp.
________________

yet another postscript - conversation with the Moth and CatGirl at church. Thought it was funny because it kinda reminded me of the kind of rubbish conversations about pop culture that might happen in Seinfeld or in Clerks (the Kevin Smith movie)

Moth: I hate touchy feely...!
Me: No you don't you are a musician and music is all about the touchy feely
Catgirl: Bach is quite mathematical actually.
Me: But he likes jazz and soul..that's quite touchy feely.
Moth: No it's not. It comes from here (jabs his own chest)
Me: and that's not touchy feely? in a manly way? anyway It's called SOUL ... that's quite touchy feely
Moth: I am NOT touchy feely. I watch war movies like Band of Brothers... Saving Private Ryan
Me: Saving Private Ryan is like the girliest war movie around.
Catgirl: Yeah actually it is quite touchy feely.
Moth: No it's not!
Me: Oh come on...the last scene where the old guy is weeping over the grave....
Catgirl: "I hope my life was worth it...." sob sob
Moth: OK...ya that was quite (rubs goose pimples on hand and shivers)...but it's not a girly movie!!!!

heehee.

it is well with my soul

a far wiser follower of Christ once wrote this song a long time ago. he had lost his family to tragedy and yet found within him some kind of courage and faith to stand by everything he believed. HIs words I imagine must have been so incredibly loaded with pain and tears as they found themselves immortalised in paper and in music. Yet these same words helped sustain him and bring hope to many others who hear it decades on.

I pray I will always learn from his example in all my problems - big and small.
It's one of my favourite hymns by far and a good thing to remember post weekend angst:

When peace like a river attendeth my way
When sorrows like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul

It is well (It is well)
With my soul (with my soul)
It is well, it is well with my soul

My sin, O the joy of this glorious thought
My sin not in part but the whole
Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul

And Lord haste the day
When my faith shall be sight
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll
The trump shall resound and
The Lord shall descend
Even so it is well with my soul

my way or the highway

the weekend has been full of reminders about how the way of Christ is truly divided from the way of the world. Sometimes my life is so content that I forget that the essential call for followers of Christ is to be set up in opposition to the world.

i hate confrontation although i recognise the need for it. Increasingly I have been convicted of the need to speak up and be bold about the gospel and everything it implies on my life, values and outlook. But when I actually try to do it, despite all of God's warnings , I am still strangely shocked by how hard and painful it is to live by His ways.

My life can be in an easy, happy, cruise control mode. I can choose to coast along, not dealing with family, friends, strangers in a deep and meaningful manner. I can live as a surface follower of Christ with simple, happy pithy sayings, shallow assurances of 'i will be there for you" "i will pray for you" etc. or i can really commit my life to doing it right and really really be there fopr people or pray for people.

the challenge is too much:. Love is so difficult. Truth is so hard.

How do you act in graciousness and patience and kindness and yet not back down on voicing on the truth, and possibly causing pain to others and hassle to your own life? How do you rest assured that a life devoted to humbly serving God and serving people is not a stupid choice in a world that tells you your status depends on your money, your title, your romantic conquests and your earthly possessions?

i should not be shocked and scared but i still am. we live in a scary world. go out on a limb to live out in truth and love and there may be a strong chance that you will get bitten, get hurt, get downtrodden, get misunderstood, get mocked or laughed at.

by my own understanding, i should either pretend not to see the needs around me and coast along in "blissful, blind christianhood" or get all self-righteous and angry about things. but by leaning on God's understanding of the world, i see a far more frightening and yet more fruitful response ; persevere, fight, run the race, love with all your mind and heart and strength whatever the cost.

in the morning, i talked with Pastor Ting about the problem with having to be an example of Christ-likeness in a non Christian family. in the night, i had a disturbing conversation with my father about the life and ambitions I have chosen to live for. It was not like we quarrelled or anything, it was a pretty decent, nice conversation. but I felt the burden of how silly my life must look to him sometimes - i don't make the kind of money that my exalted Rafllesian peers must be making right now. I did not run down the scholarship path that I was expected to. I still think he wishes I did so just to set his mind at ease that I have a good future.

i went to bed, wretched and in tears. it was pretty painful to think through whether I was truly not trying hard enough to do the things i could be doing, earn the kind of money that i could be earning. I think the only way I got to sleep was because I kept pleading to God, "Please be real, please be real, please be true. Don't let me be put to shame. My whole life is staked on the fact that you are true." Sent out a bunch of pathetic SOS type SMSs to friends, the way you fling out bottles to sea hoping for a rescue response.

In the morning, I woke to messages in virtual bottles, floating back on a sea of ether. The many encouraging SMSs from fellow "fools in Christ". Their many words of Truth brought peace again. Picked myself up, found my daily bread and continued walking, the way it has always been for every Christian since Christ walked earth.

How much harder it must be for Christians who have far more painful, difficult walks to go through? I am tempted sometimes to brush aside my own struggles because they sound so stupid compared to real Christian martyrs. Yet God assures us He understands and sees each of our individual pains - we don't need to feel embarrassed at our individual struggles, as long as we follow HIs way, we will never be brought to shame.

Come home soon, Lord Messiah. We need you, man.
We need your kingdom soon to replace the screwed up one we have on earth.

now for a very short whine...

got a deadline at 6pm.
software programme keeps shutting down.
tired from dealng with people.
hate corporations.
tired from too little sleep.
whine whine whine.
rinse repeat wash.
hang out to dry.
stupid computer.

okay time to try the programme again.
ten minutes to finish. it better work.

Why I am a Christian or Testimony ver. 1.0

along the lines of "power of a good story' thoughts....been thinking about collecting testimony stories from people around church. Think it would be a cool project. decided to work on my own testimony first and was surprised at how fun it was to sit down and try to put my christian walk in words. Beware: Long blog ahead ( i blame church camp)

++++++++++++++++++++Testimony ver 1.0+++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Christian life is full of paradoxes. The bizarre way which God makes sense out of madness is not the easiest thing to understand. He enters your life in the most poignant and intimate of ways and yet remains heart-wrenchingly elusive and intangible. He is out of reach and yet he is in your heart.

Jesus Christ once said that the secret of the kingdom of God was given to us all. It sounds so disgustingly simple: Seek it and we shall find. Ask of it and it shall be given to us. And yet for many, it is the most difficult concept to grasp.

If we look with just our eyes and mere Reason, God is a mystery, a "profound secret", a "great mystery", irritatingly hidden.

But if we add Faith to Reason and care to look with all our heart, mind and strength, God is there. He is beautifully, heart-breakingly, miraculously, astonishingly there all before us.

He is unmistakably present in the miracle of Creation itself – any designer, architect, artist and scientist with a shred of devotion to Truth to his art can vouch for the profound sense of Intelligent Design in everything around us; He is unmistakably present in the lives of every one of His believers. When I listen to the life stories of any one who has discovered Christ, I find the fingerprints of Intelligence - masterful, intricate chess moves that shape one’s destiny and identity.

I am not saying that you won’t find Intelligence and order in your life if you never find Christ. I am saying that it’s when you find Christ, that’s when you really start to see the actual extent of how far and how deep He has touched your entire lifespan and beyond, and how intricately He has knit it into the lives of others and the fate of this Universe itself.

The realisation is quite flooring and I don’t think I can ever fully grasp it with my brain. I can barely grasp the structure of an atom or how the theory of relativity actually works. Then again, I can barely grasp basic accountancy.

* * *

My father is what Singaporeans call a free thinker. From young, he filled our shelves with philosophical books and enthusiastically touted the teachings of Tao, Buckminister Fuller, Bertrand Russell, Karl Marx and Sai Baba to us kids. He was also liberal enough to allow us personal choice in religion. My mother is a Christian. But she is also an old school stoic Chinese mother. While there were Bibles lying around the house, she never talked to me about the gospel or Jesus – she talked about going to church like she talked to me about eating vitamin C - "It’s good for you." Her advice to me about the Bible was curt, "Just read Proverbs. Very good advice. Read and will be wise."

Growing up in a Catholic convent school, I knew vaguely there was a God. Thus, my assumption from young was that Christianity was just like any other ‘good religious ideology’. Christ was almost absent in my mind. He was a mysterious, sad, pitiful figure, always present on some small cross in school. Frankly, I was probably more aware of who Father Barre (founder of my school) and Mother Mary were, given the size of their statues on the school grounds.

My earliest memory of encountering God was when I was around 8 or 9. My mother had dragged me to church one Sunday morning. At worship, I saw an old woman standing in front of me, her eyes fixed towards the ceiling, her hands raised heavenward. She was consumed in her devotion to praising something I did not understand. I remember thinking, "God, if that’s you inspiring her, I also want it. Give me that big thing that she is experiencing." I closed my eyes and willed for the ceiling to open, or for a big voice to boom in my little head. I wanted The Big Feeling. But of course, nothing of the sort happened. I was mildly disappointed but gave no more thought to it. When you are a kid, you don’t focus on things like that for long.

My other key Christian influence at childhood were the books that I read: The Dragonlance novels (inspired by Mormonism), the Narnia books (by the famous Christian theologian CS Lewis) and Lousie M Alcott’s Little Women series (filled with Christian references). Vague as it was, those books showed me something important. I knew at heart there was a big lovely Good Thingamajig out there. I talked to that Good Thingamajig in moments of desperation or when I was simply searching for Someone smarter and larger than anyone I knew to talk to. I called Him God then. But I did not really know Him. We were acquaintances.

God in my teenage years was reduced to pretty PASS IT ON cards that I liked buying. He never went beyond being a nice grandfather in the sky with good advice. Growing up was difficult. Wrestling with problems is tough when people assume you are mature enough to handle them yourself, and when you are smugly convinced you can handle it yourself. Life then was a potent cocktail of angst over grades, looks, hormones, psychotic friends who played mind-games, eating disorders and a constant roller-coaster of a tussle with self-esteem. I hated myself at times – tried half-seriously to commit suicide once at 14 at the height of my misery with said-psychotic friends; stared at the mirror countless times, willing myself to be prettier, skinnier, sharper-nosed, smaller-mouthed, narrower-shouldered, smaller-armed, taller, more delicate, more feminine, more more more more.

I realised I was never going to be enough and the pain of it all was that I had to try anyway because that’s the way the world works. No excuses. Just Do It. The Best is Yet to Be. Daughters of a Better Age. Awaken the Giant Within. No Fear. The list went on and on and on. There is little grace in a world where you are expected to be your own Maker.

My struggle with eating disorders and chronic self-hate ended in university through a combination of self-help books, simple growing up and sheer dumb survival instinct. The best thing I realised through my wilderness years was this - I was basically a stupid and selfish person. For me, my eating disorder was a selfish thing – it came about from a world-view that cared nothing for others, but all about me. I never thought about loving them. I just wanted their attention and their envy. Yet simultaneously, I hated people for their stupidity, their shallowness and judgementalism. I wanted to win at a game that I despised. Quite frankly, it takes one stupid, shallow, judgemental person to recognise another. There was nothing to be proud of about recognizing the sinfulness of the people around me. The only reason I could see it was because I was just like them. No better at the heart of it. You cannot quantify sin. Sin simply does not work like mathematics or science. When sin is present in you, it’s just present. Not in less or more quantities. Just present.

In my second year in university, a weird guy from my crisis hotline society walked into my studio, bought me a cake and talked to me about how he was praying on a rooftop when he got a vision from God to talk to me. I like freaks, being a bit of a freak myself. So I listened. We ended up becoming really good friends as it turned out. He was confused with my stand that I believed in God and Christ but was not a Christian. So I agreed to check out his church service for the heck of it. And that’s when everything changed.

I remember making dumb jokes about how his church’s colour scheme were all shades of papaya and it was secretly the Cult of the Great Papaya. I remember going with the flow and singing along with all the happy worship songs. What I will always remember is how suddenly a great overwhelming feeling came over me and I suddenly started to cry. Like Big Big Big Crying. Unstoppable, uncontrollable crying. But it was a crying that was not sad or painful, just salt water coming from eyes kind of crying. It was not cathartic or emotional at all, it was just tears pouring out without reason. I looked at my friend with a mute look of, "what’s happening to me?" and he was traumatized like, "WAH LAU. What’s up with you?" The rest of the service I just sat in my seat, not hearing any thing. Everything was a blur. I had no idea what just happened. I could not explain it. And over supper, as I talked to my friend, we decided nobody could really figure out what that was all about. It seemed that it did not really matter whether I cried because it was God having his Ha-Has or because I was deeply neurotic. The most logical thing seemed to be – Go to church, find out what this God is about once and for all. If I see anything I did not like, I was free to leave. Maybe somehow I could figure out this whole nonsense. It seemed like a no-brainer, win win situation.

And so I stayed. And stayed. And never ever found one reason to leave and found many many more reasons to stay.

The longer I stayed in the Church of God, the more I realised He was the only thing that made everything make sense. The early wonder at nature I felt, the yearning for Big Good Something in my heart, the realisation of my own culpability, my own shallowness and how it worked with the world’s shallowness. And it hit me too that the very first prayer I prayed when I watched the old woman raise her hands to Him had been answered in a roundabout strange way. I got my Big Zap from the sky like I wished as a kid. It was like God knew what I had asked for, given it to me and yet taught me along the way that knowing Him was more than just a search for elusive feelings. Time and time again, He worked that maddening way. I asked Him questions, begged Him with requests and He would answer them in strange, off-tangent but yet on-the-dot ways.

And along the way, I understood Christ – His grace, His sacrifice, His example. Only recently have I understood why they say the fear of God is the fountain of life, the beginning of all wisdom. Before knowing God and Christ, I assumed Hope was Optimism. I now know that real Hope has a foundation, as solid as a rock, as eternal as time. I embrace the knowledge that there is going to be an End of all things and that Day will be one where all injustices will be dealt with and judgments will be made. Every evil-doer who got away with their crimes will suddenly realise they have not gotten away at all. I fear and revere this Day where the earth will yawn out its dead and every good and bad deed will be made known.

The secret hope all of us have in our hearts that the world was meant to be a better place is real. Scarily real. And knowing God means I have been Graced with the chance to be on the side that will not be judged as harshly. I know I do not deserve to be on that side. All I did was believe in Christ, cling to His extended hand. And somehow that is enough.

Maybe this life is actually prosaic.
Maybe thanks to my childhood love for fantasy epics of heroes and quests, I am inclined to see poetry in mundanity.
Maybe I am psychologically inclined towards wanting my life to be an epic, for Life to have a quest, a big Happy Ending. Maybe I am wrong about God and His hand upon my life.
Maybe at the end of days, this will all turn out to be a big hoakey mistake.

But for now, I seriously doubt it. I believe with all my being that He is Right – the Right-est thing I have in my life – and He steers my life towards an end beyond my imagination. He is the One thing I cannot afford to and never want to lose.

the power of a good story

have been thinking about how much power a story has to pass a message.

sometimes we need logic and reason, structure and order to get a point across. that's why we learn argumentative writing and academic writing, the nitty gritty 'topic sentences', ' thesis statements' etc. etc. I find this style of writing easiest to teach because it is so sensible and inherently clean to the mind. Any student can grapple with it - the weakest students in fact grasp the concept of order the best because they are so desperate for something to build something out of their confusion.

i find fictional writing, narrative stories the hardest to teach because you start to go beyond the realm of the logical brain and into the realm of imagination and feeling. Argumentative writing just requires you to think well. Narrative writing requires you to think coherently, feel deeply and see deeply. Good narrative writers instinctively watch the world, understand people and feel wonder where most people see mundanity.

Ravi Zacharias once said that grownups lose their sense of wonder because as we get older, it takes larger and larger concepts and things to capture our imagination and fill the gap of emptiness within.

you see, we were all built for another world, another time and place. we were built for better things in the beginning. but things Fell apart and inside every human being is a nagging horrible sense of loss, brokenness and emptiness. As children, we fill up that nagging sense of Something Wrong easily because we don't know much about the big picture of life yet. Swimming in the sun, gorging on ice-cream cones, playing with the neighbour's cat, hearing a ghost story, Christmas presents....all these things filled us up because our world view was so small.

As we aged, and experienced more of a broken world, we soon realised how truly large the gap within us is. Suddenly all those little things that used to fill us up were great but not enough. We needed bigger things to fill us up. And we spend all our life searching for the bigger thing - money, technology, ideology, philosophy, marriage, ambition, career.

Ravi Zacharias notes profoundly that the only thing big enough to fill that yawing abyss within us - is the very concept of God. The wonder of a God who Loved so deeply that He made HImself flesh to save a creation that wanted nothing to do with Him.

There is something moving, mystical about this whole Christian story. Sometimes I fear when we approach God and His Word with just a Mind, we forget He called us to approach Him with our Heart and our Strength as well.

Why do we feel so ashamed to utter out words of Love for Him? Why do we fear being laughed at for daring to utter out how much we Love and worship this Divinity? Are we too proud to show our tears, our dependency? Are our clever little analysis and intellectual theories and apologetics another way of disengaging ourselves from humbleness?

Sometimes, I want to get down on my knees in church because the weight of His majesty forces no other response out of me. Sometimes my hands are yanked towards heaven because the gravity of His Love and sacrifice pull that response out of me. Sometimes His sorrow and anger cut me right to my sinful, black heart and moves me to cry, sometimes to sob.

And yet, I am aware that choosing to worship in Presbyterian circles means that I hold back and keep it in check. Sometimes I just raise my hands anyway because I think it's all for God, who cares what the congregation thinks. But I have never dared to kneel because it just seems so ostentatious, and everytime I cry at church, I try hastily to cover it up, to brush away tears for fear of making the person next to me uncomfortable.

At church camp, I had loads of fun worshipping with a 15 year old girl in service. 15 year old girls never question strong emotions. They are at the age and of the gender that wears emotions unabashedly on a sleeve. I was glad she was my companion at the last service at camp when we sang hymns. I did not need to explain to her my copious tears at all those ancient words of worship, she just smiled and understood. She herself had cried the other night as she listened to me, J and P play Big Sisters and advise her about all the things she needed to look out for in her walk as a young Christian woman. She told us she cried because she suddenly felt God was so beautiful.

Any how, I sm not entirely sure what I am trying to get at. I think I am still grappling with the whole 'The Word is Living' and the 'Gospel is Alive' realisation I got from camp. This is me making sense of madness I suppose.

God's story is so powerful. So. Alive.
These days I cannot seem to put it in any other better words.

recently read Donald Miller's "Blue Like Jazz" - non religious thoughts on christian spirituality. He helped crystallise some thoughts for me on the mystical quality of Christianity that we post-mod academics shy away from talking about because it sounds like so much hippie kook-dom.

Am putting away my intellectual Christian apologetics books for now and going back to attempting to read the Word cover to cover to understand my God.

At the end of the day, while I can theorise and explain Christianity, when people ask me why I believe I know what answer actually sits at the edge of my smart-arse tongue, at the edge of my adult heart.

It's an instinctive answer, a girly answer, a childish answer, an answer that smacks of dependency and emotions and illogic. An answer that I find hard to share with people who are not Christian for fear of feeding the myth that Christianity is a brainwashing cult.

But there it is in all its honesty. An answer that I cannot chase away.

I love Him. I love Him. I love Him.
and He loves me. Stupid, nasty, ugly, pretentious me.
The simple wonder of it all...He. Loves. me.
and for that, I will try my best to give Him everything I can.

I can't think of a story that has gripped my heart, mind and strength more than that.

i think therefore i mac

Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve
Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of
Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see
the opportunities in life's setbacks -including death itself.

"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the
finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be
told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal.
Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed
around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed
college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She
felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so
everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his
wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that
they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got
a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy;
do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found
out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had
never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption
papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that
I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents'
savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I
couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here
I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So
I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best
decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the
ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food
with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get
one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of
what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to
be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction
in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every
drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and
didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy
class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif
typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful,
historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I
found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it
all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first
computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that
single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its
likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped
out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal
computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course
it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in
college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect
them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow
connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut,
destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started
Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years
Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion
company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation
- the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got
fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple
grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company
with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our
visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling
out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was
out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult
life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let
the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the
baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce
and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public
failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But
something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn
of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but
I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was
the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being
successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less
sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative
periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another
company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would
become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated
feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio
in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned
to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of
Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family
together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired
from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed
it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.
I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what
I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work
as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your
life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is
great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If
you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters
of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great
relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep
looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each
day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It
made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have
looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the
last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And
whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I
need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever
encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost
everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of
embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of
death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are
going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have
something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow
your heart.


About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the
morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know
what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type
of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my
affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to
try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years
to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is
buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It
means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy,
where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into
my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the
tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they
viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it
turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable
with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest
I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this
to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely
intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to
die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one
has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very
likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It
clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but
someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be
cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't
be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's
thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner
voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth
Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a
fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought
it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before
personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with
typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in
paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and
overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,
and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was
the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue
was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find
yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the
words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they
signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for
myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

church camp 2005 afterthoughts part one

stealing the first line from Shadow's blog - "i loved church camp"

At the risk of sounding like a complete nut job - Somehow this year, I felt something almost tangibly shift inside me. As if the Holy Spirit was actually physically moving a part of my heathen self and gently replacing it with something new, something more of a Godly nature. And I could feel this change in nature come out in my actions and words at church camp itself.

I talked more to other people this year. I felt compelled to stop looking out for my security blankets of familiar friends and faces and reach out to strangers in the Body of Christ. I don't like doing that frankly - reaching out is something I have to actively remind myself to do because my instincts tell me to do otherwise. But it was really really nice to know that Christ had changed me enough to actually mov me to enjoy and draw happiness from talking to strangers.

There were times at church camp as I advised people in their christian walk or as I led Bible study, where I knew the things I was saying, the way I was saying them was truly not me at work. It sounds so corny and almost trite to say "Jesus/ God/the Holy Spirit was speaking through me", but that's exactly how it felt. Being reminded in 1 Peter the past few weeks that I am called not to be ashamed of the gospel helps me overcome the fear of saying this. I realise voicing out God's work is not trite or corny - it's real.

It's wonderfully, fearfully real to know the Gospel is alive. In me, in every Christian is something dreadfully, beautifully alive and waiting to evolve you from the inside out, waiting to emerge. If it sounds like something from Aliens, I would say the analogy is not without some merit. The work of the Holy Spirit within and how it changes us is not cute-sy Hallmark, Pass-It-On card stuff. Sometimes it is warm and fuzzy, but sometimes it is something frightening, challenging and painful.

A part of me would be listening to myself from the outside and thinking 'Wow. God you really really are alive and working something in and through me. Even now, I can feel myself changing because of you' Even more poignantly, this same feeling would come over as I listened to the pastors preach or listened to the affirming life-stories of fellow Christians at camp.

When Chris preached in the last sermon about how the gospel was something alive and passed on from person to person in a form that went beyond mere words, I understood and was moved. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word went through prophet after prophet, disciple after disciple, believer after believer.

And somehow in the centuries, this LIVING WORD, this strange amalgamation of written/spoken/emoted Word, came to me, came to Philip Jensen, came to Pastor Chris, came to each person in ARPC, came to anyone who cared to hear.

And this Living Word will continue to emerge, and go out from us to change lives.

I see it happening. My eyes are open. How amazing to see for the first time with great clarity what wiser men than I meant when they declared "The Gospel is Alive"

The fear of the Lord indeed is the beginning of wisdom, the start of the "great fountain of life" within the human heart.

so much to blog about. want to remember the people i met and the things i heard. but work calls . :)

Tales from the Dorm Side

14-dorm
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

my first night in italy was spent in a 8 bed mixed dorm in Carlito's Way Hostel. The hostel itself was actually quite well designed and well thought out - good value for 20 Euros.

Out of 8 fellow dorm-mites, only 2 were gross. and boy, do they take the cake. and yes sadly, they are Americans - frat boys out to showcase their culture at its worst.

Seriously, many of the American travellers I met in Italy were doing their nation no favours - they cursed colourfully, they talked loudly about how "in america we would do things differently", showed off their serious lack of general knowledge, farted proudly and talked trash about their friends for the world to hear ("i mean dude, seriously, she thinks she's like da bomb but that girl is a beeeeyotch man...") bleargh.

it was like "American Pie 4: European Vacation".

It's hard not to roll your eyes when you hear 18 year old girls look at Michealangelo's Pieta and say in Valley Girl accents, "Who's Mary holding?"

hmmm....I dunno, sweetie, Ryan Seacrest perhaps?

but i digress into bitchiness.
back to tales of dorm horror.

So directions first: I had one Frat sleeping on the bunk above me and one Frat sleeping on the bunk beside me. A nice American 20 year old couple sleeping one bed down from me.

Frats had gone drinking till 2am. BY the time they stumbled back into dorm, everyone was asleep (till they bumbled in). Frat above me flounces heavily on bunk above mine and breathes slobberingly to sleep with sonorous snores.

Minutes later, I hear Frat 2 stumble in and attempt to wake up his buddy. I of course, being in the bunk below, get the choice view of seeing FRat 2's lovely beer-keg belly and boxer shorts as he tries to shake Frat 1 awake. Yuck.

Frat 2: Trip! TRip! wake up man...wake up...

Frat 1: Git the f**** away...lemme sleeep

Frat 2: TRip...wake up buddy...wake up...do it for the brotherhood man...come on Trip...I have always come through for you.

Frat 1: Shut the f**** up man...geeez

Frat 2: Trip....you owe me. come on, don't be selfish....TRip! (goes on for a good 15 min about the brotherhood)

Frat 1: whadya f****ing want? zzzzz

Frat 2: Trip, where are your condoms? I got a girl who wants me...where your condoms? come through for me buddy

(Frat 2goes on for good 10 min as his 'bro' curses him to go away in between tired mumbling. By then whole dorm must have been awake.)

GIrl from couple downstream of my bed: Listen guys, you are waking up everyone. If I just give you my condoms will you shut up and go away?

( does everyone in this room have condoms or something?? by this time, i am wondering if i have wandered onto set of some hormonal American high school movie.)

Trip agreeably takes condoms from the girl and stumbles out to Lord knows where. Twenty minutes later, I needed to go to the bathroom.

WAlked in to the shared bathroom and heard the showers going. My first thought was.....Oh.......crap.....they better not be in there. All I needed to hear was wonderful, tell tale groans before I hightailed out of there as fast as I could.

ew ew ew ew EW! what poor desperate backpackin' soul had Mr Beer Keg-Boxers Boy managed to con? ack.

attempting to fall asleep to the deep French Horn-like snores of Trip, the non condom sharing Frat, I thanked the fact that the second night I was going to have a private room with less drama.

thus ended my first night in the Eternal City. Go figure.

Italia - non basta una vita

02-lonelyplaneteer
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

i have so many thoughts about what i experienced in italy, i don't even know where to start blogging.

should i start with the funny bits like the Dorm of Fratboy Horror? share the simple stories of people i met and had cool conversations with? or should i go for socio-cultural observations on the Roman obsession with La Bella Figura aka Looking Good? or maybe go for the jugular - observations on the too-clever use of aesthetics by the early Catholic Church?

want to assemble my photos, sketches and journal into some kind of book but that will definitely take a while. and "a while" always means possibly never in the light of regular "things to do".

whatever. all i know is : I miss Italy.

Rome has dethroned New York to become my favourite city in the world. The BIg Apple has lost a bit of its lustre to me - no thanks in part to American politics.

I left my heart, not in San Francisco, but in Bella Roma. Florence is amazing, Siena charming and Elba gorgeous to a fault. But Rome beguiles me.

Somewhere among the multiple espresso bars, ancient ruins, dramatically manly men, dramatically vibrant women and ubiquitous dogs, I found a new place to fall in love with.

In Italy, every cup of coffee is heaven, sweet cold water springs free from spigots, antiquity and history lives with street corners and people gesture and speak with glorious movie-like abandon.

Life is a drama in Italy. Everything looks beautiful in the Mediterrenean's sharp white sunlight. Shadows are starker, features are sharper, Skin tones are bronzer, gestures are larger.

So much still unseen and un-understood. The old saying is true. Non basta una vita - a lifetime is not enough for Italy.

I read once that Italy is one of those places which is lovely to visit and fantasise about but best not to actually live in. One must be aware of the reality of corruption, slow bureaucracy, bizarre political choices (hello...pornstar politicians?) and a papacy that is still grappling with the truth of the world.

Still, love is always momentarily blinding. I am happy to fantasise about my ideal Italy for now.

I will definitely be back someday soon.

inside changi airport - cheap thrills

got 30 min to kill before my flight and am wandering around the insides of changi airport. i love this place. i always envy people who get to travel past the gates and wave back at their envious waving friends - and now i am one of them again mwahaha!

love the free internet. just realised that blogger looks different on windows vs my mac. putting links, bolding, colourising font is so straight forward! man, i practically have to code it on my mac.

shall proceed to hunt down the free playstation machines and check out duty free rubbish. have also realised that my grand plan to learn italian and read up about rome on plane has been spoilt by my idiotically checking in my lonely planet on my mountain of a back pack. darn. will just have to read my cs lewis and catch up on lost sleep instead.

hopefully can blog on the move like a pretentious little jetsetter wannabe that i am. heehee

arriverderci baby

surrealkitty
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

it's past 12am

i got U2 doing an acoustic "stuck in a moment you can't get out of" in the background, one messy room my mother wants me to clean up before i leave, and a bag pack to stuff with clothes for italy,

has not hit me yet that i am going on vacation. maybe i should stare at the pitiful amount of euros i managed to get out of my falling sing dollars.

tomorro is the kickstart of my first holiday in yonks. breakfast with me bro (who just came back to singapore!) - church service - a last minute fling with DND group from 130pm to 7pm before I scoot on a mRT all the way to CHangi Airport and into the arms of Bella Roma.

whoohoo. arriverdeeeeerrrrrrci work for 2 weeks!

the force is strong in this one (hrooooarrrrrrrr)

in honour of the opening of star wars 3 - find your star wars twin! :)
Click to see my Star Wars Personality!!

a sunday of simple bliss

last sunday was a blissful day of rest after a whole week of non-stop way past midnight working days to earn my upcoming rest this coming sunday (when i fly off to rome!)
was a really pleasant day in many ways.

morning was breakfast with RockclimberBabe at Macdonalds where conversation was really edifying one about sacrifice, family and God. Shortly joined by my ex-student ChinaKia on his MAIDEN VOLUNTARY visit to ARPC. (whoopee!)

service was a fantastic, spot-on one. Pastor Chris really nailed this one about the way men and women should conduct themselves. So gonna get a copy of this sermon - a real powerful keeper. There is so much we must learn in our walk with Christ - gentleness, quietness, to remember to set aside fear, to refrain from too much talk about love and putting it into action.

lunch was my long-delayed first Newcomer's lunch at the Pastor's Home. I cashed in my chip cos I was bringing along 2 newbies - ChinaKia and my mad insurance agent, MrEnthusiastic. Pastor's lunch was really lovely - a moving testimony to what a church is all about. A home. A place of warmth. A place of open doors and open hearts. The Prebyterians really have a good thing going with the whole "pastor should stay next to the church" concept. It's brilliant and speaks alot about what the church is about.

Chris took a load off me by helping me explain to ChinaKia all about verifying the authencity of the Bible and godhood of Christ. When he was explaining, I was like totally amazed at how much Chris could pack in one short speech - precise, concise and apt. the man is a seasoned pro.

The afternoon was spent with RockclimberBabe at the always fabulous ZoukFleaMarket (where I went slightly mad getting Zara pants for a killer $16, a funky tee for $6, a classic messanger bag for $15. whoopita!) Amid our materialistic meanderings, we continued our breakfast topics about family and sacrifice, meaning in life. We both seem to be at similar junctions in realising our roles as the only christian daughters in the family. Much responsibility rests on our heads!

night was just me and my parents, familiar pork porridge at the beach. nice.
getting home, i promptly crashed in bed from all the sleep debt.

it was a really, really, really blissed out sunday.

all the simple things i need in one day - a good word from Christ, an encouragement from fellow christians, peaceful family dinner, pride in a student well-grown, hope in Christ's salvation, good conversation, restful sleep to the sound of rain and memories of faaaaaaaabbbbulous shopping. :)

sundays. hallelujah. sweet.

2 conversations

Last overheard conversation:
2 aunties on bicycles at a traffic junction just outside the whopping big new national library

(translated from chinese)
auntie 1: wah look at the new library.
auntie 2: they built it according to fengshui you know.
auntie 1: they make it so easy like that. see drawing already can build.
auntie 2: aiyah if you study before very easy to build what.
auntie 1: ya. right right. like sew clothes like that. i study drawing and i can make the clothes and people think very difficult.

heehee. charming.
___________________
Last funny story heard:
GPteacher teaching students from top 5 JC.

teacher: blahblahblah middle east fighting over oil blahblah arab-israel etcetc.
students: (blank look)
teacher: (jesting) you know what is oil right?
students: (sheepish looks)
teacher: you know where oil comes from right?
students: (blank)
teacher: um....you know, fossil fuels?
students: (blank)
teacher: it comes from dinosaurs. grarrr roooooarrrrw.
student: (shock) you mean dinosaurs are real?
teacher: (hiding shock) er.....ya.
student: (dismay) when i watched Land Before Time they were cartoons...I did not know they were real.
teacher: um... let me tell you about the Ice Age, and how the comets came down and killed the dinos.
student: (scribbling earnestly) wait wait...how do you spell comet?

cLAPclapclap. the wonders of our education system. :)

amazing ending

veged out totally after work by channel alternating between American Idol on Star TV and Amazing Race finale on channel 5. have not been keeping up with Amazing Race at all but this ending was really a winner. I did not know the contestants except the obnoxious reknown Rob and Amber (of Survivor:Australia)

It was really great to see human decency triumph. The underdogs Uchenna and Joyce, a cash-strapped black couple hoping to win the money to start a family, won the million dollar prize. It was not so much their natural affable charm, their obvious endearing love for each other or their all round nice-ness that really made me cheer for them to win.
(Uchenna in particular was amazing - whenever his wife was on the verge of getting overly stressed and emotional about the race, you could really see him become her strength and pillar of comfort. Sounds cliche but you really have to see the man in action.)

It was the fact that just when they were almost reaching the finishing line, Uchenna had the decency to inform the cab driver that it looked like he had not enough money to pay the man. The distraught cabbie (who could not care less that they were in a race) was making a lot of rightful noises about how this was his work and how unfair it was for him to be underpaid. The sad cabbie dropped them just outside the gates of the park where all the couple had to do was sprint in and claim their top prize.

Knowing full well that the other competitors were minutes away from catching up, the couple STILL refuse to win the race by compromising their values. They industriously beg passerbys at the gate until they got the full amount to pay the cabbie. That's just awesome. They wanted desperately to win, but not by stepping on anyone's toes. At one point, Joyce tiredly said, 'we can still just run in" when nobody watned to give them money. Uchenna answered with an obviously torn heart, "no, not without paying him." When they finally make enough to cover the cab fare, Uchenna still bothered to talk to the cabbie, make sure things were right with the man and all was at peace. THEN he proceeds to run for the finish line. They won by less than ten minutes.

that Uchenna was a real winner. best ever winner of the amazing race through all 5 seasons.
what a man! His wife was in tears at the end saying how incredibly lucky she was to have him.
ya man,wa lau, I also want ! :)

QP and the Semi-Ds

have to record this before i forget. Couple of months back, me and weudiweu were vegeing out over mineral water past midnight at the coffeeshop behind funan (which serves 50 cents coffee and tea btw, unheard of!). We started recalling memories of archi days and suddenly we remembered this little gem.

weudiweu and assorted archi people wanted to form a band once. Bantering round with band names, the all round winner was "QP and the Semi Ds". (all round loser name was "Oily Lips" - inspired by Weudiweu's admission that her favourite condiment was OIL. as opposed to sane choices like salt, pepper etc ya know)

QP and the semiDs is by the far the funniest ever name for a band of architects, man. hehheh. First album name "Architectonica!". Hot selling singles include "U-R-A", "Clients Suck", "Screw Your Concept, It's About Money", "Show me your Setback", "School Taught me Nothing" and "H to the Dee Bee"

QP btw, is Qualified Practioner - the final outpost to mark one's journey to being a professional architect.

honourary mention to the other inspired name for band of out of shape academics who still want to bust their groove out to the world: applause for "The Sassy Potatoes" (TM Moth man)

HIlarious.

scary to do list

My to do list before leaving for rome is freaking me out.
its more like a "to do" web. I actually drew it out visually as a mind map to clear up my head.
gahhhhhh it will be the most i have ever done in two weeks. Only good thing is at least all the work to be done are stuff that i love and enjoy. It's just a bit much but if can do all, it's quite worth it.

geez. woke up this morning, tired from too little sleep. did bible study about how women should develop "the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit". nice stuff.
i cheered myself up by staring at my big Northwest backpack for Rome.
In 2 weeks, I will be on holiday. comforting, very comforting.

Back to work! whoo-pssssshhhhhh cracks da whip.

the one that got away

my little blue phone that threatened to get lost twice last year has finally made its break for freedom.

the first time i lost it on 26th dec, it was hiding happily in a laundry basket, plotting its next move. the second time i misplaced it in a cafe, and the kind cafe owners kept it for me until i returned to retrieve it. well now, finally, on a busride to bugis, i got off the bus and horrors, realised my phone was not in my pocket. I stared at the bus running away far from me and realised my phone had finally got away, giggling its evil little blue heart away.

Was it because I SMS'd so much that I rubbed out every single marking on the number pad?
Was it because I stored so many numbers in it, it occasionally went brain-dead?
Was it because I cruelly knocked it around, spilt stuff on it and recharged it till I halved its battery life? Oh Bluey, Bluey, how little I cherished thee.

With resigned fatalism, I crossed the road, straight for the M1 shop and coughed up hard-earned moolah for a replacement phone and SIM card. To add insult to injury, little Bluey ran away on the 16th month. 2 months short of the 18th month contract thingamajig. Meaning I had to dish out an extra $100 for new phone.

Vengeance was Bluey's. I now have a new phone - its a cool pistachio green little model. hopefully it will stay faithful to me. Shall try and love it better and maybe the second time round, things will work out better.

stupid phone.

kingdom of heaven random thoughts

just watched late night kingdom of heaven with MoJo. FunkMunk, Obenwan, DaliSpoon.

1) orlando bloom cannot carry a film as a leading man. too pretty to play the Everyman, too sweet-looking to be taken seriously, he suffers the Jude Law disease of being too good looking for his own acting career's good. except Jude Law bleeds even more talent and uppity posh accent than poor Legolas. Orly is gonna need a life changing role to break him out of the typecasting soon. i swear even though they gave Orly the scruffy beard, bloodied face, mud and all, his overly flawless skin just beamed right through, casting serious doubt on his credibility as blacksmith turned clever war strategist. ah the terrors of being to handsome.

2) Faux Saladin (the actor who plays him) and the real-life Saladin are quite impressive

3) interesting little one-liner "If God doesn't love you, how do you think you managed to do the things you did?" Muslim lord to Balen (Orlando Bloom) towards end of flick'

4) i loved the insider scoop on how sieges are carried out. like the nasty little trick of toppling the siege towers

5) the movie makes me wanna read more about the crusades.

2 friends, 2 interesting thingamajigs

surrealkitty
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

weudiweu sent me a cool article from the guardian called 20 funky journeys to change your life

alto sent me a cool little music meme so here's my answer:

> 1. What's the total size of music files on your computer?
on my g4 desktop about 3GB.

> 2. What is the last 3 cds you bought?
madonna's "GVH2' for $5 at gramaphone's bargain basement sale

> 3. What is the last song you listened to before you read this post?
em...some cheesy tunes taxi uncle was playing. sounded like a tango/cha cha oldie. one of those recognisable but dunno title things

> 4. Name four songs that you listen to a lot or that mean a lot to you.

am such a full fledged christian nerd. although i love many songs, many genres, many singers, the songs with the deepest place in my heart are still christian songs.

fulfilled - by hwee (clapclap)
because the lyrics echo the anxiety and assurance that has been sitting in my heart the past few months as i struggle through the new direction of SOT. "father, i fear what lies round the corner. already i'm gasping for breath, grasping at straws..." apt, very apt. i put this one one when i need an assurance that other people feel this way and get through it.

my heart will trust - by hillsongs
"though i walk through valleys low, i will fear no evil. By the waters, still my soul, my heart will trust in you." that's one heckuva cool mantra to keep in mind through tough times. my all time favourite gospel 'torch song' heh.

before the throne of God above - by er i forgot
"..i have a strong and perfect plea....my name is written on his hands..." wah lovely cry cry weep weep words.

alleluia - fairground attraction
no meaning, i just like the sound of fairground attraction a lot - the pretty fairylights, summer night, simple vibe - and this is one of my alltime fave fairground attraction songs.
"your smile is a prayer, a prayer for love and your heart is a kite that longs to fly. alleluia here i am..."

Kickarse Kitty and memories of paperdolls

kickarsekitty
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

aiyoh so cute. Dress up your own Hello Kitty! reminds me of the good old days of paper dolls with the little fold over straps.

I did not have enough lunch money to buy those expensive things so I ended up making my own paper dolls...with their own line of haute coture. don't play play. I learnt the name Oscar de la Renta from staring at Barbie doll outfits at Toys R'Us. For the longest time, Oscar's name was the one I associated with high fashion and good taste.

But then again I was primary school and I thought Crystal Barbie and Pink suited Office Barbie were the height of cool.

By Primary 6, I discovered pop and rock. My Barbie dolls had their tresses unceremoniously cut into savage bobs (inspired by Zoe Tay circa her infamous role as Bobo and too many Saturday morning doses of Jem who is still Truly Truly Outrageous). I dyed their hair brilliant punk shades of green and blue with my poster paints

Wonder where my old paper dolls went? would be fun to make them again for a new generation.

man, childhood fun with paper and imagination.

it makes me wanna blog about the pencil paper games me and bro used to play. they were a whole lot more violent and fun than paper dolls for sure. :) i blame him entirely for my fixation on RPG.

bo liao rambling

researching for hostels to stay in rome, i noticed a bizarro phenomenon.
Many of the hostels springing up have taken on American/Brit pop cultural references as names. I mean seriously: 'Hotel Carlito's Way, Hostel Happy Days, Hotel Pink Floyd, Hotel Fawlty Towers etc etc"? I hope backpacker central in Rome dies not turn out to be Little Frat-America or something. horrors upon horrors. Wall to wall frat boys and their sorority chickadees on their pub crawls, toga parties and pizza nights! thrillsville.

anyhoo, i'm kinda taken by fawlty towers. i would stay there just for the name alone. haha.

days of gelato, buffalo mozzarella, real pasta, real pizza, ensalata, parma ham, and REAL ITALIAN COFFEE.
20 days to rome! whoopee!

currently watching:
Full Metal Alchemist. so gonna hunt down figurines of Alphonse and Edward Elric
American Idol. I know. I know. but it's so fascinating! Am kinda rooting for Bo Bice now.

currently reading:
Lonely Planet: Italy
The Irreverent Guide to Rome
www.televisionwithoutpity.com - it's a horrible addiction

currently listening:
my mother's super loud favourite taiwanese talk-show in the background.

labour day weekend!

avatar2
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

i filed my taxes.
i finished my business plan.
i rule.

celebration via OD-ing on Full Metal Alchemist DVDs and DND gaming to come. whoo hoo. :)

the motorcycle diaries

so i rode my first motorbike today.

whoohoo! And it was cool!

post Urban Infest meeting, FundraiserMan sees me trying to flag down taxi and coasts towards me on his Yamaha, saying "ay, wanna lift?" I did not know recognise him so for a split second I thought he was some cheekopeh being funny.

After split second, 2 thoughts stood up in my little brain:
1) yay! get a free ride home!
2) crap! it's on a motorbike!
I have NEVER ridden a motorbike before and I have walked past MANY motorbike accidents. But through a mix of spur of the moment curiosity, politeness and cheapo-ness, i said, "yeah, that will be great!" I completely outed myself as a motorbike newbie by asking stupid things like how to strap on the helmet and how to get on the motorbike and whether it was easier if i held onto his shoulders or his waist.

I think I must have been pretty nervous during the ride because FundraiserMan told me a couple of times, "ay just relax and enjoy the ride. Don't worry." So, gripping his shoulder one iota less tensely, I did. And it was kinda great just feeling the wind rush by and looking at the people in cars and realising how contained and safe they looked in their air-com boxes. So THAT'S what motorbikers think of people in cars... talk about new perspectives.

top 3 thoughts in my head as we whizzed by nicoll highway:
1) "man this is cool"
2) "if there is an accident, hope my laptop does not get smashed into bits."
(ya thought of laptop came before thoughts of own life. go figure)
3) "God just checking: you will keep me safe right? Not my time to die yet right? my life is in your hands ya?"

:) when i finally set my feet again on terra firma, FundraiserMan very amusedly asked if i was ok. I must have left dents on his shoulder or something. I answered lamely, "oh yeah, i'm fine. That was really interesting!"

But yeah, motorbikes are cool.

That's another first to chalk up in 2005. FIrst time I got on a motorbike. whee!

the toughest call in the world

I think Jesus really knew how to lay the smackdown when he declared the greatest commandment was to Love Our God with all our heart and mind and strength, and then to try and follow that up with loving our neighbour.

Am finding that second command difficult. When it comes down to certain archetypes of people, i have little patience and am fully tempted to spit out what I really think about them. I always think it's funny when some of my friends think I am patient. It's more like I am patient with the archetypes that do not bug me. But put me with anyone who I think is consciously stupid or a big phony wannabe or belligerent and obnoxious, and watch me cave into anger.

The true test of love is whether you are capable of loving your enemies.
Jesus really kicks ass in that department. Me much less so.

Oh for the grace of God to guard my tongue and for the Holy Spirit to quiet my soul! :(

a random slice of oddball

Next week on my world of multiple realities:
(a message brought to you by 2 cups of coffee)

1) finish filing taxestaxestaxes! SOB. April 30 deadline. thou shalt not panic. :)

2) Plan trip to Italy. ah Escapism....Roma, la dolce vita, la buffalo mozzarella, la bamba, la lala :)

3) Finish up the LAST 2 PAGES OF frickin' business plan - the cockroach that never wants to die is meeting its end at last. mwa haha.

4) Steal back magic dagger from nasty daggerspell mage - escapism via DND!

5) Submit proposal for workshop to teach 800 kids how to dress and behave with style. heehee. fun or what

6) Urban INfest meeting - update publicity plans for URBAN INFEST. cross fingers that collaboration with artists actually happens.

7) Last lesson with poetry writing neighbourhood kids. Should be nice...they actually managed to churn out some funny little gems.

Imagine Singapore / Imagine Church

I AM SO EXCITED! The stuff that this big global movement is going towards is exactly in line with what I am imagining for SOT's future youth initiatives!

better yet, I wanna take the methodologies and run it in church youth ministries as well. cool stuff cool stuff. Wow, incredibly simple but you need someone to put it in words and action to see how much possibility is out there for the taking

From the woman Bliss Browne, the ex-banker / Anglican pastor who founded it:
"Hope is a choice not a feeling. We must tune ourselves into the frequency of hope and listen each other into hope by the questions we ask and the questions we live.

What dreams or whispers are at the heart of your own life that may be seeking your commitment? What do you want to learn? What impresses your heart right now? What small change could you make that might make a big difference? How could you make solidarity with the stranger a daily practice? Who might stand with you?

Hope, the willingness to celebrate what can be, brings with it remarkable resources for creative connections. I draw courage from being in the company of others who are committed to transforming institutions and communities through learning and who are working to create a future worthy of our hope. Take the risk of living into your questions and commitments without needing all the answers. Actively seek the company of others willing to learn and to hold you accountable to your highest hopes.

Live from the inside out. And you will discover blessing coming alive in you."

oddest online quiz title ever. :)

just had to take it because it's such an odd quiz title


You are 'Gregg shorthand'. Originally designed to
enable people to write faster, it is also very
useful for writing things which one does not
want other people to read, inasmuch as almost
no one knows shorthand any more.

You know how important it is to do things
efficiently and on time. You also value your
privacy, and (unlike some people) you do not
pretend to be friends with just everyone; that
would be ridiculous. When you do make friends,
you take them seriously, and faithfully keep
what they confide in you to yourself.
Unfortunately, the work which you do (which is
very important, of course) sometimes keeps you
away from social activities, and you are often
lonely. Your problem is that Gregg shorthand
has been obsolete for a long time.


What obsolete skill are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

sober sunday

Pastor Chris' sermon was really powerful today - he testified about how God was working constantly behind the scenes, moving things and people in place for his plans. It was very moving when he talked about how his mother prayed for him recently to bring the gospel well to the English. This was the same woman whom he had prayed for 25 years to come to know God - and she did in a powerful wonderful way.

This small but poignant reminder of God's providence really moved me. I felt reenergised for the week ahead to do whatever God called me to do...knowing full well that the success of whatever that it was, already was held tightly in His hands.

This was kind of challenged just a few minutes ago.

My sister called me from Barcelona to tell me she and her friends had just been robbed at knife-point. The two robbers were apparently very violent and when bystanders tried to help, they got punched and robbed by fellow syndicaters in the vicinity,

My sister was throughly shaken and I felt it too. She was bawling about how she just wanted to come home to Singapore and how much she missed me. For the first time, we both ended the phone conversation telling each other "I love you, I will see you soon". I wished I could be there for her and her friends. I wanted to look after them and be a friendly face in a foreign land to them. Thank God, they were safe. Thank God, she will be making a stop in New York to stay with my brother and his wife. At least there is a second home some where in the world for her to rest before she comes back Singapore.

Hearing how violent the guys were, it really hit home how I could have lost her. It made me think how I try to escape from the fact that I could lose anyone of my family and friends at any time. And yet knowing that reality, I do not take seriously the need to pray for them - their salvation, their saftey, their health. Though I profess diffferently, this instance showed me that I still live, thinking and hoping troubles will coast me by. I don't take my family seriously enough. I have to start living with the fact that I must pray for them and must remember anytime, without warning I might lose them and whatever chance I have to love them, care for them and speak of God's Truth to them.

sigh. All this heavy stuff and I still have not done my taxes yet. God help me! :(

friday thoughts - postscript

birdbird1
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

FRIDAY NIGHT
On my way to see the Best of Asian art,
loud shrill chirps made me look under a bush
i saw a small, young mynah without a head.
Correction: it was a mynah whose neck had been twisted cruelly
twisted, so far to one side that he looked headless.
His posture vulture-like, his head held in place by plastic string and a little splinter
Knotted so ingeniously that you wondered
at the cruel inventiveness of the hands that tied it.
Freeing the bird, it hobbled clumsily to my foot, like a drunken chick.
Forced to permanently view the world askew, it no longer had a sense of balance.
So I sat outside the art museum, bird in hand, clueless as to how to help
the bird lay its bizarrely cocked head on a hill on my palm
as it it was exhausted and needful of a place to rest.
As I petted its tiny head and smoothed its delicately feathered wings
it amazed me that I had never seen a bird so up close before
It was an amazing creation of God - fragile, light, intelligent
Now horribly twisted by some arrogant, human fool, too blind to see its beauty.
In the galleries, painting after painting echoed the same theme
No matter what the style, what the medium, who the artist, what the artist believed
Every one of the works was stark in its observation of the dark heart of humanity
I carried the bird back to my school, put it in a box and knew whatever i did,
it was going to die - twisted, a parody, a joke, forced to view the world askew,
Without God, there can be no sense of balance
How much we need Him to save us and illuminate our dark world with Truth and Love!

friday thoughts -winter in singapore

FRIDAY MORN
they say seasons never change in singapore
but that morning, it was winter in my neighbourhood.
above me, the sky snowed yellow petals.
the grass, the drains, the roads were buttered liberally with raintree buds.
yellow as taxis, as crayons, as the doubled lines that snaked down the street.
the wind sent down drift after drift of gold
a road-sweeper paused to look at the sight,
the swash and backswash of her bamboo broom stopping momentarily.
she smiled at me and i returned the gracious gesture.
they say seasons never change in singapore
but just for that morning, we both knew better.

In the face of Age, soar like an eagle

kid
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

i wish i could lay claim to writing this rather nifty little piece but i can't. It is a forwarded email from (of ALL people) my father, the happy agnostic.

recycling the pic of me in my childhood...thought it was a nice reminder of how many years God has brought me through. From silly 3 year old kid to slightly less silly adult of 27. Transformed, renewed, strengthened and scaling new heights every year.

"Eagles are the most long-lived bird in the world. By the time they reach
40 years old, their claws will start to age, losing their effectiveness and
making it hard for them to catch preys.

The lifespan of an eagle is up to 70 years old. But in order to live this long, it must make the toughest
decision at 40. At 40, its beak is too long and curvy that it reaches its
chest. Its wings, full of long, thickened feathers, are too heavy for easy flying.

The eagle is left with 2 choices
- do nothing and await its death
or go through a painful period of transformation and renewal.

For 150 days, it first trains itself to fly beyond the high mountains,build and live in its nest and cease all flying activities. It then begins to knock its beak against granite rocks till the beak is completely removed. When a new beak is grown, the eagle will use it to remove all its old claws and await quietly for new ones to be fully grown.

When the new claws are fully grown, the eagle will use them to remove all
its feathers,one by one. Five months later, when its new feathers are fully
grown, it will soar in the sky again with renewed strength and is able to
live for the next 30 years.

In life, as an individual, in a ministry, even in an organization,sometimes, we have to learn to make difficult decisions so as to make room for changes. Changes bring about renewal. And the only way
for us to soar again is to let go old ways, old habits, old lives. For as
long as we are prepared to put aside our old baggage - past glory or
shame, past success or failure - be willing to become zero, with an empty
cup mentality, we will be able to discover our potential and head towards a renewed perspective in any aspect of our lives.

I am also reminded of Isaiah 40:31 but they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

I used to wonder why the Lord would associate those who wait upon him
with the eagle and not other birds like peacocks, chickens or turkeys. It
is only when I read this that I know - God has intended that we should
soar on wings like eagles, run and not be weary, walk and not faint. But
this could only be possible when we hope and wait in Him to renew our
strength and be prepared to be moulded all over again - be zero again, be still again, be quiet again. And the journey of renewal will be painful and it requires an attitude of 5 words - I WANT, I AM WILLING.

Finally, be bold, be strong and soar like an eagle - for the Lord Thy God
is with You."

100% Presbyterian

just took this interesting little 'what is your denominational belief system?' test and here are my results.

i have been fully brainwashed by ARPC haha.
gosh. 100% presbyterian or what. Just as well, I switched membership over the weekend. :)

1: Presbyterian/Reformed  (100%)
2: Congregational/United Church of Christ  (89%)
3: Baptist (Reformed/Particular/Calvinistic)  (79%)
4: Anglican/Episcopal/Church of England  (76%)
5: Eastern Orthodox  (74%)
6: Roman Catholic  (66%)
7: Seventh-Day Adventist  (61%)
8: Lutheran  (56%)
9: Anabaptist (Mennonite/Quaker etc.)  (53%)
10: Methodist/Wesleyan/Nazarene  (51%)
11: Baptist (non-Calvinistic)/Plymouth Brethren/Fundamentalist  (38%)
12: Church of Christ/Campbellite  (38%)
13: Pentecostal/Charismatic/Assemblies of God  (28%)

sober teacher thoughts for the day

class at neighbourhood school was acting up again. EM3 + Poetry + hot afternoon = madness.
Instead of running through my intended lesson plan about "how to present your poems", I ended up talking to them about why it was very important for them to know how to do simple things like stand properly, speak well, look people in the eye etc. in context of future job interviews, bursary / scholarship interviews etc. I was really laying it on to them how they better make sure they can at least conduct a proper introduction of themselves.

Some of the kids got my drift and were solemn and obviously paying attention. Some tried shutting up the rest of their nonsense-spouting classmates. But more than enough rabble-rousers still persisted in disrupting class with inane antics.

I had stopped a class game halfway to lecture them and the rabble rousers proceeded to ask, "ay cher, play games leh. have fun lah. boring lah cher"

I was not angry with them anymore and just felt really sad. I told them, "There's no point in me playing games with you if you don't learn anything from them. You laugh laugh have fun, so what? I walk out of here after one hour and leave you with nothing. Tell me, who loses? If every teacher just haha with you and not teach, you will spend 4 years in school and learn nothing. Your teachers walk out of the school, with pay in their pocket and all the skills and content still inside them. Isn't that terrible?"

The brighter ones shut up and realised what i was getting at. Some even chirped, "Ay cher don't be sad lah"

The poor, silly, out of control, playful ones were still fixated on the game and said, 'Cher, cher, so who won the game? You never say who won the game yet."

How do you tell them that if they never started to see what their brighter classmates had already perceived, they might never win the game?

sigh : _(

Poor kids.

Regarding that whole recent flurry of self-righteous letters to the press about teachers who quit too easily on their students, I have only one comment: I teach in neighbourhood schools only 4 hours a week and already I can feel an iota of what these teachers are up against day in day out.

It really is not easy at all and perhaps it would help if all education policy makers and armchair critics taught one day in one of these classrooms for a massive reality check. I don't think neighbourhood school teachers should quit easily but I do think they deserve a lot of our respect and sympathy for the onslaught of apathy they have to face everyday.

Claim to Fame ST-4apr05

ST-4apr05
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

was in the Straits Times on 4 April concerning the whole "let's change National Education" hoo ha I am in.

my one claim to fame and the reporter spells my name wrong. :)
Kiuk? Now I am Hawaiian?
this is how God keeps people humble. :P

that's my good looker of a ex-student PseudoElf behind me btw. i had dragged him into class to be my designated "Pro Art Representative" for the day in our class discussion about "Art and Obscenity",

His mother went into paroxysms of delight upon seeing her son in the papers - cut it out and is going to laminate it to preserve forever. His brother paraded the photo to all the girls at his office.

Needless to say, me and PseudoElf were much amused.

for those who never saw it

commie
Originally uploaded by neonangel.

just to update those who never saw the infamous secret files of the Commie Party. hee

when chromedome leaves for the states, we are gonna need another theme party. if we all self-sacrificing enough , we can all go as famous bald people. haha

literary moment

i was in the same year as this brilliant guy, Alfian, in RJC who wrote amazing plays and poetry. People used to point him out to me back then and tell me he was an amazing writer. He's quite the high profile artsy guy now in the scene and i came across his blog. Loved reading it because it was always so full of fire-y comments and poetic little slice of life observations.

To my sadness, his blog has been down for a long time due to some server errors.....I only have one piece of his blog saved on a stray Sticky.

So here it is:
quite poignant stuff...amazingly sensitive eye and ear for detail

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

2001-05-24 - 10:39 p.m.
The Writer's Family, Abridged

-----------------------------

My father is a fierce man. My mother is not so fierce. My father has a way with words such that sometimes when he wants to ask a question it ends up like an accusation. For example, 'Did you bring your wallet?' becomes 'You didn't bring your wallet,' and 'Are you going to school?' becomes 'You're not going to school.' It often makes me angry but I tell myself far worse than being hurt by bad words is to be hurt by bad grammar.

My mother also has a way with words. But her problem is not with grammar. Since I was young, she has been developing a repertoire of phrases designed to make me feel small, to make me desire smallness, such that I can climb back into her womb and lie still and sinless. Certain words and phrases recur: 'you don't love', 'you don't pity', 'knife in heart'. Far worse than being hurt by bad words is to be hurt by words which aren't.


My father works through symbols. When I come home late, I will find the things in my room damaged by his invisible rage. The phone line for my modem like a sliced vein, my favourite shirt a dissected tangram, theatre flyers wrung into paper croissants. But these metaphors are mine. The symbols my father uses are straightforward: 'If you come home late, you make people angry. If they are angry, their anger leaves a wake.'


There was a time when I bought a pair of do-it-yourself-hobbycraft insects, convinced I could pinfocus my restless energies into something constructive. I punched stencilled shapes out of flat wooden boards and eased edges into slots. A few nights later, coming home way past midnight, I noticed that having finished with my phone cable, my shirts and my theatre flyers, my father had chosen to vent his paternal anguish on my 3-day-old invertebrates.


The next morning I found them pieced together with glue. It was my mother's handiwork, but since I had thrown away the instruction manual, she had created a pair of mutants: the cricket with rickets, the praying mantis gone heretic.


My father is a fierce man, meaning, obvious. My mother is not so fierce; she is subtler. My father taught me how to write fiction: 'A boy comes home late. A father wrecks his room. This is a story. A boy comes home late. A father wrecks his room out of fury. This is a plot.' But my mother concentrates on the details. The disfigured insects now buzz to me: 'Do not break my heart, because even after I mend it I cannot restore it as it was before.' In this manner my mother taught me poetry.



 

blogger going mad

blogger has been eating up my most recent posts so this is a test to see if this is going the way of the dodo as well... :(