Fulfilling dreams in Year 2009

I have been dreaming on many random things which happened over the years.
One of which, my army life. I think there are many events which I miss during that period.
BMT is one.
Some of the things I learnt/experienced during army:

Never ever drag your boots, especially during route marches.
2. If a commander asks you to talk to the ground, he actually means “KNOCK IT DOWN!”
3. Being Armskote IC teaches you plenty of patience and resilience
4. Refrain from using the words “Ya” and “Har” unless you wish to be doing jumping jacks and saying silly things.
5. Opt instead for “Yes” and “Excuse me, sir/sgt?”
6. Help is always welcomed when carrying jerry cans.
7. Your rifle is probably the first wife you’ll ever have.
8. NEVER EVER fart in front of a commander and laugh about it.
9. Blisters during route marches are fine. Its when you try to walk to the toilet in slippers that it hurts most.
10. You can actually go from wearing nothing to Full Battle Order and vice versa in less than 15s.
11. Failing which you will find yourself talking to the ground.
12. Its always the biggest and heaviest guy who gets wounded outfield.
13. You always want to get to sit on the bench in the tonner instead of the floor.
14. Commanders keep asking who has girlfriends
15. A cold shower, clean clothes, hot food and a neat bed never felt so good after outfield.
16. Don’t argue, you are the lowest life form on earth.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. – Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau.

Here comes Autumn…

I apologise for the prolonged absence.
5 months brought me places and exposure to numerous experiences were gratifying, as it were been intended, Providence made it this way.

It has been more than a year at Parkway College, this pattern of familiarity has gradually mature. Meeting new people, what do they do, open palm, finding your way while you are lost, roleplays are strangely second nature now. So many faces and so many names- to be honest, I welcome every weekend as a form of respite. It does not help either when my masters courses are packing more things into my head. For that- a challenge- more for some, less for some. There are approximately 20 over students in each unit and some hail from Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Australia. Yet despite its status as a Colombo Plan university and a “world class” institution, it has a significantly lower international student intake, as opposed to other Group of Eight universities. And on a news-worthy note, University of Adelaide is 106 in world university rankings. Good riddance.

This week is arguably the worst week at Parkway. Having relatives of colleagues passing on greys our environment considerably and my condolences go out to them.

I will share the grief and many at times, we question God why he has broke many of our hearts and allow us to struggle in tears to wonder why we have not prayed hard enough; or where is it that we have failed. And that in my own blind pursuance of dreams, I wished I could have put everything into its respective places and make my family loved.

I remembered I read somewhere in a book on Contract Law sometime ago, in the Preface, Burrows ends, “This book is dedicated to my father who died from cancer as I was nearing completion of it. If I can be half as good a father to my four children as he was to me, I will have done a wonderful job”. If I could ever be half as good a man as my father is now, I will live with no regrets.

And may I recall the time at Margaret River where Marlene fondly remembers the late famous comics artist husband Paul Rigby – “He stays here with me, always.”

Dear folks, do take care and feel love.

Be exceedingly blessed.

Its June soon!

I think 2008 is moving a little too fast.
I blog when I feel like, slugging around, with most of the time spent munching on Daiso tidbits. Daiso must have been one the Japanese’s way of cultural invasion and perhaps, their great invention ever.

This prolonged absence has proved to be paid off, as I am too caught up with everything going on around me. ACTA course which has been completed and intense planning for an impending Perth trip It is Thursday today. I look forward to Fridays because of the arriving weekends. It instils an indescribable sense of joy and peacefulness deep inside of me, yet evokes strong sentiments and emotions from inside. Its similar to scoring full points for your test paper and enjoying the praise and jealousy from everyone else and secretly savoring the hidden happiness exploding inside you, over and over again.

I am getting close to a year in this job.
C.S Lewis once likened God to the rising of the sun- that he sees God not in the way he sees the sun, but because it illuminates everything around him and allows him to see them clearly. I think training is a mode indelibly etched in C.S Lewis’ words. While training is like the rising of the sun, the trainer does not see training as in just training but the exchange of ideas to see his participants and the whole world even more lucidly. Trainers spend an awfully long time speaking- an estimated 10 hours out of a 13 hours programme. While speaking on facts, facilitating, groupwork, team building, orientation, customer service, management issues, complaints, everywhere, staff, managers, nurses, personal life, everything, food, travel, graveyards- trainers do not know they are tired till they are done speaking, often at the end of the day. One day, they wake up knowing they have not got a tongue anymore because, they spoke so much it dropped off. Today i share with you certain frustrations and distractions inside my four-walled pressure cooker.

BUT
The past year has been meaningful and inspiring, with travelling and at many times, spent breaks having meaningful intellectual philosophical discussion with participants. I am attracted to intellectual people. These can span from religious theories to political issues and by extension, I found myself deeply engaged in issues of suffering, creationism, sin, capitalism, communism, all combined in one. My mind is open to ideas and perspectives beyond my own – and i am truly blessed. For this is the way training and a job ought to be – a time in your life where you are aware of the world around you and introspectively make sense of it. There is just so much that begs to be explored.

Yes, I need to return to do some reading, picking myself up after blogging – secretly craving for one of my 3 loves- wasabe crackers.

Qingming

iPod: Michael Brecker- The Nearness of You

I will remember you not the way you left, but the way you lived – as one of the bravest persons I have ever known. I will remember you from the first steps I took in the house, to your last days as I stood before you almost a full grown man at 22. Week after week, I have known you for longer than, and more regularly than any of my friends. Even in your last days you remained lucid; and stole time, after a colon operation, despite an ailing liver and other complications.

I do not remember myself being a devout Taoist but spent time at Chua Chu Kang Columbarium to offer many paper items for prayers. My mother was a generous Taoist and I often attach burning of paper items for ancestors equivalent to the burning of our money in the furnace. Wasteful. Life is melodrama filled with colours and tears and death is just a silence that rings and the gutsy fire just brings your wishes to the heavens.

While Time- to many, is a contrasting thought altogether from many other things. Indefinitely, I marvel at the idea on how I can turn back time, to many lost memories, to lost places.

The past March mornings, fear got me everyday. The initial shock lasted for many minutes and then turned into a choking sensation that wrenched my heart. I realised how Time can be so important to me and yet many others are helping me to waste it. This despairing affair cannot be blamed, as those many others are just like me, shocked, chocked and wrenched and wretched.

I must admit I have not been very happy with my work(place). I find many things utterly disappointing. People and numerous circumstances just clearly manifest the brutality of reality. How competitive this world is and how ill affection are so incommensurable. Just like the unkind weather- fluctuating between mornings of general comfort and nights of subzero chills. This only confirms that [no one is kind] is veridical. While some might just dismiss this as another innocuous entry and the complaints of angsty 24-year-old-boy-who-has-yet-to-see-the-world, then let me pose a question. What is then the right number of years for you to know what is real of this world? 30? 50? 80? 4 feet under the ground? So is this the truth? or the light to know the truth? 

Light and Truth.
Lux et Veritas.

 
Past 2 weeks in pictures:

Busy but alive, lazy but working still

Just wanted to let everyone know that this is the case.

 Apologies. Have been occupied with many issues on hand.  Many of which include visits to the Jurong Bird Park and the National Museum.

1. My MBA application has got through but I am still looking at other business schools.

 2. The past 3 months have been very vexing, especially when my claims are not in yet. I am losing not only patience, but bank interest and very beautiful items that have lost their charm because they are no longer in vogue after 3 months!

3. Travel plans to Perth in June have been made to ensure sanity over the course of poor  organisational planning by whoever [you know who you are and there are more than one of you] and to maintain the country’s economical health. 

In case you are still wondering whether have I gone crazy for some inexplicable reason but I just cannot take it lying down and still thinking about it. You wouldn’t know very sure about it unless you are in my shoes. I am wearing US size 8. It does not even make sense, not to say conventionally right to happen.

It is in this incoherent shade between ill animosity with people and silent happiness that I pen this entry. Shall keep that inside.

Following a series of eventful things that happen, I learn one thing about myself: I cannot tolerate inefficiency but yet I am quite inefficient myself. Now, this is really strange.  

Wake up 2008 and ask her why

Having disappeared from the face of the world for two months, I find myself sitting at my table, consolidating thoughts, the figments to go into this entry. This assemblage is highly immense, given much has happened- Christmas, New Year and jetting to Shanghai.

There is beauty in everything before our eyes. Sometimes all things around us point towards and focuses your attention on something so magnificently grand and imposing – that may be beauty. Yet the most beautiful things in life exist everywhere, in every nook and cranny of all buildings, in the lives of ordinary people like you and me – an elderly couple walking down the sunset beach hand-in-hand or a child with teary eyes of hope and faith. The most beautiful glimpse of the Singapore sky I have ever caught was a gradient of violet, pink, blue- which I ever took for granted.

My trip to Shanghai was eventful but dreary. A week away for a homesick singaporean boy is clearly evident where the temperature was negative one degrees celsius, I wrapped myself up into a mummified turkey. Never will i complain of Singapore’s heat again(or in the next one month or so). In Shanghai, my colleague Esther and I had our fair share of eating, shopping, walking, sightseeing and probably the most enjoyable activity of all – seeing snow. There are so much to share but allow the pictures to do all the narrating. (please adjourn to “my porn pictures” on the right)

Leaving 2007 for 2008 was a refreshing change – which much promises to making many firsts. That in retrospect, Shanghai made it. Life is beautiful only because you live once, for if you could repeat every experience ad infinitum you lose the most precious inherent value of existence – das schwerste gewicht, nietzche.

Singapore:
Just over five months ago, I went cycling and then sipping my love- frappucino at MacCafe, for free (And until this day, why my drink was free still eludes me). Since then, I am afraid coffee houses have ceased to make frappucinos. My friend thinks that it is only a summer-drink. So at the cafe, I looked beyond the edge of my cup and watched the people around me: going about their lives as if nobody cared. Maybe they’re right. Each of them sitting by themselves either with iPods plugged into their ears, or a laptop or a novel in their hands or building sandcastles. In an almost unexplainable way, I find this alienation remote but comfortable.

Let me capture this moment; Then I am going home.

The still frames in your mind

After zipping through for what seems to be the pensive period of my life, I am not ashamed to say that so far, I have done far
more serious thoughts than any time that I can recall.

In the past four weeks, I have restrung and played new pieces on my violin, been out with someone special to places and penning the admission statement for MBA- in fact, the past week was one of the most productive in recent memory. To be fair, I have had my fair share of hours at work, but nowhere near as much as I had expected to / am capable of putting in. After 15 years of rigorous structured education, I think I have outlived my time as a student. The truth is painfully obvious – I cannot wait to start living life the way I have always wanted to. Already I am responsible for most of my life. I know that everyone says how the best time of your life is when you are a student, but surely I have had enough of this “best time” and want more. With my hands now, I want to make a difference, to make more impact and make education work for me.

And so as I was (metaphorically) flipping through old photographs on my laptop, I realised that each and every photograph captures not only a particular place or a particular scene, but a particular mood or emotion I had. Beyond the question of ‘what I was taking’ lies ‘why was I taking that’ or ‘in what mood did I see this particular sight’. Having procrastinated for two years, I finally developed chosen photographs from my album and put it as my desktop picture – each and every photograph has a story of its own waiting to be told.

If each photograph tells a story, then by extension, life is a sequence of interlinked photographs. When I look back at these photographs I have taken, I am reminded of myself when I was 18, when I was 20, as I am today. It is for these very same reasons that I blog, so that through these words I capture my particular perspective and feelings, and lock them in for an undefined amount of time. One day I will return to these words; One day I may unlock these feelings and let them run.

For that special someone, I remember your voice. The week might be long but yet its always the time together that set the difference.
Always the day, the time, the moment.

Thank you PS John

This is absolutely weird and uncanny but I have been having series of military dreams.
I have to pen it down here because I am getting senile with each passing day. Like with each dream that has been dreamt, passed to the air, leaving me with total emptiness.

When I recall, I have to thank my BMT platoon sergeant- John for giving me the wonderful memories during army.
One of which will include bringing me to the medical centre on the very first night I stepped foot on Pulau Tekong.
To think of it, I am the very first person to report sick for the basic military training stint.

And yes, thank you PS John, I can still remember, almost crystal clear.
Though I have no idea where you are.

We shall not be moved.
We like it here, we like it here.
We call ourselves a home.
A home, a home, a home sweet home.

October

You know that it is now October in Singapore because of the wonderful occasional downpours and one by one of us drifting onto the grey cobble-stoned walks with different shades of brollies. You know that it is October because the breeze is cool, and yet hot at times under the scotching glow of the afternoon lunch sun. You know that it is October because there is an unspoken energy all around that whispers a secret – that December is arriving, and that it is sort of Fall in Singapore. You will not know its Fall because Singapore’s tropical weather comprises only 2 simple types, either sunny or raining.

From the bustling streets along Orchard to the quiet lanes by Petir, from the cautious faces of runners to the shoppers who go berserk from sales, even from the majestic and glorious wide expanse of the sky – with sporadic rays of the sun hidden behind the clouds. It has begun, and eventually it will end.

You know I miss you, whenever you are away for that week.
I sleep, every night, ruminating and reflecting on times we had.
Moving forward for the day that comes.
You know it too.