Monday, January 31, 2005

Human time does not turn in a circle, it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

-Kundera.


Wahhhhh....

Sunday, January 30, 2005

went for a jalanjalan session w qing and sher at chinatown yesterday. loved the crowd, tho i'm not sure the other two liked it v much. had a headache for most of yesterday, was foolishly thinking that my eyesight was failing due to unhealthy reading positions. sher provided enlightenment and said that it was probably cos of all the "heaty" stuff i've been eating...hehe, yeah, on hindsight, that's a likely reason... -_-
stuffed myself silly yesterday:

`yin yang dessert (walnut + almond paste-hot)
warm familial feeling, shared various (peanut, seasame) concoctions w 2 vv good friends!

`char quay tiao
i think i gulped down 10 tablespoons of oil, but it was good ($4 tho). then got a tad disgusted by the cockles, cos just after i finished praising them and asking sher n qing to try some, one started to ooze weird reddish black juice from its centre. was kinda piqued, then proceeded to set up "inedible and evil pus oozing marine bivalve mollusks" section on my plate and used my spoon to dissect all the other cockles, whereby they produced a pool of highly questionable liquid. the worse bit: the liquid blended right in with the rest of the dish, black, slimy, a bit bloody. cue plath who says morosely:"the blood berries are themselves, they are very still" lol

i went on to finish the whole plate. (haha, qing ate some too, but i think sherry was secretly disgusted by my dinner but had the courtesy not to say so...)

`chinese rojak w extra you tiao cos qing whined to the tattoed but surprisingly nice rojak uncle who wanted to pass his baton in the art of rojak making to qing... ("ni yao xue zou arh? zhe yang cha cha lor, haha")

`happy vegcrisps
basically a very unhealthy dish that uses a v healthy main ingredient. no one wanted to eat it when i got home cos apparently they had a HUGE dinner while iwas away. humph

`sampled alot of goodies along the way. what! they were offering k...

ohwells have the urge to write sth nice abt yesterday, been feeling like i'm wasting my mentorship, havn't written anything properly for almost a month. eek. will send ms ho a nice cny card to remind her that's she sorta loved... :)

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

barnard during econs today:
the poor in ethiopia are gruesomely different from the poor in britain. the situation in uk is, if you live in the inner city area of liverpool, u haven't got a car, a tv, an aircon, life is hell. but in ethiopia, u haven't even got food, but the relative poverty is lower.

why?

because they're used to dying over there.

.......

singapore govt trying to find more jobs for retirees, and raising retirement age.

does so on the pretext of letting elderly enjoy their golden years. but seriously, wth wants to spend their shining golden yrs pumping petrol at the neighbourhood shell kiosk?and if they do think that's a fulfilling way to spend one's later yrs, they've probably inhaled too much toxic petroleum fumes which have irrevocably damaged their brain cells, bringing them a step closer to senility.

argh, am being unfeeling bitch here. i'm just terrified of aging.

the deranged hardly ever know about their...disability. i don't want to euphemise it, but i can't help it. do you ever want someone to tell you that you've lost it, that you've gone mad,without you knowing when, or how. who knows the critical point of insanity, the precise moment when your remaining slivers of rationality precipitate into a single morose molecule before dissipating into the misted forests of your mind. wouldn't everyone prefer it this way, instantaneous, buffered by a comforting zone of ignorance, rather than to have it set in slowly, yourself excruciatingly aware of the existence of your mind's non-existence.

take away, all at once.
all at once, take it away.
take it all away, at once.

there ppl, here it comes, it's setting in already...i can feeel it. argh, utterly senseless post.
possible explanation: have been doing plath for the past TWO hours.


Sunday, January 23, 2005

nothing much to blog about really, just chugging along in incessant routine. elddfs is taking over my life. there's just so much admin to deal with and nitty gritty details..argh, dramafeste is coming up just as film feste is ending. sigh, attendance was quite miserable, but whatever lar... lol. can't wait for cny. hey! let's go chinatown to jalan jalan!! :D ALOT of food available. been gaining wait at astonishing speed recently (ok, more like for the past month, but weight gain in dec was deserved...)
ewww,econs test soon on national income accounting (?!?!). can't bring myself to mug, am perpetually sleeping. ok, will halt this very boring and ... er boring update.

bye!!! meet up soon!!
***********************************************************************************

the words do not fit in the screen and this is not supposed to happen

Sunday, January 02, 2005

Tsunami attacks in South Asia
26th Dec 2004


.


One year from now, this is going to be reduced to a problematic statistic. 130 000 is a horrific number, but who remembers the 100 000 killed in an Iran earthquake exactly one year before? It seems horribly pretentious to be grieving for them. I don’t know anyone involved, I haven’t visited most of those areas, I haven’t even heard of some of those places before this (Khaw Luak ??) I can’t do anything substantial for them, or perhaps I’m too afraid, ignorant, lazy, uninspired to do so. It’s unbearable and out of my depth to think about the victims and perhaps, even worse off, the survivors of the attack. (it‘s weird to use the word “attack”, like when we say “terrorist attack”, but now mother nature herself is the culpable one.) It’s been raining for the past few days, and I’m cold here in Singapore. Wonder how it is for those in Aceh. You know, if this disaster could spark off some inroads to a peace agreement between the central Indonesian government and the Aceh rebels, perhaps there will be at least some good to come out of this catastrophe.

Perhaps it’s best not to think too much about the disaster in it’s whole monstrosity, but to focus on the micro aspects of it. Dive into volunteer work. No, I’m not talking about going to Sri Lanka to help dig mass graves or direct emergency aid. Someone told me this: if you don’t know what you’re going to do, don’t go cos you’ll just be wasting everybody’s time and resources. Stay in Singapore and help ring bells for the RC or help to pack and box donated items. Donating $10 could go a long way if everyone chipped in. Japan has donated US$500 million, the biggest single donation from a country, and it touches me because if you think about it, they weren’t very much affected, in terms of geographical location, they didn’t feel any tremors. Neither did they suffer many casualties in terms of Jap tourist deaths. That’s why Bush frickin pissed me off when he initially commissioned US$35 mil for foreign aid. (He later upped the donation to US$350 mil after being sworn and cursed at by majority of the world, but it‘s still way less then Japan‘s donation, esp if you consider the proportionate size of each country‘s economy). For the record, Singapore only donated US$3 mil, whereas South korea and Taiwan have each donated US$5 mil. Well, if we’ve been experiencing “robust growth”, where have all the excess money gone to. I’m normally blindly adoring the PAP, but it’s disgusting that they prefer to keep the money in order to dangle election goodies for the people. I mean, who else are we going to vote for anyway?

.


Don’t feel guilty that you’re warm and alive while others are cold, in pain, too dead to even feel the pain, too in pain to even remember what pain is. There is no point to this guilt, and your energy would probably be more positively generated into doing actual work. Mere sympathy is not tangible, which translates into uselessness. The survivors won’t feel it, much less the deceased victims.
Tsunami attacks in South Asia
26th Dec 2004

.

One year from now, this is going to be reduced to a problematic statistic. 130 000 is a horrific number, but who remembers the 100 000 killed in an Iran earthquake exactly one year before? It seems horribly pretentious to be grieving for them. I don’t know anyone involved, I haven’t visited most of those areas, I haven’t even heard of some of those places before this (Khaw Luak ??) I can’t do anything substantial for them, or perhaps I’m too afraid, ignorant, lazy, uninspired to do so. It’s unbearable and out of my depth to think about the victims and perhaps, even worse off, the survivors of the attack. (it‘s weird to use the word “attack”, like when we say “terrorist attack”, but now mother nature herself is the culpable one.) It’s been raining for the past few days, and I’m cold here in Singapore. Wonder how it is for those in Aceh. You know, if this disaster could spark off some in roads to a peace agreement between the central Indonesian government and the Aceh rebels, perhaps there will be at least some good to come out of this catastrophe.

Perhaps it’s best not to think too much about the disaster in it’s whole monstrosity, but to focus on the icro aspects of it. Dive into volunteer work, no I’m not talking about going to Sri Lanka to help dig mass graves or direct emergency aid. Someone told me this: if you don’t know what you’re going to do, don’t gp cos you’ll just be wasting everybody’s time and resources. Stay in Singapore and help ring bells for the RC or help to pack and box donated items. Donating $10 could go a long way if everyone chipped in. Japan has donated US$500 million, the biggest single donation from a country, and it touches me because if you think about it, they weren’t very much affected, in terms of geographical location, they didn’t feel any tremors or suffer much casualties in terms of Jap tourist deaths. That’s why Bush frickin pissed me off when he initially commissioned US$35 mil. (He later upped the donation to US$350 mil, but it‘s still way less then Japan‘s donation, esp if you consider the proportionate size of each country‘s economy). For the record, Singapore only donated US$3 mil, whereas south korea and Taiwan have each donated US$5 mil. Well, if we’ve been experiencing “robust growth”, where have all the excess money gone to. I’m normally blindly adoring the PAP, but it’s disgusting that they prefer to keep the money in order to dangle election goodies for the people. I mean, who else are we going to vote for anyway?


.


Don’t feel guilty that you’re warm and alive while others are cold, in pain, too dead to even feel the pain, too in pain to even remember what pain is. There is no point to this guilt, and your energy would probably be more positively generated into doing actual work. Mere sympathy is not tangible, which translates into uselessness. The survivors won’t feel it, much less the deceased victims.