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Blog hopping to brainless blogs are fun.
But others are interesting:
http://gssq.entori.net/writings/religion/questionnaire.htmExtracts from the blog:
HWMNBN: do you agree that all women are whores? just direct or indirect?Me (the blogger): about as much as all men are rapists, just direct or indirect. Hahah. I am amused by stuff like that.
Communism is a really weird concept.
Imagine total and complete equality.
You think everyone will be happy.
But why?
Everything in life is relative.
There is happiness because of sadness.There is success because of failure.
We fee good because somehow, we are somewhat better than someone or something.(Harsh, but let's just deal with it.)Even in the altruistic sense,
when we feel good about helping someone,
it is because we regard that person to be somehow, somewhat worse off than us.
So,
if there is complete equality,
how will we live anymore?
3 down. 1 more!!! (((:
You said everything happens for a reason. I guess they do. And when the reason becomes clear,you'll wonder how you could have been so blind all along.
I am totally not studying. And according to Facebook, neither are many people.
Joh completed the quiz "What do your eyes say?"
The result: Deep Thinker
You think deeply about things going on in the present, past, and sometimes even future. You often drift off during work or class and start thinking about other things. You always hide what your thoughts from your friends and it often takes a poke or a snap of the fingers to bring you back to reality. Your eyes often portray a different personality than you are. Your eyes are a different part of your soul.
Oh and I LOVE this one!
Joh completed the quiz "Which celebrity should you marry?"
The result: Johnny Depp
You should marry Johnny Depp. You like the bad boy turned good type, the hotel room trasher turned loveable daddy type. He is your soul mate.
The first one is rather true (surprising for a FB quiz..).
And the second one... TRUE LA. (:
"The wind was so strong it blew the prata off my plate."
Classic.
3 years. Just enough time for me to graduate and suffer a bit in the working hellhole. (this is kind of liberating because that would mean I will not need to study so darn hard anymore…) Or that I simply have nothing to lose? Miley Cyrus -The Climb
I think the world is probably united in doing only one thing – destroying the world.
They say the world is ending in 2012.
This is probably all some fluff thought of by some guy who has nothing better to do than to think of when the world will end and thus end his sad sad life, BUT, if this is true, what will you do in these 3 years?
Will you still be doing what you will be doing if you had 30 more years to go?
Will you be ready when the time comes?
Interestingly, at this point in time, I feel ready.
Not in the I-want-to-die-now kind of way, but in the I-don’t-feel-any-regrets kind of way.
Only,
does this mean that I am utterly satisfied with my life?
I read this sometime ago in the floods of email going everywhere and I realise posting stuff here is less work than forwarding emails - yes, I am THAT lazy.
This article is actually a speech by Adrian Tan, a litigation lawyer at one of Singapore's leading law firms. Outside the courtroom, he is known for a variety of funny things, including The Teenage Textbook, which he wrote in the late 1980s. The Teenage Textbook was converted to a movie in the 1990s.
This is Adrian's speech as a Guest of Honour at an NTU Convocation Ceremony in 2008 to the graduating class.
"I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It's a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.
My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.
On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.
Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.
And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you've already won her heart, you don't need to win every argument.
Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.
The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You're done learning.
You've probably been told the big lie that Learning is a lifelong process? and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters? degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don't you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.
The good news is that they're wrong.
The bad news is that you don't need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You're in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.
I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I'm here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.
You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There's very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.
Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.
So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you'll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.
Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they're 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn't meet their life expectancy.
I'm here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.
After all, it's calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.
Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.
That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.
If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don't need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.
What you should prepare for is mess. Life's a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.
Don't expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.
What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.
Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.
The most important is this: do not work.
Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.
Work kills. The Japanese have a term Karoshi, which means death from overwork. That's the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there's nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.
There's a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are making a living?. No, they're not. They're dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.
People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.
Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.
Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.
I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn't do that, I would've been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction, probably a sports journalist.
So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don't imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I'll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.
Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don't, you are working.
Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I'm not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or
equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.
In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.
I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.
It's not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.
One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it's often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one's own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.
The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.
I didn't say be loved. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one's looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.
Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We've taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work - the only kind of work that I find palatable.
Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.
Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn't happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.
You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.
Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don't, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.
Don't work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.
You're going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there's no life expectancy."
Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in. - American Beauty
I was stuck in a step-on-accelerator-step-on-brake-step-on-accelerator-step-on-brake kind of jam the other day.
The sky was gloomy.
All in all, it was a rather depressing moment.
But leaves began dancing in the air,
an ordinary dreary building caught the light in the most captivating of ways,
and tiny droplets of water started falling.
I turned off the radio,
and heard the light splatter the raindrops made on the windscreen,
interrupted only by the intermittent mechanical swipe of the wipers,
and the slow whirling sound of the engine.
I always loved being driven around in the rain.
The way the rain pours down the windows,
the way the sound of rain becomes so loud the radio can no longer be heard,
the way the rain washes everything away while all the time you were dry; protected in the comfort of your car.
I would feel so blessed.
Sometimes moments like these take your breath away.
And you are just grateful to be alive.
Back before Susan Boyles, in Britain's Got Talent 2008, there was Paul Pott:
It touched me to the marrows.
But not too long ago, he was brought up in one of my Cyberarts lesson.
And I realised that media does have a huge influence over what we think and perceive. Here they gave us an unassuming man, a car salesman who didn't look like the typical celebrity, who then blew us away with his talent.
But what most people, including myself, did not know was a severely downplayed fact that Potts was not just a car salesman with this huge voice. He was already singing in choirs and had been performing for quite some time but just never happened to have a breakthrough.
The fact remains that he didn't have much luck in the past, but I could no longer identify with him. He just wasn't one of us anymore, you know?
And now comes Susan Boyles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXX_gMFeWlc
(bah, all videos have their embedding disabled. grr.)
What would have normally moved me left me cold, nonchalant.
AND,
I was at the airport with MY today and there was a group of guys at a table next to us.
They were either in NS or just ORD, perhaps around my age. They were engaging in some boys' talk and MY and I couldn't help but find them so... young.
They sounded so innocent, untainted by life, perhaps even naive.
I guess I was like that at some point in my life.
Wonder what happened?
Hotel California
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyAizpEasc
"The girl carefully placed her giant scissors by her side and paused for a moment. ‘Oh I have so many favourites. It’s really hard to say, and it all depends upon my mood. Currently my favourite word is melancholy’.
‘Melancholy,’ I sighed. ‘I’ve been melancholy all my life. In fact I was going to say melancholy but I thought you might be frightened by such a word and so I said oxymoron.
‘Why would I be frightened of the word melancholy?’ asked the girl, clearly perplexed.
‘Well,’ I tried to explain, ‘whenever you say words like that, people are a bit shocked. They don’t know what to do with themselves. The moment they hear such words they form an opinion of you – normally a misguided opinion of you. It’s like telling someone you once had the depressions, or your favourite pop group is The Smiths. The moment you say it, you can see their faces change. Fear consumes them and they either want to stop talking to you - pretend that you’re no longer there - or they want to run away’ "
- Abeautifulrevolution
I think there is an interesting fine line between sadness and melancholy.
Sadness is often interpreted as being emo.. Depressing with perhaps a tinge of whiny-ness.
But melancholy is... thoughtful sadness (at least according to web definition).
We don't have to be sad to be melancholic. At least not morbidly so.
My past posts may border on the line of emo-ness but these thoughts have always been in my head all this time. Even before everything. Maybe I have always been a melancholic person.
Afterall, we do spend 24 hours a day in our own heads, and I do find reading about people's thoughts much more fascinating that reading about the happenings in their lives (albeit some overlaps).
But that's just me.
And I do feel fine.
And yes, this is dedicated to you Sihui!! =D
I once heard of a man,
who got thrown in prison
and was later given a second chance at life.
He was assigned a counsellor of sorts,
someone who would guide him to the "right path".
They fell in love,
got married.
They were perhaps incompatible by our social standards.
But they were happy.
Till one day,
he had cancer,
and passed away soon after.
I'd like to think,
in a way,
he was a very lucky man.
How can someone sound so amazing. And be so charismatic.
Who said life was fair? They lied.
I may have lost things I treasure.
I may have lost people close to my humanly fragile heart.
But I have not lost what makes me, me.
Stories like this.
Are what I need. Someday you'll need them too.
"So when you feel like hope is gone,
Look inside you and be strong,
And you'll finally see the truth,
That a hero lies in you."
It has been said that humans are the most optimistic creatures on earth. We are the only ones intelligent enough to realise that one day, we will all die, yet we live, fight and love as if that day will never come.
"It's not that person's fault," I said.
"But it's not your fault either", she replied.
Wouldn't it be great if we could all blame someone else for everything?
Would it? I know I mentioned this a few days ago. And at the risk of sounding like I have some fetish for the moon, it's really beautiful tonight.
STOP. And go take a look.
Wonder if anyone feels the same way I do when I look at the moon. The sort of feeling where even you can't quite find the words to capture what you feel.You know?
Ever wondered what one minute meant?60 seconds.100 heartbeats.15 breaths.Difference between life and death,despair and joy,yesterday and today.To me, it was the freaking difference of 50cents thanks to:For TWO days! $#%@*&Bah. Someone up there is having fun.Triviality. HAH.
I like staring at the world go by. At night. There's something serene about seeing an empty place which you know is brimming with life. Wonder how it would feel like if the empty place was truly empty, if we all died in our sleep and are reborned everytime we woke up.
I like the moon. It reminds me that everyone of us is looking at the same moon. Thinking.
I am tagged to be most likely to save the day!
HAHA. Cute.
And what a song.
Lily Allen - Not Fair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUYaosyR4bE
"There's just one thing,
That's getting in the way,
When we go up to bed your just no good,
its such a shame! "
Darn the catchy tune!
I no like emo songs anymore.
They told me I am always so very calm. They also said that I am strong.Strangely, I don't feel that I am either. Neither do I pretend to be.Sometimes I wonder, then who are these people seeing?Do they know me?Do I know me?
The beautiful thing about this situation is that things can only get better.
Don't prove me wrong.
Last night, I had a dream that the world burned down and I didn't have to wake up cause nothing mattered anymore.
It was comforting actually.
Then I woke up.
Weather like this makes me feel like the world is ending. So what do we do? We take a long cold bath and hide in a air-conditioned room.
Remember the days where happiness was eating an ice cream?A trip to the playground?A swim in the pool?A family outing to the movies?A late night staying up for TV?A game of catching?Scoring full marks for a spelling test?Collecting many many stickers?Getting a new toy?Finding your mom in a sea of parents waiting to fetch their children after school?Living in a make-believe world where you can be anyone you wanted?Or did your memories all fade away; dwindled into the night just as your fervour for life did. Will you stay with me in my childhood?In a place where nothing will ever hurt us and the world is coloured with innocence.
