Run Away!

Argghhhh...Nnnoooooooooooo...Don't disturb me...........

She Ain't Heavy, She's My Sister...

I broke a chair this morning, just by sitting on it. Time to go on a diet. All those who call themselves my friends, stop me from eating so much!

I'm turning into Obelix-sis!!

Moments of Self-Doubt

It was a hectic day today - conference calls taking up the whole day with the occasional 1-hour break in between, and I still had my projects to run. So there I was trying to multi-task; to pay attention to what was going on in the conference calls, and trying to execute the projects at the same time. It was by no means an easy feat and I'm ashamed to say I lost my cool. I become frustrated and angry. I got flustered and confused. I started snapping at people. I started to whine and complain. I became sarcastic and rude.

How does one maintain balance in a tight-rope situation? How does one keep the head effortlessly above water when the waters threaten to drown you? How does one at sea maintain serenity in the face of a storm? How does one be stoic in the face of hardship?

It's really not only about running projects; it's really about life. Because what I am at work translates into what I'll be like in real-life difficult situations. And if and when the time comes, I don't want to lose my cool.

I mean, if Leonardo De Carprio had lost his cool when the Titanic hit the iceberg, Kate Winslet wouldn't have survived with the huge diamond would she?

Living Above the Crap

I like what Lucid Maxima said in her blog, "all I can say is that I refused to let him drag me down his downward spiral of gloom and doom".

This is something which I've been pondering about for a while - what I call, living above the crap. Most of us are very affected by the things around us - whether it be the environment we live and work in, or the people we have to interact with everyday, or even the alluring lifestyles and things we see in advertisements and movies. Our minds, values, emotions, moods are changing every day and every second, depending on what hits us hardest at that point of time. Sometimes it's an unreasonable client that has us frustrated and boiling mad; sometimes it's the Tiffany advertisement that has us lusting for what we can't afford; sometimes it's the people around us who tells us we need to lose 15 pounds. And I'm not sure why I behave like a dog, running to fetch every stick that people throw and orders us to run after.

Why are we so affected by things around us? Why do we allow people to drag us into their 'downward spirals of gloom and doom'? Why are we so vulnerable and susceptible to everything that comes our way? Are our values and principles so weak that we change our behaviour the instant we get angry or upset? Is our self worth and self esteem so low that we feel ashamed of ourselves the moment we see slimming ads on TV, or when some idiot tells us we need to lose 5 pounds? Are our feelins and emotions so susceptible that our days can be ruined just be a hysterical screaming client?

I'm still thinking, how do I live above the crap? If I don't do that, I'm going to be swallowed up by other people's crap. Yucks!

More than a pretty face...

I've noticed that about 50% of the photos I take have me up to some monkey business - it's either a funny face, or some weird monkey-sutra position. I'm not sure what is it with me and being ugly. I guess it's that, if I have to go down in posterity in a photo, I'll like to be remembered as being fun and not taking myself too seriously, rather than just a pretty face. That's my way of self-expression. Given a choice in life, I'd rather a unperfect one, filled with loads of booboos and laughs, then the commercial-type perfect life. Am I weird?

Dancing Building

I was watching some Travel Discovery show, and they featured this really really cool building in Pargue. The building resembles a pair of dancers in motion, and is affectionately known by the locals as the "Dancing Buiding".

Is it cool or what?!

Funny Story

I'm just suddenly reminded of something funny. I know this guy. He has 2 children. His older son is called Rambo. And the younger one is called Rocky. No kidding.

Save me from the aliens!

Help! Save me!

Raymond behind me is singing, no yodelling away. Kelvin talks to himself. And Audrey is starting to catch on the craziness.

I'm surrounded by crazy people. And they're driving me to hysteria! Save me! Please!

How ATMs work....

One of my questions answered....

Happy Food

I just had dinner at my favouritest places in the whole wide world - the Nasty Old Man Siao Long Bao place near my office. Frankly though, the service is nothing to rave about - the service is curt, the uncle is grouchy, they make you share tables with other squeezed strangers, and they glare at you if you linger too long over your last morsel of food. But the food makes me happy.

I love siao long bao, and Nasty Old Man still makes the nicest I think. I gone round in search of the best of my favourite food - the legendary Ding Tai Fung's, atash Crystal Jade Palace, and everywhere else that has it on the menu, but nowhere are they as comforting and warm to the tummy as Nasty Old Man's. I call it my happy food - it warms my tummy as well as the cockles of my heart everytime I eat it, because I make a point to only go there with people I care about. Good food + Lovely people makes for the best meal...

Long Weekend Musings

It was a super duper long weekend, and it serves me right really, for so happily taking Friday off, because I've just returned to a whole load of crap in the office Monday morning. Never never again will I allow myself to indulge in such decadently long weekends. (You do know I'm being sarcastic here don't you?!)

I don't know what is it with long weekends, but I seem to make use of my brains more. I mean, look, 3 whole new blog entries just over the weekend! Never have I been so productive! It usually takes me 2 weeks to churn out a single blog article, and that explains why my blog is so scarcely populated with content even though it's been in existence for 3 months I think!

Anyway, it's what I so relish about these long spaces of time; I actually have time to engage my brain! I mean, on a normal weekday, I finish work at 8ish, and then there's dinner, and I need to space out in front of the TV for a bit, pretending to appreciate the intricacies of the murder happening in CSI, when all that's really happening is that nothing is happening. In my mind at least, it's a total blank. Kaput. Zero. Nothing. And hey, before I know it, it's time to go to bed so that I can wake up in time for work the following day. In the morning, it's a mad scurry to ge dressed decently, and then be in the office by 9am, 9.15am if there're unforseen circumstances (according to stringent HR policies)! And then life is an unceasing fluster of meetings and calls and what not, and even lunch, the only break that we have is sometimes a five-minute affair, or even if there's more time, we have 5 people fighting to get their words in edgewise.

Is there time to even breathe, much less think, I ask you?!

Anyway, the one extra day over the weekend provided me with much fodder for future blog articles. All the insights I've gotten are merely one-liners that may not make any sense when you read it, but has definitely greater depths and insights. I mean, that's the way geniuses work...

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You know the miniature sharks that they have at the Wisma Atria aquarium? Why don't they ever grow bigger? Are they some kind of species of miniature sharks? Or are they even real?

How did people work before computers exist? I mean, can you imagine, I'll be telling my client to check out the fax of the creatives I just sent over.

Is Singapore the only country who actually has National Day songs? Other countries have their folk songs and their folk lore, and we have National Day songs. Gee, that's really embarassing.

I think people like reading blogs because it's an electronic form of mental voyeurism, and it's the only form that's legal! It's fun to 'look into' people's minds, and thoughts, and ideas, and crap.

I think I'm a failure when it comes to killing mosquitoes. I can't kill one that was sitting right on my knee and drinking my blood! And I doubt I'll be able to kill a lame mosquito flying with one wing, and the size of a tennis ball either. Is there some way I can improve my mosquito killing skills?

Winnie the Pooh? What the heck is a 'pooh' anyway?!! It is a combination between a bear and a puppy and something?

If whales are mammals, and they supposedly mate like mammals, how do they actually do it without hands? I wish National Geographic will do a documentary on it. That will be interesting!

And a goldfish supposedly has a 3-second attention span right? What goes through their teeny weeny fish brains in that three seconds I wonder? Foo... Fo...Ood..Hungr...Starv..Dyin... No wonder my goldfishes all dies young, they didn't have a chance to finish the thought they started out with, so they all starved to death. (Now you know what I mean when I call you 'Fish-brain'!

Work is work...

I don't like it that my work has seeped into my personal life. My life now seems to revolve around work and the numerous conference calls that are taking place almost everyday. Not only that, it has turned my otherwise scheduled life upside down with its many after office hours and last minute demands. My life has to be re-adjusted, sometimes, at last minute notices, just to fit my clients fancy. As you can tell from my ranting, I don't like it one bit.

Let's take this all into perspective. Life is life, while work is merely work. The world doesn't end if some of this work is postponed until the next day. It's not a matter of live and death for people if your work is somewhat late. The work you do doesn't make you a more successful or better person. You're not a success in life just because you can work 3 days and 3 nights without sleep to meet some stupid deadline.

So, I shall not bow to the pressure of ambitious clients. They can work their asses off for all I care, to prove to the world how competent and capable they are, and hopefully, the feeling of success can assuage the other insecurities and fears they have. As for me, I have nothing to prove; I have a life to live.

I Need Time To Think...

It's something which I do a couple of times every year, take a day off work and just wander around alone, watching a movie, having brunch at some breezy cafe (With 'breezy' being a key word here, it must be breezy!), reading a book in some quiet park. It's what I call my-day-off-and-mine-only-and-nobody-else's. And it is an absolutely necessary thing for me to to do in order to keep my sanity. For a few hours every couple of days a year, I spend time with just myself, and nobody else, and I don't usually look very kindly on those who intrude on those day offs!

This time however, instead of doing what I usually do, I spent the day with Evie instead, in honour of her 26th birthday. We met for a slow leisurely lunch of too much food. And then attempted to take photos with a camera that refused to work because of user-stupidity problems. Wanted to catch a movie, and ended up watching a cringe-worthy 'Wet Dreams 2'. The fact that I had not vomit all over the cinema floor due to large amounts of cringing and grimacing during the movie itself is testament to my strong self-control. Well, it was fun anyway; Evie and me - we're the invincible happy people. We squash Boredom by sitting on it, and making sure it doesn't rear its boring head.

But while fun days are, well, fun, I think I need to take another day off just to 'find myself'. Fun's all good and well, and while it does make life more bearable on one of those 'off-days', it doesn't sustain me for too long. At the end of the day, the things around me - the environment I live in and work in, my friends with their good intentions and their good advice, my trusty punching bag, won't be able to take me through all the crap. This is the slickest of cliches, but it's what's inside me that really counts, and it's what's inside that will take me through the long hual. And I desperately need to sort my insides out.

Haunting Melody

Over the weekend, my teenage friend very enthusiastically showed me all the stuff she could do with her stylo-mylo high-tech class-class phone. She could store loads of MP3s and midi files, as well as play some fancy-pancy 3D high-resolution game on her phone, plus other cool stuff, at which point my attention started to stray. Anyway, I managed to get a classic favourite of mine, Jay Chou's 晴天, which I am going to use as a ringtone for some people.

I'm no Chinese song fan, and it doesn't help that Jay Chou's not exactly the most charismatic and good-looking of Chinese pop singers. In fact, the reticent broody moody sombre bad-boy image he attempts to portray is, I'm convinced, a cover-up for his inability to say anything clever or witty. But hey, it's merely a personal opinion, you're entitled to disagree with me if you want. Anyway, I digress. How I started hearing about this song, is when my silly colleagues in the office were singing it ad naseum one time, day in day out, from morning till night, until it started to haunt me even in my dreams at night. After a while, the very first note of the song will drive shivers up my spine, and I will drive my singing colleagues out into the rain with a broomstick.

For all it's worth, I actually like the song, and upon scrutiny of its lyrics, I found that I liked them too. It has all the elements that I like it there; rain, wind, sky, memories of love. Especially poignant are the following lines...

从前从前

有个人爱你很久
但偏偏

风减减

把距离吹得好远

好不容易

又能再多爱一天

但故事的最后妳好像还是说了拜拜

You want some? Get yourself Aids tested first!

In the news yesterday, there was this piece of news of how this couple in India celebrated their love by giving each other Aids-free certificates as a pre-wedding present. In an Aids stricken society, they figured the best present they can give each other is that of being disease free. Plus, it sets the platform for a worry-free marriage.

I was totally fascinated the idea, and think it should be implemented in Singapore as a mandatory pre-marriage measure. Now, with the test clinic set in some dubious setting, and making such a super big deal out of it, it makes it distasteful not to mention inconvenient for anybody to do a simple Aids test, and what happens is that, the number of Aids cases is on the rise, with the free-love lifestyles that more people are adopting nowadays.

If only it was made a mandatory test for couples who want to get married, it will save us a lot of grief and help stem the cases of people being unwittingly infected by their partners, who in turn are deluded and thinking that their promiscuity will be blessed by the gods, and by some miracle they will not get any sexual diseases despite sleeping with any Jane, Mary, Sally and Tom.

THis is not a fool-proof measure of course. It won't protect those who have pre-marital relations or one-night stands. But at least, it helps those planning to marry, to go into it with wide-open eyes.

Oh, and another thing, it won't be such a bad thing if they make Aids tests more widely available, and also in more pleasant conditions and environments, rather than just a dingy clinic located somewhere within the red-light district. Aids is no longer a red-light district problem. It has become a formidable enought mass social issue.

I Work For A Mad Cow!

Here I am in the office on a bee-yoo-tee-ful Saturday morning, when I could have been home, having a nice breakfast of warm toasty croissants and hot coffee. And last night, a Friday night, I was on a conference call from 10pm till 1am! And that's not the worst of it! The Mad Cow was actually suggesting that we work through the night and give her the stuff that she needs before 5am the next morning, so she can email her boss.

Is she insane or what?! That's the worse of working for an insecure unmarried woman, who's ambitious and a go-getter and yet insecure. This kind of women have lots to prove to the world. They want to prove to everybody that they're capable and competent and ambitious (And they usually are, just that they have to make sure everybody knows it). At the same time, they suffer from angonizing feelings of insecurity and loneliness, and therefore want attention, if from nobody else, at least from their vendors. Put together, this becomes a lethal combination which spells trouble with a capital "T" for us poor people who have to work for them!

Make That Decision To Be Happy

It sounds pretty simple doesn't it, to make that decision to be happy? But it's just slightly more complicated than it sounds. Because if it was so easy, more people in this world will be happier than they are. There're some of us, who make the wrong decision to be unhappy, every single day.

Take the example of a girl who's in a physically abusive relationship. The logical and rational thing for her to do will be to walk out of the relationship isn't it. But the sad truth is, in reality, these girls don't make the decision to be happy, by walking out. I'm not judging them. I'm just making the point that sometimes, even in the clear-cut situation which I've just mentioned, if people are still not able to make the correct decision to be happy, doesn't this mean that many of us may not be able to clearly see that we ourselves are in the middle of a destructive relationship as well? I've seen so many people caught in destructive relationships or friendships, and I'm even speaking from personal experiences. We people can just be so blind sometimes, because love supposedly makes us blind. 'Love' makes us irrational and illogical and dare I say it out loud, stupid. I'm not sure whether that's love, or mere myopia.

So, I've have decided I want to be happy. For the long run. And that means I have decided to start investing my time, energy and efforts into the things that will make me happy. I will be doing a spring-cleaning and clearing out the things in my life that will not contribute to my goal of attaining that state of happiness.

I will remove people in my life that are not worthwhile. By worthwhile, I don't mean that I want to get something out of the relationship. By worthwhile people, I am referring to people that I can invest my time, energy and love in, because I can contribute to the lives and personal growth and development. And in turn, they will likewise give me all the help I need to grow.There are those that are parasites; these people are merely taking advantage of your niceness and kindness and your good advice. With my wealth of advice, I can afford to dish out a little to them once in a while. But when the rubber hits the road, there's no way i am going to give up my life for these people. They are just not worth it. To those that are worth it, they are entitled to all the good stuff!

There are activities and activities that are just a waste of time. For the longest time, I'm not sure why I automatically switch on the TV the moment I get home. I mean, there's nothing good on TV. The noise makes me cranky. And the worse of it is, I don't even enjoy watching TV that much. So I'll just watch the TV that I want to watch, and that will save me some time to do other stuff that I actually like to do. Books too. Books should be entertaining and should make me happy, if not functional. I shall stop reading books that make me depressed. The Graham Greene book's making me depressed. I shall stop reading it.

And how about all those negative mindsets and attitudes that could make you less happy? For those of you who are prone to worrying, please stop. I know it's not easy, but please, do yourself a favour, and rid yourself of that self-destructive pattern of thinking. For all of us who like to bear grudges, or who are not able to let go of the past, I say, let it all go! How about those of who who are constantly cynical and suspicious, let's be open-hearted about people, instead of staying petty and constantly wondering whether people are actually sincere when they compliment you? I'll say, life's just too short!

Make that decision today to be happy!

It's a Frightening World We Live In...

And the people living in it are becoming increasingly frightened people... It's no way to live, afraid that any day now, will be the last day we will ever live. Because we never know what's coming around the corner. We're like chickens in a cage; not knowing when we'll be slaughtered to satisfy somebody else's perversity for blood.

Change is Good

Change is good! Change is inevitable! And I'm going to quote the line that everyone quotes ad nauseum, the only thing that is constant is change. And yet, change is not an easy thing to achieve.

I was doing pretty alright the first half of the year. I wanted changes in attitudes, mindsets, perspectives, behaviours and actions. And although I wouldn't say I've arrived, I thought I did pretty well. But now that the half-year mark has come and gone, the second part of the year seems to be a more difficult period in comparison.

They didn't tell me change will be such a tiring process. I'm not sure I'm able to live up to the 'constant change' mantra. But there's no choice really, if I don't continuly to plod on, it means going back to square one. Nevertheless, I wish I could take a day off to recuperate. I'm not sure that really works though, but it sure will be nice. No, at the end of the day, what drives you comes from within, not from without. The trick is setting the mind to it, and finding the strength from within to overcome all that inertia and lethargy, and to quote Lucia Maxima, the 'general feeling of malaise' that's going around like some flu bug.