Being Happy, Outrageously

I've given up on wishing I was outrageously happy.

Seriously, what's the point in wishing for something so impossible? Being outrageously happy all the time, every time? You must be kidding right?

For starters, how does one define happiness? What makes you happy?

Is happiness being in love?

Is happiness having tons of money to go on holidays and shopping and leading an indulgent, relaxed lifestyle?

Is happiness about being great in your job and the things you do?

Is happiness about being in a job you love, working with people who are fun, and having a boss who rocks?

Well, I don't have all the above. Does that mean I'm doomed to misery?

Niang

Niang is a very special person. She looks like a nice harmless person, but she really is not. In actual fact, she is the scariest person I know that is about 1.5m in height.

I thought of her today when I was eating cheese. Like me, Niang loves cheese. Like me, she also loves books. And like me, she's also very clever (but of course she's cleverer). Oh, and rude too. (She's the rudest person I know, even ruder than me. But I like it when she's rude to me because it's funny!)

Our relationship is a strange one. We're friends, I think. And then again, we're not. So it's like a love hate relationship. Sometimes we love each other and sms each other non-stop. Other times, we quarrel and call each other rude names. Or she asks me to go away and not disturb her.

We don't talk very often. We don't meet very often. But sometimes I'll see something and say to myself "I think that sucker Niang will like that", or I'll remember funny stories to tell her. And I know although she tells me she hates me, she'll beat up anybody who bullies me, and she'll lend me her ultra precious books if I beg hard enough.

So Niang, every time I eat cheese, I promise I will pause and think of you for at least 10 seconds.

PS And by the way, Niang, I promise to pray for you everyday, to grow taller.

I want to sing

After watching Celine Dion belt out her heart and her lungs in To Love You More, I've fallen into some kind of dark depression. Because I want to sing too, but I can't. I seem to have the singing genes of either a frog or a crow, I can't quite decide yet.

The gift of singing. A paradox in itself.

If a fairy appeared and asked people what are the talents that they wished they had, I bet most people would wish to be smarter, wiser, more beautiful, or can play an incredibly difficult musical instrument like the saxaphone. Ane there won't be any who wished they could sing. (I mean, why waste a good wish right?)

No one, absolutely no one will waste a good wish on wishing "I wish I could sing". Because most of us figure we can pretty much live without it. It doesn't better our standards of living in anyway. Heck I probably don't mind selling away my ability to sing if 1) I can sing in the first place, and 2) it is transferable.

But hey, when you're at a concert and you hear a sing that moves you almost to tears, at that point, you'll be willing to give up anything and everything, just for the ability to sing and touch people, just by opening your mouth.

For Music sooths the savage beast.

Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, Expels diseases, softens every pain, Subdues the rage of poison, and the plague.

The power to sing, is the power to give life, joy, peace, comfort, love.

Now can somebody sing to me please?

The New Year Resolution for 2007

My new year resolution for 2007? This comic strip says it all!

Faster, Further, Higher

There was a Coaching feature in the papers recently, sports coaching naturally.

All athletes worth their salt have someone who, besides provides training in terms of their game and their skills, also acts as a friend, a mentor, a discliplinarian, and sometimes, even become surrogate parents.

The importance of these people is paramount. Because these are the people who can take someone with innate but raw and unschooled talent, and train them until their rawness unschooled skill turns into the fine practised, precise and consistent play and skill that brings them to the top of their game.

And frankly, I don't envy them their jobs. Because I can imagine the amount of pushing, scolding, training and prodding it involves. But it's their job and they have to do it, even if their ward hates them for the things that they do sometimes.

Tough huh. For the poor guy. AND the Coach as well

Actually, it's not only athletes who need coaches. We all need someone.

Someone to believe in us. To believe that we're worth more than we seem on the outside, more than we think ourselves to be.

Someone who has x-ray vision, who can see see through all our crap to the good stuff within.

Someone to root for us when we don't believe in ourselves.

Someone to drag us out of our little holes of self-pity when we get tired and discouraged and want to throw in the towel.

Someone to tell us to make us give up our comfortable but very bad habits.

Someone to make sure we practise good time and money and relationship management.

Someone who will push us to our limits, in order that we can expand and grow beyond our limits.

Someone to push us to do the things we cannot do because we're so fixated in our mind about our inadequacy.

Someone who can and will help us make a success of our lives.

We all need that someone. And as a boss, a colleague, a friend, a parent, sometimes, we even have to be that someone to somebody else.

It's because we want to see the people we love and care about be a success, to go faster, further, higher than they themselves have imagined.

So if I nag at you, or push you to do something you think you can't do and don't like to do, and force you to change, NOW, you know why.

Happy new year pull your ear...

Welcoming in the new year. It's like getting ready for a first date.

You get all excited and in preparation for the significant day. You preen and pose and scrub and shave and diet and mentally rehearse interesting topics of conversations to entice and to make your date think you're not too dumb yet not too intelligent, and pretty enough.

My usual welcoming of the new years in the past, have been pretty much like my usual first dates, I was always unshaved and unscrubbed and un-dieted and very much unprepared.

Well this time round, it was different.

I have been pretty much preparing for 2007 for a while now, maybe it's because 2006 has been a less than satisfactory year.

For the last few months now, I've been thinking long and hard about things; about myself, my life, my relationships, my work, my past, and also my future.

It was a long and hard process, this attempt to honestly and carefully review and revalue my life of 29 years. (Because one can't just think about 2006 in isolation you see. The things that happened to me in 2006 were part and parcel, and many times, a result of what happened to me previously.)

It was a roller-coaster ride as I re-looked my life. Some parts were painful, others humiliating. Many a times, as I remembered things, I cringe at my naivete and stupidity sometimes. (I think it was at this point that I sometimes send what my friends say, wierd sms-es to them, in order to rectify a possible wrong or misunderstanding.)

While it's useful to re-think the things of my life, it sometimes brought me to a severe low when I realised how much of my life I've wasted, how many friendships I've taken for granted, how many people I've lost in my almost three decades. There were many "what ifs", and "supposing" this and that, and "if onlys".

What if I had taken this path instead of the other?

Supposing I had listened instead of being so stubborn?

If only I had apologised?

But that is now all past and gone. No point thinking "what ifs", and "supposing" and "if onlys". You blew it. Deal with it. And move on.

I blew it in so many things. So many of these I don't even want to think about or talk about.

I dealt with it today, the last day of 2006. Once and for all, I packed all the excess baggage together, and hoisted it out into the metaphorical sea of forgetfulness.

And I'm moving on to a great new 2007.

I'm excited. Because I know that 2007 is going to be a great year. I'm not sure what and why and how yet, but I just know.

Next year, this time, I'll be blogging about all the great things that happened. I may not be able to accomplish all that I want to do for 2007, but I want to be able to at least accomplish some. And more importantly, I want to make sure I will no longer live a life of regrets of "should haves", "could haves", and "would haves".

For once, I'm going to be free to enjoy a new year. The old has gone, the new has come.

Here's to 2007!

Happy new year and pull your ears everybody!