Being good

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves.

- 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Whenever I am at a loss as to what to do, I take a cue from you, from your love, and just try my best to do what is right, to love as you do. Thanks for being one of the last few things that I am sure about. Thanks for letting me know in all your wonderful ways that no matter how bad things get, that everything is going to be alright.

I have so much to be thankful for

It is complete madness. No matter where and when I look, I am Pollyanna Glad. I bet it's the same for you. If you can't see it, I'll be happy to point it out. Seriously, hit me.

In other news, 'Dreamy Creamies':
is the product of thinking about IP law while listening to Joshua Radin's 'Sky'.
is what I fully intend to name the one big thing I will create in this life, whether it turns out to be a dessert or my Dream XI FC. O Law of Passing Off won't you descend upon me and my soon-to-be multibillion dollar business of Dreamy Creamy selling your protective shield.

Choo, out (pronounced 'oat' in Canadian)! I AM A SCHOLAR OF MANY LANGUAGES THX. A right poly-gloat heeheehawhaw.

Last troubled night I woke up so abruptedly that I found myself in the sitting up position. The 4 big bright red letters flashing in my head were ADHD. There you go wj, my brain is that lag. Don't know which caused which but woke up this morning feeling very itchy and restless. I blame swimming weekend warrior style. Need to blast chill music, scream the lyrics impassionedly and dance crazy 80's dance until finally tired. Use your joshua radin cd.

One red paperclip: what really happened

(Last night, I was wandering about the Department of Nice Stories, My Own Head, furiously throwing files and papers in the air, determined to find a real good story to use as a pre-emptive strike against Rachel's looming nightmare when I stumbled upon this. Believe me, I tried so hard to tell the story properly but, as usual, failed epically. Seriously, not only do I manage to make the most incredibly amazing things sound dull and unexceptional, I mess up all the facts along the way. I've known for awhile with this sad sense of helpless inevitability that my poor memory will eventually be my undoing, but at least my Subconscious has sort of wisened up to this, and it duly nagged me all the way home and throughout my sleep. So now I have to try to do this story justice if only to shut it up.)

Meet Kyle, who at the beginning of the story was NOT HOMELESS (he rented a house) and his one red paper clip NOT LONGER THAN HIS ARM and NOT HIS ONLY POSSESSION (recall lease and as you will come to see, a healthy, unbridled imagination). Kyle went online and told the world about his plan to trade this one red paper clip for something bigger or better and to keep trading up until he got a house. He accomplished this exactly one year and 14 trades later, and now lives in the two storied house in Kipling, Saskatchewan (incidentally the inspiration for much of our Consumer (Fair Protection) Act and also the reason for my genuine fear that I would burst out laughing midway through my lawr moots) that he traded for.

This is how the clip mighty morphin power rangered into a house:
One red paper clip
Novelty pen
Ceramic doorknob
Camping stove
1,000-watt generator
Beer keg with neon sign
Snowmobile
Trip to Yakh
A large van
One recording contract
One year rent-free in Phoenix
Afternoon with Alice Cooper (rock star)
Motorised KISS snow globe with mult-coloured lights
Hollywood movie role
House in Kipling

This list is just like one of those old lady/young lady, is it a tree or is that a face pictures in chain e-mails or psychologist offices. Depending on who's looking at it, different trades seem iffy, or even clearly not bigger and not better. For instance, I would not prefer a fish-shaped pen to the mega paper clip (I once bought a fifteen cm hair clip which made me very happy but otherwise had no conceivable use/value) or a doorknob to a pen (What could one possibly do with a doorknob detached from its door?), and then there are probably the more obvious head-scratchers - beer keg for generator, rent free apartment for a year vs afternoon with someone whose identity must be explained in parentheses, and then wth, a SNOW GLOBE? What was he thinking? I fully expect that to be n rather than two trades away from a house, really.

Anyhoo, I really like what this story stands for: (a) Possibility - Growing up, one of the greatest lessons that I have learnt (at home, in school, from various events/inventions/discoveries around the world, from general postmodern ideas) is that in this day and age, the size of the realm of possibility is enormous, and that it keeps expanding exponentially as people tirelessly chip away at the stumbling block of impossibility. Kyle succeeded because he had a good idea, the Internet and an interested media, all of which are easily within many people's reach. (b) Kindness - The rules of the game were clearly stated from the start: give me something bigger or better than what I have, and many came voluntarily to offer to do just that. So don't ever tell me that there are no more good people in this big bad self-interested world. (c) Relative value - One girl's pounding migraine could well be 75 million headbanging people's Ga-ga Ro-ma-ma favourite on youtube . Kyle was lucky to have met the No.1 Collector of Snowglobes; if he had been luckier, he would have met the No.1 Fan of Mega Red Paper Clips and gotten to the finish line much quicker.

So my dear scrw, never think that it is out of your means to make things better, trust that goodness exists and I will get back to you when I can think of an application for the third lesson.

Letters

Dear Rio
Today when I was in the shower, I thought of something which was admittedly only about a 3 on the haha scale, yet I did a full-blown chuckle to myself for a bit. I hope you saw that :)

Dear Jim
Where are you? What are you doing now? I am so used to being the uncontactable one in all of my human relationships, I am at a loss now that you are MIA. I mean, I know roughly that you are in the Arctic tagging fish, stabilising icebergs, hugging Andy the polar bear's longlost relatives and generally saving my grandchildren's world but that's all. I hope that either the internet contraption you guys set up on that mountain collapsed, or that the aurora borealis is being all angsty on your wireless again, or that you are too busy living your exciting life or that you've just grown tired of writing me.. as long as you are warm and safe! Because of you I now look out in the papers for reports on Arctic explorers / Canadian-American environmental navy groups. I miss you and your poems and pictures, your sweetness and your particular brand of humo(u)r. I'll always be waiting.

Dear Rachel


Do you remember what I do of this song? Hmm, of course you don't. It was what I looped on my ipod one day long long ago when we were running at east coast. I didn't want to be the first one to stop the two of us, so I kept telling myself that I would only stop when the song stopped playing. Now when I think about it, that day seems so surreal and dreamlike, I almost doubt if it happened at all. For starters, we were running, that in itself is enough to make it a suspicious memory. And then there's more! We were advancing at an admirable pace for such an incredible distance, you were not shielding your face from the sun and we had a proper, orchestra-building-like sunrise. These days the sky just brightens abruptly and without warning the new day is foisted on us all. Something like that day will never happen again but I'm so glad it did once :D

Today in my head

I am wet and late and panting up the - i swear - growing hill. FLIPPING FISH AND ALL THINGS EFFITY! I settle into the steady rhythm of mindless IE browsing against the background of Ng-Loy. She oscillates her wand, sending wave after wave of information towards us. Okay this is not so bad. I yell at shiiingz. Shiiingz yells back at me, figuring that the best defence is offence. She is right. Sneaky. I could get used to this. Then a whole succession and I mean succession of delightful things follow :D

I love the old skool feel to this song, which is rare. The only old things I like are the Beatles and my grandfather.

Vacation/Vacances!
Add sleeplessness, solitude and silence (thank you Bose QC, my new baby :D!) to a plane home and you get the perfect mix for a full session of thinking (too much, as pong would say, but nah I still believe more good than bad comes out of thinking). In my head, I fastflipped the part of the book of my life beginning from my last trip to hong kong in 07 to today, riding a whole rainbow of emotions in the process, and then I thought about the meaning of new events. Somehow, some way - maybe because the good old classic me is still solidly anchored in my core - I ended up being hopeful, optimistic and so impatient for the plane to land, for the rest of my life to begin and for that impossible thumb print machine to welcome me home. I would rather not need anything in life but I appreciate how good a holiday always is for me.

It's chocolat for now. Who knows what it'll be by the end of the semester (I promise to do my best to document everything)? I sense great things coming... and by that I do not mean the new Taylor Swift song on radio which is of course really an old Taylor Swift song, no effort at disguise at all. She is officially the new 50 Cent in terms of self-passing off. C'mon you have got to give the listening public more credit than that. I do know an apple is an apple is an apple.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND IN SINGAPORE GUYS, GO GO GO. Disclaimer: I was not paid to advertise this event, nor did I receive any benefits, say in the form of free concert tickets, hint fully intended.

Mr. Nobody

Because I need shows to resemble real life and real people as much as they possibly can, I hate! cartoons (sorry Pixar, your colourful balloons win over the whole world minus me) and guzhuang shows. Usually, I hate sci fi with a vengeance fierce enough to scare the whole genre into withdrawing into non-existence. But oh, Mr. Nobody is just special somehow. I have no idea how to put it into words, it is difficult in the same way that 'talking about music is like dancing about architecture', but I'm long due for a post so I'll try. The images! You know how you come across a word so many times that you have a good guess what it means but the dictionary lies beyond the reach of even 1x ridiculously long limb (even after yout try both arm and shuffling leg) so you're never sure if you've gotten its exact meaning but one day it is demonstrated so clearly before you that you understand it immediately, perfectly and obviously, just like that. So long story short, pretty image after pretty image triggered a flashing light in my head and I think to myself that this is what people must mean when they say 'cinematography'. And the music SO FITTING that you cannot decide which was made for which (chicken, egg?) and you just want to cry the way the people did when Michaelangelo's David was unveiled. Then the story. I did not understand all of it and I disagree with the conclusion that the protagonist comes to at the end but it meant something to me, which is much more than I can say for a lot of the 2 hour blocks of crap that I've sat through in this lifetime (yes I am talking about you, movie where Hillary Duff plays 2 characters, 2!!!!! warranting all those exclamation marks!) To me, it stood for this: (1) so much hinges on every little choice you make in life, so (2) it's very important that you choose right but (3) life moves in such complex ways that you can never tell what one thing will lead to and so.. nothing. You just choose and live with it. Suck thumb. Tragic, right? Plus there was some physics in it which I actually understood or at least sciency terms which I recognised from Big Bang Theory! So exciting! So maybe the secret to a well-received movie is to include intellectual yet reachable content so that it will stroke a happy audience's ego. For those who know me well enough, I will proceed to confirm that you do so know me by giving you at last what you have been waiting for: THE LITTLE BOY WHO PLAYS YOUNG NEMO IS <3<3 He puts the Home Alone boy to redfaced SHAME. He's playing young Dumbledore in the last two HP movies so guess which big money-grubbing movie-splitting company already has my happily surrendered $20 :D:D