Post-exam

• Watched The Incredibles (Five stars!)
• Bought Clay's Christmas CD (50 stars!)
• Bought one Christmas present
• Got free Christmas wrappings
• Did not manage to find Amazing Gracie as present for friend
• Have yet to think of presents for anyone else
• Nor started on anything on post-exam To-do List

Heart of gold

"People judge you on your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg."

-- Kenny Carter (via The Lion's Roar)

(Who is Kenny Carter?)

Pa-la-PONG!

I sleep with my room door opened. My mom came in one morning (or afternoon, or dinnertime), as I was waking up, and informed me that I was making weird noises in my sleep.

"This reminds me of when you were young," she said. "One day, you just decided to keep saying pa-la-PONG! over and over again. We couldn't get you to stop, nor figure out what you were trying to tell us."

I'd never heard this story before.

"It was a long time afterwards, when we'd almost forgotten about it, that we noticed the ladder in the wash area, and remembered how it fell some time ago when you were playing nearby. Turns out you were making the noise of the falling ladder... pa-la-PONG!," she chuckled. "The things you children did."

"The point?" I enquired sleepily, still stretching under the covers.

"You were making that noise in your sleep."

It's hard to believe that the woman who can remember this from almost 20 years ago is the same woman who pops her head in my room every evening, without fail, to ask me: "Eh, do you know where my glasses are? I forgot where I left them again."

Sex

Who says we shouldn't talk about sex?

An e-mail interview worthy of the (free) registration required to read it.

Interview

Microsoft interview questions

These are supposed to be actual interview questions asked by Microsoft. I don't know if they are real, but they are so hilarious! Check out that last one at the bottom of the page. Priceless.

Come to think of it, sounds like something an eccentric Israeli lecturer I know would do.

Happy Birthday, Babe

Candlelight contains the night
Heaven lends an ear
And I lift you to the throne
Sending empathy on a summer breeze

To brush the window sill
Where you sit alone
The silence whispers your name
Echoing tears with the rain

Something told me you might be crying
Lying with your smile, alone
Something told me yours may be troubled eyes
Broken windows to your soul

For every tear that you cry
I promise you, I'll cry too

I have seen the hearts of queens
Broken now and then
One of them is yours
I won't lie if you ask me
Why it's gotta be this way
But I may not have much to say
The moon reminds me of your face
As I pray your heart finds grace

-- "I'll Cry Too" by Nouveaux

For every tear that you cry, I promise you, I'll cry too... Happy Birthday, babe. I hope that we helped brighten up your day a little today. :)

My girlfriends

I don't know why this didn't hit me sooner, but tonight, I just realised that my girlfriends have set sky high standards for my future boyfriend/husband to follow. They laugh with me, cry with me, hug me, and love me so much... I cannot ask for better friends as these.

I love you very much -- each and every one of you.

Perfect night

It's in the way the moon
Smiles on the water
Twenty past midnight on a Tuesday
It's the magic of the silence
Falling on the scene
Standing by a river in some sleepy mining town

And I'm powerless
Over this
Words fail, and I'm speechless
You find me where I'm hiding
See through me, and You undo me
And I'm loving the way… You move me

It's in the way You love
When love is not returned
And the way that I can feel what I can't see
It's the mystery of grace
Praying I won't fall
While waiting in the wings
To catch me

-- "You Move Me" by Paul Alan

The rain is pelting relentlessly against my window, and I cannot help but stare at the soft orange glow of the street lights outside. Even though textbooks and lecture notes are strewn right under my nose, it doesn't detract from how beautiful the night is. It's how it all fits together: the dimmed lighting, the soft rumbling of thunder, the coolness of air.

The night is perfect.

Free iPod!

Free iPod, choose from five colours!

(Hurhur.)

Healthy eating

Singapore noodles in British schools

Quotable: "These days, instead of dishing out burgers and chips daily, schools are beginning to vary their menus by serving ethnic food for about two days a week."

(Free) registration required.

Sibling rivalry

I remember when I was only three or four, having one of many writing books; on the first page, there was a picture of an ant on the top left corner. The rest of the page was filled with alternating solid and dotted lines, with a sample 'Aa' at the start, showing us how the letters were to be written. You had the exact same book; being only a year apart, we had the same of almost everything.

I don't know (or don't remember) why, as we sat down to begin our new book, you took the back of your pencil and ran it across that first page. Of my book. It left a yellow scrawl on the page. I screamed for Mom at the top of my voice, and I was crying, I don't know why. Mom resolved it the way she always did: since you drew on my book, it was only fair that I got to draw back on yours.

You refused, but Mom said so, and there was no disobeying Mom. So after a lot of pouting from you, and more tears and screams from me, you finally relented and handed your book over. I took my pencil and drew across that same page of your book with as much strength as I could muster, leaving a huge black scrawl that threatened to tear through the page. Before I reached the end of my scrawl, you were screaming and crying your lungs out.

I promptly got scolded by Mom.

"Meimei used yellow to draw on your book! It can hardly be seen! Why must you use such dark ink on hers?!"

I had no answer to that. I only knew that you started it, and I had to pay you back.

I don't think either of us touched the books again; we got new ones. We were spoilt.

I never apologised for it. And perhaps that is why I've never quite forgotten it. I know it's silly, and you might not even remember, but I still feel guilty to this day, for the vindictiveness I showed you, for not giving in to my little sister.

I'm sorry.

I promise never to deface your writing book, not even if you started it first.

That, I think, ranks as one of our most bitter fights.

I hope it always does.

We've been blessed.

Polo bun

Me: "Where'd they go?"

Y: "Went to buy polo buns."

Me: "They sell polo buns here? Where?"

Y: "At Crystal Palace, lor..."

Me: "... The football club?"

Y: "Eeps! No-no, I meant, Crystal Jade!"

Me: "Ah."

When love takes you in...

I know you've heard the stories
But they all sound too good to be true
You've heard about a place called home
But there doesn't seem to be one for you
So one more night you cry yourself to sleep
And drift off to a distant dream

When love takes you in and everything changes
A miracle starts with the beat of a heart
When love takes you home and says you belong here
The loneliness ends and a new life begins
When love takes you in

And somewhere while you're sleeping
Someone else is dreaming too
Counting down the days until
They hold you close and say 'I love you'
And like the rain that falls into the sea
In a moment what has been is lost in what will be

When love takes you in and everything changes
A miracle starts with the beat of a heart
And this love will never let you go
There is nothing that could ever cause this love to lose its hold

When love takes you in, it takes you in for good...

-- "When Love Takes You In" by Steven Curtis Chapman

Mom

Despite enduring long hours at work, my mom still cheerfully takes my temperature and makes ginseng tea for me. I have no idea how she does this; 20 years, three children, one dog, waking up at five every morning, coming home from work as late as 11 PM, and she still manages to give me a goodnight kiss every night.

My mom, my rock.

Thank you, Mom. Know that I always appreciate and am amazed at what you do for me, especially more so when I am ill. ;)

Pink dress

Why aren't more people obsessed with talking about the pink dress that the girl is wearing in the Lacoste advertisement? That is a dress that would take my life one step closer to perfection if I can ever pull it off.

Thanksgiving

Some great Thanksgiving messages. :)

Happy Thanksgiving, Emily and Annie.

Happy Thanksgiving, A L.

Autism

"A fair, fighting chance in daily life. That is what we all want for our children, isn't it?"

A touching insight into one corner of our society that is sometimes all too convenient to forget.

Chemical castration

Australia considers chemical castration

"It would not resolve the mental issues that primarily drive sex
offenders."

-- John Hatzistergos

Yes and no, but mostly no -- to chemical castration, or castration of any kind, for that matter. Let's not be gullible enough to think that it is sex that drives sexual abuse; there are many other ways one can inflict sexual abuse even if they are denied the ability to penetrate. Sexual crimes are, more often than not, issues of control, rather than uncontrolled sexual desire.

But let's not totally dismiss this. It is foreseeable that with specific circumstances, different approaches may prove effective.

Cooking for me!

Cooking for Engineers

Very cool. :)

Blonde jokes

Blonde jokes to be banned

While it's difficult to say that I understand their frustration, I do understand the frustration of discrimination to some extent. I mean, don't most of us, at one time or another? There isn't a way to eradicate bias, but people will do well to control themselves and understand that thinking ill of someone because of something as superficial as their skin or hair colour is something more to be ashamed, than be proud of.

The fact that the article is placed under the "Quirkies" category tells it all. Yes, I feel that it is a valid claim. No, I don't think it's going to help. How one will ban blonde jokes, I know not. But I do know that it will take more than that to cure bigotry.

Abstinence

Lessons from US teen pregnancy drop

The most ridiculous thing I have ever heard:

"Abstinence until marriage tells young people that contraception does not work and makes them vulnerable to unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections when they do have sex."

-- Melissa Dear, speaking against abstinence policies

So abstinence leads to unplanned pregnancies and STDs. Right.

The future

When my dad first started working, he'd spend all of his pay whenever he got it. He wasn't thrifty nor responsible with money, values that he'd always tried to inculcate in us. For their wedding, my dad had to borrow $4,000 from my grandma.

"She would nag at me endlessly," he recalled of my grandma. "Imagine," he chuckled, "I had to borrow money from my own mother to marry your mom."

This was the first time I heard this story. It continues to amaze me, that despite hearing years and years of anecdotes from two generations, I still feel like I'm a little girl, sitting on their lap, listening to these treasures that I hope never to lose.

In all honesty, I still see it in my dad: not that he spends recklessly, but his occasional indulgences in his toys -- MP3 players, thumb drives, CD cases -- do give him away.

"So it was only after you married Mommy that you decided you had to stop this spending habit?" I asked what I thought was the obvious.

"No," he answered.

I raised my eyebrows, then when?

"I think I only learnt to plan for the future when you were born. I learnt to plan for your future."

As he said that, an unfamiliar silence hung in the air, as we both registered -- I think, for the first time -- the poignancy of that revelation. Tears stung my eyes, and a lump formed in my throat. I couldn't speak even if I'd wanted to.

Thank you, Dad, for planning for our future. For always putting us first.

Blogger vs D-X

The reason why I left Blogger two years ago was because of the annoying, huge banner that hung over my blog. During my time at Diary-X, I realised how much more it gave me in terms of confidentiality; I could password-lock specific entries, or even the whole journal (which I have since done).

But I suppose it was always a cop-out. Life, I have realised, is more like Blogger than it is D-X. You make choices, and sometimes, you can't take back the wrong ones. Like how Blogger insists on keeping all of my archives, despite my attempts to delete them.

It was wrong to think that it was okay to have a place to anonymously vent my frustrations so that I wouldn't take them out on others. Anger does not diminish that way; that's how it breeds. It was a bad way to learn self-control.

Now the banner is gone, and it feels like the sky has cleared. We'll see how this goes. If it goes wrong, I can't take it back; maybe it's time for me to learn to think before saying or writing things that I would want to take back.

An inexpensive way to measure fat content

"Next time you get out of a shower, grab a stopwatch and stand in front of a full-length mirror totally naked. Start the watch and stamp your foot on the floor as hard as you can. When stuff stops moving, punch the watch and check the time.

"I'm down to two days, three hours, and six minutes."

-- Ken Davis

This is how ridiculous it sounds to me, when I hear of people with 22-inch waists complaining that they are fat. Although, if you really do have a 22-inch waist and think you are fat, I should be more worried than sarcastic. I really should.

My cousin

My cousin came home for vacation, and she never fails to make me feel twice her age, when I am four years her junior. All I really did was to advise her -- with matters pertaining to safety -- not to drive too fast, not to turn on the radio too loudly while driving, and not to have bottles of sweet drinks in the car (in case they spill). That got me the you-are-such-a-mom earful.

In the short time that my cousin was back, she banged the car up twice, and messed up the front gate, rendering it unable to perform its function of opening and closing. It was fun. And now that she is back in England, I will miss her loads.

Online book shopping

Kinokuniya BookWeb

For people who need to get presents amidst a tight examination schedule. ;)

Things to do

Something to look forward to, for after the exams. It's a short holiday, so I mostly want to rest and do all the reading I've missed during the semester. But here are some other things that I hope to get done during this break:

• Revise sign language
• Learn to play the guitar
• Get a tan Swim at least once a week
• Spring clean my room
• Tidy up blog(s)

Let's see how many of those I get done.

Sir Fred Hoyle

"The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 naughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence."

-- Sir Fred Hoyle

So this is the guy who coined the term "Big Bang." Only, he did it to ridicule the theory that he, ironically, helped popularise in the end.

25 years

We were in church today, and before worship started, my mom took out her tube of hand cream. (Air-con dehydrates, okay?) As she twisted off the cap, it slipped through her fingers, dropped to the floor, and rolled a couple of rows down the pews.

"What'd you drop?" my dad whispered.

"The cover for my hand cream," my mom whispered back. "I think it rolled to the front row."

My dad got up and made his way amidst the congregation, and searched for it a bit, before he found it, picked it up, and returned to where we were, handing the cover to my mom.

I don't know why this gesture touched me so much. My heart was so warmed by this small act that probably didn't even mean anything to either of them. I just hope that when my husband and I have been married for 25 years, he will still pick up after me, with such a cheerful heart; and that I will remember to thank God for giving me him.

A different perspective

Baghdad Burning

Worse than being blind

"Is there anything worse than being blind? Yes, a man with sight and no vision."

-- Helen Keller

Moo

Not the best time to be playing such juvenile games.

Click and drag the arrows to your right, and place them on the green board. Then click "Go!" and watch your cow(s)... er, go. Click "Run" to make your cow(s)... er, run.

Ding-dong

E: "Hey, it's raining. I think I'll take a cab over to your place. Is your front gate unlocked?"

Me: "Yep."

E: "Can I just run in then? Like, without ringing the door bell? Since it's raining?"

Me: "Um, yeah, sure."

E: "Cool."

Me: "My door bell hasn't been working for the past year."

E: "..."

Me: "And you ring the door bell every time you come over?"

E: "Yes."

Me: "Um, then what happens?"

E: "Then I end up standing outside your gate for ten minutes until I've waited too long. Then I call your brother and get him to open the gate for me."

Me: "Yeah. My door bell hasn't been working for the past year."

E: "Now I feel like shit."

Me: "Sorry."

The reason

I guess I just got tired of people popping by, even after I'd told them (you) not to. Not that I could hold it against you for being curious, or thinking it didn't mean anything, when it actually did to me. Guess it must have gotten old for you, too, to hear me repeat my routine over and over again.

So I'm trying this out now. To be prepared for people to stop by. To allow you to say hi. Or not. But out of sensitivity to some friends, and consideration of others, I've decided to be a little bit schizophrenic with this. Bear with it, this is new to me.

It makes good organisational sense too, and you know how I can be about that.

It will probably take you guys some time to find this, but when you do, I'll be prepared. No worries, all is good.

I will neaten this place up after my exams are over. And hopefully some of you will decide to stay. :)

Thank you for two years of faithfulness, Diary-X. Maybe someday...

DOOL

For those of you who want to play catching up with Days of Our Lives. :)