A Time of Celebration and Feasting

when i was little, chinese new year was something i looked forward to, not just because of the food that were prepared once a year (you might not believe it, but back then i wasn't so crazy about food as i am now :D), but also the fact that i get to meet up with everyone in the extended family. the school holidays, the cny music wherever you go, the tangerines, and the red packet (angpao) of course, firecrackers, lion dances, family gathering & gambling, marathon of cny movies like the classic wong few hong series, and jackie chan's police story series. my fav part would be - the boisterous family gathering peppered with laughter and little kids' cries (both accounts without correlation though); and of course, uncle tony's palm-reading sessions. ;) only during this time of the year you get to eat like a glutton (not that i did that when i was a kid -- really! :P) without being frowned upon by the adults - sweets, soda, and all the fried stuff, plus the cny cookies. new clothes too! back then my brothers and i get to buy new clothes only during cny. once a year that's it, unless it's emergency or absolutely necessary. all these came in a package - and it has only all the good things with nothing horrible that entails. who wouldn't love it, right? today though, i don't think kids appreciate it as much as i, or my generation of kids, did. particularly in the US. to them, i guess every day is like cny. :D these days kids get everything they want whenever they want it, it's almost like a matter-of-fact thing. and if they don't get whatever they want, it's WRONG. -__- we live in a time of nimiety and profligacy, yet there are certain parts of the world that lack the most fundamental resources to survive. such is the paradox of the world we live in.

anyhow. i digress. as i grew up and dislocate myself from my nest, the meaning of Chinese new year diminishes each year when i'm not with the nuclear and extended family (yeah the whole clan both on dad and mom's side), and friends - but mainly it's the family. this year though, i'm not gonna sing the same old song bout being depressed and homesick etc., because, well. quite frankly i've gotten over it. it's like taking steroids for a prolonged period of time, or drinking too much coffee that you're immune to the effect of caffeine. having any stimulus for an extended span of time and this is what you get - hyper-excited sensory system that increased its threshold of stimulation. and so now i'm at this plateau stage where i feel just okay. *mehhhh* is an informal but accurate way of expressing it.

despite being 7000 miles away from home, i did have my fair share of fun. ;) on cny eve, i went to a family friend's relative's house for dinner, and they had an abundance of food, no kidding! :)))  ahh it was a temporary heaven for me hehehe. no steamboat like what i'd have back home, but they're all good food: roast duck, roast pork, yee sang, shitake mushroom with seaweed, poh piah (Chinese burrito haha), stir-fried shark fin, scallops with asparagus, homemade chow mein, deep-fried meatballs, fishball soup, deep-fried shrimp. :)  for dessert, there's homemade cendol with the choice of adding frozen durian. oh and i almost forgot - there's moscato and ice wine too. i wish i had some pictures to share, but it'd be kinda rude to whip out my DSLR in an almost-stranger's house, so. [note to self: getting a small digital cam is essential and this is why! :P]

and so, on this special day, though i'm far away from home, i wanna wish all my family and friends back home a happy and prosperous Chinese New Year, may all good things happen to all of you. i'm sorry i overslept and missed the chance to talk to everyone when you were all at the family gathering (/sadface), and though i said i don't feel much anymore, i need to clarify that i still miss everyone and everything back home. i have no idea when i'll be back for cny, hopefully next year. :) but i do hope you guys didn't forget me just because i'm thousands of miles away. i'm still the same old me (except perhaps.. chubbier). :D

much love, from LA.

The Fringe Benefits of Failure

i can't remember the exact dates, but sometime last week TED conference 2010 was held in Palm Springs. my twitterfeed was filled with attendees and speakers alike spooling out their take in 140 characters throughout the 3-day conference. guess how much it is to attend that conference. no don't guess. i'll tell you. 7k! good grief. anyway. since i couldn't go, i had to resort to their website for updates and talks. but in the midst of it, i found this video - JK Rowling giving a commencement speech at Harvard. it's inspiring and funny, so i thought i'd share it. but even more so is the mere fact that i'd like to keep a log of what struck a chord in me, or what i thought is worth revisiting in the future. trust me, it's definitely worth the 20 minutes of your life, simply because the underlying message is timeless. if for any reason you can't watch it, or prefer to read the transcript, it is included as well. (the red fonts are bits that spoke out to me or that i resonated with). enjoy!

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement.

Text as delivered follows.
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination. These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools. What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown. Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. 

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone. Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read. And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life. Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy. One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives. Thank you.

A Gallimaufry of Events

towards the end of last year, i stopped writing consistently - in part due to my coursework, and catching up with all the supplemental reading materials (which up till now i still haven't gotten to). what's more, i was so engrossed in the senate debate on health care reform that i didn't have time to do much else. then there's procrastination and the holidays. so before the hectic lifestyle begins, it's back to my intermittent updates-o-meter on my blog. the stuff i'm writing will be (mostly) in chronological order.

hair-cut: a disaster
so you see, i've been wanting to trim or cut my hair since the beginning of 2009, but for one reason or another i just never got to it. i didn't realize how long it got, until it got in my way in everything i do. so on a crisp November day, i walked to a nearby salon to have it chopped. it was a decision made on a whim, without much thought, but i know when i cut it i wanna donate it. (which i did, and i got a thank-you letter few weeks back.) now the disaster began. that lady didn't trim my hair for me after she literally chopped off my hair. she didn't even attempt to try to make it look presentable! but worst of all, she really did seem contented with her work and thought i looked "good". (?!?!?!?) wtf! i didn't want her to mess up my already-short hair (which, btw, i requested my hair to be cut from shoulder-length downwards) so i hurriedly paid and left before she could do any damage to my remaining hair. decided i couldn't go out like this the next day to work and to class, so i walked to the nearby mall and went to this supposedly reputable hair salon for an emergency trim. just my luck that i had to get this girl who had no sense of symmetry and didn't know how to thin out my hair. uggghhhh. i let her "layer" (if you could even call it that) my hair and "fix" it for the next hour or so, but the end product was still not much better. alas, i had to dash or i'll be late for class so that's that. what a disaster! i'm swearing off non-asian hair salons. those people should really go back to cosmetology school.

thanksgiving
like i mentioned before, i went to blythe for the entire weekend. 'twas a long break, had ample rest. and food omg!! :)) pictures up soon! i want more eggnog with rum! ;)

birthday
that day itself was uneventful. just work, and menstrual cramps. gahh! but i had lots of facebook birthday wishes, and a few birthday cards from important friends, so i'm okay. didn't feel completely deserted or forgotten. am thankful for my family, my brothers (whose bday card just arrived yesterday!), my friends who took the trouble to get me a card and send them by snail mail because they know i love it. more on birthday-related story in another post soon! i'll have to take pictures of the cards i got, my friends are funny. :P

Christmas
finally! this year i actually did something as opposed to the past Christmases whereby i just stayed at home not doing much. this year's Christmas was surrounded by lots of love and coziness in the little cocoon out in the desert. :) i can't ask for more. pictures of Blythe Christmas will be up soon too, in another post.

two-timer
sometime during the long holidays, i found out about certain scandals that i didn't know about and that i wished i didn't know. apparently it's been on-going for quite some time now, but nobody wants to be involved in it and so everyone pretty much chose to turn a blind eye on it. there's much dispute whether we as friends to all parties involved should interfere and warn the victim about what's going on. i personally think we should, because first of all what the other two did was wrong, and secondly the victim would find out one way or another anyway. it's just a matter of time. that being said, i haven't done anything yet. but i now have an utter distaste for that girl who could have stop all these from happening. please do not fend for them and say "not all things are black and white". it doesn't apply here. and on another note, i heard another similar story happened to a very close friend too. i hope he's coping well.

love and heartache
love can be so blind it sometimes makes you do stupid sh**. one wonders where the hell does one's common sense go, when it comes to that four-letter word. love can be possessive to the extent that it becomes toxic. then there are those who said "better to love and be loved, than not at all". i'm sure there's truth to it, but only when it's not the crazy intense feverish emotion that might take complete control of a person. and while i don't dispute the goodness that love brings to this world and our human race, i do think that sometimes it really is over-rated. (p.s. the love i'm talking about is strictly between man-woman kinda love, not the family love or friendship love etc) yet if you look closely, it's precisely this fiery intense love that most people, if not all, yearn for. the unrequited love is almost always more exciting and interesting, isn't it - notwithstanding the heartache it brings, that is. talk about irony!

Book of Fate

anyone who pays the tiniest bit of attention to the news would know that Air France 447 crashed into the waters of Atlantic last week. they're still looking for the black box, i think. how could any of them in the plane have known that everything will end there, in the midst of the deep dark water nonetheless? such is life eh.

the book of Fate dictates how our lives will turn out, no matter what you did or didn't do. doesn't it scare you sometimes, to know that you have no control over what's gonna happen in the future and that you can't predict or be prepared for it? am i gonna live to 50? 64? 78? am i gonna die young and be frozen forever at the age of [insert a relatively smaller number], or die of old age with wrinkles and flabby skin and toothless? if i could go online and buy this book of Fate from amazon.com or ebay that would be awesome. but of course, that would constitute as cheating. and that's the one thing we can never do, we can't ever cheat on Life (or Death)! :/

these days unpleasant feelings recur more frequently than the good ones. very often i forget how good it is to be living. to just be breathing. who cares about whats gonna happen tomorrow as long as we live today to the fullest, right? why worry when worrying won't do any good? yahdah yahdah yahdah. yes yes i know. i just have to practice them in real life. and i will! :) i just have to wait it out... for the sinking feeling to pass. so meanwhile, i have Breyer's fat-free (which we all know is a lie) double choc or haagen daaz' coffee flavor ice cream to choose from.

hmmm. life. it gets better with practice, and some getting used to. non? ;)
----
sidenote: may the victims of AF 447 rest in peace. my condolences to the families and friends of all victims.

Happy Chap Goh Meh

Yee Sang at this Malaysian restaurant in Alhambra, called Yazmin.
i'm going back there to try their curry laksa and asam laksa, heard its good. :)))

Less Than Perfect

this year's chinese new year wasn't too big a deal for me. in fact it was almost non-existent, except i made it a point to call most of my friends and family back home to wish them happy new year. through the earpiece i could vaguely hear the new year songs and the firecrackers which got me excited for a good few seconds!! :))) that was my slice of new year, transmitted a thousand miles across the ocean via the cell phone technology.

i can't explain how badly i wanted to be back at home just enjoying my favorite time of the year, but due to work and a lot of other complications i couldn't afford to do so. yet despite the disappointment that enshrouded my little world, the remnants of memories of chinese new year celebrated in the heart of penang and KL were held ever more tightly in my heart. and perhaps in the midst of reminiscing, i might have painted a picture perfect with only the giggly moments, abundance of cookies and food, family jokes and gatherings and palm reading during cny (we all know it's never the case, especially when all the relatives get together - there's sure to be dramas and gossips); it's still better than forgetting it altogether, no? it would be utterly sad if there comes a day that this 15-day long of celebration meant nothing to me anymore.

it's not the first year i'm not at home for cny, and its true that celebrating cny anywhere away from home is rather meaningless. but instead of feeling alienated or numbed, or worse - feeling indifferent about it all, i choose to celebrate it my own way, even though it meant not out there doing something and declaring to everyone else that i am indeed celebrating it.

it's a little less-than-perfect one this year, but i embrace it with all my heart anyway. wishing everyone a happy new year! moo~ :)

*aa-choo* excuseme blessyou

the lab i work in is extremely cold, every day the boss will come in and say the same thing ("its very cold in here") but never did anything about it. it's centralized i know, but he could talk to someone and turn up the air-con, couldn't he?! bahhh. its no fun when you freeze in-doors and out AND when you get home it's still cold!! it's no wonder i can't get out of bed in the morning these days.

food craving of the past few days: curly fries!!!

every day i drive past mcd's in front of my house, and carl's junior in front of my workplace and i sooooooo want to just drive-through and grab some fries. mmmm hot fries!! in cold weather, even better in exceptionally cold office. but no, due to new yr's resolutions i shan't give in to temptations. i did have some taco bell though. not too healthy with slabs of cheese and sour cream, but oh they tasted so good!! :)

back to topic of cold, not that i'm complaining - i'd prefer cold to hot, snow to sweat anytime. and i always tell people i'd love to live in Norway for 2 years. just for the heck of it. most of them think i'm crazy, others think i'm just being silly, neurotic, or worse - on crack. but i'm serious!!! i just wished it'd happen some time in the near future. see, they have this Ice Music Festival every first full moon of the new year, and all the instruments used to play music are made of ice. no kidding! trumpets drums everything. isn't it so cool?! and and and!! they have one of the largest ice hotel in Norway! though not in the same town, i don't think so. but still! with the carbon dioxide emission ramping the world temperature at an exponential rate, i wonder how long more can the weather sustain the ice music festival... because you know - the sound varies with the temperature.. and you obviously can't play the instruments when they melt in your hands!! :( think about it: music festival with all things ice, at the location none other than an igloo. if you remember, i have a thing for igloos.

sigh. anyway, i can't make it there this year - its starting this friday through sunday i think. at Kikuttoppen in Geilo, Norway. check it out if you have time: http://www.icefestival.no/ Hopefully i can make it for next year or 2011's festival. who wants to come with me?! we'll go ski, stay in ice hotel, and have hot cocoa in an igloo. yay. cant wait. :)))))

meanwhile - ongoing sneezes i shall have. and as of now, my curly fries craving is gone.

Bling Yourself

every now and then we need to have some fun and do crazy stuff lest we die tomorrow and have no more chance to do so. thus on roy's birthday we decided to use it as an excuse to throw him a ghetto themed party and had everyone dress up in their bling-blings. food we had? fried chicken, of course, whatelse. :P

from left: prasanna aka baby bai, kenna aka lil K, roy aka bday boy, and fahmi

fried chicken was delish. should've ordered biscuits too

fahmi and erin. erin was so cute she had the chain with lights blinking :))

"now you see me, now you don't"

buatan malaysia: our very own valedictorian and genius

sparkling teeth :) darlie should get her to advertise for them.

but she'll tell you, "its the indian toothpaste!!"

its me and miss C. guess what she wore. graduation gown. XD so funny

roy in his ghetto-ness. you can't see it in this pic,
but he had aluminum foil wrapped around his front teeth :D

no custom-made cake for you this year roy. but its still good nonetheless ;)

sean's room with the gang. its a bit dark, i didn't edit the picture.

Dance All Night

we malaysians cant live without good food, especially during festive season

this year there were some entertaining performances, like this skit

indian dance, boy courting girl

hip-hop dance

after party dancing

good friends good company. happy deepavali to all (or rather, happy belated D~)

Temacula Wineries on a beautiful November Day

Denise and Wilson Creek's Almond Champagne. :)

rows and rows of wines and champagnes and sparkling glasses smiling up at me

alcohol before food, no matter how tempting the food may be.

best salmon dip ever! made by roxann's hubby kenny :) yumm.

the piglet and her plate of food

to our 2nd winery - la cereza winery. woohoooo~

excited faces

playing with my toy

from zero to naked in 1.2 bottles of wine?! XD

beware: wino-crossing

pretty cool merchandise in the shop

spot the girl :) who's this?

yummy looking cheesecake with fruit tarts around it that was wayyy overpriced.

table cloth as a reminder to drink more ;)

if one day i'd become one of them sitting and drinking with my girl friends, i'd get this :)

white-haired lady in pink smoking cigar and wearing hip shoes

what is this. wendy took this pic of me. how embarrassing. fyi - i wasn't drunk okay.

see i can still do the sobriety test and pass. damn dr kageyama would be so proud of me.

hahha means i can drink more :D

knocked out on the way back to roxann's parents' house

that's their mansion :)

driving around their plantation in that green truck (or whatever you call it)

five of us in this... (hmm seriously though what do u call this thing.)

my attempt of being an expert like brandon (obviously a failure...)

much easier to be the model

who wants mellons? big ones they are! we brought home a lot

and the sun's setting - its time to go home... group pic

夕阳无限好，只是近黄昏

night lights. pretty

dinner time with denise and wenz (who's behind the camera)

and how can we miss out dessert?! tiramisu at 85 degrees bakery in irvine. we must go, chean!

(please.. no more getting lost okay... :P)

a happy day ending in a bittersweet note in the midst of enjoying my hazelnut latte
too bad the day has to end

October Pictures

It all started from Sheena's birthday in October. Then Denise's Halloween Party, Izwan's birthday, followed by the actual Halloween. Wine tasting in the beginning of November; then came MySA's Diwali night, the night right after. Somewhere in between there's a lot of birthdays. Before we knew it, it was the fourth Thursday of November aka the Turkey Day. Just when you thought it'd stop there, the December birthday marathon begins: Sean's, Brandon's followed by mine. Then it's Christmas!!! and 2008 shall end with a blissful note (I hope) on New Year's Eve!!

If you haven't noticed the similarities already, let me tell you: good food and good company were present in all those events. of course, that would also mean inevitable outflow of cash or card-swiping, but good times like aforementioned couldn't be bought in the future even if we had loads of cash (ahh we all know it's just a means of justifying our lavish spending..;P).

Having said all those, and I know I should've posted those pictures LONG time ago, I never got to it. But whatever. I'm here now aren't I. I'm gonna post some pics here, the rest of which need to be edited, I'll post them later (warning: don't know when, perhaps never). What-to-do, I'm a busy girl okay. :P So here goes.

midnight surprise. a song, a rose, and cupcakes to sweeten the day to come.

sheena the warrior princess. also known as miss c.

denise's halloween party, with best food ever. cheese and crackers, wine and grapes,
walnut shrimp, brownies, and the cutest costumes. scroll down to see 'em.

the puppy that dresses as a bee.

bear-crossing! well they weren't careful, hence all dead. ooops.

for some reason, lisa was laughing her lungs out that night. must be the wine. :P

our sushi master, roxann, wearing my geeky glasses. so cute.
and NO. i wasn't drunk.

lauren the princess from the 18th century.

soooo. from top left, clockwise: cupid, princess, sushi master, graduate student,
the Mad Hatter, imperial princess, the unemployed, and juno's bf.

izwan's bday midnight surprise. :)

cake-cutting. even though its already sliced.

scary halloween. with miss c and pras.

the joker and joker's girlfriend. :P

ok so there's more pictures, but i'll post them up in the next few entries. now its christmas eve. if you'll excuse me. i have some real life interaction to do. :P