Remembering

“Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. 

And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life.” 

― Steve Jobs

When there is life, there is death. Every new life that comes to this world is guaranteed nothing but death that will ensue, albeit it being just a far-off concept that no one ever thought of at the present moment. But of course. Why would anyone think about that when they're too busy rejoicing in the beauty of this bundle of joy in their arms, their mini-selves. Unless you're like me, who's weird and morbid at times. It's a good thing then, that I'm not in the position where I have to deal with the contradictory emotions.

In medicine, it's hard not to think about death, when you're dancing around it on most days, if not all the time. Fact is, mortality stares at you all the time. Healthcare folks somehow learned not to be bothered by it, and just kept an arms' length from it, I suspect to protect themselves from being too emotional or overwhelmed, and also to be able to function and carry out their tasks. It's a matter of habit, and one can usually go about his/her daily business, focusing on the science/medical aspects of the job, instead of the life and death that is the core of what we do every day. But-- when it comes to someone we love or care about, it'd be tough, if not impossible, to ignore this aspect at all.

In all honesty, I only knew her personally for a short while, so I don't think I have the right to be tremendously affected when I heard of the news. And yet, I felt disproportionally affected- more than I think I should, because in that short period of time I've grown to care for her. She was this amazing, extremely capable, independent woman, who had accomplished so much both in her professional and personal lives, always positive, generous, caring, selfless, and determined. So when she found out she had this terminal illness, her personality and character didn't allow her any other way to deal with it other than facing it head on, with that fierce determination to beat it. Her grit, her strength, even at her weakest moment, amazed me, and touched me to my core, and I wished I could've done more for her. I almost believed that if anyone deserved a reprieve from a terminal illness, it would be her. It has to be her. I want it to be her. But alas, cancer is a b--ch, and there's a reason why terminal illness is called a terminal illness. And so when I heard, though it wasn't completely surprising, it was still a shock (that it happened sooner than I thought).

I want to be mad at God (if there is one), for taking a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, and a friend away from those of us whose lives she had touched. But my upbringing and beliefs also taught me that: 1) death is inevitable, and 2) life is unfair.  Couldn't exactly get angry at impermanence of life now, could we. As for the second point, I don't think anyone has come up with a solution for that yet.

Sigh.

I will always remember her as the beautiful person that she was, inside and out.

To those reading this, it seems cheesy or cliché to say it, but really-- cherish every moment of your life, and those around you, for you never know...  Tomorrow is promised to no one, today is all we have.

Taboo

Preamble

I've been saving this draft I wrote long ago towards the end of my fourth year of med school, uncertain if I should share it. Was worried that I'd get in trouble for sharing something like that. It's probably unlikely, given that I'm not sharing any identifiable information about the patient or the personnel taking care of the patient. Plus, it's been so long ago... I doubt anyone other than myself remembered this incident. I've considered deleting it and just move on, but some things are hard to let go, and this is one of them. Sharing it now because it was so hard to talk about it when it happened then. Perhaps sharing it here now will allow me to see it in a new light, and put it to rest. So... here goes.

-----

My Emergency Medicine rotation was a memorable one, one that gave me some of the best and worst experiences in my clinical years as a med student. One particular incident left a deep impression on me, and I had to pen it down while it's still fresh in my head. On one of our on-call nights, my friend and I returned to the ED (Emergency Department) from a quick dinner break, only to find the red zone to be almost empty save for this one patient with the attending and a house officer huddling around him. The ED was divided into 3 zones - red, yellow and green (like the traffic light) - and patients were triaged to a zone depending on the severity/urgency of their condition: red being the most urgent/severe and green the least like a cold or a minor cut, with yellow in between with the potential of escalating to the red zone. As most med students can attest to, we usually like to be where the 'action' is, if not actually making ourselves useful during such occasions, at least watching and observing to learn a thing or two. And on that fateful night, a thing or two we did learn, indeed, albeit not what we expected.

A 60 year-old pedestrian was hit by a motorcycle, and was found unconscious on the ground for an unknown period of time. Upon arrival, he was found to have GCS of 8, with an active bleeding somewhere in the oropharnygeal region. He had no external wounds, no broken bones. His condition warranted a tracheal intubation to secure his airway before being sent for a CT scan of the head to rule out an intracranial hemorrhage. Unfortunately, none of these happened and he was not intubated until two hours later. Meanwhile, this man was bleeding quite profusely and we were tasked to suction the blood out of the cavity, as they tried to intubate him. I watched helplessly, worrying about him bleeding out. At the rate that he was bleeding, I was almost certain the blood being transfused could not keep up. It took another two hours to send him for the CT scan, because while all this was happening, his abdomen became increasingly tensed and swollen. The consensus was that there might be internal hemorrhage, but they couldn't seem to agree with the next step. It was between sending him for head CT only, or whole body CT scan. At this point it was close to midnight, the red zone started to get busy, the surgical residents who were called for consultation were reluctant to bring the patient to the operating room for an exploratory laparotomy to potentially stop the hemorrhage in the abdomen. Deliberate discussion took place, and then some, and in the end they decided they wanted a whole body scan. As all those were happening, patient's BP kept going down, his pupils fixed and dilated, and all we did was keep giving fluids and blood products. Bad luck had it that the CT machine in the ED wasn't working, so he had to be brought to the radiology department at another site, which was a long way away. It took us at least another 30 minutes to gear up before we were finally on the move to the other side of the building. Alas, as soon as we got there, the man coded, test was aborted, CPR was started while we wheeled the patient back to where we were 10-15 minutes ago.

It was of no surprise that this man died after an unsuccessful resuscitation; and everyone carried on with other tasks and patients as if it was just another death. Everyone except me. I was bewildered, stupefied, but most of all I felt helpless. Perchance when he came in he was already a lost cause, perhaps death was inevitable with the severity of his injuries, but we didn't know that for sure. Even if we did, shouldn't our job be to do our best to save his life, the emphasis here being 'to do our best'? I was upset not just because a person died that night, but that in every step of the way I felt we as providers could've done so much better. I didn't (couldn't) understand why everyone acted as if it was just another green-zone case, why there was zero sense of urgency, why certain decisions were made (and took so long at that), and why everyone appeared to be emotionless and moved on so quickly. Throughout the entire time no one contacted his family members, no attempt was made, or at least none that I know of.

I tried to understand what happened, and what could've been done differently to prevent this from happening, but I was stumped. This to me should be a case to be brought up during Morbidity and Mortality meeting, but when I asked the attending about it at the end of our shift, her reply to me was this, and I paraphrased: "... you will see things that are done correctly, and things that are handled poorly. Good and bad decisions, and behaviors/attitudes. Just learn the good ones, and ignore the bad ones..." For the second time that shift, I was baffled. Sure, yes learn the good and leave the bad behind. But what about the patients?! By not doing anything, aren't we silently consenting to the wrongful actions or behaviors? Does that not make us complicit? That morning I had trouble sleeping. I felt I've failed the patient, and I couldn't get rid of the guilt. As I eventually dozed off, I think I died a little inside.

-----

Afterthought
I still think about this man once in a while. I wonder if it's just me being the med student who was 'young' and 'innocent' and this was some kind of rude awakening to 'how things are' in real life. An initiation of sorts. Because how else do you explain why everyone who was working there acted so nonchalantly and went about their business? Maybe they felt something too, but had to hide it to be able to function. If everyone dwelled, then no work could get done. Maybe it's the culture to act tough and move on. Maybe like me, initially it got to them, but after a while if this kept happening, they just had to wall their emotions off, toughen up and learn to shut up and move on. Maybe they all felt helpless at some point, but believed that nothing could be done to change this and so they just accepted the way things were and learned to live with it. I don't know. These are just my speculations, because we weren't allowed to talk about it. Because pointing out some behaviors, actions, or decisions that might be questionable is forbidden, I didn't get to understand the root cause in that context. I doubt they really understood it either. It's such a taboo that you just learn to sweep everything under the rug and do your thing. If you want to survive, that's the modus operandi. 

My writing this and sharing it here wasn't intended to criticise or to let known how bad things are back home. Situations like these happen everywhere. The point is, there is a need to talk about it, to discuss and address the issues so that we can improve. Pretending as if it didn't happen won't prevent it from happening in the future, and then it's just going to happen again, and again, and again... We owe it to our patients to do our best, and make sure we do not repeat mistakes that can potentially cost lives. Primum non nocere, in English, means 'first, do no harm'. To do that, we've got to set aside the ego, and be willing to take the first step to talk about things that went wrong. I do not know if things will ever change back home, but I sure hope it will. One can only hope. 

A Wrong Diagnosis

If you ever had that passing thought that "things couldn't go any worse than this right now", my advice to you is: please, stop. Stop that thought right now and switch it to something else, whatever that may be. Think of mockingbirds, ice-cream, the cute guy/girl you saw yesterday, your pet. Anything. Anything but that. Experiences prove, time and again, that every time that thought comes into mind, things will inevitably become worse. You may say, well maybe that's just my selective recall bias, an anecdotal fallacy, and not truth. Fine. Have it your way, but don't say I never warned you.

For the past few weeks I've been obsessed with rashes. Found every article I could and read about the differentials, examined for hours the images of each rash, read more than once about varicella, scabies, PLEVA, and a few others on the differentials. I'd wake up in the middle of the night from the itch, reached out to my phone and looked up other causes of rashes, or read up on one of the many skin diseases. I really shouldn't be going down the rabbit hole when I should be studying for boards, but I can't help it!! I can't stand not knowing what it is and why it's getting worse when it should be better! Arggghhhhhhwwarrrrghhhuuuurgggh!!! [That's me turning into Hulk, in my head.] 

So. As you can tell from the title of this post, turns out the rash wasn't chicken pox after all. Here's what happened. 

About two weeks after it started, when it didn't get better as expected for varicella, but in fact got worse, I started questioning the diagnosis. I would've got to the bottom of it all sooner if I wasn't so reluctant to see a doctor, or if I didn't hold on so tightly to the wishful thinking that it is the easier, simpler diagnosis. Because even though it's absurd that one could get varicella twice, it's still a shorter course of disease, self-limiting, and- I was banking on the probability of it being milder since it'd be a recurrent infection. I was really hoping it was "just" that, and be done with it. So when the rash started to spread, I convinced myself that I'm seeing things, that it's all in my head. Sigh. "For someone who studied so much, this type of reasoning was downright stupid," I can almost hear my dad say that to me. :(

And so it got to a point where I just couldn't lie to myself anymore and had to go to the university health center to get it looked at. The doctor being uncertain of what it was, referred me to dermatology. And with just two words, a huge portion of my anxiety melted away: pityriasis rosea. UGHHH. Really? I never thought bout it because there's no herald patch! And no christmas tree pattern as well! Here's another lesson learned, just because something is pathognomonic of a disease doesn't mean the absence of it precludes the diagnosis. I guess my frustration was noticeable, when I asked the dermatology resident: "How on earth did I get it?!" To which he calmly responded, as if trying to placate me, "It's nothing that you did or could've done to get this. It's a really common disease and a lot of people get it, but we still don't really know why it happens or what causes it." Great. Just great. Isn't this the majority of the case for almost 80% of the diseases out there?! That we don't know what the heck we're dealing with most of the time.  If I weren't in the medical field and could understand the unpleasantness of having to tell a patient that, I'd have rolled my eyes and stopped listening. But I get it, so I didn't pursue further.  Yes- I get it now, more so than ever, because now I don't only understand it from the physician's point of view, but also from the patient's. I know how it feels to be on the receiving end of that statement- and it sucked. 

Sure, I understand that a lot of medicine is still in the grey area, and that there are a lot that have yet to be discovered. But the simple truth is that logic never does make anyone feel better. It also makes me realise something about myself, which is probably also the nature of most human beings: that we always attempt to explain everything that happens to us (that's how the age-old adage of "everything happens for a reason" reasoning came along, isn't it? To make us feel better?), and we also try to do so in a way that attribute the cause upon something other than ourselves. In other words, we're always inclined to blame it on something else, anything but ourselves or our own deed. But when push comes to shove, we'd take the blame too, as long as there's a logical reason to it. We don't handle the "unknown" very well though. Indeed, it's the shrugged "I-don't-know-why-it-happened-it-just-does-and-I'm-sorry" explanation that makes us feel the worst. But why??? Why did it happen to me? What have I done to deserve this?!  Those are the thoughts that would plague one's mind, because one usually cannot fathom how a bad outcome could befall oneself when one has done everything by the books. Think of all the people who got lung cancer but never smoked a cigarette or anything in their entire lives. Or substitute it with any cancer that happened without a known risk factor in someone who had lived a perfect life up till that point. Think about the 30-something neurosurgeon who was about the complete his decade-long training only to find out he had terminal lung cancer. It's atrocious! How vile to have been sentenced to such fate when a 90-year old man a stone's throw away was probably happily puffing his cigarette celebrating his 70th-pack-year! But what can one do but throw up his hands and surrender to this thing called Life??! 

And when the initial emotions has passed and the dust settled, how does one cope with this kind of horrible outcome? Ironically, one tends to circle back to the "everything happens for a reason" argument to cope with it, or chose to accept and entrust one's faith to the higher beings. That, or one could go into self-destruction mode and start hating everything and everyone with the "fuck god, fuck the disease, fuck the world" mentality. 

Now I'm not being melodramatic, I don't have a terminal illness, I just have a skin condition that is also self-limiting, albeit one that will last 6-8 weeks. In the bigger scheme of things, I am thankful for being alive, for having "just" a skin disease. But being unwell is hard, especially for someone who's spent most of her adult life working towards being the person who provides care. Now that table has turned, it's a hard pill to swallow. I don't want or like to be reminded that I too am mortal, that I'm completely susceptible to any disease, and that the medical degree earned is not an immunity to any or all sickness at all. Alas, I, and all the other physicians who may share my sentiments, are just humans too. We too can die, can get heart attacks, dementias, stroke, or [insert your disease of choice here]. It's a silly, not-worth-mentioning known fact, but we don't really think about it until we have to. (One could argue that some deliberately avoid thinking about it, but that's a topic for another day.) The truth is, we all have to face mortality at some point, and we will all do so on our own terms. One way or another, eventually. (Unless you happened to be in a plane that miraculously disappear into thin air. Then sorry, no time for you to think about dying and death because your brain cells and every bit of you will be blown up into ashes before you could even conceive of what just happened.)

I write this before I had the chance to read Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, or Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air (that's the neurosurgeon who had terminal lung cancer I mentioned above), even though those books are just sitting on the shelf two feet away from me. When I'm done with exam, I'll read them. Perhaps I will have additional thoughts on mortality then. But at this moment, as I'm writing this pondering upon mortality, grateful that I'm alive yet slightly (only slightly) resenting the cards I'm dealt with, I still think it's a good thing over all. I see some good coming from it, not because I'm a masochist, but because through this ordeal I had a taste of being a patient, of being unwell, without having to go through chemo or radiation (or worse- to die!).  Empathy and compassion often grow exponentially from first-hand experience. So hopefully this experience will help me be a better doctor. Then again- one could only hope, eh. :P 

Peace. xoxo.

Barry Schwartz: Our Loss of Wisdom [video]

Was talking to a friend about the current state of Malaysia, and it just depresses me. Yes. It has that effect on me. And then I chanced upon this video and though it's only loosely related, it's inspiring. Sharing this here so I, too, can re-watch it another day, when I need it. Enjoy!

Mindless Babble

the world does not stop spinning it doesn't care if you have exams tomorrow or the day after or whenever, it doesn't care if you can't finish studying or if you need more time to study because you waste too much time lingering on social media/news sites or because you are ill. it doesn't care if you're bleeding to death and you need more blood for transfusion- blood that better match your ABO blood group and best be HLA-matched as well. it doesn't care if you're a genius or a janitor when it comes to accidents, diseases, or cancers. it doesn't care if you've been hurt by someone you thought you loved and needed time to heal. all this, just points us to one brutal truth- that the world waits for no one. there is no time to spare. doesn't matter if you're a bazillionaire, a president, a king, or a holy man. you're not getting any extra time that any others do. if there is anything that is fair in this world, it is the time given to us at any living moment.

here's the million-dollar question: how would you spend your time at this very moment? or, how are you spending you time at this very moment?

《那些年》感言

平时很少用中文写部落格的我 （uh 不对，是 从来 没用过中文写的我）
那晚 看了《那些年，我们一起追的女孩》之后，突然好像在这儿乱涂一两句
别人说， 拥有过类似暧昧的感觉的人，都会深同感触
而我，却因为没有属于我自己的故事而深深的感慨
想想当年 17 岁的我，好像缺少了什么
是我让青春白白溜走了吗？是我在很想闯入成人的世
界里的当时，失去了那一点点容许我天真无知的时空么？
有人明白我在写什么吗？

＊＊＊

时光是一去不回头
但就算时间真的能倒流
我想，凭我了解自己性格的我
应该也不会改变我所做过的选择
所以其实 也没什么好感慨的
虽然，有过一段自己的 “沈佳宜” 或是 “柯腾” 的故事
好像蛮令人羡慕的
但错过了，也不差啦

毕竟，每个人都有自己精彩的故事
我的故事，少了这么一个特别的人
但却多了更多很特别，要好的朋友
也让我有更多的精神和时间去关心其他对我非常重要的人事物
做人嘛，开心就好！:)

Mulling

Have you ever encountered a situation whereby you wish to keep certain things to yourself because, technically speaking, you can and you have the right to: it's your personal life and your ultimate decision to let it be known, or not. Yet, the reality that we live in, governed by certain societal norms, has it that we should share with others our personal stories or incidents or what-have-you's - because we live in a society, and we're all connected to each other, no (wo)man is an island, or whatever reasons to justify such sharing. And perhaps there is a physiologic explanation to it too: we humans can never keep secrets. We just can't. We are not built that way. We are social animals bound to share and communicate with others, and so, in that regard, you can almost argue that there is no such thing as privacy!

Indeed, in the past, our grandparents or great-grandparents used to know everyone in the village or town. Everyone knew everyone and everything everyone was doing, and I doubt the word "privacy" existed in their daily vocabulary. So what then, brought about the concept of privacy? When exactly, in the history of mankind, did the idea of separating private from public life spring to existence? I have no answer to that, but my "guestimate" is - and I may well be wrong about this - it probably occurred some time around when paper was invented. When paper technology was invented, it gave us an avenue to jot down whatever ideas, thoughts, opinions, secrets, etc., that we wished to tell others, and pass it down in written form. In the case of which we do not wish to tell others yet needed a way to "get it out of our system", it allows us to do that too, as long as the written words are hidden from others. It is most likely that it goes a lot deeper and is more complicated than this, but for what I'm referring to in this post, this simplistic view should suffice.

My question is, where do you draw the line with regard to when it is appropriate to tell and when it's okay to not tell? Here I'm not talking about those apparent choices that involve legal actions or moral values. I'm referring to those grey areas between friends, family, relatives, coworkers, bosses etc. There's probably no significant impact if you make the "wrong" choice (if there's such a thing as the wrong choice), so it probably doesn't matter much what we choose to do. Indeed, this is more like a rhetorical question. I'm just wondering out loud, if there is a moral implication when we choose not to share some information we believe is rightly ours and which is part of our private lives, whilst the majority of the outside world believe otherwise. Is there?

Pondering. :P

Suspension

Clear sky, spotted with few fluffy clouds. Light breeze caresses skin, as if trying to soothe her nerves. It would've been a perfect day, had it not been this 'thing' that's been bothering her. Why, she wonders. Why is this happening, that is. But more importantly, why is she letting it get to her. It feels as if she's hanging from a cliff, not knowing whether she'll be rescued, or if she'll fall. No amount of nature's beauty will be able to tranquilize her in that situation. Or, will it? In another point of view, there isn't much she can do, so why not try to enjoy the surroundings and find peace in it? Perception is a very strange thing. We all know that it can change our behaviors, and all it takes is just to change our perception. Yet it is, sometimes, more hard-wired that we allow ourselves to believe.

Like in this case, she could very well choose to think that this irritant, which she has no control over, is but a pimple. One that is irritating to live with, but it will either be 'ripe' and be popped out, or it will eventually go away. Either way, it'll be fine. This 'thing' that's bugging her will eventually be resolved too. Patience, and a different perspective, are all she needs.

Bite-size X's

X #1. As I steer my way in and out of the human crowd during peak hours after work, I imagine myself watching my movements from a high vantage point. I must have looked like a tiny blip zig-zagging through the sea of other blips. There are times that I feel it's harder to maneuver my way amidst the human traffic than it is driving on the 5-lane 405 freeway. Thank goodness PMS only happens once a month, else I'd be bald by now from all the pulling of own hair.

X #2: This island republic is over-saturated with consumption. I don't mean it in a bad way. But it's stands out like a sore eye, more so than her neighbors, probably because of its limited land and high human population density. Everywhere I turn, I see something calling out my name, seducing me to buy them. I feel trapped, claustrophobic even, surrounded by lures of Consumption. The irony is, being someone who loves living in big cities, this shouldn't bother me, yet it does. My being so eerily conscious about this is having an effect on me, something which I can't quite explain or fully understand. To be pondered upon further.

X #3: Dreams. It's a big part of my life. I love having all sorts of dreams when I sleep. They say I'm not getting proper rest when I dream, but I couldn't care less. Life would be less interesting without them, at least for me anyway. These days I have recurring dreams about snowboarding, except its not on snow, but water. (Is there a name for that sport? Don't know what it's called.) That, and water theme parks. Roller coasters in water theme parks. There is this particular ride that I keep dreaming about. And I'm constantly looking for someone, people whom I got separated from. It's either i'm running away from someone, or chasing after someone. Wonder what it means, if it really means something.

X #4: Recently saw 'Pi' the movie. Very interesting movie, though can't say I get the ending. Ivan, if you're reading this, you should watch it (if you haven't already)! Promise you'll find it very interesting. And tell me what you think after watching it.

X #5: Patience is a difficult thing to acquire. Find myself getting antsy about things I have no control over, despite knowing very well I can't do anything but wait. So for now, wait it is.

The Pricetag of A Human Life

Yesterday afternoon during lunch with colleague, she pointed out there's been quite a number of bodies found in water (here in Singapore). There's the maid in the water tank of a HDB flat; there's the half-body found in Bedok reservoir; and there's the body floating in Singapore River. Are there any others? I can't remember.

Unless someone invented an immortal pill, death is something everyone has to go through. It's nothing new, but there is something about it that bothers me — it's how the living regards the dead that bemuses me, to a certain extent. I say "to a certain extent" because I can understand the "why", but I question the validity of it.

That which bemuses me, is this: why do people feel so deeply for a celebrity's death (like MJ, Princess D, etc. you get the drift) and yet can feel so much lesser, comparatively, if it's "just" an unknown person that they somewhat knew but weren't close with? Is this person "just" another person because he or she wasn't famous enough to be known and remembered by a large enough group? Suppose all things are equal, the difference of reactions towards the two dead due to their status/level of fame (or the lack thereof) is what gets under my skin (albeit just a tiny bit, it's there nonetheless).

So what? You may ask. Yes, indeed. So what if people react to the two dead people differently? Why did it irk me? They're dead anyway, it wouldn't make any difference to them.

Perhaps, you're right. But I guess, to me, this indirectly reflects how we regard life, how we give different people a label of how much they're worth - both in general, as in the case of celebrities; and to us, in the case of our daily lives. In fact, how we view the dead is not too far of from how we treat the living.

Observe your surroundings, and you'll know what I mean. We're all biased. That's usually fine, because we're all imperfect, but that doesn't give us an excuse to mistreat or disrespect others.

Just something to think about. Maybe, just maybe, it may change how you behave to the stranger next to you.

Reflections on 2010

Two thousand and ten was, for me, a great year. I completed most of the things I said I would do, I visited a few places, I'm one step closer to my dream, had quite a few revelations, made quite a few good friends, met interesting people, but most of all, I had a few surprises thrown at me that I never thought would've happened in my lifetime. I am reminded, once again, that life is so much more than what our senses tell us, that there is something bigger going on in this universe. It sounds vague, but only because it is. We mortals only know so much about the universe, which is paltry compared to the vast amount of information yet to be learned.

I've learnt so much over the past year- not just concrete facts or information I learned in the healthcare courses, but something more abstract. Sometimes I can't help but wonder, what would've happened if I did one thing different in any point of life- just one, for all it takes is just one, single event to change everything. My life would have taken a different course, no doubt. And yet, I am sitting here typing this, instead of doing or thinking about anything else. As one who never believed everything was just a series of random occurrences, I'm convinced that there is a set of laws that governs life (and beyond), and this set of laws which is more commonly known as Fate, or Destiny, (or God?), continues to intrigue and humble me. 

I stepped into 2010 with very realistic expectations, but came out of it with a handful of surprises, and with a bagful of lessons. I am, if I may say so, a little wiser than I was in 2009, and my heart is filled with gratitude and humility. 2011 will be a life-changing year for me, and I will be starting a new chapter of life. How it will turn out I have no idea, but I'm hopeful. With luck, I'll be able to embark on that road for which I've waited so long. Whatever it is though, I will embrace every moment with my open arms, and continue my journey learning and exploring as I go. I wish everyone the best in this new year to come. :)

Sand Brain

They say the texture of the brain is like tofu. Tonight though I feel that mine is like a pile of sand held together by water, which really isn't working. Every grain of sand tries to adhere to one another but attempts are futile because they aren't meant to be that way. My mind, alas, remains scattered all over the place; and I, for once, will just let it be. Tomorrow when the sun is out and the weather calm, I will sweep up them all up and mold them into one again.

A Brief Escapade

i felt as if i just got there, and the next thing i know, i was back at the airport heading home. it was such a short visit, like a butterfly lightly touching the surface of the pond only to fly away instantly without the chance to enjoy the beauty of the pond and its surroundings. i had to move on before i got a good feel of what it's like to live there. that was my greatest regret of that weekend excursion. having said that, i had loads of fun, met some great people and it was a good break from my usual routine. to be clear, the excursion itself wasn't a regret at all. far from it, in fact.

if you ask me why i had chosen to go there if i had known i wasn't able to see much of that place, i'd tell you it wasn't so much of the destination as it was about the necessity to jump off my usual track to get a reality check. a self-evaluation of some sort. it didn't really matter where i went, as long as i went somewhere foreign, somewhere i haven't been before. i needed to get out of my cocoon, and put aside of my perspective of life for a moment to rethink my path, my goal, and where i'm heading. if there was such a thing as a "reset" button, that would be most apt for the situation. at least that was what i had in mind when i decided to make a trip out there. in reality though, i think i've gained more than what i'd bargained for--both the good and bad. for better or worse, i find myself really in need of a reality check - not just career-wise, but also in all other aspects.

every encounter with a different city is a chapter written about me and the place. this chapter started off very briefly, but i'm sure there'll be subsequent episodes in the near future, stories that i'll add to my library of travel notes and threads of memories. i'll be there again, to the windy city of Chicago. :) for now, this trip was quite an adventure, and i have my friend to thank - for the hospitality, the fun and all the awesome people i met through him.

in the future, though, if i ever wanted to go somewhere for a peace of mind, or to get a reality check, i should probably consider a monastery, or somewhere really really quiet and isolated. like maybe, deep in the fishing village somewhere in norway. or some icelandic pasture. :P

Succinct Thoughts in Point Form

- with expectations, come disappointment.

- sometimes i wonder if i'm here in this world to repay the debts from my past life. (and if there was such a thing as past life, i'm pretty sure i was a boy in that life.)

- the palm reader is right:  i have always been - and always will be - a lone ranger who's misunderstood by people all the time. this time round though, i don't want to explain myself anymore. whatever will be, will be. 

- it's high time i channel my energy for something else more productive.like, mingle with a group of first followers and do or learn something awesome every day. :) 

- life is good. and if it's not, keep repeating that to self. it'll come true some day. :))) 

- oh, and by the way, if i could put off my debts from the past life to this one, can i put it off for another lifetime and get to it in the next life?? :P

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.

Machines and Us

David Wallace-Wells wrote a provocative review on Jaron Lanier's new manifesto, "You Are Not A Gadget", and judging from the few excerpts in that review, I'm absolutely convinced it's a book I want and have to read. Will check it out some time soon (after I finish Atul Gawande's books). Until then, I shall reserve my thoughts and opinions on the topic. Here's the review, in case you're too lazy to click over to that page. :P 

Rage Against the Machine

In a watershed 1909 story, published when science fiction was known still as "scientific romance," E. M. Forster reimagined the Victorian dream of an empire of universal knowledge as a future tyranny gorged on endless information. Citizens of his brave new world lived, contentedly, in bunkerlike quarters serviced by a small, personal terminal for a global, Weblike system that brought the user food, music, visual entertainments, books, articles, and correspondence both anonymous and intimate—and that did not simply satisfy the desire for those things, but intuited and perhaps even created it. The network was called "the Machine," and the story was "The Machine Stops."

Today, the futurist Jaron Lanier warns in his persuasive new manifesto, You Are Not a Gadget, the danger is less that our network of machine intelligence will fail than that it will endure—that Web culture, and its chiliastic faith in the superior wisdom of computers, will triumph. Lanier, who invented the immersive computer environments called virtual reality in the early 1980s and who has helped to shape the very contours of that cocksure culture, is the first great apostate of the Internet era. The colleagues, mentors, and students he calls both "digital Maoists" and "fellow travelers" are forging an Internet future that offers the promise of radical freedom, "but that freedom," he warns, "is more for machines than people."

The Web began, Lanier recalls, as a noncommercial, utopian experiment—"in vast numbers, people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful." (On early, ugly home pages, he wistfully reminds us, one would find bits of a professor's ongoing academic work alongside sketches of his pet newt.) But today, those elements have been scrubbed away to reveal a singular and anti-individualistic apparatus of cloud computing and reasoning by "hive mind." Why are we so enamored of Wikipedia, the signal achievement of the Web 2.0 era, when it has channeled so much intellectual energy into a reference project that is, at best, only as good as the book it replaces? Do we value knowledge so little, it excites us only when it is free? For Lanier, this is a design problem, propagated by software developers in the grip of a near-religious fervor. The great ecumenical promise of the early Web, he writes, "has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature."

This faith, known in its most florid form as the Singularity and enormously popular in the digital world, hails the imminent rise of superpowerful artificial intelligence, and is built on the idea "that the world can be understood as a computational process, with people as subprocesses." As our machines get smarter, the thinking goes, consciousness will be revealed as a simple outgrowth of computational magnitude, and computers will attain something like personhood. Soon after, the shibboleth says, they will grow from human to superhuman.

To technologists, this is thrilling, a vision of deliverance out of the human realm and into what Lanier calls, incisively, a "lifeless world of pure information." For Lanier, the Singularity is a cult of self-abdication, embraced only by those who aspire to inconsequentiality. In defining as progress the inability to distinguish between people and computers, are we flattering our technology, he asks, or demeaning our own intelligence?

Misty Mystic Mystery

tonight it was as if Nyx the goddess of night came to visit, bringing with her a veil of mist, drawn forth from underworld that blotted out my vision beyond a few hundred metres. perchance it was also her presence that sent a chill to my bones and caused the temperature to drop a few degrees Celcius. my usual route to work was mystified by the layers of mist that enwrapped me and my surroundings, and i couldn't help but getting all perked up at the sight of seemingly different scenery much thanks to the illusion created by the mists. like a child promised of her ice cream, it kept me on my toes, wondering and anticipating for something to happen or reveal itself. something i haven't noticed before or, really, just anything that might trigger yet another spike of imagination that would bring me to places i've never explored - even if it's just in my head.

throughout the 15-minute fog encapsulated journey, i mused at the movement of vapor particles hanging low and floating around, allowing the soft breeze to carry it wherever, surrendering themselves to the larger stronger force without any resistance at all (other than its own mass, that is, if you really wanna get technical). isn't life just like that, with us being one of those vapor particles, and life as the breeze. i am, in fact, just a tiny particle in the vast universe; and i have no idea where life will bring me. not saying that i have no control over my life, or that what i do doesn't matter at all, but on a larger scale, at a macroscopic level, i do believe that each and everyone of us has our destiny written somewhere, somehow. so. i'm just gonna let the breeze take me wherever i'm supposed to go. meanwhile, i shall sit back and enjoy my Brown's Theory journey as a dot particle that crashes into and interact with other similar particles. :)

and on a completely irrelevant note, since we're on the topic of illusions, this rather peaceful night here in a foreign land gave away another split-second illusion that nothing bad could happen to the world. i am safe here. or at least, i feel safe (but in truth might not be so - for reality and perception might not always coincide). indeed, the notion that nothing bad could happen to the world is a delusion, a farce that claws at whoever who'd even entertain that idea. result? well. it will spit at you with the news about bombings at churches back at home, where disputation about the rights of non-Muslims to use the word "Allah" is ongoing. really?! i mean, seriously. the country has so many more urgent issues to be tended, yet they're engaging in a debate on a non-issue like that. oh what has become of my country?! sigh. this should be a granted a completely different post by itself. next time, maybe.

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!

Two K Ten

I wonder how much weight I've put over the past month or so. Whatever it is, it's a number I don't wanna know. This year it's all about being pragmatic. On my list of new year's resolutions, you won't find anything about losing weight to x kg. This year I shall keep it simple. In fact, it's even simpler than last year's. It's so simple I'd rather just remember them than to put them down in words. They say if you make public of your intentions to do certain things, chances are you probably won't see them through - because blogging about them or relaying to others would seem as if you're already half-way there. You then cut yourself some slack and you lose focus thus fail to realize them. I'm a walking example of that saying. So this year, I'm just gonna keep them to myself. We'll see if I have accomplished any of them at the end of the year.

So it's 2010 eh. I look around and find myself still standing at the same spot I was last year - which is, in short, not where I wanna be. There's a thousand thoughts zooming past each other in my head, and I don't know which to focus on first. Have I done anything that I've regretted? Yes, of course. Would I have done things differently if I get to go back in time? Probably, but since turning back time is impossible (as far as I'm aware of), I'd rather not dwell on this. Have I done my best in working towards my goal? No. I probably could have been more efficient, more disciplined, less emotional. Alas, the lack of planning and foresightedness is a costly mistake, and I'm paying for it now. Luckily for me, it's still not too late to fix things, so hopefully this year things will get better.

Last year was sprinkled with many little joys and series of miserable moments. Some stretched longer than the others. But mostly, 2009 has been blurry for me. It passed by so quick I barely noticed anything. It felt like it was only yesterday that Obama gave his inauguration speech. It felt like it was just not too long ago that I called my friends in other parts of the world (whose birthdays fall on January) to wish them happy birthday. Felt as if it was just a while back when I still lived in Santa Ana with my landlady, who cooked for me every day. I do miss her sometimes, and I know I lived a more comfortable life with her pampering me with all her cooking. But that's also one of the reasons I moved out - to get out of the complacency that is slowly but surely eroding my goals. So I put myself in this slightly uncomfortable living situation as a reminder that this is really just temporary. (It better be!) I need to get out of here asap.

In half an hour's time, I'll be off to work; and my classes commence in two days. This year, I wish for a peaceful year, and that whatever happens I hope I'm a step closer to achieving my dreams.