The Age Old Question....

Who am I?

One who is seeking often finds himself on roads leading within rather than without.
Or when one is building unless you have good plans often you are at a loss about the next structure to be built.

That is what I have come to.
A decision of who I must be finally.
But as forever, that which will tear a man in two, the dichotomy of good and evil.

After somewhere close to 5 years of spiritual searching (and maybe even before that) things have been stripped down to their bare.
It's not a matter of logic and reasoning. It's not even a matter of faith! Because reason has proven itself endless and answerless and faith is assured but not forced upon.

It's now merely a matter of choice.

Do I make any sense?

Semester

Sorry sorry
The semester has started and I already have a million and one things to control and handle. I will try my best to keep the blog up but things may go downhill pretty fast.

Quick cap on everything...

The war in Israel and Lebannon is shit. What is wrong with all these people? Why are you firing missiles at one another? Don't you have families? Don't you have friends? Can't you understand each other's pain? Or you refuse to do so? Fuck all you morons who pick up guns and fly fighter planes. How do you sleep at night with the blood of a hundred people drowning you? Yeah, God's gonna be real happy with you, cleaning the outside but inside full of grave contents.

Dentistry is actually not to bad now that everything is slowly falling into place. Or seeming to at least. I now know what I'm looking at and what all the damned concepts were about. The dental faculty on the other hand is a crock. A complete utter crock. I mean how can you cancel an entire subject for a course that is really really really important to learn or so the lecturer keeps stressing on us. You dodos!!!

I'm keeping fit! Yay. I can actually undergo a full soccer game now and run up and down the field without spazzing out from hypoglycaemia. Hurrah for perseverance to train through the holidays. I hope they pick me in the team ( I mean in all honesty I don't think they will because all the other players are really good but I can dream!)

My contact hours in uni have dropped from 40 to 20!!! I have no idea what to do with myself except to really try catch up on all those things I never did in the last 2 1/2 years.

And Satadal. Damnit organise Vong organise!!! I pray to God this magazine will work out. Time to call a meeting.

Been getting hit by my singularity problem once again. It's just cos that new wave of people getting hitched is happening all over again. Gah! Must - not - splutter - turn - green - gah - eyed.... system shut down. Yeah. You get the idea. But I called mom. And she made me feel better again. HAHAHA. How many guys actually discuss these kind of things with their parents? It's ok. I've dealt with it this long it's not like I do not know the routine even if I tire of it.

Ok. Must bathe and then eat.

Catch you all soon.

Lydia you owe me an e mail or a message or something. I'm counting on it!

The End

So here we are in the midst of life's own little problems. A project to do for uni, a colleges social life to survive, a course to learn...

But death is the destiny of all men, and the living should take this to heart - Proverbs.

So this morning, I have spent a little time just reading about the crisis over in the middle east. Over these few years we have had several more earthquakes than usual, storms and hurricanes of increasing magnitude and frequency due to the perceived weather changes and just not too long ago, the largest natural disaster known to affect men, the Christmas Tsunami.

Every generation has seen itself as the last generation. The prophets have been crying out about the end of the world long since Jesus came. But if there is an end, then surely one generation will be the last.

I have always been most intersted in the Mayan calendar. They were star gazers and built a very long time line of the future and the fate of the world based upon the changes of the stars. They noted that the earth underwent cycles of severe changes believing that with each change all life would undergo an upheaval of mind and matter. These cycles were incident with the slow, unending wobbling of the galaxy and its paralleling with the plane of our own solar system. On one of their greatest time lines, the time just stops suddeny at the fifth change/cycle and it is termed the Great Cataclysm. There is no more after that as if the sculptor grew bored or disillusioned or died. The date of this end coinicides with the winter solstice of 2012 - 21 December.

I've always been fascinated by that. Not many predicitions like to give accurate dates. They prefer being vague and full of intrigue.

This morning, reading of the horror and sadness of war, I remembered a passage. Jesus talks about the end times only on occasion. This is the line that I remembered well -

Luke 21:13 20-21 - When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near. The let those in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out and let those in the country not enter the city.

The whole of Luke 21 is basically about the end times. It is a scary and sad thought. What if, I always ask myself, what if all we have until is 21 Dec 2012? And worse! The years and events leading up to it are ones full of pain and sorrow.

A random graffitti I read on the street that made me laugh - Jesus is coming! Look busy!

Some people told me once not to bother whether or not the end is coming because you wouldn't be able to do anything about it. I never ever agreed with them although I didn't know any reply I could give. But now I do. I will be watchful - watchful because that day will come suddenly and I want to be able to stand before the Son of Man.




Growth studies doesn't feel like such a big deal after all of that...

New scanner!

Allow me enthuse over my new scanner! It's absolutely wonderful. It's sleek and black. It doesn't require any power outlet for its own. It scans at a really wonderful resolution and is fast. It is sooo cool. Now I have it all! All that I need to start drawing art proper and without any haggling around with scanners and difficulty drawing on a small screen!

Have been working on my group project over the past week. So far I've done a lot of it. I would say I'm 70% done. Some stuff still needs to be done cos unfortunately one of my group mates didn't quite know what she was doing. Even more unfortunate, is that her portion of the work is probably the more important part. So now I think I will have to redo most of that part. It's irritating, more because I'm not quite sure how to go about it myself. If I had weeks to work on it and information at hand it wouldn't be such a problem. But I don't. So now I'll just have to make do.

Played soccer again today. Fell down over bloody Bowen and jarred my shoulder pretty badly. Can't really lift my arm up more than 90 degrees for now. darn it.

Man I'm sleepy. Should really type more but oh well.

Nite people

Reflection

Apologies for the lack of posts.

The days passby faster than I can keep track of them despite it being the holidays. Things are drawing fast to an end and I am beginning to feel a hectic rush of a semester begin.

The damned growth studies project is bothering me to no end. We were meant to be finished with this since the second week. But then consider that we are lazy procrastinating university students obviously that would not happen. So here I am staring at all these particularly meaningless numbers wondering if I should be doing dentistry at all.

Well, yeah the results are out. Despite the effort put in this semester, I am trailing somewhere at the bottom of the class... I don't quite believe it myself. But my standing among my classmates is somewhere around the lower quater of the class. Exactly where did I go wrong? I have no idea, but it's pissing me off.

Somewhere I lost it. I thought having survived in Singapore I would be more than well prepared to take on a lot of education systems, and the Australian Universities are not well known for extremely strenuous studying.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I thought I knew enough to get better marks. Apparently not. Sigh...

Or maybe I just can't accept the fact that I'm just not as smart as the rest of the cohort and that in Dentistry I am in fact below average!

Then again, when I look back at the semester I know I could have studied a lot better. I know that in truth I only started the hardcore studying somewhere 6 weeks before the exams and that before the six weeks I knew close to nuts about what the hell I was doing. One of my key weaknesses is that I never seem to have the lecture notes for anything. It was not until a couple of weeks before the exams that I actually had a full set of lecture notes for everything from Sivlee.

So in short - a lot more discipline is required and a lot more organised revision right from the start and less panicked frenzy studying towards the end.

Sigh... Well it's smack in the middle of Dentistry now. Even with low results I'm not kicked out yet! I believe I can still bring my results to good levels. I just don't know what the cost of that may be.

It's not easy though. And I do wish I was more enthusiastic about my course. It always has been the problem that I chose dentistry not out of want but out of a matter of elimination. Perhaps the interviewer at NUS was right to not take me into dentistry in Singapore.

It's life though isn't it? You don't always get to do the things you want to do. Everyone these days is so up on the do what you want to do with life though. It's not that easy sometimes guys. There is such a thing as responsibility and reality.

I dreamnt a dream this afternoon. I can't remember the details. But it was about dentistry and how much I didn't want to do it. It was a terrible feeling.

What choice do I have now other than to find something within my course that will initiate some interest? I find that Omar who is the ultimate dentistry enthusiast is constantly thinking about dentistry. I instead the moment I get out of my faculty wish to think and ponder everything else except dentistry.

For now at least I hold on to my mother's advice that the results don't matter anymore and that as long as I'm still comfortably within passing range that's all they want of me. And also the fact, my dad, who is one of the most intelligent men I know failed his fourth year of medicine just because he hated it so much. When there is no will... is there no way?

In a small way, I am walking his path. This course isn't what I want to do with my life. But I just have to find the discipline and will to complete it... and complete it well if that is ever possible. But it's so hard when you're just not actually on fire about what you are doing.

Crash!

Watched this movie last night called Crash!

There is no way to actually make a synopsis if this movie. Except that throughout the whole damned movie I wanted to cry. It serves to remind us just how cruel, selfish, prejudiced and fucked up people are in the heads.

There were a couple of heroes in the film. People who at the end of the day didn't sell their souls to the Devil. Truth is, although the movie was primarily aimed at racism and prejudice, I found that it seemed to just talk more about people. People in bad situations just given a choice, to walk the high heavy road or take the easy way out. But the truth was that there was no easy way out and you just can't beat the universal game of dice.

Some interesting plots within the movie:-

Dirty cop who molests a black woman ends up saving her from a burning car at the risk of his own life. While watching this Bowen (sorry but this boy knows how to grate me the wrong way) blurted out he didn't understand why because the cop was meant to be evil. Sigh... it's never that simple. Things don't come in black and white, they come in shades of grey.

Two black men who steal cars for a living (one of them being Ludacris) - one of them is a racist paranoiac (ludacris) the other an easy going person. Ludacris the more 'evil' of the two, at the end lives and learns a lesson. The other guy gets shot by a cop who thought he was pulling out a gun when he was just pulling out some trinket. There is a, rather morbid, irony in the outcome of their story. Makes you wonder about that universal game of dice and karma.

Black cop hides information that would send an innocent man to prison so that his brother gets of the record. However, after hiding the information, his brother happens to be the black guy mentioned above who got killed. Now that is what I call signing a deal with the Devil.

The most scray part of the movie I guess is the angry middle eastern man who buys a gun at the beginning of the movie. And through some miscommunication, just bad language skills really, ends up wanting to shoot the innocent Latino door man. Ends up shooting the guy's daughter who ran in front of her dad. That was a terrible terrible scene... fortunately the moron's daughter had the sense to buy blanks instead of real bullets. Man I almost cried...

..........................

Bottom line is this. The movie gave me nightmares. Yeah, really bad nightmares that lasted for hours on end. It was some sort of horrible mishmash of Silent Hill and the college and that really horrible sad feeling that permeated the entire movie.

What the hell... The world sucks. There was a time I imagined what if, what if the truth was that the world had already died and passed away, and that right now, this is hell - for eternity. And we'll just keep being reborn again and again into this mess we call Earth...
Fortunately the

My brain feels mushy... like... like... seeweed....

It's one in the morning. I have decided I am going to force myself to sleep late because for the past three nights I have been waking up at four, going back to sleep then waking up every subsequent half hour till nine. Do you have any idea how exasperating that is? And every half hour I must without exception have a dream that leaves a bad taste in my memory. Why can't I have sweet dreams instead of these strange twisted things then maybe I wouldn't mind this so much!!! And even then, I want sleeeeeep!!!!! What the hell is wrong with me???

Sigh...

Teeng has made me a nice emoticon... I forget how to link things on the blog site. I'll post it or link it at some point of time. Right now my brain feels too painful to actually find out how and be responsible.

I think I may have bitten of slightly more than I can chew this time round. See, now I have to make the college magazine cos for whatever reason I still wanted to be useful around the college. It has recently come to my realisation that if my whole team does not workout it is still my responsibility still to complete the magazine. That means I have to make a minimum of 60 pages in a matter of 10 weeks starting now... Zzzz.... And next semester dentistry doesn't get any easier... So basically I'm screwed unless I'm very efficient and have the boundless energy some others have... which I don't... so I'm screwed.

Well, no, not totally screwed. I really hope people are going to help me and my crew doesn't let me down. Still... sigh. I mean I'll be proud of it and everything when it's actually completed. And the rough ideas I have right now aren't too shoddy. I am really unhappy I was not able to get the photos of Ee Lin before she left for Singapore though... Really annoyed at myself. But it was freaking exam time I'm not that freee!!! Gah I hate myself sometimes.

Sigh... this is sooo going to be like a tough test of efficiency and energy. AND I CAN'T GET DECENT SLEEP!!!!

..........................................

Can't chicken out now I suppose. And I had dreams when I took up this role and it would be so great to see them come to fruition. No pain, no gain eh? Damned old adage.

Just watched Flight Plan tonight (yah I know it's like superbly old). It was really interesting in the beginning. There was this whole sense of paranoia and you weren't sure whether who was crazy. The airplane was really creepy too and it was tense and worrying. But then they dumbly revealed everything... and the movie just went from A grade suspense thriller to B grade hijacking action movie. Sad... It's cruel, but for the movie's sake she should have turned out to be a crazy and there should have been an interesting psycho twist instead of the dumb hijack and they should have left us guessing all the way to the end.

Feel like blogging more crap.

Working for Dottie these days. Ironing sheets, cleaning up rooms, moving really heavy tables everywhere. I'm used to it I guess. But your mind does ponder over the strangest things as you stand there ironing. Things start to get really repetitive and you do it without thingking even so your mind starts to go places.

In a way I forget, that although everyone goes home and manages to do a bit of thinking and getting things back on track, I too am a someone. I also begin to patch up all the bits of my thoughts and life that don't make sense or that has been disturbing me inside. What does that mean? I have no idea. The things that you decide to do differently in the next phase of life happen suddenly and not suddenly. It's as though your subconcious is working behind this curtain that your concious is not allowed to see. And then suddenly just as the next stage of life is about to start, it decides to throw back the curtain and you just decide to do things differently.

Who knows what will happen next semester. The anger and turmoil that occured at the beginning of this semester feel as though it may be leaving. Back to a calmer more settled me. Perhaps....

Meh, I've crapped enough. Really tired now and I know if I keep typing I'm just going to rant more. Not that ranting is a bad thing, but I'm old and tired of griping. Haha....

Ok sleep Vong sleeo

Play of the day

While the world is grieving over the way the World Cup Soccer is coming about...

The bright lights glared across the mutli-purpose court as an intense three on three soccer match takes place at International House, Melbourne. It's a very close game as both teams are equally skilled. The ball rolls towards a goal post, but!!!... oh no the defender clears it to the striker Li Yen. She is two metres in front of the goal mouth with no defenders anywhere in view! She kicks!!! AND MISSES!!! and then proceeds to repeat this fiasco another FOURTEEN TIMES!!!!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Omg I have never laughed that hard for quite a while now. It was absolutely hilarious. Towards the end of the game three of us didn't even bother defending her. We just let her kick to see if she would ever get one in XD She never did not till the lights went out at the end of the night.

Defintely play of the day. I wish I had recorded each and everytime she had tried.