♥♥♥
* fragments of the same dead star
a girl who doesnt live life the way she wants it to be, peppering her existence with countless regrets along the lifelong journey
EARCANDY
Dear God,
sometimes i feel you're just playing a game with me, and you take delight in the fact that in the end i would always lose.
holy shit... i realized through wikipedia that i have a genetic skin disease called ichthyosis vulgaris! sounds damn vulgar :( but apparently, i have the mildest case. which is just thin scales on my shins and small bumps on the back of my upper arms, which oh.. are called keratosis pilaris.
i've always had comments like my skin is so dry cos i don't hydrate enough or use moisturizer. but now i know its genetic and not my damn fault! i rly shld have guessed cos i've noticed my scaly shins ever since i was 7. i think i noticed the keratosis pilaris much later. but now i don't have to keep searching for the perfect moisturizer cos i think there's no cure for my condition (since wikipedia didn't state any).
altho it's true that moisturizer does help reduce the appearance of the scale lines, and also make your skin smell good ahha. yeah man i've always wondered why moisturizer makes my skin so damn smooth but can't get rid of the lines completely. it can never be done?? :( and i think i have less bumps on my arms than before, cos i find them irritating and like to scratch them off.
what saddens me that i have this condition just because of 1 pathetic mutated gene. maybe i shld just be glad i got a mild condition of it. but what's disturbing is that it is semi-dominant, meaning i have a 50% chance of passing it to my future kids. so i guess nobody would want to marry me now.
haha okay case solved.
the great gatsby
after reading, re-reading, confusing myself, settling things straight, and re-confusing myself again. i've decided american politics is too comprex for my simpleton mind. first i thought i was Democrat liberal (yay obama), then i lost faith in obama and strongly believed i was a Republican conservative. now.. i think i'll just be an Independent. maybe cos of a singaporean upbringing, i value social mobility and the right to property which are conservative values. yet in the societal sense, i'm not pro-life anti-gay which leans me toward the Democrats. as an independent, that wld probably mean both parties would be clamouring for my vote during election fever hurhur.
obviously speaking from a PS bias, i find it interestingly funny when pple actually post their political views on their fb info page. i wonder how many of them even know that being liberal or conservative means completely opposite things, depending of whether you see it from a parliamentary or federal perspective. when someone puts their political view as "liberal", do they mean they support welfare or they are economic classical liberals which are not in favour of welfare? i bet they don't even know! they simply put "liberal" as a show of saying they are "open-minded, modern, enlightened cosmopolitan" or smth along those lines. sometimes people even put "very liberal" haha, probably implying they are open to pre-marital sex lol.
misinformed choices or not, they get more respect than those who just put "apathetic". okay props for honesty, but being a self-absorbed consumerist is nothing to brag about or post publicly :(
ps: i am disturbed that my textbook speaks very highly of Bush, (did he sponsor their publishing??) yet I see the validity of its arguments. personal dilemma!! okay i shall conclude that he has very low EQ and diplomacy skills, but as a Republican he was pretty darn successful on the domestic front. also with a bit of luck that 9/11 pushed his executive power to greater heights than he should have had.
reading about competing conversion missions in SEA fascinates me. i wonder how many pple nowadays practicing religion can possibly trace their family's customs back to early colonial days.. and this is like 1500s 1600s, not the more recent colonism era. i think quite a fair bit, myself included? my Catholic side of the family can probably trace its customs to Melaka where Portugese priests did their thing, and Arabs lamented that the people there were not as steadfast to the faith and largely inter-married and diluted the Islamic influence. which brings me back to the belief that religion is very much a social phenomenon.
funny anecdote from the reading!
Frederick de Houtman, leader of the first Dutch expedition to Aceh, was held captive on shore after a fight broke out between his men and the Acehnese in 1600. After some months of captivity he was told that Sultan Ala'add-in (omg Aladdin hahahah) had decided he would be killed unless he agreed to become a Muslim. When he refused, saying that one could not be forced to believe what one did not believe, the judicial officals of Aceh set about trying to convince him. They explained that Muhammad was the last of the prophets in the line of Moses, David, and Jesus and that it was as illogical not to acknowledge him as it would be to say that only the earlier kings of a dynasty were ordained by God and not the later. They asked him how Christians could worship stone idols as in Catholic Melaka, how they could believe that God had a son, and why they did not accept circumcision since Jesus himself was circumcised. All he need to do was repeat the shahada -- a greater understanding would come later. De Houtman's report declared that if he narrated the whole of the debate it would fill half a book. When he remained obdurate, they took him to the river for execution, waved a sword over his head shouting "mau Islam?" and threatened to trample him with elephants. Nevertheless, the sultan clearly wanted him alive rather than dead, and eventually his release was negotiated.
funny right!!! "mau Islam??" .. "tak mau!" *splat* trampled by elephant
Christians and Muslims have so much in common, why can't they be friends?
just because i don't think like you, doesn't mean you regard me condescendingly okay.
what will it take for me to live up to your expectations? a lifetime and more.
its simple for you because you naturally think like you. but everyone is different.
its really not easy at all, to be with you.
why do you go out of your way to please everyone but me?
why do i go out of my way to please you, but you never see it that way?
there is a bird stranded in the kitchen.
it is too close for comfort.
fml.
Capucine
kudos to Freda for showing me her videos last year! i'm still in love with this little French cupcake.
i resolve for my future kids to be as cute as her, if i ever decide to get over the mental barrier of the horrid pains in giving birth.
Merci, Krista ! from Capucha on Vimeo. <-- just click on the link and start getting hooked to all her videos like i am
so busy with work, i haven't been thinking about life in a while.
came across this particular reading from my SEA module (so sucky cos of the lecturers), with references to Mahayana Buddhism in Vietnam. what i rather regret from my university experience was that i never really had a chance to learn about world religions and cultures, like i expected i would have. maybe cos there's no proper anthropology course here, or that i probably didnt explore enough modules hoho. but anyway even in my PS modules, it has influenced/tainted my view of religion to make me see it from a distanced and objective point of view. now it just seems to me like a human construct, just needed for identity and social cohesion. easily manipulated to create the idea of ethnicity, geographical patterns and statistics make them even like fashion trends. yet somehow in me i always believed (and still do) in God and Jesus. and i think this has largely got to do with me somehow landing up in a christian kindergarten, catholic mission schools and introduced to church by a secondary school friend, altho later on i got secretly very uneasy with the fanaticism and somewhat superficial friendships and cell grps in my opinion. or perhaps i just didnt see eye-to-eye with their rigid world view. so anyhow now i am rather unreligious altho still seeing sense in there being a higher being. and then university came and messed up and twisted this world view so i'm on a clean slate again. education is a good and bad thing haha. when i'm done with school and have time to read for leisure, i plan to read up on different philosophies and religions and make sense of everything, establish my world view and find my true religion. altho right now at this point of time, i know (think) there is Jesus cos it fits with what i currently think about life. i know i'm a bad christian for even expresing doubt in the existence of God, but its better than being a good christian without knowing why. right now, i don't believe that following rituals and practices such as going to church and baptism and all is a true test of faith. its just human expressions of faith, and throughout history practices have changed and will keep changing. so i believe more in the Buddhist style of philosophy, but i don't believe in buddha, enlightenment or karma. maybe not yet. haha complex! (is buddhism a religion or a lifestyle? i dont even know) and on an endnote, i'd like to believe that all religious people will go to heaven. and if people sin cos its nature, then people should not go to hell forever cos that's just unfair. ultimately i shldnt pick and choose what to believe cos i like it or not, so i should just read up on this whole thing one day? it'll be interesting if i end up being muslim or wiccan or scientologist (tom cruise haha that crazy douche, omg is suri cruise a scientologist?) who knows, the possibilities in life are endless right.
wah so long. nobody is gonna read this ahhahahhaha, except Ashley cos he has nothing better to do and likes to think his mind is as complex as his screwed up "ethnicity". (Kaka says you're filipino haha pls.) but i just like the cathartic feeling of mental non-intellectual release. my thoughts may be flawed so anyone else is welcome to enlighten me and convince me otherwise!
Buddhism, in contrast, teaches "self-lessness," that "there is no permanent self, soul or ego behind the ever changing flux of mental and physical processes that comprise our being." "For Zen," says George Rupp, "the individual is in the last analysis not an independent entity. Whatever reality individuals have is derivative from their union with the whole." Thich Nhat Hanh says that true self is non-self -- "the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements," that "there's no separation between self and others, and everything is interconnected." Non-self, Thich Nhat Hanh says, can be cultivated: "When you love, if your love is true, you begin to see that the other person is a part of you and you are a part of her or him. In that realization there is already non-self. ... When people love each other, the distinction, the limits, the frontier between them begins to dissolve, and they become one with the person they love. There's no longer any jealousy or anger, because if they are angry at the other person, they are angry at themselves."
a girl who doesnt live life the way she wants it to be, peppering her existence with countless regrets along the lifelong journey
EARCANDY
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 @ 8:37 PM
Dear God,
sometimes i feel you're just playing a game with me, and you take delight in the fact that in the end i would always lose.
Sunday, April 25, 2010 @ 11:25 PM
Saturday, April 24, 2010 @ 5:52 PM
holy shit... i realized through wikipedia that i have a genetic skin disease called ichthyosis vulgaris! sounds damn vulgar :( but apparently, i have the mildest case. which is just thin scales on my shins and small bumps on the back of my upper arms, which oh.. are called keratosis pilaris.
i've always had comments like my skin is so dry cos i don't hydrate enough or use moisturizer. but now i know its genetic and not my damn fault! i rly shld have guessed cos i've noticed my scaly shins ever since i was 7. i think i noticed the keratosis pilaris much later. but now i don't have to keep searching for the perfect moisturizer cos i think there's no cure for my condition (since wikipedia didn't state any).
altho it's true that moisturizer does help reduce the appearance of the scale lines, and also make your skin smell good ahha. yeah man i've always wondered why moisturizer makes my skin so damn smooth but can't get rid of the lines completely. it can never be done?? :( and i think i have less bumps on my arms than before, cos i find them irritating and like to scratch them off.
what saddens me that i have this condition just because of 1 pathetic mutated gene. maybe i shld just be glad i got a mild condition of it. but what's disturbing is that it is semi-dominant, meaning i have a 50% chance of passing it to my future kids. so i guess nobody would want to marry me now.
haha okay case solved.
@ 3:01 AM
the great gatsby
after reading, re-reading, confusing myself, settling things straight, and re-confusing myself again. i've decided american politics is too comprex for my simpleton mind. first i thought i was Democrat liberal (yay obama), then i lost faith in obama and strongly believed i was a Republican conservative. now.. i think i'll just be an Independent. maybe cos of a singaporean upbringing, i value social mobility and the right to property which are conservative values. yet in the societal sense, i'm not pro-life anti-gay which leans me toward the Democrats. as an independent, that wld probably mean both parties would be clamouring for my vote during election fever hurhur.
obviously speaking from a PS bias, i find it interestingly funny when pple actually post their political views on their fb info page. i wonder how many of them even know that being liberal or conservative means completely opposite things, depending of whether you see it from a parliamentary or federal perspective. when someone puts their political view as "liberal", do they mean they support welfare or they are economic classical liberals which are not in favour of welfare? i bet they don't even know! they simply put "liberal" as a show of saying they are "open-minded, modern, enlightened cosmopolitan" or smth along those lines. sometimes people even put "very liberal" haha, probably implying they are open to pre-marital sex lol.
misinformed choices or not, they get more respect than those who just put "apathetic". okay props for honesty, but being a self-absorbed consumerist is nothing to brag about or post publicly :(
ps: i am disturbed that my textbook speaks very highly of Bush, (did he sponsor their publishing??) yet I see the validity of its arguments. personal dilemma!! okay i shall conclude that he has very low EQ and diplomacy skills, but as a Republican he was pretty darn successful on the domestic front. also with a bit of luck that 9/11 pushed his executive power to greater heights than he should have had.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010 @ 1:57 PM
reading about competing conversion missions in SEA fascinates me. i wonder how many pple nowadays practicing religion can possibly trace their family's customs back to early colonial days.. and this is like 1500s 1600s, not the more recent colonism era. i think quite a fair bit, myself included? my Catholic side of the family can probably trace its customs to Melaka where Portugese priests did their thing, and Arabs lamented that the people there were not as steadfast to the faith and largely inter-married and diluted the Islamic influence. which brings me back to the belief that religion is very much a social phenomenon.
funny anecdote from the reading!
Frederick de Houtman, leader of the first Dutch expedition to Aceh, was held captive on shore after a fight broke out between his men and the Acehnese in 1600. After some months of captivity he was told that Sultan Ala'add-in (omg Aladdin hahahah) had decided he would be killed unless he agreed to become a Muslim. When he refused, saying that one could not be forced to believe what one did not believe, the judicial officals of Aceh set about trying to convince him. They explained that Muhammad was the last of the prophets in the line of Moses, David, and Jesus and that it was as illogical not to acknowledge him as it would be to say that only the earlier kings of a dynasty were ordained by God and not the later. They asked him how Christians could worship stone idols as in Catholic Melaka, how they could believe that God had a son, and why they did not accept circumcision since Jesus himself was circumcised. All he need to do was repeat the shahada -- a greater understanding would come later. De Houtman's report declared that if he narrated the whole of the debate it would fill half a book. When he remained obdurate, they took him to the river for execution, waved a sword over his head shouting "mau Islam?" and threatened to trample him with elephants. Nevertheless, the sultan clearly wanted him alive rather than dead, and eventually his release was negotiated.
funny right!!! "mau Islam??" .. "tak mau!" *splat* trampled by elephant
Christians and Muslims have so much in common, why can't they be friends?
Sunday, April 18, 2010 @ 4:33 PM
just because i don't think like you, doesn't mean you regard me condescendingly okay.
what will it take for me to live up to your expectations? a lifetime and more.
its simple for you because you naturally think like you. but everyone is different.
its really not easy at all, to be with you.
why do you go out of your way to please everyone but me?
why do i go out of my way to please you, but you never see it that way?
Friday, April 16, 2010 @ 6:45 PM
there is a bird stranded in the kitchen.
it is too close for comfort.
fml.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010 @ 7:18 PM
Capucine
kudos to Freda for showing me her videos last year! i'm still in love with this little French cupcake.
i resolve for my future kids to be as cute as her, if i ever decide to get over the mental barrier of the horrid pains in giving birth.
Merci, Krista ! from Capucha on Vimeo. <-- just click on the link and start getting hooked to all her videos like i am
Sunday, April 11, 2010 @ 2:27 AM
so busy with work, i haven't been thinking about life in a while.
came across this particular reading from my SEA module (so sucky cos of the lecturers), with references to Mahayana Buddhism in Vietnam. what i rather regret from my university experience was that i never really had a chance to learn about world religions and cultures, like i expected i would have. maybe cos there's no proper anthropology course here, or that i probably didnt explore enough modules hoho. but anyway even in my PS modules, it has influenced/tainted my view of religion to make me see it from a distanced and objective point of view. now it just seems to me like a human construct, just needed for identity and social cohesion. easily manipulated to create the idea of ethnicity, geographical patterns and statistics make them even like fashion trends. yet somehow in me i always believed (and still do) in God and Jesus. and i think this has largely got to do with me somehow landing up in a christian kindergarten, catholic mission schools and introduced to church by a secondary school friend, altho later on i got secretly very uneasy with the fanaticism and somewhat superficial friendships and cell grps in my opinion. or perhaps i just didnt see eye-to-eye with their rigid world view. so anyhow now i am rather unreligious altho still seeing sense in there being a higher being. and then university came and messed up and twisted this world view so i'm on a clean slate again. education is a good and bad thing haha. when i'm done with school and have time to read for leisure, i plan to read up on different philosophies and religions and make sense of everything, establish my world view and find my true religion. altho right now at this point of time, i know (think) there is Jesus cos it fits with what i currently think about life. i know i'm a bad christian for even expresing doubt in the existence of God, but its better than being a good christian without knowing why. right now, i don't believe that following rituals and practices such as going to church and baptism and all is a true test of faith. its just human expressions of faith, and throughout history practices have changed and will keep changing. so i believe more in the Buddhist style of philosophy, but i don't believe in buddha, enlightenment or karma. maybe not yet. haha complex! (is buddhism a religion or a lifestyle? i dont even know) and on an endnote, i'd like to believe that all religious people will go to heaven. and if people sin cos its nature, then people should not go to hell forever cos that's just unfair. ultimately i shldnt pick and choose what to believe cos i like it or not, so i should just read up on this whole thing one day? it'll be interesting if i end up being muslim or wiccan or scientologist (tom cruise haha that crazy douche, omg is suri cruise a scientologist?) who knows, the possibilities in life are endless right.
wah so long. nobody is gonna read this ahhahahhaha, except Ashley cos he has nothing better to do and likes to think his mind is as complex as his screwed up "ethnicity". (Kaka says you're filipino haha pls.) but i just like the cathartic feeling of mental non-intellectual release. my thoughts may be flawed so anyone else is welcome to enlighten me and convince me otherwise!
Buddhism, in contrast, teaches "self-lessness," that "there is no permanent self, soul or ego behind the ever changing flux of mental and physical processes that comprise our being." "For Zen," says George Rupp, "the individual is in the last analysis not an independent entity. Whatever reality individuals have is derivative from their union with the whole." Thich Nhat Hanh says that true self is non-self -- "the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements," that "there's no separation between self and others, and everything is interconnected." Non-self, Thich Nhat Hanh says, can be cultivated: "When you love, if your love is true, you begin to see that the other person is a part of you and you are a part of her or him. In that realization there is already non-self. ... When people love each other, the distinction, the limits, the frontier between them begins to dissolve, and they become one with the person they love. There's no longer any jealousy or anger, because if they are angry at the other person, they are angry at themselves."