funny joke

A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, you're a great guy, but I don't like you in that way. This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we're not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we're going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn't work out, we'll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

timeless

made a casual observation today after watching season 1 of friends

if you want to make a show classic or timeless that future generations may be able to enjoy

avoid pop culture references, because they only make sense at roughly 1 or 2 years of broadcast.

this kind of reflects how some producers or writers just think about the short term and use pop culture references to a obscenely irritating level and then find that while it may be good now, its hard to get syndicated because no one understands anymore.

crazy kids . . .

crazy ideas me and my friends used to talk about

joel came up with a shirt for us with team srjc synchronized swimming jersey that we would wear to school

he also came up with buying old plastic power rangers masks or something like that from the pasar malam and then sneaking it into the cinema. when mama mia or high school musical 3 played. that way, anything there was a song, we would burst from the seats and start dancing as if it was some live show

joey sir used to say this when he makes a mistakes, "testing you only, lucky you all pass!" hahas

and i have a hell lot of friends whose name start with J. counting JUST my contact list, i have AT LEAST 11 friends whose names start with J. and that's not even counting those i don't have numbers of.

NEED MONEY FOR SHADOW COMPLEX

My Dreams

a name that came to me in a dream yesterday night, or was it the morning today. anyway

the name is HG aegis Lewis. author, female

i think the name came from lewis carol, whom i thought was a girl

still another word that i used to keep pronouncing because it is so fun to pronounce was

alex faire. i dunno how to write out the pronunciation and if i did i doubt you would know how to read it.

anyway, just some of my weird dreams.

also, a strange observation, things in your memory do not have colour unless you take special notice of them.

things like rainbows and blood and things like that.

everything else looks like its in grayscale. or black and white for layman terms

particularly, i can't remember any colour in my dream except until the part where i cut the author's hands with a samurai sword and blood came out, and that kind of woke me up. it wasn't even like kill bill gushing out type. it was like a stylised flow, like the blood from the wrist flowed out in a radial style. like those cool wavy lines you see at the end of most web designs nowadays

anyway, her hand was gray and the blood came out was red. and then i remember pulling her hand (the hand wasn't completely cut, it was deep, but not enough to go through) and making her run because a lot of readers or probably zombies were chasing me/her. then i dodged a taxi or cab or some black car with a huge white stripe in the center which kind of held them back. the readers were probably zombies. at least they behaved and moved like zombies.

then i woke up and my lungs and legs were all warm and i didn't bother to check the time because my dog was still hogging on to my blanket.

in case you think this is a generic nightmare scenario, it was not. it was not scary at all. i or rather the main guy in my dream felt very relaxed and calm and like somewhat experienced, like some kind of special agent who's seen this before kind of stuff. so there was no particular fear involved in this dream, just more like rushing for time, late for deadlines/meeting/school etcetera.


and that's my dream. i have others that i don't post online because those are more surreal and many times more incomprehensible. this is one of those dreams that people, in other words me, generally can make sense of.

I CAN SEE THE FUTURE!!!

money

also, i need a lot of money this month

and the Zimbabwean dollar is discontinued

$72 batman arkham asylum (possibly more)
$32 Trials HD
$32 Shadow Complex


and yes al, i need my money back

Clone info

NEE-NAH-BU-AY

bloody hell, i know how to do qn 5 yet i go and stupidly do qn 1. stupid econs. stupid time limit. cannot 3 hours meh. will die meh.


heard mcfly on radio. they sound very pop ish like simple plan, which kind of caught me off guard. saw them on youtube, hate their hair, for the fact that everyone and their monkey has that same hairstyle

i actually wanted to write that last line in my gp essay.


anyway, saw a guy from sr 's twin in the elevator, he lives 2 stories above me, looks exactly like the guy from sr. i think he's s13 or something

anyway, got me thinking about twins going to different schools and different social circles. then i thought about having my own twin. like i would give him a picture of who are my friends and who are the people i would say hi and bye too. then i thought about clones.


then i thought about having this flashcard of "clone information" like basically you give this flash card, like the pw presentation cards, and he would be able to "continue" in your place. i wanted to compile my own clone info here, but i realized that i would have to put my friends' picture on the interwebs. and that's not right

www.lightamillioncandles.com

Random Musings

I find it incredibly strange that people can sit down and spend hours upon hours on facebook and yet cannot type up a decent 2 sentence blog update.

also, if i had to choose which club to go to based on name alone, Ministry Of Sound would beat all competition hands down. i mean who comes up with a name like zouk anyway.

also, i found out that certain words are incredibly fun to pronounce, like konfrontasi and batu ferringhi. and alos this latin phrase i always used to pronounce even though i didn't know what it meant but now can't really remember

also, nokia screwed up the entire bus 80 ride i took from bugis to kovan. the bus shook like a phone was ringing on vibrate and they screwed up the seating plan and made it look like seat so much less people, and for what? music? the music is not even half decent. also there's a part in the bus with 2 seats designed like a bar top complete with weird ang moh guy sitting opposite you,(on the window, meaning your seat is actually facing a window) in front of a table full of alcohol. and the most ironic part about this was that the bus passengers consists of either old people and foreign workers. the youngsters only made up like one fifth at most.

went to bugis national library just now. never ever gonna go there again. me and edmund reached the library's study lounge itself at 9.12am, while the library opens at 9. it was already full. so we went down to the actual library part of the library to wait since it opened at 10. by 9.50 there was already a goddamn queue outside a library. A FRIGGIN LIBRARY. and most ironically, most did not come early for the books, they came early for the seats.

so you know, there's a business opportunity somewhere there. rent a huge warehouse, load it with tables and somewhat comfortable chair, install a good aircon system, and charge students to go into study. to get them to enter, charge them cheaply, like 50 cents per hour with like $5 for the whole day or something like that. and then overcharge the food and drinks, but make sure you have a SILENT air filter to filter out the crap smells that food seems to bring with it. there you go, business plan!

also, i spent more time in the library reading dilbert than actually studying. so apparently even the school is more boring than the library

also another thing i never really understood. i always seem to eat lor mee even though i have never once tasted lor mee that actually tastes good. it just always seem to be like on the priorty list for an irrational unexplainable reason. i mean i don't really like lor mee but yet i always seem to buy it even when there are perfectly reasonable substitutes and then end up hating the lor mee that i for some reason will buy and eat. it is just completely irrational.

and to end off my post, WHAT THE FUCK DOES HURR HURR EVEN MEAN?? does anyone even make that sound naturally.

myself : a somewhat psychological analysis

anyone who has simply read my blog but never met me in person would believe i am an empty shell with little to no social skills and the number of friends that i have would attest to that.

many times when i read my on blogs, particularly on "good days", i always see myself writing as this really emo angsty kid. sometimes i find myself incredibly immature. and yet at the same time, i feel very immature for calling myself immature. did i just make any sense back there?

for purposes of understanding, good days are those where i am in a RELATIVELY good mood because the last thing i could remember happening was something pleasant.

i am incredibly pessimistic, the only things i am really optimistic about is the food i am about to eat later will taste good as long as someone other than my maid is cooking. i tend to, and i do fault myself mostly, proclaim that i have few friends on my blogs. on any good day, when i see this, i will think about all the good friends i have, which comparatively to maybe the most popular guy on campus, may be little, but to call them few is quite an injustice to them. on any good day , when i read my own posts, i feel a little guilty for saying that i only have so and so friends.

as a kid i always used birthday parties and birthday gifts as sort of a gauge to see how many friends i have. in recent years, if i get more than 2 i would jump for joy, and i'm not kidding about that. every birthday post that i have written about in my blog has been a "bad" one, and by bad i meant i only received a cake from my family and maybe a shirt or a card from someone considerate enough to remember. P.S thank you wen hui and also all the insurance companies. when i was in sec 4, i decided to change all that, i told myself that hey if i wanted more gifts, then i should do the same and give them to other people right, thats' how karma works. but it doesn't. eventually i started to feel that my gifts or gifts i shared in cost were becoming more and more insincere and i felt more like a chore than a truly thoughtful gesture. eventually i gave up on that silly idea and only bought and helped with people i truly cared about. it wasn't very often, but the feeling you get is infinitely more satisfying.

i often feel emotionally and socially crippled, maybe not as much as some people, but i do feel that there is a part about the nuances of society that i don't seem to be getting, which others do and that puts me at a disadvantage. i have rather low self-esteem if any of you guys have not yet picked up on that. many of my actions that i took in jc are merely "leaps of faith", hoping that if i do enough crazy things i wont appear insecure. but it never truly worked. i still am lousy at running despite 2 years of will run. i hang on the my broken shoes, as an excuse that i couldn't really let go of because i don't want to face up to the fact that i suck at running. i always tell others gp so easy what, just as a way to make myself feel a little better about what little strengths that i have, even though i always come off as a jerk. most of the times, i only realise how much of an asshole i am after the words leave my mouth. although i have no reason to apologize for giving others a reason to judge me, i have a strong compelling urge to say i'm sorry, for perhaps belittling you somewhat.

speaking about birthdays, i think the reason i get so upset is because i'm jealous of others. everytime i visit blogs or from other people verbally, i always see this recurring picture of lots of people surrounding them as they either have a meal or go out and have a good time. i see pictures of people who have enough gifts to put on the ground and take pictures without having to zoom in. and then on every 6th september, i look at the computer screen and walk around in my house with nothing but boxers and a big t-shirt, wondering what went wrong with my life. because every 6th september i am reminded that i will not have a great big birthday bash like everyone else. to be fair every birthday night i can expect a nice small little strawberry cake from my parents, and to that i really must say i love them. i don't tell them i love them enough.

i never fully understood the concept of humility and i feel that is also why i'm socially crippled. unlike many other traits or values, this is one that you cannot fully adopt and portray it. some people feel that imagination is the most difficult, but i do not think so. just think a little different from how you normally do, and stop applying logic and you should be fine. but humility is difficult, because it cannot be displayed prominently like perhaps courage or moral integrity. sometimes when people talk to me about my achievements, if i downplay it and say as if its' nothing or that its' very simple, people, particularly my mother, say i am arrogant. if i talk about it as my ego would allow me to, i come off as an even bigger asshole. if i don't talk about it people think i'm anti social. so i sometimes really do admire and perhaps be a little jealous of people who come across as humble. perhaps it's the little subtleties that makes it such a simple idea so much more complex.

for the sake of simplicity i will, as i have in the past, refer to anyone who believes in jesus, christians. because there are really too many splits if you want to nitpick

i actually wanted to use my little birthday analogy to start as a small little anecdote before talking about some of my friends. particularly the similarities. i noticed that i remarkably large percentage of people i knew whom i think, or at least gives the impression of having great social skills and hence numerous friends including many who are close friends, are in fact practicing a religion of some sort, most notably christians. granted i do have friends who are somewhat "meh" about any religious views, i have only met one person who is even remotely atheistic, despite the fact that i have 200 odd "friends" on facebook and probably more in real life. i think as a general approximation, i think that only may be 1 out of every 5 friends that are "meh" about religion, are relatively successful when it comes to socialising, whereas for religious friends it is the opposite, 4 out of 5 are great at socialising.

this has mixed implications on me personally, because on one hand cultural diversity, and on the other, it means my chances of finding a girlfriend are slimmer somewhat, considering that most christians i meet would RATHER have a relationship with people of the same ideology. it's one thing to be friends with someone with a conflicting mindset, but it's another thing altogether to have a relationship with someone of a conflicting mindset, especially when it comes to something as big as religion.

ok so now i'm going to base everything that i am about to write on the fact that religious people tend to be more socially "successful" or have a higher EQ for another interpretation and vice versa for non-religious people.

in sociology, the problem of causality would come into effect here. was it that the religious part the cause of such people's social ability, or was it just liek coincidence, maybe because christians make up such a big part that they overlap with people who do well. because both sides are in fact equally possible since chirstians actually make up more than 50% of singapore's population.

but based on my own personal experience, which i must stress is just opinion and not fact, is very simply that religious people, particularly people whose PARENTS preach to them, are the ones who have that extra opportunity to "practice" social interaction. i'll explain what that means.

parents who preach to their kids and bring them to any temples or churches, on a regular basis, like not just new year, who generally have kids that are exposed to more people. so as a kid you will have more time spent with other people, be it kids or adults. and you will pick up certain subtleties very early on compared to people who don't have that opportunity. it is akin to riding a bike. if you can't bike, and you always try to ride a bike everyday, eventually you will learn certain tips and tricks like the faster you go the more stable you are and looking down as you paddle will make you unstable. this are very fundamental and incredibly crucial subtleties that anyone who is already trained to bike will find it difficult to teach because you have already gotten past that phase for so long you forgot how it was to start riding. just like social interaction, the kid who does it everyday will pick it up faster than the kid who does it once a month. so that explains the ability point of view in the ultimate success of somewhat "religious" people.

as for the expanded network and circle of friends, its' actually quite simple. people who go to church have access to a larger group of people to talk to than people who don't. it's simple math. people can always try to "offset" that difference by taking up different hobbies that will help them meet people but then again so can religious people. often times, i have heard of people quoting stories from their church friends, and i always think to myself, how interesting can your church friends be.

as a kid, my parents never imposed any form of religious upbringing in me. they did teach me to be morally upright and honest and always say thank you, values oriented things. but none of what they taught me ever oriented from any kind of religion or even any story. they just said hey you should do this, otherwise other people will suffer, like e.g if you don't share, others won't get to play your toys and they won't share with you kind of lessons. i was a product of a christian convert mother, who never wears a cross and folds incense paper and a buddhist/taoist father who only prays to guanyinma and his late father, unless other people are around. while they have never explicitly stated how strong they were in their individual faiths, i think the main thing was that they never ever tried to influence me in any belief system. so i grew up learning to question others, i grew up question why i had to go to a temple when all the incense smoke was just going to make my eyes tear up, that was when i was a kid. in my primary school years, being in a catholic school, with prayers every morning, it undoubtedly had an impact on me. because according to what they said, everyone was a catholic. and i thought i was a catholic. i remember one time where there was this wishing thing they had where you would send letters to god, and all i wished for was so i wouldn't be careless and keep losing stuff. and my mum was like looking at me with this weird look, and said are you sure you're a catholic. of course i eventually understood that it was just the school and that i was not one of them even though they kept saying everyone believes in their god. as i grew older, i started to respect my roots, become more like my father somewhat, with a quiet respect for the unknown. my dad used to tell me, it's better to give offerings to the ghosts during the seventh month in case.

every time i tried to speak to any god, all i could ever hear was me replying in a slightly deeper voice telling me what i already know i should do.

after one particular incident, i questioned existence, and eventually came to the conclusion that there wasn't. for such a long time i had suspected that if there were so many religions how could i know which is the right one, but i never acted on that impulse. today i look at religion like how a historian would look at history, marvel at the great ones while respecting and admiring their own roots, no matter how detached they feel, there was still a small strand of connectedness with it.

i reflect upon this as i considered my own flaws. maybe that was why i am such a cripple. maybe i will never have a floor full of gifts. maybe i will never become anything more than an arrogant son of a bitch. but i know that inside me lies the potential to change all that, and whether or not i was put here by an almighty god does not matter, because my actions will determine my outcome, and i refuse to let whichever god you believe in take credit for that.



because this is my story, and this is how i choose to write it

this post was originally going to be named the impact of religion

www.lightamillioncandles.com
something you can do to help

the new paper

read the new paper just now
can't remember when was the last time i read it, probably the time the auntie at my void deck stopped selling.

anyway, they were running articles about ndp and stuff

i din actually buy tnp to read the ndp articles, but the part about soo being kicked out because she din have an american accent

anyway. about soo. she is a dj on 987 who does the midnight shift, called pillowfight with soo. i heard her voice before and i actually thought she was some new graduate from the radio academy or something like that. i had no idea she was 30. seriously

anyway, she thinks she was kicked out for not sounding american. i have heard her on the dj a few times and i don't think she deserved to be kicked out. i thought she was a great dj with a great personality and i din really think she had any language problems that i could think of. so i think the kicking her off part is a bit too drastic. i think she does a great job of connecting with her audience. so there is a facebook petition to get her back but i can't seem to find it.


anyway, another article that caught my eye. it was about race. it talked about how this young malay boy doesn't speak with other races because they were of a different faith. then he met the old man who changed his perspective.

i never discriminate. ok let me rephrase that. i don't discriminate intentionally, i think. i never really found a reason to hate or even dislike a person for his skin color or faith. i did find other reasons though. so sometimes when i see my friends making fun of chinese immigrants, i never really understood why. i mean yeah they have an accent, so? i also never really understood why people made fun of indians, that cannot see them in the dark. my friend once laughed at me and called me racist jokingly when i showed her i changed my phone language to malay. i actually saw that in edmunds' phone and thought it was really funny because you'd go about looking at your phone and not knowing what the hell you just stumbled onto. i din think of making fun of the malay language. hell, i'd change it to french or german or thai if i could, because it was the not understanding that was the funny part.

also i thought about my own "religion" if you can call it that. i think i made a breakthrough this week, in that i thought about existence of god and the supernatural. to adopt a scientific mindset, it would be naive and ridiculous to think that god doesn't exist, or anything is an absolute for that matter. basically, what we have right now is a whole bunch of nothing, in the box of evidence of god's existence. and that is a compelling enough reason to take up atheism. but then again, to think deeper is to understand that we do not have evidence to prove that god DOESN"T exist, in maths this is called a null-proof. so it is only fair that we remain open-minded to accept that one day we may have evidence to one or the other. so until then, i will list my "religion" as i am forced to, to Atheist Until Further Notice. it has a pretty nice ring to it.

watched gi joe with yang today while i waited for eman aka Clog02, whose work you may have seen around orchard during the singapore arts festival. GI JOE WAS AWESOME, waiting for a trailer. for the first time, both the lead girls are equally hot, with no one girl being hotter. i think gi joe really beats transformers 2 hands down, probably on par with transformers 1. this is the kind of movie that makes you wanna join the army and work hard there. awesomesauce.

also had our thanksgiving concert yesterday. the performance by the teachers were awesome by themselves. it's just the connection between each performance was not really well done. because the time travel theme was rather lame and made the mcs work hard and come off incredibly lame. i think the time travel theme is very difficult to make cool. seriously, even if it does sound so on paper

the science grease performance was the awesomest. the guys were cool and the ladies were sexy, so yeah i guess that makes an awesome performance. the humanities was also very creative, but a bit sad la cause only can see 2 people, the rest all must cover up until liddat. but the part with the college anthem was damn funny, when the teachers held up srjc signs.

1s11 went out to rk prata house after that. around 16 people went, including gabriela and cheng kai. saw mr thomas there with his class i presume. played truth or dare, but only has truth. quite fun, know more about friends. the starting quite boring because always ask the same standard questions. but this kind of game more fun to hear about other people's stories. also note to self: improve dress sense. it's more important than you'd imagine. thanks to everyone who made 7/8/09 such a great night.


www.lightamillioncandles.com
awesomesauce too!

mr subhas anandan

who in case you don't know, is the top criminal lawyer famous for defending people like one eyed dragon.

our school invited him to come to talk, and boy was he a good speaker.
there was a sense of open honesty that he had with his words, kind of like he already knows all about us.

anyway, whomever convinced him to come to our school must be one brilliant person

he had this very "not in the mood" kind of face, which maybe was his beard, but i couldn't really tell. he talked about his life and lessons for us in jc

when it came to the q & a session, for the first time, councillors need not stand up. thank goodness. i mean i'm getting sick of hearing people complain that confirm is teacher set up one or councillor again, wah lau. i mean if you don't want to speak up then don't complain when others do so right. anyway, this was not the problem today.

he was this really interesting man who talked about the cases he took and why and how he goes about with the cases. incredibly interesting.
i shall not divulge what he told us, but rest assured, this is probably the most interesting moment in srjc for term 3, before thanksgiving concert of course.

anyway, i'm making a new blogskin, so that's coming up, just couldn't get the top banner just right, any suggestions.

www.lightamillioncandles.com