2006 CNY - A year of hope and enlightenment

I have to say the Piggy year was a sure inauspicious one for me and my family. I saw myself thru' a few setbacks, some lifechanging some plain frivolous but each made me learn something about myself. I don't wanna see them happening again.

That feeling is extremely dreadful when i getta drive my dad to hospital for his treatment. It was the same route everyday. I could anticipate where're the turns, the speed-cams, the jams and exactly which minute the cars will come streaming in. And i really hate the hospital, the air, the atmosphere. I just wish I don't have to step into one ever again. My papa's really having a hard time being tossed around by the treatment side effects. It'll be 1 to 2 more months before the whole ordeal can be over. It's the new year...my mom, sis and myself are all extremely positive about papa's conditions. He's gonna be fine.

This is the first time I'm skipping all the CNY house visits with my entire family. We're gonna stay at home to look after papa. And what we're going thru now made us realize how weak family ties are...all those superficial greetings over CNY, how we hope each other will prosper and harmonize, are all the hypocrisy we've demonstrated over the years. It's thru a crisis that you identify who your true frens are. Even our neighbors have shown more concern for us than some of our blood relatives. And it's also thru this crisis that I see what true tear-moving love means..that unconditional tender loving care my mom showered on my dad, all those drama scenes coming to reality...

Tonite's steamboat's gonna be great, in fact better than ever cos it's just the 4 of us sitting round the table, gathering hope and prayers for the new year...

When love and hate collide...

This is what i mean when I said some bloggers tend to let their blogs waste away.

3 weeks of inactivity here and 2 reasons. There ain't much time to sit down and banter nonstop and also because there really ain't nothing much to keep up with.

I'm beginning to see the end of the tunnel, the tunnel in which i'm walkin thru a terrible journey of post-breakup cold turkey. Trust me, it ain't easy when you still gotta see her in class for at least another year or so, having flashbacks of the past and getting all confused in the departments of love and hate. I guess the ultimate solution is still to escape, temporarily at least ...

On mahjong and ktv...

Mahjong...

Playing mahjong and going KTV are perhaps some of those things I didn't get to do the past holz. Because of my dad's conditions, I can't afford to stay out late at nite anymore, which means no more overnight mahjong...

I have never viewed mahjong as an undesirable gambling thingy even when money is at stake. It really depends on who your mahjong kakis are. I play social mahjong, and that means I only play with some close friends. I am usually more interested in the conversations and jokes exchanged on the mahjong table rather than the money colllected at the end of the session. But then again, if there's no money incentive, the game will not last. Like Jerry said, "談錢傷感情". Money destroys friendships, but I guess if the amount of winnings is kept within a healthy limit such that the losers don't really feel the pinch, it should be alright.

Mahjong's a healthy game if it doesn't lead to addiction. In The Philippines, it's been proven to be able to prevent memory deterioration, so I guess it ain't that bad for a social game. I am personally not very good at it as reflected by some terrible mistakes I made during those intense sessions with my JC pals. My view is that mahjong's a game that requires luck and foresight. It is fun and doubles up as an afterlunch bitching session.


KTV...

KTV's another thing I personally enjoy very much. It trains confidence and allows you to vent your frustrations over the microphone. Many have this misconception that if you suck at singing, you should just keep the squawking within your bathroom. That is so not true.

C'mon, if you're really that good a singer, you should go join Project Superstar or something. KTV lounges are really meant for people like me who thinks highly of his own singing but actually suck at it.

I think the standard of the lounges in S'pore are quite pathetic. They don't have the latest songs and the peak-hour charges are damn high. They also serve crappy food. I've been to the ones in HK and Taiwan where each lounge basically stands alone in a building of its own. The service is good, the price is just right and more importantly, they have almost every song you're looking for. Don't count the "lar-sup" lounges though unless you're going there for a different purpose.

My advice is..when you go ktv, don't always sing the same old song from your own repertoire! I do getta know some nice songs from my KTV kakis and I personally love singing canto songs. The local mandopop listeners should open up and expose themselves to some really good canto pieces even though they don't quite understand the language. I'm sure they're already sick of the same old familiar tunes - Beyond's 海闊天空, Candy Lo's 好心分手, leslie cheung's 追 and a few more over-played canto songs.

As for those who completely abstain from chinese/canto songs, KTV lounges are really not the place for them and I must say they've missed out on quite a bit in terms of family/social entertainment.

Being boring...

I'm thinking of how to arrange my new blog and spice things up hopefully.

Maybe I should ask myself what's the objective of maintaining a blog? For my overseas friends to catch up with what and how i'm doing? I do have quite a few good friends who're studying overseas. I don't think I'm gonna write about everything under the sun. That's just too arbitrary, but I would love the randomness though. I certainly do not want to impersonate someone else or lead the perfect life in cyberspace like pretty daphne. There isn't much about myself though. I'm no whiz kid who can share with you a new finding in science or economics and neither am i some hyperclubber who can share his experience in every damn club, every alcoholic drink and every babe he meets in this world.

I think chrono narration of daily stuff is super boring. It'll be like my Police NS pocket book where we detail every damn thing we do in 15-min packets from dawn til dusk. No criminals arrested though. Plain silly.

It's also quite hard to stick to a weekly/monthly theme. That will require too much planning. Someone told me blogging's supposed to be random and to respond to and act upon unexpected stimuli. So you basically get hit by some falling meteor and start asking yourself where the rock comes from and why it hits you. You don't wait and position yourself to be hit by the meteor.

I guess my blog serves 2 purposes. It can be a sewage pipe for me to flush out my wild thoughts or a scripture full of the screamer's self-proclaimed words of wisdom. There're a lot to mention for wild thoughts though, for a million things run thru my mind everyday. It can be a dream/nitemare I had, someone i met, something I saw or something irrational that i'm attempting to explain, each having something in common. It creates a deep imprint in my mind. It changes my life somehow and I believe it can change yours too.

I think i'd make it a point not to overwrite cos I personally have the tendency to give up reading long draggy blogs that go on and on in circles or simply do what the title of my blog says.

I had just committed the mistake that I said I shouldn't have...


~screamer

2006...i'm moving on...

On blogging...

I had such a hard time trying to start a blog because I always had this impression it will be an abandoned mine, an unfinished job that isn't worth the maintenance effort if you don't expect to see the end of the tunnel. Many friends of mine have blogs of their own. Some had internalized the blogging habit into their daily routine while others simply stopped at some point of time when they found it too much of a hassle to maintain their blogs. I guess when everything picks up rhythm in a society like ours, it is hard to find time to translate the deep yet random thoughts in our minds into words, to jot them down somewhere and to look back at them. Or very simply, our lives might have become so mundane and iterative that we just can't find any interesting things to talk about anymore.

I spent half my life in front of my PC either doing work or looking for interesting stuff to download. It never did cross my mind that I could make use of the idle online time to pen some thoughts, send them out to the world and hear them echo in cyberspace. I suppose I was just lazy. And my command of English isn't very good.

Moving on...

It's the first day of the new year. The past one month had been a tough one, despite it being the school holidays. I was in the midst of my exams when I was told my Papa had been diagnosed cancer, and shortly after that, I fell out with my girlfriend. It wasn't easy managing so many crisis at one time. Taking care of Papa was #1 priority. I drove him up and down the hospital for cancer treatment everyday and spent many hours in hospital waiting, waiting...and waiting. We're doing everything to manage the physical side effects of his treatment and he's doing alright now. Another 2 months or so, and he'll be back to work. It really didn't feel like the holz to me at all. Just when I thought I can get myself settled down, it's time to head back to school.

My 2005 resolution was to be more humble. It didn't quite work out for me. The short BGR I had made me realize my pride is the only thing that's preventing me from moving on. I can't be "myself" anymore. I need to change and the first thing I need to do is to step down that big ego, be less judgmental of people and me more aware of what others think about me.

And so 2006 really looks uncertain to me. There are obviously very important tasks to be accomplished which are however not worth mentioning here...be more hardworking, more positive and doing everything i can to improve that disappointing GPA of mine. These are what I call routine tasks to accomplish a short-term goal, certainly not a major component in my life.

However task-oriented it may be, nonetheless, it is still important to have a wishlist and certain things to look forward to for the next couple of months. I've decided to give my ACCA course a break. I started doing it during NS as a timefiller and I didn't expect to come this far. I'm 3 modules away from completing the whole course and obtaining the first professional certification of my own. But I kinda had enough of all the boring auditing and accounting talk and I simply loathe studying for the exams. I'm gonna take a break from it and slowly finish the remaining modules in the next 3 years or so. Meanwhile, I'm gonna learn something that I've always wanted to - Japanese.

It could have been any foreign language and wouldn't matter much to my ability since I do have an affinity towards languages (I picked up cantonese from listening to cantopop alone!), but I guess I have too much respect for the Japanese culture and supremacy. It will be a 5 year course and I'm gonna just give the Elementary class a try to see if it really is my cup of tea.

I believe the Japanese class will be another major commitment that requires time, effort and money to keep up with and to maintain my passion for it. I am also looking forward to the summer vacation to do an internship and to save up enough money to go NYC hopefully. I really love travelling. Unrealistic as it seems, but I guess these are some things I can work towards. If things take a turn, I guess I would just have to live with them and make the best out of what I can do.

Now, right now..first day of 2006..my immediate wish is that my Papa can recover quickly and my brave and strong family can walk out of the storm unscathed. I am positive towards everything and I hope everything, in time to come, will be pleasant and smoothsailing for me and you, my readers.

I hope I didn't sound too stern. Haha...i'll be back shortly.

Happy New Year!