JUNO

I was lamenting the other day how it now takes so much more to move an audience, to touch people. The more we are exposed to movies/films/books/art, the higher the standard we set, the greater the expectation, the more it takes to evoke some sort of emotion. Not that we become desensitized, there just is a greater hunger for something more, it is like eating durians, once you've tried D24 durians, the sweetness will leave you hungering for XO durians, and you'll no longer settle for those fifty cents ones.

And just when I felt that I was no longer able to find my XO durian in movies, I watched this show today which left me gushing, laughing, crying and gushing. Juno is not just a comedy about teenage preganancy, it is about love, about life, about living, about familial relations, about responsibilities, about choices, about coping and dealing. I hate speaking about it in such airy-fairy ambiguous concepts, everyone should go catch it. Natural yet witty, funny yet endearing, I cannot remember the last movie I watched that I felt so much for.

I am not bothering to be more objective or critical because this show is PURE ABSOLUTE BRILLIANCE. I love the part when she says, "I need to know it is possible that two people can stay happy together forever."

For a day

I wish I've more time to think and write. The months are flying by so quickly, one-sixth of the year has gone by and it seemed like yesterday that new goals for the new year were drawn.

During Deviance lecture today, Dr Gana fused the need to have a date on VALENTINE'S DAY with Durkheim's thoughts on Suicide!



At the train station just now, there was a guy with a huge bouquet of roses passing the gantry, there was another teenager, who was mildly embarrassed when his eyes met mine, with a stuffed toy flower protruding out of his paper bag. At a gift shop which was just about to close,a man rushed in, asking if they sold ribbons. "Yes, that kind! Heng ah..." A bunch of my single friends are going to town tomorrow to celebrate. It is quite amazing, there is an energy of anticipation hanging in the air, everyone is a little excited, I think, the singles and the couples alike, over a day that is purely purely a social construct. Okay, here's to a great day of overflowing LOVE, it only happens once a year! :D

what time is it?

I just finished an article and I realized that I don’t really enjoy doing assigned writings because it is constrained with a fixed topic and there is always the deadline, it feels like work… During Social Thought and Theory lecture this afternoon, we learnt about what Marx has to say about work, “my work is an alienation of my life, for I work, in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.” I hope we don’t graduate to become Marxes but even that depends on class, social position (cringing), but idealistically, I would like to believe, it depends only on mindsets (very disappointing coming from a Sociology major).

I’m learning a lot about time and space in a science module and although I’m grasping 0.01% of the science, I am very fascinated by some of the ideas, how time is not the same for everyone and a person observing a moving other are experiencing two different sets of timings. I cannot explain why so or do those crazy calculations which the prof flashes but I only know that time depends on who measures it. Amazing.

Walking on Water

Sometime ago, maybe a year ago or maybe two, I read a friend’s blog. She was a young Christian then and she posted biblical verses, she spoke of how God is her everything, and as I scrolled up and down, I remembered thinking these thoughts: how malleable her mind is, how she has allowed herself be drawn into a current of emotions, how mentally weak she was such that she needed an illusion to hold on dearly to.

Now, a year or maybe two later, there are times when a verse speaks to me, or when I see how God is working His way in my life, little happenings which I would regard as pure coincidences in the past that I want to document here in this virtual space but I am always hesitant. There is a fear that people reading this would come to think of me as a changed person, suddenly spiritual, having such a “malleable mind”, and such uneasiness turns into inhibitions.

In fact, I sense many changes in my life, subtle but significant, how I go to sleep in prayer and wake up seeking Him, how He has become such a constant presence; it is like having someone there I can communicate with all the time. It is amazingly frightening, when I think about it sometimes, how my perception on things has changed within such a short span of time.

And I am writing this now, well aware that there would be another someone like me, reading this, having those same thoughts I had then. But still, I want to document moments like now, when I listen to this song and “where would I be without You here in my life” resonates with me. As I witness the transformation within myself, moving from a skeptic to a believer, I realize that my fear of writing such “spiritual stuff” comes not so much from being weary of the judgments of others, but from a fear that I would not be able to prove God’s greatness and that my writing can do little to convince others. I sigh as I type this line, because there really is a limit to these words, these black alphabets on this white screen and I truly feel that it is only through personal experience that can one feel His tangible presence. All we need is an opening of the heart.

Above your vision

I have been observing the landscape, the people, the sights here in our country more attentively ever since exchange results were released and there is two weeks to make a choice. Almost everything inevitably turns into a comparison, from the orange-blue shuttle buses here; I wonder what colours they use there, to the red cloths drapped in shopping centres, they don’t celebrate Chinese New Year there, and Singaporeans sitting down stirring black coffee in transparent kopitiam cups, they probably drink Starbucks and that’s it.

I had dinner at a hawker centre tonight and I was looking at the ceiling, which was a blackish-brown from accumulated dirt. I never gave any attention to ceilings until a few years back because it is unnatural to be staring up all the time. But I remember one night at a Chinese wedding dinner, I was bored to death because weddings in hotels have become rituals, photographs outside, couple parades inside, same speech all the time, same thank yous and tired yam sengs always. I was also starving because six of the eight or ten course dinner was always seafood, it has become some sort of tradition, the food, the setting, the place, the same soy sauce smell. I remembered thinking if you closed your eyes and forgot about the people, or the couple, all weddings would be the same. In my absolute boredom, I began studying the interiors of the hotel, the whiteness of the pillars, the intricate carvings, the ceilings that stretched so high and are so clean, I wondered how they managed to clean it, who supports the very tall ladder, who climbs up, what cleaning equipments they used. And tonight, when I saw that the ceilings were dirty, I thought that is how it ought to be, more personal, more natural, less perfect.

Silent all these years

Some days I am idealistically unrealistic, some nights I am cynical as can be, tonight I am glad that it rained in the day and there is this cool air that hangs all over.

I’ve been telling everyone (with wild enthusiasm) to read Joshua Harris’s Boy Meets Girl because it seems to me that if you are able to choose the right partner and follow his very high standards on courtship, then it’d end on a “and so they live happily ever after” note (on a less cynical night).

And I’ve also been telling everyone about the jug-big rocks-pebbles-sand-water story (I’m sorry if you don’t know because I’m too lazy to type it) and asking them what the big rocks in their lives are. People usually have a difficult time ranking what their rock ought to be, or their pebble, and so on. And if they had only one big rock, what would that be? They usually agree that well surely we can have a few big rocks in the jug, right?

Also, interestingly, I just heard this one, the jug represents religion (because we all need something to contain us) and the jug’s shadow represents family, ever present, but always taken for granted.

Other things today, I saw an old abandoned sofa along the road on my way home.

Other thoughts today, I hate it that time is always triumphant (like a big fat Cheshire cat grinning) because it catches one off guard no matter how many years of our lives we have been through, we still go oh my time flies. We ought to have gotten used to it by now, two decades, and the time span of a year never changes, but time is always faster than we remembered it to be.

More thoughts today, I think insecurity moulds a person to be guarded and contentment moulds one to be open. Is the open person the abandoned sofa along the road cold and wet in the rain for all to stare at? Is the guarded person the one within the house safe from the coldness but having nobody to admire the shine of her leather? (But who cares really-my favourite line from Silent All These Years is “What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts”)

I hope I don't get sued posting this online, Good Night.

(Maybe a guarded person is one who has left out all the additions, all the extra brackets in life.)

DON'T GO TO UNIVERSITY

UNLESS THE SUBJECT OF LEARNING IS CLOSE TO YOUR HEART.

In the midst of ploughing through a thousand modules looking for a suitable breadth/GEM, I came across this: ).