Cea-rin

This is how my straits-born grandmother used to call her, our dear Serene. It could sound like the most lovingly pronounced name, but on occasions where she finds us watching Little Lulu at 4am in the morning and comes out equipped with the rotan, it could spell trouble too. But that was a long time ago. Cuz Serene no longer lives in that single-storey house with a steep staircase leading to an attic where the lion head is kept. She’s moved twice since. And since her last trip to The Eye of Malaysia, she could be moving again. Cuz, congratulations! I hear the bells too. Si cea-rin… you do us proud.

Aquaria KLCC

I’ve never been there before and I still prefer tropical ornamental fishes that can swim happily in a 5 gallon tank. Aquaria KLCC is the code name for this feeling which germinates itself in an office setting, either because of too much or the lack of work. It is the ingenious antidote coined by my dear cousin Simon to dispossess sien-ness. Let them drown among the weeds of the sea and be eaten ferociously by sharks…It is like jaundice in the sunlight…sien-ness and the water at Aquaria KLCC. Take me there…

look at the clouds

You can only hear the clicks on the mouse, the sound of the space bar being rigorously thumbed and the keyboard being typed on in here. The CPU fan belt is spinning as loudly as when there are 3 or more programs running simultaneously on my PC and one of them is rendering a 3D image. The photocopier is printing out something and you could just picture the xerographer’s light sensitive tube scanning to and fro the document. Amid all these mechanical noise, it is dead quiet in here. I could hear my colleague breathe from my cubicle and it’s probably as the temperature is quite low in here.

To this I am quite sure, that there are thousands of people out there hearing and experiencing the same thing in their respective cubicles. And basically, it is the same thing day-in and day-out.

It might not be such a good idea to post the question as to why work, but aunty Ah Poh did remind us to ‘remember to look at the clouds.’ It’s drizzling now. Have a good day at work.

ouch!

love in any language - lyrics

Performed by Sandi Patti. By Jon Mohr, John Mays:

Je t'aime
Te amo
Ya ti-bya lyu blyu
Ani o hev ot cha
I love you

The sounds are all as different
As the lands from which they came
And though the words are all unique
Our hearts are still the same

Love in any language
Straight from the heart
Pulls us all together
Never apart
And once we learn to speak it
All the world will hear
Love in any language
Fluently spoken here

We teach the young our differences
Yet look how we're the same
We love to laugh, to dream our dreams
We know the sting of pain

From Leningrad to Lexington
The farmer loves his land
And daddies all get misty-eyed
To give their daughter's hand

Oh maybe when we realize
How much there is to share
We'll find too much in common
To pretend it isn't there

Love in any language
Straight from the heart
Pulls us all together
Never apart
And once we learn to speak it
All the world will hear
Love in any language
Fluently spoken here

Tho' the rehtoric of government
May keep us worlds apart
There's no misinterpreting
The language of the heart

Love in any language
Straight from the heart
Pulls us all together
Never apart
And once we learn to speak it
All the world will hear
Love in any language
Fluently spoken here

prattles

A strength I find, can also be a weakness. In which case, Grace is needed for both to be accommodated. Strength portrayed over a span of time could be pictured as foolishness while a weakness gets away easily as one is ignored for too much a display of it. Too much of anything apart from wisdom, is not wise. Cheesy, as my dear brother would say. Moderation, on the other hand, is safe but dull. To season the matter - the presence of Grace in all.

无聊

Sometimes I think I'm a bit 无聊, which is lame. An advert for Samsung? Just toying with my camera and Photoshop Lightroom again.

In any language...

Growing up in my grandparents’ house where Hokkien was the spoken language, my Hokkien then was considerably fluent for a kid. I don’t really recall having problems communicating with my grandma when young in that tongue. Grandpa’s gone now and grandma’s the only surviving grandparent I have. That too, I only see her a few meagre times a year. While I still understand the dialect (to a certain extend), it’d be quite a chore for me to hold a discussion in Hokkien now.

Mandarin is next. The only mandarin-speaking person I was in contact with was my cousin who roamed around my grandparents’ rented house when young. I remember knowing the words, but not having them articulated in the correct way. But he somehow understood. Then came college years in KL where everyone either spoke Mandarin or Cantonese. That was when I found myself in a circle of Mandarin-speaking friends and had the choice either to try speaking the language or contribute silence and try sign languages with the group. Weekend Mandarin classes also helped a lot. But it was more so the Mandarin-induced environment that I was in for 2 good years which helped me the most in the language.

University days in a Commonwealth country heard me speaking more Mandarin than English. Apart from Ps John, Jon, Eddy, Hong Swee, and occasionally Ka Hoo, it was full-time Mandarin for me after classes, although there were hints of Fu Chow here and there, thanks to the Sibu folks who infested every layer of friends I met! (btw, Eddy, Jon and Ka Hoo are Fu Chows too…)

Language for me, I find, is a matter of practice and being in an environment which uses it in its communication. The same applies to the language of love. It has to be learnt, practiced and mustered. While we all have an unlimited capacity to love, it doesn’t come as naturally as we wished it could. And the lack of practicing it could result in forgetfulness. Native, first language or mother tongue, English definitely fits not the bill for me. I am of Chinese decent born in an officially Malay-speaking land to an English-speaking family. Language tongue-wise, I might not have an identity. But love…

Well, just some thoughts about love as a language as this song which a friend once sang in the bus on the way to an SU camp kept repeating itself in my head today:

Love in any language, straight from the heart,
Binds us all together, never apart,
And when we’ve learnt to speak it, all the world would hear,
Love in any language, fluently spoken here.

I’ve never heard that song sung anywhere since that bus trip…

Abang Dell

Sempena Harijadi Abang Dell:

Kenapa agaknya kita selalu panggil Abg Dahlan ni, bos?

Hmm...Happy Birthday, bos!

?

There must be days when we wished the sun shone longer, and days when the moonlight would last forever. Some days we wish for everything, and some days for nothing at all. To hear the wind, the smell the trees, to notice the dew…the simple marvels of nature which never fail to revitalise the soul, but more so, to hear His voice…in the confines of this cubicle…

A labyrinth of unrest

I’m taking some time off now, to blog. Call it stolen time. I’m just not ready to delve into things laid before me yet. Work. I feel unsettled, uncertain of the things around me. Yet, to catch me from falling, there’s this labyrinth of projects and things to do which I suddenly find spread out to secure my day. My colleague who recommended me to this job has tendered in her resignation. I find documents on my desk to attend to and phone calls from contractor and sub-cons asking me regarding projects which I’m not familiar with. Boss is not around, and I’m dragged into this so-called mess which I have to sit down and look into one by one. I have my own projects to get done too. Keeping my head above water, I feel my hair all wet now. I feel the weight of workload in my lungs. Suffocation not so much from the volume of it but from its foreignness and unfamiliarity which sinks the ability to stay focus. Bubbles, bubbles. I really don’t feel like doing anything for the moment, honestly.

Much ado about reading

How do you go through the day doing the things you have to, with encounters of things later trust upon you, and are up against the unpredictable? There just seems to be a hundred things that you have to do, want to do, are asked to do, think about doing, yet to be done or are in the process of doing. And at the end of the day, we bury our head under the pillow thinking of, well, more things. It does liken us to sharks swimming through a sea of things-to-do in order to breathe or risk sinking and drowning.

Then again, there are those whom we know of who seemingly do very little and live through the day either on the computer with games, watching tv, sleeping or just reading.

That comes to the origin of the question I asked myself, ‘when was the last time I finished reading a proper book?’ Time is not the question, but the reason is. And I came to the conclusion that whenever I picked up a book to read, my mind goes through a list of things I could do and end up being convinced that I might be better off doing something else. Well, priority might be the issue. But then again, some things are done habitually eluding any re-evaluation on its dominance on precious time.

Truth is, there are probably countless things of what needs and can be done. It is a matter of who is willing to do it. While we may admire the guts of some for their resignation to being lazy, we marvel more at their attitude in not getting things done for themselves, or others while expecting a silver spoon. Then again, is all work relevant?

There will always be things to be done, from picking up the papers on the floor to writing in a complain to the authorities to alert them of their shortcomings which has caused the public some inconvenience. They seem like valid work to be done that almost anyone could accomplish. Then again, how many chose to do it? On many occasions, I too have closed an eye. Let someone else do it…

What then, has that got to do with freeing up time to sit down and read a book? Nothing, really. Conclusion is, things to be done are countless while not everything really needs to be done, either by us or at all. But whatever our hands find to do, may we do it to our best, be happy and recognise that it can be committed unto Him to be a blessing to ourselves and to others. What's the point in a half-hearted job, anyway? Maybe the objective is not really the end, but the means which justifies it. Well, not in all cases I must say. Or does the end justify the means?

Hmm....

That said, I seriously have yet to finish reading a book!

What do you do?

Poor focus, noisy pictures, lousy micro shots, superficial preset aperture settings, dull colour results, 5.0 megapixels which does not mean a thing and with a price that could have fetched something capable of twice its performance now…what do you do with such an item? One thing is to capitalise on its weakness, and making it do what it does best.

A toast to my Kodak C360 for being such a candidate. A toss I mean. Well, that’s what I did. Didn’t even feel inspired enough to click it. Swung it around with a 10 second timer on instead. Well, on the bright side, I would never have ventured such a shot with a DSLR...no, no.