White Windmill

I was listening to Jay Chou's new album, Still Fantasy, and this song caught my ear. Listen to the lyrics carefully; I thought they are pretty meaningful.



For those who don't get Mandarin, here's the translation of the chorus:

I carried you to the end
Can we don't go back?
You hugged me silently
And said that you don't need a promise
You said that I would have freedom if I am alone
I don't know what you're saying
Anyway I would not let go of your hand

I carried you to the end
Can you don't think too much?
Will we walk hand-in-hand
And reach the end later
You said we shouldn't meet because of the moment
Thank you for letting me hear
Because I am waiting forever

P.S. Don't be confused Dear, I am always by your side.

Fat Scoop

Now, I am listening to continuous bossa nova from Lush 99.5, and suddenly I felt like writing. Blogging is an impulse, I guess, at least for me. Supper is becoming more and more regular as well, and it ain't really doing very well for me. Hence my title.

I guess I am getting fatter. It's not a guess actually, it is a fact. Damn, a guess is just a way of making yourself feel a bit more comfortable rather than succumbing to the fact that what you said is a pack of lies. Woah. Somehow, I felt good saying that. What happened to my pacs? (I used to have 4, I think, but that was a long time ago). Lookin' at my tummy, I have to admit that I had succumbed to the savoury oily favor of pratas and milo-dinosaurs-with-lychees-on-top. On top of that, we drove to suppers. How metabolically unhealthy is that?

A good old meal of Indian goodness gets friends together and secrets out. How cool is that?

I am not a health-conscious freak. Nor do I care about gaining a few more kilos. I just don't like the line of fats that protrude defiantly from the waist everytime I sit down. Guess I will have to do something about that before things get out of hand.

But yes, I do like suppers. But not just for the food.

Suppers, in my opinion, are one of the best avenues of exchanges. Over a cup of teh, teh halia or any of their close cousins and prata or bak chor mee (minced meat noodles), friends exchange views and opinions on their recent happenings. They discuss, laugh, joke but all in all, they communicated on a level that is both casual and comfortable. Forget about the high collar, cufflings and pin-striped poshy dinners; they are costly and half of the time, they don't get the job done. A cheap $2.20 meal of 2 plain pratas and 1 teh will probably get your friends talking more than they should. Throw in a couple of Sapporo beers and you have a party, berms-and-flip flops style. And while you shake that leg of yours and your friend smoke that Malboro Lights of his, a conversation about politics, army and sports ensue.

So go on, have your fill. Just make sure you work out after that. (A good round of intercourse burns a good deal of calories, for those who are relevant. Check them out here).

English Essay

It started out pretty harmless, just two questions posed by my sister who barged into my room (thankfully my hands are on my laptop), one of which I will not mention cause it is on the long moldy topic of "kiasuism" in the society. So passe. Cheah.

Her teacher had given her these two topics to think about and write down the various arguements that the issues evoked. I thought ok, I had done this umpteen times myself and so I agreed to take a look at what she had came up. Then she handed me a piece of paper with an interesting topic in the middle. It was a typical mindmap kind of thing with arrows and bubbles and squares.

In the middle typed, "IMF Annual Meeting in the Island of '4 Million Smiles'. Why the red carpet treatment?"

Believe it or not, the image of Suntec Convention Centre, reinforced with its metal girdles and fences, came into mind. Impenetrable fortress, guarded by police and soldiers round the clock to protect the interests of the foreign delegates. See, I have to be politically correct in my selection of words (Nowadays, words can get you behind bars. No, not Mars bars.). Then I looked at the question again, "Why the red carpet treatment?"

I came up with a few reasons off hand, which I then spend 10 minutes explaining to her (even bringing in China who is hosting the Olympics 2008). Another word crept into mind, a Malay word commonly used during National Service which starts with "W". I would not elaborate.

Naturally, one tidies up the house when you are playing host to a lot of people at your house, I told my sis. When it's all over, the host can then heave a sigh of relief and start the whole process of cleaning up the mess.

For Singapore, we have secured, cleaned, mopped, painted, scrubbed, arranged, lined up, prepared, fussed, secured again, fussed again to welcome the arrival of the foreign delegates. I think we are pretty good hosts already. Agreed? (P.S. You could protest if you disagree.)

Monday

I woke up this morning, switched on my laptop, ran through my emails and thought, "Maybe I should blog." And so I did, desperately trying to type something in that empty white space provided by blogger when you click on "New Post".

It's being a while since I last suffered from Monday Blues, since every alternate week I have no lessons on Mondays and have no intention of going to school as well. Fridays are the worst of the lot as I usually have lessons from 12 noon to 10pm at night. Talk about irony man. Mondays are supposed to be the shittiest days of the weeks and Fridays are days frosted with hope and freedom. No one parties on monday nights; Friday nights are crazy.

Ok, I shouldn't complain. There are people who are having a 5-day week holding daggers and bayonets at my throat.

I just done a forum on radio. The topic is cute yet supple, "Are parents spoiling their children in today's society?" I thought I lost control of my panelists (4 of them), yet I could probably blame it on my lack of experience since it was my virgin try. Problem is when you pose a question to the panelists, a few of them might answer and supplement each other along the way, so in the end, you might really have no clue what they are talking about, or if they are answering the question for that matter. Nonetheless, I did have good panelists who contributed when I directed the questions at them and that's all that matter.

I watched NUS Dance Blast's "Shut Up and Dance" and was awed. Literally. Half of the time, I was on the edge of my seat, leaning forward, tapping my feet to the beat of Timberlake, Ne-Yo, Teriyaki Boyz and their hip hop friends, while fixing my eyes in the dim lights on the slides, locks and pops of the various dancers in their various states of undress. Hmmm, they were well-dressed, what more could I say. I always have a weakness for short skirts, colourful tubes and "bling bling" corsets. Well done to all the dancers, you did well and we had a blast of a night.

Okay, its almost one in the afternoon. Time for me to wash up and have some brunch. Think I shall catch a movie later since there are quite a lot of good shows up on screen lately.

Don't you just love Mondays?

Dick and Rick Hoyt

I read about them through a stranger's blog. The story of this pair of father and son is way too inspirational so I had to dedicate a post to it as well. Here is an article adapted from the Sports Illustrated by Rick Reilly about them and their amazing story. Watch the video, you will know what I mean. Here goes.

*I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to Pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck. Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars - all in the same day (doing the Ironman Triathlon). Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much - except save his life.



This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life," Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old, "Put him in an institution." But the Hoyts weren't buying it.

They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way," Dick says he was told. "there's nothing going on in his brain." "Tell him a joke," Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!"

And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want to do that." Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described "porker" who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles?

Still, he tried. "then it was me who was handicapped,"Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks." that day changed Rick's life. "Dad," he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!" And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

"No way," Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year. Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?" How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried. Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzz kill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? "No way," he says. Dick does it purely for "the awesome feeling" he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together. This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992 -- only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

"No question about it," Rick types. "My dad is the Father of the Century." And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn't been in such great shape," one doctor told him, "you probably would've died 15 years ago." So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy. "The thing I'd most like," Rick types, "is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once."*

Well, I hope this story gives you the pulse and inspiration that all of us are so missing nowadays. Just remember, when you don't give up on other people, you don't give up on yourself as well.

Essential Brew

Jennie yells out, "Run Forest, Run!" so what did Forest do? He ran, and ran and ran. He ran so much and so hard that his braces broke from his legs and he never had to wear them again.

It's the first day of September. Normally things are quite normal in September, but that was before; now, people are preparing to honor and remember those who were sacrificed on the 11th day, I have a 2nd year anniversary date with Dear on the 22th day. Before I start, I just wanted to explain why I put that scene from Forest Gump in the first paragraph.

The reason being, I just felt like it. Simple as that.

Okay, I did quite a bit of stuff since I last posted, but nothing is so much called academic. I went to the beach, spoke to a psychic, had a fancy Japanese dinner with my hairdresser friend and his wife, played half a day of music on an idle monday afternoon to passing faces, gathered with friends at a place known as Essential Brew, which serves nice tea and desserts while you slack against the wall, well propped up by red fluffy cushions and talking about life and relationships. That was quite a mouthful, sorry, but that was in short the highlights of the previous weeks.

Let's talk more in depth.

As I was saying, I spoke to a psychic previously. The experience was, well, surprising considering the fact that I wasn't prepared for it. She told me stuff that were accurate to a certain extent, and foretold my future in a harmless kind of way. I must love myself to a larger extent, she said, and derive energy that I kept giving others from a higher source. When I asked her what, she smiled and answered, just pray. If I ever worked in the oil industry in the future, this blog post shall bear testimonial to what she had said as well.

Believe me, it feels cool to talk to someone who is at peace with the soul. At least that's what I perceived.

Since a lot of people are suffering from insomnia, I shall disperse some advice on how you can possibly go to sleep without counting metaphysically jumping sheep.

Close your eyes. Imagine yourself to be a piece of paper. Not an ordinary piece though; you are white and pure and clean, and as spotless as the first piece of paper ever conjured out by humans without the ability to write. You are floating, the edges folding gently as if it were carried on invisible waves. Relax.

I hope this helps.

**It's amazing to know how friends can come about from a head of hair.

Mr Black is a current undergraduate who resides in Singapore. This blog is a non-whimsical reflection of his life and the society in which he lives in at large.

- Confidental -

Music, Love and Freedom

May the One who Reins the World keep his fingers out of the bowels and holes. Okay, World Peace.

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