and yes talking cock is still down...

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I am very tired. And still in a fairly bad mood. The good feelings of the past two weeks have dissipated, leaving me quite grouchy and very sleepy.

today i will be going to play badminton with my colleagues at 8pm. it feels weird because of this other colleague - i can't figure out whether she has anything against me. Of course it wouldn't matter if i had nothing to do with her, but she is on good terms with another collegue whom i am rather fond of. and now it seems like i have become an intrusion in their happy relationship. how drammatic and secondary-school-ish! But it bothers me. :S

I am hoping a good rousing game of badminton would do me good.

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do the funky chicken

the very first time I write an article, the website goes down! i am curious what talkingcock did to it. i am expecting that it would be funnier and better since i wrote it in all of 5 minutes and was rather embarrassed about it the next day.

i'm home. its a different feeling to be home and online than to be at the office online. i've been in a funky mood for many reasons, none of which i wish to elaborate here. so it puts me in a halfway sad and very precocious mood, likely to shoot my trap.

i have many sandfly bites on my feet. :(

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there is nothing online about the last service of c. chapel. there are no stories, no goodbyes, nothing. and all i have left is a webpage from the past.

what was it like, that last service? i remember the first service in the refurbished sports hall. it is terribly sad to me.

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Tamil poetry part 1
Where is my poem, the poem I had written and folded in my dreams?
Oh mother! Did it dissolve before my waking eyes?

Tamil poetry part 2
It only takes you a moment to say No.
To bear the hurt I will have to be born again and again and again
Oh! What will your answer be?
Is it fair to shut the windows against the sandal(wood) breeze?
Your eyes are silent.
Is that their answer to my love's question?
A second is enough, sweetheart, to declare my love.
To prove it will take a lifetime!

What kind of night receives no light even after sunrise? -
Your hair which smells of flowers.
Which part of the world stays bright even after darkness has fallen everywhere?
Your eyes in which the rays of the sun leap.
Beauties of the world let us get together and wash her feet.

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it feels like a day of unravelling. today the headlines reported that the Mariott blast in Jarkarta is the first of many attacks to come planned by a team of 15 JI members. Yesterday my trusty computer system got infected by the W32 Blaster Worm, not through my ignorance of or my laziness to install the Windows patch, but because my internet connection at home is so bloody slow that i gave up after an hour and a half. Now i have a viscious worm. Shit.

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mulch :)

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what is the name of those red bits of wood and mush that they use to cover the flowerbeds so they the soil wouldn't dry up in the hot summer heat? it smells of cool woody rain, and it sinks under a bare foot. it turns tshirts and knees red, and gets lodged in your shoes all day. summer should be coming soon over there. its time to bring out the gardening tools, and the blue bandana.

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The Darkling Thrush
By Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings from broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice outburst among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carollings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

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Bloody insurance policies. I hate them. I hate how I have to pay till 2075, till I'm a stinking 98 years old! I hate to put a monetary value to a life - that it puts loved ones in the awkward position of benefiting from a death. I hate that I don't understand it at all, that every month, 15% of my salary is poured into this unending hole that never gives back. I'll never get anything back. I hate insurance agents who don't explain things properly, hate it that my dad can't explain squat to me even though it was him who put my whole family in this mess, hate it that my mum never got anything for lupus but as to keep paying like 5000 a year until she dies. I don't want to benefit from their deaths! As long as I can support myself, my parents are comfortably well-off, and I have no dependents, let a death be what it merely is, a dreadful loss.

I am irritated. I don't know why no one can explain things to me. Just brought my policies down to my colleagues at the accounts department cos they said they knew how to read policies, but they admitted that either mine is a really lousy policy or that they didn't know how to read it. I am never going to be able to afford a home of my own :(

I understand the need for insurance for permanent disability or sickness, for what the secular world call "acts of god". I understand saving plans, and endowment plans. It is life insurance that throws me off. And that is apprently what I have. (or at least one of the unknown number that I have) I hate it!!

Why is lodging so expensive? Do you realise that I cannot afford a roof over my head, and the expenses that come along with it? Do you know that I am not on a salary scale, that I could possibly be earning this amount, doing the same things, for the rest of my life? But that is my own fault, my own lack of ambition.

I am punching the keyboard furiously, hopeing that somehow this will alleviate the irritation.

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Gourmet attachments

Have you had any chilli crab and mantou recently? The supermarkets sell mantous with dao sa, red bean and green bean paste, but we all know that mantous were made for chilli crab, and chilli crabs for mantous - a wonderous gourmet attachment.

Now, french fries go with chilli sauce, ketchup, curry sauce, malt vineger, salt, pepper; (breathe), with sour cream flavouring, BBQ flavouring, hot and sour flavouring, pizza flavouring, oriental flavouring, smokey grilled flavouring, with mos burger spicy sauce, black pepper sauce or even hot fudge sundae.

But have you ever had french fries with chilli crab? :)

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Bleary eyes
Yesterday I did something what every mum warns their kids not to do.

if you rub your eyes some more, they will fall out! and you will have to go to hospital!

my eyes didn't fall out, but i did have to go to the hospital.

p was very good to me. sent me there, waited for me to get done, and then sent me home. i was disappointed with d, cos it reminded me of how she left the last time i was sick (when i puked), and it seemed to reinforce the idea that she will never be there if you need her, and that she is only a lunch companion. someone tell me that my expectations are too high and i'll shut up.

today i watch the world through slits.

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Re-discovering html
All of a sudden, the light came on.

I could use html in my blogger entries!

(You were expecting something earth-shattering like I discovered gravity weren't you? wait long long) I used to do html in school a long while back but it is all fuzzy inside my head. It wasn't difficult - it was the simplest bit of the whole java course - but I can't even remember the programme that we used to input the data anymore.

But heck. I'm still young, I can learn it again.

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I was thinking about something important to say while putting on my socks today (I think they are pink) but I've forgotten what it was. It was something worth saying, unlike this bunch of bullshit I've been sprouting. I know one thought was that I ought to replace the sole of my shoes since they are completely worn out. Ask M how much it would cost and she said, "Very expensive, $8 a pair." That's my family for you.

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Watching the Sunset

One of my favourite songs of all time is "When God Ran" by Shaded Red. It is the story of the prodigal son -- how he squandered his father's money on his own pleasure, and how when he came down that dusty road in repentence, it was the first time God ran. It is a beautiful song to listen to, especially in a quiet office with a vibrant orange setting sun.

I don't feel like going home today. My friends said in jest today that you "never can tell" with me, and that I have many things that I don't tell anyone. I almost want to reply, "Yes it's true! I have layers and layers to get through." Shrek says he is an onion, not a cake or a parfait.

There is only pink left hanging in the sky. When the son returned to heaven, he said that he would not leave us orphans, but that he would leave us a comforter, the Holy Spirit. Dear Holy Spirit, where are you? Are you the wisps of pink left in the sky, about to disppear from my life?

Standing on the edge of quiet sadness.

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I think after a extended period of being bombarded with tragedies both big and small, the human being learns to shut things out, and concentrate on only that which is most essential to survival. Like the bombing in Saudi Arabia and Casablanca, what is that to us, except what we've already known already, that the world is a mess? Fundamentalists point to human sin and God's wrath; atheists point and say there is no god; and i can't think beyond the issue of where i should go to church this sunday.

I have church problems. Right now, I go to CE half the time and to W the other half. While W worked for a while - it was a timely break - i don't have the initiative anymore in me to keep going and sit alone in a church as i would sit in the movies. I have ideals of community, yet in reality i espouse isolationism in church. What will I do? I thought about going back to PL, but it is difficult to say the least, when all my friends have left. So glad that i have another 7 days to sunday again. another 7 days to hide.

i wonder how long adam and eve hid in the bushes before God found them out.

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Collective disappointment
We were so close to being declared Sars-free by WHO when they found a Malaysian man residing in Singapore with the disease today. Just hours away to that psychological label, and then we have to wait another 20 days, again. I only hope that the man did not get it from the community, and then he did not spread it further. Who knows who he has been in touch with? The goverment keeps saying that we are in this "for the long haul". Sigh.

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Hot

Went for a swim this afternoon with A and T and I am red. My chest is itchy from a rash because of the heat, and what I would really like to do now is to curl up in front of the computer and watch a VCD in a dark and air-conditioned room. I am tired of thinking and figuring out how to put presentations together. It can wait till tomorrow.

When people ask me what I have been doing at work, I always want to say that I've been really busy with this presentation, and tell them how difficult it is to fit presentation to music and narration; and then I feel stupid because it all seems so trivial compared to their work. Its very depressing. All of this for a book? I don't know. I'm not even artistic, but worse, I am sensitive too. It can wait till tomorrow.

Mother's Day today and I bought Gao Lak for my mum. What did you do for yours?

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There is something about blogs that capture the spirit of this age. It is a pullulation of information, emotions and opinions - but all of this is hidden behind a facade, an online idenity dismembered from the real self. Connection is everything. You are able to read the most intimate thoughts of an American girl living across the world in the sub-urban mid-west, and yet at the same time struggle to remember that the beggar sitting in the subway is also human.

I just entered this URL into for goggle to crawl though. It is a perverse attraction to be known.

But I'm not about to tell you what I think. smirk.

I had a conversation (one-way) with my colleagues about the meaning of fallicious reasoning concerning dandruff today. I was tired of being the butt of jokes, so I was lashing out at them. Of course they didn't know that I was doing so.

Cycled from Choa Chu Kang home yesterday. Gave me a high that night, woke up with aching shoulders.

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There is both fire and ice in me - the zeal of faith and the chill of doubt.

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The War has begun.

I find myself not knowing what to think at this time. There is a black and white sticker that I got from the Roman Catholic Church that I can't decide if I should put up on my window. Its says, "Make Peace, Not War".

Which captures what I want to say, but what if? What if it is true that war is a means to peace? But is it possible that a peaceful end may have violent means? What if the US is correct and that Iraq has the "weapons of mass destruction" (gosh do I HATE that word) and the intentions to hurt and harm? What if...

I have been reading about the just war theory as espoused by Ausgustine and then later by Aquinas in The City of God. In The City of God, Aquinas refutes certain positions commonly held by pacifists even today. I have fragments of it in my brain right now, but I'm too lazy to write it out.

I wish it didn't have to come to this :(

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In memory of a one-eyed fish
It is always sad when a fish dies. Granted that the yellow one-eyed fish wasn't my favourite pet, its still sad to see its stiff floating body.

Weird enough, last night I dreamt of my yellow one-eyed fish and twerp. I was trying to create this new fish tank concept where the yellow fish was in its own bowl in the middle of a larger tank which held twerp. Twerp is my orange-striped paradise. But the yellow one got out into the larger one and the two of them started going at each other. Interestingly, it was the yellow one going after twerp (usually it is the other way around) and what's weirder, it suddenly changed into a luo han in mid-chase, and a very handsome luo han at that. Maybe it is the vengence of a fish.

I have another sick fish with me. Its a fighting fish, my colleagues actually. I feel so nurturing when I crush up the worms for this fish. It lies at the bottom of the tank all day, and it can't swim straight. Think it has some fin rot too.

"My mother is a fish" - Faulkner

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human technology
Friedman, in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, shows a picture of a Jewish man placing his handphone on the wailing wall so that a relative on the other side of the world could say a prayer at the wall.

My father and I, when my grandma lay dying, placed a handphone by her ear, so that my sis could sing to her and say goodbye from a different continent.

When I leave my house in the morning, I bring all my friends in my pocket.

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