-ve Priming: An e.g. of what not to do

I really shouldn't say "crap" first thing in the morning, 'cos it means that later at 12:20pm, when I realise that I have clean run out of time and I have one more stanza of the poem to go, that is the first thing out of my mouth.

Then I hear a ripple of not-so-whisper-like-whispers... "I can't believe Ms G said "crap"!"

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Internal monologue

Monday, 5:45am [Alarm rings]
Crap. Groan. No.... 9 more minutes

5:54am
I'm snoozing some more. Who needs a shower in the morning anyway?

6:03am [Visions of being late for school jolt me awake]
-blank-

6:10am
Brain kicks in and tells me I've got to shower, who am I deluding.

6:30am {Walking out to the bus-stop]
Brain kicks into second gear and alarms go off: "CRIKEY! I FORGOT THAT WE'RE NOT GIVING BACK THE TEST FOR LIT CLASS TODAY WHICH MEANS THAT I HAVE A LIT LESSON IN THE MORNING THAT I HAVEN'T PLANNED FOR!!!"

6:40am [On bus, scribbling lesson plan in exercise book]
I think I'll re-use my Sec 1 materials for my Sec 3s. Heh heh heh. *evil laughter*

6:50am {Asleep on bus]
ZZZZZzzz

6:55am [At school]
Need coffee. Cannot function without coffeee. Is the photocopier down? Oh dear. But I'll make my cup of coffee first.

7:05am {madly photocopying. madly planning. brain, infused with caffeine, in overdrive]
How many copies do I need? Why is there no paper? What's wrong with the Master Print? What do I need to scan? What is my password? Who am I?

7:35am [singing the Mahjulah]
I need to tell the kids to stay in their class. Where are they?

---- FAST FORWARD

9:00am [NOW]
STOP BLOGGING! GO TO CLASS!

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Tete-a-tete with Lee Tzu Pheng

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” Robert Frost

I was standing at border's flipping through local poet Lee Tzu Pheng's collection of poems "Lambada by Galilee & Other Surprises" and it struck me how revealing and intimate it is to read another person's poetry. I read her poem about teaching Tyger in a classroom and I laughed because it was all too familiar; I read her poem about the way of the cross and I thought—ah! she's a Christian; I read the one about finding Lucky Plaza on a map and I thought—she's kinda whimsical; and so, from having absolutely no idea who she apart from the role she has played as a local poet, I thought, hey, it would be nice to sit down and have tea and a chit chat with her.

I wish I could have my poems published one day too. But for now, my poems are too frivolous, too particular, too sentimental, and too unpolished. But it would be so cool to add my voice to the accumulation of local poetry in Singapore...

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My Macbook sleeps

My Macbook sleeps tonight
I left the power cable at work
And I think of Jesus
dead in the tomb
three days
drained and poured out
exhausted for the sins of men.

He lies on the cold rock, painfully still
silent
a man without a shadow
a useless God bereft of power.

Satan laughs

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My wicked soul

mumbles through the bits it doesn't like.

OurFatherwhoartinheaven
Hallowedbethyname
ThykingdomcomeThywillbedone
Onearthasitisinheaven
GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD
FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES
asweforgivethosewhotresspassagainstus
leadusnotintotemptation
BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL
forthineisthekingdom, THE POWER, andtheglory
FOREVER AND EVER.
amen.

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A poem in two parts

Everytime they take a test
she writes a poem
a sad poem a tragic poem a nothing poem
______neither here nor there
just to fill up the quiet
and drown out the scratching of pen on paper

Everytime she writes a poem
it is a test
of how much how far how deep
______she would succumb
to the stranglehold of lies
that maligns hope and whispers chaos

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What is poetry?

A poem may appear to mean very different things to different readers, and all of these meanings may be different from what the author thought he meant. For instance, the author may have been writing some peculiar personal experience, which he saw quite unrelated to anything outside; yet for the reader the poem may become the expression of a general situation, as well as of some private experience of his own. The reader's interpretation may differ from the author's and be equally valid-- it may even be better. There may be much more in a poem than the author was aware of. The different interpretations may all be partial formulations of one thing; the ambiguities may be due to the fact that the poem means more, not less, than ordinary speech can communicate.

T.S. Eliot

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My long days

I wake at 5:45am, get to school by 7am, leave school between 4 and 6:30pm, have dinner, start work at 8pm, fall asleep at 11:15pm, and the cycle begins again.

WHAT IN THE WORLD DID I SIGN UP FOR?

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I'm a chao enthu newbie teacher

I have a bruise on my hip and my thigh from lugging an accordion up and down the overhead bridge, up and down the public bus, and up the stairs to class.

I tried to psych myself to walk like an air stewardness with a chic trolley luggage, but I kept getting stuck in the narrow doorways.

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How to create an interactive whiteboard with the Wiimote

This is so cool! I wanna make one!

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Thoughts on the Monday after Easter

The day after Easter, and I order a chunk of grilled chicken breast on top of my mee siam. Which makes me wonder: could I ever give up eating meat? If I can't, does that mean that I am a hypocrite who gives lip service to the cause of the poor squealing pigs being led to the slaughter? Is it possible to feel for the sorry pig and desire meat at the same time?

Are we all vegetarians in heaven?

Why do Mondays breed in me such difficult questions?

I am up to two cups of coffee. There is a 20-cents-per-cup cappuccino machine in my office that I've grown awfully fond of. I watched this TV show that showed that if you have grown used to coffee, it doesn't actually stimulate you as much as you'd like to believe. True, if you suddenly stop drinking coffee tomorrow, you'll have a splitting headache and your attention would drop, but in two weeks you would be as good as new. But I like coffee. The way I like meat.

Anyway, on a totally different track, some of my kids are so angelic. Sometimes when I stand in front of the class and look at (some of) their bright-eyed faces (ignoring the rest), I want to sit them down and talk to them like King Solomon: enjoy the days of your youth! Before your teeth fall out, your hair grows white and your heart heavy with sorrow. And I'm not even that old yet.

I enjoy telling my kids that I'm twice as old as them. Haha! I said today, "I'm twice your age and you don't know what a wiki is?" Heh. I'm a show-off teacher. :)

Sorry about the rambly post. I blame the back-to-back classes and the 20-cents-per-cup cappicino. (It only dispenses half a cup: a kid's portion.)

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Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

I was in the living room singing and playing my guitar and my mother brought out from the kitchen

1. An orange

for the stone that was rolled away

She went back into the kitchen and came out 2 minutes later with

2. A bowl of hard boiled eggs

for the new life we have in Christ Jesus because he rose from the dead!

Finally on her last trip, she brought out

3. A bag of pears

for the fruit of the spirit that we have: love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control

Christ is risen!

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A girl with a guitar

is that a scar on her face?
why is she green?
what is her name?

iamnotanartist2008

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Funny

that I should want to tinker with iGTD than start on my work proper.

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I am teacher

I've lost my voice.

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iGTD is hot!

I like Actiontastic. But ever since I encountered the ever-spinning wheel and lost my database, I haven't been able to get it to work for me, in spite of multiple re-installations.

Enter iGTD.

iGTD is hot stuff. I've had it for fifteen minutes and I like it already. I had been wanting to install it ever since I read popagandhi's quasi-review, but all the links to bargiel.home.pl led to a dead end. His servers must be overloaded or something. Get iGTD from the CNET site instead.

I've become somewhat of a needy geek. I need my GTD app to sync with my iCal; I need my GTD app to come with a quicksilver plugin. I'm very needy, but iGTD meets all my needs.

1. It syncs with iCal.

Similar to Actiontastic, contexts are synced as calendars in iCal, for example, @home, @mac, @errand, etc.

Syncing is scary business. You may lose everything trying. One of the things I appreciate in iGTD is that it backups my data before each sync. It also comes bundled with a plugin for iBackup.

Having said that, if you notice something wacky happening to your data in either iCal of iGTD, don't sync it again. Instead, you want to:

- backup the iGTD data file
- unregister the iGTD from Sync Services (Syncing tab):
- quit iGTD
- remove all iGTD data from iCal (important!)
- start iGTD and do a sync to iCal

Personally I wouldn't do step 5 unless I'm very sure it will work. I will look for the backup file (GTD.sql.startup.bkp) and restore it. Better, I will backup my iCal database before every sync.

2. Quicksilver is its buddy.



iGTD comes bundled with a quicksilver plugin. To add tasks, simply write:

@context [project] task !! #duedate

Where
!! - highest priority
!
?
?? - lowest priority

What more can a needy geek ask for??

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allo

iamnotanartist2008

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whoooosh...

It's a bird!
It's a plane!
It's my souped-up Mac!!

Haha. I'm so pleased. Bought a piece of 2GB Kingston DDR2 RAM for S$78 at Sim Lim.

It's quite easy to replace. These are the steps.

I love generic RAM. So does anyone want to buy my 512MB bonafide Apple RAM for say, S$15?

[On another somewhat relevant note, I am amused how uncharacteristically organised and disciplined I am when it comes to my computers. When I bought my macbook last year, I told myself that I would save the $304.50 and upgrade my RAM in a year's time, and gosh, I must have some internal clock or something, 'cos it has been a year and a month.]

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Tightrope over Hell

A taut line
stretched over the mad abyss.
Dark despair in shapes that shift
clamour at the heart.
Cold infects and preserves the dead,
squeezing out all thoughts of home.

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Inflation woes

The egg prata from the prata shop near my place now costs $1.40!! And the kosong prata costs $0.70! Am I that old? They cost $1.20 (egg) and $0.60 (kosong) just last year. I mean, I remember when it used to cost $0.80 and $0.50.

Sigh. I sound exactly like my dad when he tells me that 10 cents got him a large bowl of fish ball mee some forty to fifty years ago.

I should have eaten more prata in primary school.

Five ways to beat inflation, by Ms Nomer

1. Buy stackloads of those stamps for local use only. You'll still be able to use them in ten years times, and by then, you'll be gloating how you got your stamps at "half-price".
2. Spend now, use later. Your dollar is bigger today than tomorrow anyway. Need a coffin in approximately fifty years time? Why not buy it now?
   
3. Invent a time-machine.
4. Migrate to a rural town in Africa.
5. Go Malaysia.
   

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Things fall apart

I was walking in the rubble when I saw this face.

______________________Staring at me from the rubble.



It got woozy...






...and fell apart.

iamnotanartist 2008

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Line drawings

Caliban

Lion:
Bad Hair Day

iamnotanartist 2008

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Jer 29:11

[Source: climate.met.psu.edu]

"For I know the plans I have for you,
plans to prosper you and not to harm you,
plans to give you hope and a future.
Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
I will be found by you, and will bring you back from captivity."

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I don't know why but this makes me proud to be Singaporean

Perhaps because of the common cultural currency, idiosyncrasies and all.

This is an old one, btw.

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Emotional resilience = Nil

I start teaching next week. I'm seriously wondering if I have the emotional resilience to deal with it right now.

I was waiting for my dinner at the coffeeshop earlier. They were really packed, and so I waited about 40 minutes, standing by the road with my heavy laptop bag. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a traffic police jumped out of a van and started punching in the numbers to "summon" the car right beside me. The stall keepers noticed and started yelling out "Summon! Summon!" This middle-aged man noticed it a little late, but still managed to get to his car on time. He drove his car away. When he came back later, he made a comment to the stall keeper that "people who wait for their food never say anything when they see the summon man coming." What the heck! Is it my fault you didn't hear the stall keeper yelling? How am I supposed to know that it is your car? If you want to park your car there, you bloody well keep an eye on your own car!

Then I realised that people coming in ten minutes ago were already getting their food, while I was standing there waiting for 40 minutes, and it made me madder. And then when I got home, and the house was empty, I cried.

Things like this don't usually bother me. I'm just not well enough or strong enough right now, and I'm afraid of breaking down in front of the class over some stupid thing. Like a PMSing woman, like a pregnant woman, like someone whom I don't want to be.

I want to go for a run so that the stress can drain away. It is the fifteenth day of Chinese New Year and there is a perfect moon hanging in the deep blue night sky. And there is a strong wind making the immense pine trees sway. But I have an essay to write.

I want a miracle.

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Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert

This book is about how the human brain imagines its own future, and about how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy. I think the book's premise is that human beings are surprisingly bad at it.

All I got out of it is that the frontal lobe is in charge of planning. They used to take out a part of the frontal lobe to treat anxiety and depression, not realising that the poor fellas with frontal lobotomies, while happy as clams, could not imagine the future. To them, thinking about the future was like walking into a room and being asked to find a chair that was not there.

That's about as far as I got in the book. I will need to keep reading... BUT NOT ENOUGH TIME!!! ARRGH....

(will update post if possible)

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The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson

I confess: I skimmed through this one. I've just been too busy to read a storybook properly.

The Passion is set during the Napoleonic wars. I think it has something to do with identity: among boatsmen in Venice, only boys get born with webbed feet, all except for cross-dressing Villanelle. But it is so much more than that too.

I think you're better off reading the blurb here.

I'm telling you stories. Trust me.

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Words can never be consequence-free

Sometimes I am glad that my real-life friends don't read my blog. It gives me the freedom to write without having to worry about who my friends and family expect me to be. But of course this freedom is limited. Words can never be consequence-free. Words are powerful, terrible things, and there is no way I can just say what I like, and think that there will be no repercussions.

You musn't underestimate the power of words. The word of God is a "double-edged sword", dividing "soul and spirit", "judging the thoughts and attitudes of the heart". Just words, my friend. Imagine that. But we all know the feeling when words cut into our very hearts.

It isn't just the word of God that is powerful; the words we use are powerful too. James compares the tongue to the bit of a horse: a small part that controls the whole body. With our tongues we praise God and we curse men—oh the irony; with our tongues we can bring life and joy to our friends, or we can corrupt our entire person.

So, even in my descent into madness, I will try to keep a rein on my tongue (and my mind), so that I am not completely lost.

I will not go mad.

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Gunning for Gold

Fluff(races) are going to be discontinued in twelve hours.

Olio's stats

• Total Challenges: 395
  
• Challenge Victories: 366
  
• Percent Victory: 92.66%

The turtle in front of me has a victory percentage of 94.14%.

I have lost 29 races. Therefore, I have to win 100 more races (and not lose any) to get neck-to-neck with the leading turtle.

29/ y = 5.86/ 100
Therefore y = 494.88

If I can only race 20 times per hour, it means that I will get the gold trophy in five hours time.

Fingers crossed.

[Something wrong with my calculations. It doesn't look like it will happen.]

[Didn't get it. Boo.]

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One for the Singaporeans: All about what I think about noodles, whether or not you want to know; a.k.a my brain is a noodle

I have pretty fixed ideas of what kind of noodles go with what kind of dish.

For example, wan ton mee should be you mee.

Fish ball noodles should be either mee pok or kway tiao.

Bak Chor Mee should be either mee pok or you mee. (Some people like it with mee sua)

Prawn noodles should be yellow mee (dry) or bee hoon (soup).

Sliced fish noodles should be choo mee fen.

I get more and more opinionated the older I get.

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Bruised tailbone

My tailbone sticks out. And it has been sticking out even more since I started losing weight about two months back. Which means that when I plonked myself down on the hard cement floor — at least that is what I think happened — I bruised my tailbone, and now it hurts to sit.

I am a very evolved monkey-species with a very sore butt.

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A SURVEY: Fuzzy and Blue (and Orange!)

Love this Sesame Street clip! I wonder if it is indicative of the humour of a 30 year old woman though.. So this is a survey question. Please state your age and whether you

a. love it! digg it!
b. like it!
c. ok lah. it's amusing enough.
d. er... no comment

Thank you! Oh, while you're at it, please state your gender as well. It may end up being a 30 year old FEMALE thing...

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Monster in the Mirror

I couldn't find the Grover "Near... Far" video that was the inspiration for this post so I'm posting "Monster in the Mirror" instead. This is one of my favourites. I remember sticking a post-it on my friend's mirror saying "Monster", or something along those lines. I don't think she was too flattered.

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i before e (except after c)

i before e, except after c
or when sounded like an a
as in weigh, neigh, or sleigh.

drop this rule when -c sounds as -sh
like ancient, species, efficient;
but what do we do about
neither, height, leisure, weird???

Or abseil, albeit, atheist, beige,
caffeine, codeine, deity,
feisty, forfeit, heifer,
heinous, heir, meiosis,
protein, sleight, surfeit,
their—for crying out loud, THEIR, veil?

Oh poor me,
What do I do when I forget the words
that are pronounced with an a
like deign, freight, and vein?

What do I do if I apply the rule to protien,
Forget the rule when spelling concieve,
Mispronounce deign as deegn,
And spell it diegn instead?

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Therapy

NEAR


FAR



NEAR


FAR

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MacBook Air

A thoughtful review (thanks dubdew!)

Pics that may make you drool.

Apple has got me tied about its little finger. Every time a new product comes out, I find myself having to justify to myself why I DO NOT WANT it — even when it is plainly obvious that I DO NOT NEED IT, like an iPhone or the MacBook Air. Apple's genius is not in coming out with products that I need; it is is coming out with products that I know I don't need but think about anyway.

I am constantly justifying to myself why I DO NOT WANT Mac products.

Anyway, I'm not getting one because I already have a MacBook and the MacBook Air is just the emaciated cousin of my MacBook. If I were to want an anorexic lappy, I would get an UMPC instead, something like the Eee PC in the Mac version, which sadly does not exist. Besides —here begins the justifications— there is no optical drive (but no optical drive means no region code either: warped thinking I know); there is only one USB port (not like the two on my MacBook is that great); it is light (...) Oh wait, I think that last point is on the wrong side of the fence...

Anyway, the long and short of it is: I DO NOT WANT THE MACBOOK AIR.

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Random thought

Keeping the bluetooth on makes me feel... connected.

It is a bit sad that words such as "in sync" and "connected" have been usurped by technological pundits. They mean so much: To be connected to one another; to be in sync with yourself; to have a network of people to belong to...

Now when I think of the words, all I have a picture of a ginormous network of computers in a seamless network talking to each other via bluetooth or the internet.

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Therapy

I like working with my hands. I like fixing things up, cleaning things, putting things in order. Two nights ago, I stayed up late replacing the bridge and strings of a guitar I picked up (bridge: $2.50, ground floor music store at Peace Centre) because somehow, concentrating on not cutting myself on the metal strings, twisting the knobs, removing the funky sticker, manipulating the spanner, and tuning it exactly made me calm. The owner had put the wrong type of strings on the guitar and the metal had ruined the bridge and cut into the wood.



New bridge. Note my intricate knot-tying skills.



This is my fixed up guitar. And yes, it is sitting in my trash can.



This is my regular guitar. My aunt gave it to me for my 18th birthday.

Apart from fixing up a guitar, I also cleaned my Macbook. Today, I used my facial toner—Dewy Flower Fresh Toner— to wipe down my screen and the grooves between the keys of my keyboard. Sometimes I wonder about the effectiveness of keyboard covers. I have an aesthetic fitted rubber keyboard cover but it somehow manages to let the dirt in. Furthermore, I have a permanent imprint of the keyboard on my screen because the rubber cover leaves marks when I close the laptop. So what's the point, if you know what I mean? Apart from the awesome tactile feel and giving me an excuse to clean every three weeks or so.



The rubber covering my keypad whose only purpose is for the awesome tactile feel and the excuse to clean.



My clean keyboard. You can't really tell it is clean from the picture, but it is clean, excepting bacteria, dirt and coffee molecules below a certain microbe size.

You can't tell from the picture—come to think about it, you can't tell anything from the picture—but I have already removed the plastic cover protecting my trackpad. I was doing some vacation work that required an unhuman amount of scrolling in excel, and I couldn't cope with the extra lag caused by the plastic cover any more. So I stripped it. And my trackpad isn't any dirtier than what it was before.

So, what's the point?

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Is it wrong to hack a Mac?

I'm helping a friend upgrade her RAM and reformat her HP laptop. And tinkering with it has given me the itch to tinker with my Macbook.

If I'm daring enough, I would like to:

1. Install a region-free drive
2. Upgrade RAM to 2GB

But is this fool-hardiness or foolishness?

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Eee PC

I'm rather taken by the 0.92kg Asus Eee PC. The Eee PC is what they call an UMPC, or Ultra Mobile PC. It is light (my Macbook is 2.45kg), supposedly shock-proof, has wi-fi, and lets you access your documents and gmail. It runs on Linux.

I love my Mac, don't get me wrong, but sometimes I just want something really portable that I can stick in my bag and go for a cycle. It is also going at a decent price — $598 for the 4GB model; although if I were to get it, I would upgrade it to at least 8GB. Popagandhi got one in Taiwan.

The only thing holding me back? iCal. I will need iCal in my UMPC. As my ex-colleagues said over lunch, "She runs her life from her Macbook!" Which is true.

Can anyone figure out how I can get iCal on the Linux-running Eee PC? I'll buy you lunch. :)

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The Very Hot Aamir Khan, who makes 'em swoon

I watched my very first Hindi movie at Jade 2 the other day — Taare Zameen Par. It's about a boy's struggle with reading and writing and how he struggles to overcome it.

Hindi movies are such fun. So much music and dancing. We were five minutes early and already there was dancing music filling the hall. The movie had so many gorgeous looking people in it. There was the very hot Aamir Khan, who makes 'em swoon, and other beautiful people whose names I don't know. Ishaan, the boy protagonist, had a smile that lights up the screen.

And... the movie had an intermission! So that movie go-ers can run to the loo. Heh.

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Ubuntu

I am because you are.

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No time to blog

8 minutes before I absolutely have to leave the house for the 1.5hr journey to school. In 8 minutes, I have to finish this post, shower, get dressed, and pack my bag. My room is a god-forsaken mess, largely because I've run out of space on my bookshelf and my wardrobe. My storage boxes are filled to overflowing.

3 minutes left. Where did all that time go??

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Free stuff I cannot do without: Combine PDFs

What do you do when you have scanned pages from a book and the pages are in three separate files, in every which rotation because that was the way the book fit on the scanner, and all you want is a single correctly-rotated PDF file?

Use Combine PDFs. (Mac-only)

Combine PDFs lets you merge different PDF files, remove unwanted pages, and rotate individual pages within the file to create a single, well-organised PDF.



What you do is to click on the "Add File" button at the bottom left of the start-up screen. Then you choose the PDF file you want to edit. Do this for as many PDF files you would like to merge.

The individual pages of each file will open in the main section. The two left columns indicate the file name and page number of the original PDFs. If you wish you rotate a single page, select the page and click "Command-R". If you wish to delete a page, select it and click "delete". You can change the order of the pages by dragging and dropping individual pages.

When you are done, type in the name of your final PDF and click "Merge PDFs".

It's as simple as that. Now if only it would let me crop the pages too!

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The Tap Dancer, by Andrew Barrow

Andrew Barrow won the McKitterick Prize and the Hawthornden Prize for The Tap Dancer. The reason I know this is because I found this novel on the "award winning shelf" at the Central Library and decided to borrow it because it says "a comic masterpiece" on the front cover. (See the small red print by the trousers?)

How can a bookworm like me pass by a "comic masterpiece" on the award winning shelf at the library?

Unfortunately, I didn't find it that funny. (Is it because I am not English?) It was almost rambly at certain points, going on and on about the minute details of British living. Nothing extraordinary happens plot-wise, but still, I found it a strangely compelling read. I couldn't put it down.

Perhaps it was the keen and humorous dialogue. Or perhaps it was the weird, off-the-wall characters. Barrow described them so well that I half expected them to climb out of the book and shake me by the hand. The protagonist, the father of the first person narrator, is unforgettable, along with all the other characters from the novel. Barrow is quite the genius at characterization.

Reading the novel also gives the reader a feel of Britain after World War II, where you can get a meal in London for under a pound.

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First day back at school

I woke up cantankerous.

Then I got productive.

I had a cup of coffee, ate a slice of cheese bread, printed my timetable, a claim form and a result slip, sent an email I've been procrastinating about, got a quick reply and the promise of payment, added three tasks to my to-do list, made a phone call to arrange an work appointment, sent another email, addressed a birthday parcel to a friend in the US, took a shower, got changed, and am now sitting on the floor blogging and scanning "Sanctum" by Will Eisner.

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Invisible People by Will Eisner

I am so impressed with Eisner's ability to pick up an ordinary black ink pen, sketch a few lines, and create such expressive and unique characters that seem to jump out of the book. Eisner is considered as one of the early shapers of the genre, and rightly so, because not only did he draw, he weaved stories.

Invisible People is part story, part social commentary. It is about the anonymous faces in every crowd, the "invisible people" we pass by every day. Eisner tells the story of three "invisible people": Pincus Pleatnik, the man whom the world pronounced dead; Hilda Gornish, a spinster involved in a perverse romantic triangle; and Morris, a man who was blessed with the ability to heal others.

I liked the first story best because of its poignancy and tragedy. What happens when an ordinary man, someone who shunned the limelight, suddenly realises one day that the world thinks he is dead? A curious thought, isn't it?

Invisible People is very readable — I mean, it is a comic book! — but the content is serious. It is like a parable in pictures. It is a great resource for teachers actually. Lit teachers can use the first story to introduce foretelling or tragedy; GP teachers can use it to introduce social issues.

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What I am having for breakfast...

... makes me smile! :)

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Loose limbs flying

Sometimes when I run, I imagine myself a lanky teenager, limbs loose and flying, totally free. It is a great feeling.

Tonight's run was interesting. I saw a taxi driver urinating into a drain by a fairly deserted pavement. He gave me a furtive embarrassed look as I ran by. I also saw a big double-deck SBS bus getting its tyres changed by the street. Huge wheels the bus had. They had to use a drill to get the nuts out.

I saw runners, shop keepers, teh drinkers, cyclists, pedestrians, taxi drivers, adults, teenagers, children; I saw you.

Distance: 11.6km
Time: 75mins
Speed: 9.3km/hr

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Taking the new year by the horns

Happy 2008 everyone!

Had a bit of a weird moment yesterday when M said that she would consider settling back in Singapore in 2010, and I thought, what? That's ten years away! And then it dawned on me that I've been living on some other planet 'cos it is 2008 already. Where did the last eight years go?

I'm starting this year with fear and trembling.

But I want to take it by the horns, be my own person, and not let my life slip away from me.

So, my double-barreled resolutions.

1. To be more positive and less of a worry wart.

I really need to stop thinking about everything that can possibly go wrong in any given scenario. This super-ability makes me quite a good event planner, but socially, it makes me a wet blanket and just not very fun to be with.

I also need to be more positive and trust God more with things I cannot control.

2. To find myself and look outwards more.

I spent the last bit of 2007 completely wrapped up with my own problems. Life is bigger than that. It is going to be hard to do — in a way, it is impossible to look outwards if the centre is not stable — so I will try to find myself first.

Two double-barelled resolutions should be more than enough for me.

Have a great year ahead. God bless you and your loved ones!

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