Sunday, June 28, 2009

"Bo-liao!" remarked by my mum

I reached home just now and told my mum that I fell off my bike in Desaru.

I showed her my wounds on my left shoulder and my right albow, and cuts on my right palm, my left chin, and left leg.

Her immediate remarks was "Bo-liao!".

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For those who don't understand the word: "Bo-Liao"


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Then, the next moment, she searched for bandage for me.

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There are alot of things that I have done or am doing appear to be "Bo-liao" for my family.

For example: Camping in a deserted beach in Borneo and coming back home with 100+ sandfly & mosquito bites over my whole-body. Traveling to third world countries and staying in shabby guesthouses (kena bitten by bed-bugs). Backpacking alone. Trekking mountains. Run Marathon (and limping the next day). Exercising 6 days per week to train for Triathlon. Being a vegetarian (aka Flexitarian) etc...

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In my family view, most of the things that I have done are quite "Bo-liao" with the exception of working for money and studying university. However, they always support me whenever I do those stuffs that they perceived as "Bo-liao". Eg. My mum would wake up and prepare a hot drink for me at 6am before a race.

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Doing all these "Bo-liao" things made me happy,

as I know that i am alive.

And I feel alive.

To me, That's life!

The World is too beautiful to be sitting on the couch watching TV.

=)

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+++

Today is my first fall while riding.

I still don't exactly know what happened.

It happened too fast, and the next moment I was already on the ground.

I was thinking "Damn! I can't swim the next week because of the wounds."

I am sure this will not be the last fall.

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I always felt that:

While it is nice to hope for days and days of good day.

but i would rather have the wisdom to handle a bad day, then to hope for a good day.

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Applying this small philosophy of mine:

While applying the Chinese Oilment "Qing Shao You" on my wound, the pain magnified a few times (but the wound will heal really quickly). I took this opportunity to practice empathy and compassion. I think of those people experiencing more intense pain than me (ie. people in hospital, people with cancer etc..). My pain is totally insignificant.

Not surprisingly, I experienced less pain.

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It also reminded me that I experience pain because I am alive.

I should be grateful.

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I just hope that I could sustain this optimism.

=)

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Friday, June 26, 2009

We are the World - Michael Jackson



There comes a time 
When we heed a certain call
When the world must come together as one 
There are people dying 
And it's time to lend a hand to life 
The greatest gift of all 
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We can't go on 
Pretending day by day 
That someone, somewhere will soon make a change 
We are all a part of God's great big family 
And the truth, you know love is all we need 
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[Chorus] 
We are the world 
We are the children 
We are the ones who make a brighter day 
So let's start giving 
There's a choice we're making 
We're saving our own lives 
It's true we'll make a better day 
Just you and me 
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Send them your heart 
So they'll know that someone cares 
And their lives will be stronger and free 
As God has shown us by turning stone to bread 
So we all must lend a helping hand
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When you're down and out 
There seems no hope at all 
But if you just believe 
There's no way we can fall 
Well, well, well, well, let us realize 
That a change will only come 
When we stand together as one 

Heal the World - Michael Jackson

"This is for the Children of the World"
- Michael Jackson




Heal The World

Make It A Better Place

For You And For Me

And The Entire Human Race

There Are People Dying

If You Care Enough

For The Living

Make A Better Place

For You And For Me

Bye Michael... Rest in Peace.

Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009)
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I was shocked when I heard the sad news this morning.
Despite being the King of Pop, Michael seemed to have a very unhappy and lonely life.
Apparently, Fame and Fortune did not bring lasting happiness for this pop Icon of our time.
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While people might regard him as a weirdo, child-molester etc... which are disputable.
We can never dispute that Michael is a musical genius who brought so much hope to people.
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I was especially sadden when Michael was trying to get back to life (Concerts in London in July, which will never happen anymore). I believe he was trying to make things right, but he was not given the chance. The tabloid had been tough on him.
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Everybody deserves a second chance.
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I like his music, especially
"Heal The World"
"We are the World"
"Man in the Mirror"
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Deep down inside,
Michael is a good man.
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Hope that he will find peace in another world.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Quotes

"Nothing that is violent is permanent"
- Proverb
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"Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors"
- African Proverb
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"Keep your face to the sunshine
and you cannot see the shadows."
- Helen Keller
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"I don't think of all the misery
but of all the beauty that remains"
- Anne Frank

Monday, June 22, 2009

'Yes mum, I'll fight monster' - Charmaine Lim


Such cute and innocent 4 years-old child.

This is her blog:


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For Donation:


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Please give her the ammunition to fight the monster.

=)
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+++
The Child's mum is my good friend's cousin and my JC schoolmate.
I do not know her personally, but I know I had met her before (back in JC time).
It must be tough to see your child suffering, and yet feeling so helpless.
I could never imagine the intense pain and frustration.... and may be despair & desperation.
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I sent a note to some friends to spread the news for donation.
It is very heartening to know that quite alot of them responded.
(I am sure there are many more who donated, just that I am not aware)
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I believe that if we are in a position to help, we are already very fortunate and blessed.
We should rejoice about it.
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My friends' actions just made me really happy today.
It made me really proud of them.
It is these acts of kindness and compassion that makes the world so beautiful.
Life is beautiful!
=)
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+++
Side note: My happiness was dampened by a call when I was on my way home. I was angry and bothered by the call. After some pondering, why should I let someone who is unreasonable and unhappy to compromise my happiness? It is stupid and very unwise to be bothered by it.
My anger subsided slowly after rationalising it.
Now, I am not angry about the call anymore.
It will be foolish of me to be angry and allow that call to dampen my mood.
Stop thinking about the trivial bad things in life.
Focusing on the things that are more worthwhile.
=)

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Reprieve by Tim Kreider

Another great article taken from:
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Fourteen years ago I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and it’s not the point of this essay. The point is that after my unsuccessful murder I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year.
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Winston Churchill’s quote about the exhilaration of being shot at without result is verifiably true. I was reminded of an old Ray Bradbury story, “The Lost City of Mars,” in which a man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likes — in locomotive collisions, race car crashes, exploding rockets — until he emerges flayed of all his free-floating guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.
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I’m not claiming I was continuously euphoric the whole time; it’s just that, during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The sort of horrible thing that I’d always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. I figured I was off the hook for a while. In a parallel universe only two millimeters away from this one (the distance between the stiletto and my carotid), I had been flown home in the cargo hold instead of in coach. Everything in this one, as far as I was concerned, was gravy.
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My friends immediately mocked me out of my self-consciousness about the nerve damage that had left me with a lopsided smile. I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old pop songs too stupid to name in print. And I developed a strange new laugh that’s stayed with me to this day — a loud, raucous, barking thing that comes from deep in the diaphragm and makes people in bars or restaurants look over at me for a second to make sure I’m not about to open up on the crowd with a weapon.
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I wish I could recommend this experience to everyone. It’s a cliché that this is why people enjoy thrill-seeking pastimes ranging from harmless adrenaline fixes like roller coasters to suicide attempts with safety nets, like bungee jumping. The catch is that to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent hit man to assassinate you.
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It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, sort of the same way some of us only appreciate our girlfriends after they’re exes. I saw the same thing happen, in a more profound and lasting way, to my father when he was terminally ill, and then to my mother after he died; an almost literal lightening, a flippant indifference to the silly, quotidian nonsense that preoccupies most of us and ruins so much of our lives. A neighbor was suing my father for some reason or other during his illness, but if you tried to talk to him about such “serious” matters he’d just sing you old songs like “A Bird In a Gilded Cage” in a high, quavering old-man falsetto. When my mother, who’s now a leader in her church, sees people squabbling over minutiae or personal politics, she reminds them, diplomatically I’m sure, to focus on the larger context.
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It didn’t last, of course. You can’t feel grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever — or grieve forever, for that matter. Time forces us all to betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living in the world. Before a year had gone by the same dumb everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back. I’d be disgusted to catch myself yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night wondering what was going to become of me.
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Once a year on my stabbiversary I remind myself that this is still my bonus life, a free round. But now that I’m back down in the messy, tedious slog of everyday emotional life, I have to struggle to keep things in what I still insist is their true perspective. I know intellectually that all the urgent, pressing items on our mental lists — taxes, car repairs, our careers, the headlines — are so much idiot noise, and that what matters is spending time with people you love. It’s just hard to bear in mind when the hard drive crashes.
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I was not cheered, a few years ago, to read about psychological studies suggesting that most people inevitably return to a certain emotional baseline after circumstantial highs and lows. You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a major, permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain breakups I’ve gone through. If anything, it only reinforced the illusion that in the story of my life only supporting characters would die, while I, its protagonist and first-person narrator, would survive. I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience.
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I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d experience after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace. It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.
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+++
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"Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live"
- Tuesday with Morrie
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Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Quote

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover."
~ Mark Twain, 19th century US author

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Birthday

Today is my birthday.
I never had a huge birthday party,
because it is just not me.
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But,
I kept most of the gifts and cards.
That's me.
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When I received a birthday sms from a friend,
I would take time to think about my relationship with that friend.
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There is nothing significant for me to celebrate my birthdate.
It is not important at all.
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A simple sms from friend/family is a call for celebration.
I celebrate that I have good family and friends.
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I am very grateful for that.
That's worth celebrating.
Thank You.
=)

Title: Brotherhood
(Taken in 2005, Outside Jokhang Temple, Lhasa, Tibet)
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This picture reminds me of Friendship & Family Relationship.
=)

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The Joy of Less by Pico Iyer

Taken from New York Times:
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“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.
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I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.
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So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.
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I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).
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When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.
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I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
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Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.
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If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.
+++
Very well-written.
=)

Quote

"Since the flames of anger arise within, they must be extinguished within."
- Stonepeace
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"Nobody can make you angry except yourself.
Nobody can make you jealous except yourself.
Nobody can make you inferior except yourself."
- Boon

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Travel: Timor-Leste May 2009

Just created a travel-blog for my short biz trip to Timor-Leste.