Like I said, I’m reading Confucius. I did expect to, and found some antiquated sayings, but was also pleasantly surprised to see that the Master was….
a decent relationship advice-giver…
The Master said “In his errors a man is true to type. Observe the errors and you will know the man”.
pretty damn funny…
Chi Wen always thought three times before taking action. When the Master was told of this, he commented “Twice is quite enough”.
a romantic...
The Master commented, “He did not really think of her. If he did, there is no such thing as being far away”.
downright relevant…
The Master said “ It is rare for a man to miss the mark through holding on to essentials”.
“To attack a task from the wrong end can do nothing but harm”.
And for better or worse pivotal, to the core of the Chinese judgment and mentality:
The Master said, “It is rare, indeed, for a man with cunning words and an ingratiating face to be benevolent”.
Did your parents, or even you ever look at someone for the first time, and go "chan hai yong suei lor" or "that man's face is kan tou sei"?
Yea, that makes two of us.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007
Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
View from Victoria Peak, Hong Kong Island.Bustling as they say, not as unfriendly and expensive to get a meal as expected though. The dimsum IS great, roasted goose personally is overrated, and yes Cantonese does help get you around.
17-21 October 2007. Family, bauble-shopping, catching up, fishballs so bouncy they induce toothaches, too much walking in not-so-right shoes, trams that run backwards downhill, bus drivers who step on it the nano-second you alight, people who walk and talk right into you. The Light Show from Aqua at One Peking, the old-school ferry ride across the harbour after.
Not unlike in KL, it's nice to see old and new things co-exist.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
The Neighbourhood
The little three storey shelf is a bustling place. On the ground level reside pale yellow RM8 Penguin editions of James Joyce, Henry James, an Edgar Allen Poe. Also a rickety combination of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, Treasure Island, assorted haunted and unhaunted fairytales, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula where it all began.
One floor up the serious favourites reign – Maugham, Orwell, Dahl and Rushdie hold their own in hard-bound omnibuses, paperbacks and dog-eared childhood copies of both well-known tales and the odd essay or prose.
Still higher is an eclectic mish-mash of pairs, trios and quintuplets of authors who respectfully managed to entice purchases beyond the first encounter - A.A. Milne, John Kennedy Toole, Banana Yoshimoto, Steinbeck, Wilde, Gibran, Carson McCullers and Roddy Doyle.
The rooftop is fashion high street – Penguin Read Red adventures with their crimson overleaf share space with Cecilia Ahern’s pretty, heart-rending brand of chick lit. Skip to the adjacent shelf and tucked in the corner are the Little Books – collections of Cicely Mary Barker, Mitch Albom, Freud and Confucius in appetizer portions resting atop a gift of Chairman Mao’s quotations.
Cross the room and you will find on the lofty top shelf the fabulous Singles. The Beach (yes the Leo DiCaprio movie), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Potrait of a Floating World, Peter Pan, To Kill a Mockingbird, Sylvia Plath, Ken Kesey and a few others powerful enough to evoke realisations, potential heaviness of the heart and laughter that catches you unaware each time attempted.
A jar of pencils sensibly divide these from some paperback heavyweights– the complete novels of Jane Austen, Tales from the Arabian Nights, and the alphabetical guide to Greek Classical Mythology, admittedly yet to be leafed but reassuring in their quiet promise of a good read.
Yet more un-reads on the coffee table by the bed, a variety of short stories, movie tie-ins, plays, and fiction from Shakespeare to Jonathan Safran Foer. Each in this row seems to promise a good time simply by being something new.
I wonder if books could speak, what would they say?
One floor up the serious favourites reign – Maugham, Orwell, Dahl and Rushdie hold their own in hard-bound omnibuses, paperbacks and dog-eared childhood copies of both well-known tales and the odd essay or prose.
Still higher is an eclectic mish-mash of pairs, trios and quintuplets of authors who respectfully managed to entice purchases beyond the first encounter - A.A. Milne, John Kennedy Toole, Banana Yoshimoto, Steinbeck, Wilde, Gibran, Carson McCullers and Roddy Doyle.
The rooftop is fashion high street – Penguin Read Red adventures with their crimson overleaf share space with Cecilia Ahern’s pretty, heart-rending brand of chick lit. Skip to the adjacent shelf and tucked in the corner are the Little Books – collections of Cicely Mary Barker, Mitch Albom, Freud and Confucius in appetizer portions resting atop a gift of Chairman Mao’s quotations.
Cross the room and you will find on the lofty top shelf the fabulous Singles. The Beach (yes the Leo DiCaprio movie), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Potrait of a Floating World, Peter Pan, To Kill a Mockingbird, Sylvia Plath, Ken Kesey and a few others powerful enough to evoke realisations, potential heaviness of the heart and laughter that catches you unaware each time attempted.
A jar of pencils sensibly divide these from some paperback heavyweights– the complete novels of Jane Austen, Tales from the Arabian Nights, and the alphabetical guide to Greek Classical Mythology, admittedly yet to be leafed but reassuring in their quiet promise of a good read.
Yet more un-reads on the coffee table by the bed, a variety of short stories, movie tie-ins, plays, and fiction from Shakespeare to Jonathan Safran Foer. Each in this row seems to promise a good time simply by being something new.
I wonder if books could speak, what would they say?
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Songs
Hey there Delilah by the Plain White T's.
Have you heard the song? I'm very fond of it, but it makes me kind of sad everytime I hear it because it's so full of hope, of the hope-with-abandon kind, which is the worst because it then becomes unbearably crushing if things don't actually work out. And the naivety in presuming that one person could manage everything that could pull a relationship through, without quite considering that just maybe, the other person doesn't feel the same way? Poor fella.
Everything by Michael Buble, now that somehow always makes me smile. Don't know how he's like in real life but lucky you, Emily Blunt! What a lovely, balanced, song of a relationship. How does one not marry a man that writes a song like that?
Have you heard the song? I'm very fond of it, but it makes me kind of sad everytime I hear it because it's so full of hope, of the hope-with-abandon kind, which is the worst because it then becomes unbearably crushing if things don't actually work out. And the naivety in presuming that one person could manage everything that could pull a relationship through, without quite considering that just maybe, the other person doesn't feel the same way? Poor fella.
Everything by Michael Buble, now that somehow always makes me smile. Don't know how he's like in real life but lucky you, Emily Blunt! What a lovely, balanced, song of a relationship. How does one not marry a man that writes a song like that?
Mobile phone paralysis
It's like it got the stroke or something.
The Right and Left cursors work, but the Up and Down ones don't.
The green Pick-up Call button works, but the red End-Call one doesn't.
The left sidekey skips 3 lines when it scrolls, but the right one for the camera works fine.
I adapt and learn new tricks. Scroll sideways 5 times when you want to scroll once up. Text "not" instead of "no" because the predictive text switch doesn't switch.
I'm wondering if this unpleasantry is going to last.
I could, but I don't want to get used to working around things that don't work.
I'm thinking, maybe it's time for a change.
The Right and Left cursors work, but the Up and Down ones don't.
The green Pick-up Call button works, but the red End-Call one doesn't.
The left sidekey skips 3 lines when it scrolls, but the right one for the camera works fine.
I adapt and learn new tricks. Scroll sideways 5 times when you want to scroll once up. Text "not" instead of "no" because the predictive text switch doesn't switch.
I'm wondering if this unpleasantry is going to last.
I could, but I don't want to get used to working around things that don't work.
I'm thinking, maybe it's time for a change.
Sunday, September 02, 2007
1st post for September
For lack of a better title. Almost every blog I've visited have an entry on random thoughts - I guess this is mine.
It's a mellow Sunday on a 3-day weekend. There really isn't a better word to describe an evening after an afternoon rain, golden sunlight on red rooftiles and the soundtrack of Elizabethtown on the player. Mellow is a word I haven't used a lot of in long time, I am reminded of it from JL's blog where it appears frequently - hope you had a good time in Bali, kid!
"Look closely at the beginning of the heart line. If there are small hairlike influence lines dropping away from the line or passing through it, the owner will be a restless type, constantly looking for something new to stimulate mind and body. It is not unknown for people of this sort to vary a routine journey just for the sake of change".
I have been harsh in my previous entry. Sometimes it isn't ego. It can be truly hard to be happy. You just have no idea how to at times. The negative half of things is real, justifiable and stares you in the face. You will have to consciously look the other way. That's tough.
"..that naive coarseness that women often prefer to the affectations of politeness, because it reveals the depths of thought and proves that feeling has won out over reason".
"Women was created for our ruin, and it is from her that all our miseries come".
:). The above two quotes from The Three Musketeers. I'm barely a third through, but at this point I think I'd like to date Athos.
How do I say this? When there are a million thoughts milling around your system, and sometimes you chance upon one which correctly explains so many others headed in the wrong direction, the relief makes you want to cry.
It's a mellow Sunday on a 3-day weekend. There really isn't a better word to describe an evening after an afternoon rain, golden sunlight on red rooftiles and the soundtrack of Elizabethtown on the player. Mellow is a word I haven't used a lot of in long time, I am reminded of it from JL's blog where it appears frequently - hope you had a good time in Bali, kid!
"Look closely at the beginning of the heart line. If there are small hairlike influence lines dropping away from the line or passing through it, the owner will be a restless type, constantly looking for something new to stimulate mind and body. It is not unknown for people of this sort to vary a routine journey just for the sake of change".
I have been harsh in my previous entry. Sometimes it isn't ego. It can be truly hard to be happy. You just have no idea how to at times. The negative half of things is real, justifiable and stares you in the face. You will have to consciously look the other way. That's tough.
"..that naive coarseness that women often prefer to the affectations of politeness, because it reveals the depths of thought and proves that feeling has won out over reason".
"Women was created for our ruin, and it is from her that all our miseries come".
:). The above two quotes from The Three Musketeers. I'm barely a third through, but at this point I think I'd like to date Athos.
How do I say this? When there are a million thoughts milling around your system, and sometimes you chance upon one which correctly explains so many others headed in the wrong direction, the relief makes you want to cry.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Death of Sorts
This has been one of those great weekends where Saturday felt like a Sunday, hence Sunday felt like an extra day off. Which has left me time to be pensive over complex topics one should not spend too much time thinking about.
Like being happy. Over Thai food in Penang last Thursday night, my friend LCL tells me that the thing that keeps people from being happy is their Ego. Emm...hmm? She explains that Ego is what causes people the need to feel different from others. When really of course, we are all part of one another and part of the same body of...God.
Stay with me here.
Sometimes I suppose we do revel / wallow in our past experiences, hanging on long past their memorabilia due date because these make us feel that we have encountered a depth of something that others may not be enriched enough to understand, making us more special because we did. We "survived". Add sentimentality and you're singing too much of Pink's "Who Knew" when someone leaves your life - a death of sorts. Add cleverness and sometimes you get prejudice.
Doesn't help either that happiness is a pretty commonplace thing. Let's face it, most of the time we don't realise we had it until we get into an unhappier place and look back. Plus, happiness is a current thing, and living in the present is always scary - running the same circles of lessons unlearnt from the past has at least some hopeless certainty to it.
Maybe we shouldn't be afraid of forgetting since it's harder to forget than we think anyway. Maybe we shouldn't be afraid of a blank canvas everyday, although it may turn out to be empty, lonely or just plain boring.
Like being happy. Over Thai food in Penang last Thursday night, my friend LCL tells me that the thing that keeps people from being happy is their Ego. Emm...hmm? She explains that Ego is what causes people the need to feel different from others. When really of course, we are all part of one another and part of the same body of...God.
Stay with me here.
Sometimes I suppose we do revel / wallow in our past experiences, hanging on long past their memorabilia due date because these make us feel that we have encountered a depth of something that others may not be enriched enough to understand, making us more special because we did. We "survived". Add sentimentality and you're singing too much of Pink's "Who Knew" when someone leaves your life - a death of sorts. Add cleverness and sometimes you get prejudice.
Doesn't help either that happiness is a pretty commonplace thing. Let's face it, most of the time we don't realise we had it until we get into an unhappier place and look back. Plus, happiness is a current thing, and living in the present is always scary - running the same circles of lessons unlearnt from the past has at least some hopeless certainty to it.
Maybe we shouldn't be afraid of forgetting since it's harder to forget than we think anyway. Maybe we shouldn't be afraid of a blank canvas everyday, although it may turn out to be empty, lonely or just plain boring.
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