i’m off

i’m off to kyoto and will be back on the 7th.

may you and your loved ones, together with the unloved, unseen and brokenhearted, find peace this new year.

2006 lessons

half way through the year, i moved from suntec city to raffles place in search for more money, more satisfaction and more knowledge.

while it’s a little difficult to share money and satisfaction with you, knowledge is another matter. Some lessons, centered around diversity and culture:

Treat everyone uniquely. Listen to people. Get on their side. Be suspicious when everyone agrees. The best leaders listen and engage; talent and strategy is overrated. Welcome diversity of ideas. Ask where people are coming from. Make room for differences. There are no universal values nor meanings. Be glad you’re different. Resist people, organizations, evil relatives that want you to conform. Step away from yourself. Role-play, imagine, empathize. Your uniqueness is the reason you exist. Act the fool.

i know what you’re thinking. most would rather want money than my silly advice. i hear you and feel your pain.

i do.

beyond our vision

At the only true Christian bookstore in Singapore (the rest are giftshops really), SKS Books, I read Ken Untener’s homily about the Archbishop Oscar Romero:

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.

recent purchases

mcdog

on a cold day, he warms my heart.

a disease called myself

In the poem Children Selecting Books In A Library, Randall Jarrell writes about the beauty of reading and imagination:

it is because we live
By trading another’s sorrow for our own; another’s
Impossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own …
“I am myself still?” For a little while, forget:
The world’s selves cure that short disease, myself,

extremely loud and incredibly close – pg. 33

I’d lost the only person I could have spent my only life with, I’d left behind a thousand tons of marbles, I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself.

my 2007 manifesto

the premium website that is gapingvoid has a list of change-the-world manifestos, written by the insane, the passionate, the haunted and other sorts of honest people.

i have written mine, on my soon-to-be-printed business card.

it looks like this :

marketing people

i met a marketing person recently who speaks like a brochure, even on matters unrelated to work.

i do not know this person well enough to determine the cause of this malady, may it be genuine madness or occupational hazard.

a young person recently told me that I speak like a research analyst. of course, a young person has no idea how a lonely, desperate monster would speak.

James Brown (1933 – 2006)

Hair is the first thing. And teeth the second. Hair and teeth. A man got those two things he’s got it all.

the fifth horseman is fear

Boy
Daddy, who is a hero?

Boy’s Father
A man who dies unnecessarily, as opposed to those who live unnecessarily.

everyman by philip roth

(51) – Long before his final illness, he’d asked his rabbi to conduct his burial service entirely in Hebrew, as though Hebrew were the strongest answer that could be accorded death.

(55) – It had never been difficult to know what to make of either his father or his mother. They were a mother and a father. They were imbued with few other desires.

(102) – You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.

(130) – Once upon a time I was a full human being.

(156) – Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.

(160) – … he had lived closed to three quarters of a century, and the productive, active way of life was gone.

(161) – … he was in the process of becoming less and less…

(182) – He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nontheless, he never woke up.

xmas with rick warren

i have never been a great fan of christmas, even in the days as an enthusiastic believer.

this christmas, i will be setting apart an hour, watching the Saddleback Valley Community Church’s celebration service on FOX News.

for those of you with Starhub Cable and a Family Plus subscription it’s channel 75. these are the times:

25 Dec 2006 Monday 09:00 AM
25 Dec 2006 Monday 11:00 AM
25 Dec 2006 Monday 01:00 PM
25 Dec 2006 Monday 07:00 PM
25 Dec 2006 Monday 11:00 PM
26 Dec 2006 Tuesday 03:00 AM

strictly no entry

in the guard room of the Australian High Commision, there is a blown-up picture of a certain Mr. Koh T.H’s identity card. on the picture, the words “strictly no entry” are written in bold black ink.

what is the manner of Mr. Koh T.H’s trangression that has seen him banned from this place of diplomacy, i wonder?

perhaps he is a spy. a lunatic. an enemy of Australia. perhaps he’s a quitter of this country and a serial failure at migrating to Australia. a fella so ugly that he offends the very notion of humanity. perhaps he smells bad. perhaps he is a demon, a red devil, a Manchester United fan. perhaps he is so in love with one of the embassy staff that he has to see her every day, once, and he buys her flowers and gives her his soul. And she banishes him, she and her country: away, away, away.

chinese women are staring at me

chinese women (from china) are staring at me.

lately. at least on 2 occasions.

at the Australian High Commission, I was waiting at the visa counter when I turned around to see a chinese woman staring at me with her mouth wide open.

not a pretty sight, let me tell you that.

some months ago, another chinese woman with her boyfriend/brother/friend also gave me the look when i sat opposite them on the mass rapid transit.

(allow me to pause here to make a causal observation: unless they are intimate, i find it hard to tell, when i see a chinese man (from china) and a chinese woman (from china) together, whether they are a couple. They all look so brotherly and sisterly all the time.)

in any case, on these 2 occasions, I had my China bag with me which made me conclude that chinese women are staring at my China bag.

I wonder what goes through their minds when they see the bag.

Long live the People’s Republic of China? Have we suffered enough? Crazy westernized Chinese? Is he one of us? Chairman Mao is always right? Forget the bag, check out the hunk?

so many questions.

at the Australian High Commission

Before reaching the visa section at the Australian High Commission, you go through an ID check, a bag search, an X-ray machine, a metal detector, and just before you reach the door, armed Gurkhas.

After a long wait, I was standing at the counter when behind me, someone boomed an Arabic greeting to another person across the room.

For a moment or two, my heart stopped beating.

Later that afternoon, I celebrated life by sharing with a friend, a Mushroom Madness and a salad at NYDC, Wheelock Place. Not before a chance encounter with a lawyer friend at Borders, which reminded me that my will remains undone.

girlfriend is too independent

i am always wondering about the people that read my blog. who they are? what they like? do they love me, etc?

recently, someone came to my blog googling “girlfriend is too independent”.

who is this guy? is he having a problem? does he need help? is he going to kill himself?

many, many questions.

i scoured the Internet to make sure that “girlfriend is too independent” is not the title of a book or movie, not part of a lyric, not a quotation.

it seems like one of my blog reader does really have a problem - his girlfriend is too independent.

if you have been to the Singapore zoo recently, you might have seen the baboon enclosure which is really top-class. it’s a great way to see how animals living in communities interact.

there are a lot of closely-guarded kids who want to play and get away from their mothers. but the moms are pretty sharp and always ready to yank the kids by their tails when they try to be too independent.

where am i going with this? i really don’t know. nevertheless, let me take this opportunity to remind everyone the 2 fundamental rules of dating for guys -

1 ) Your girlfriend is not a baboon.

2) Don’t grab your girlfriend’s behind unless they are ok with it.

so unless your girlfriend is a baboon, i guess it’s ok for her to be “too independent”.

if not, dump her and date a baboon.

(Email me for their numbers)

tv shows shouldn’t glamorise materialism?

Jean Lian Jwn Jiun (try pronouncing her name, it nearly killed me), wrote in to the Straits Times, and complained about how TV programs like THE FINER SIDE, glamorised materialism:

These programmes are a superficial, decadent and corrupting influence on Singapore’s social fabric…

One could say the same about the News on 5, especially during the elections.

Jean Lian Jwn Jiun should be more selective in her television viewing. Switching off your television when you hear the words “this program is brought to you by” is a great all-round tip.

If I were to write in to complain about THE FINER SIDE which I saw a bit this week, I would rage about them picking Shangri-La ’s The Line restaurant in their best-of wrap-up.

The Line isn’t fine, let alone finer.

Too many local television programs aren’t fine either. Which makes the impending $110 annual tv license fee a pain in the butt. Of all the taxes one has to pay, this is the most evil.

evil florists

this disgusts me. the florists should be named and shamed…

Dec 15, 2006
Family plagued by florists when father died

MY CANCER-STRICKEN father died recently and my family soon fell victim to unethical florists who target grieving families. What happened was appalling and shocking.

On the day the obituary was published in the newspapers, my mother received a phone call from a florist at 5.45am who claimed that he was sending a wreath to the funeral wake. However, what followed was a series of probing questions to seek further information about my father, and the family members listed in the obituary – where they work and what they do for a living.

Other family members also received calls from other florists in the early hours, asking about their place of work. For a family that had just suffered the loss of a father, such disturbance is unwarranted.

A check with my colleagues revealed that florists called up my place of work seeking a list of business contacts, such as suppliers and customers, and calls were then made to them to garner their business.

My business associates visited the funeral wake and many told me they were informed of my father’s death by florists. One florist delivered seven wreaths in one go.

Just like there is a rule against excessive touting in food centres, could organisations such as the Consumers Association of Singapore look into this unethical practice of florists and put a stop to it?

Goh Theng Kiat

the chickens and the crab

Among the 21 block of flats in my estate lies a coffeeshop that sells the Worst Chicken Rice in the World.

Here, they sell chicken that taste like they died twice over. You have a sense that these were anti-social, anti-nutrition chickens, raised in the desert and died alone. Twice.

Here, they sell rice that feel like instead of being cultivated, they were given birth by cockroaches, whose Nation of Cockroaches, before the birth of these children, did not understand the meaning of shame.

Two nights ago, I stared at the man who served Mr. Tan the Worst Chicken Rice in the World and vowed never to be like him.

In the same coffeeshop, among the 21 block of flats in my estate, there is a solitary crab that sits alone in a fish tank, waiting. A time will come, when someone will want him and need him.

And that is the only difference that separates the solitary crab and the solitary me.