Update.

There has been alot of things going on in my life. Alot. Let’s see. I think the biggest thing that changed in my life is the fact that Jojo is dead. My dog died of organ failure at night after being in the hospital for a long time because of some heart problem. It has been quite an interesting few weeks after my mum first told me the news….Its hard to live your life when something that you really care alot for is dying and it isn’t possible for you to be there with her while she is suffering. When she died, it was immensely difficult for me to deal with it…Principally is the guilt that I had to deal with. The guilt that I couldn’t be with her when she was suffering. That was something that I had to deal with up till now. Whatever the case…I already gotten over her death and the guilt. It will always stay with me but I will eventually deal with sooner or later.

I have had a terrible week and while this week doesn’t seem to be going as bad as the last week, I suspect it will either stay this way or get worst. No way its gonna get better.

Forget it.

I’m too filled with rage to type.

Make what you think of it.

A Whirlwind Experience And Something Else?

Lets start with something…substantial.

I haven’t been posting much lately since there has been alot of changes in my life. Firstly would be me moving back to Australia, Perth to assume my proper role as a university student of the University Of Western Australia. Yes finally I have finished my torturous year at Taylors College and now I’m finally a full student of the university. I think one of the best perks of being a university student is no longer having to be called a Taylors kid by all the other university students, especially when I stayed in Currie Hall. The sense that I am finally a full student in UWA is quite an overwhelming sensation and rightfully so, this goal that I have sacrificed so much of my brain cells and burned so many bridges to get to is finally here. On a side note, I enter University with only one person that I don’t like entering alongside with me. The rest has either been exiled to Curtin or Murdoch or sent to the East Coast. HAH SUCK IT ANH, you can go copy other people’s work over there instead.

*Ahem* I digress.

I used to arrogantly believe that I would be able to take University and not be overwhelmed by everything that is happening around me. Oh boy was I ever so wrong in my life. I’m feeling completely overwhelmed by the amount of reading that I have to do in the first week and I went through my first tutorial at the Faculty of Education and I feel really unprepared compared to the rest of the class. I hope its just jitters so far and not an indication of my performance throughout the semester. For the uninformed or the curious, I am taking 4 units this semester. Anthropology Global Change Local Response, History From Imperialism to Globalization, Political Science The Contemporary International System and finally Education Youth Culture. I managed to get a good timetable with little wasted time and nice starting times around 10-12pm and one free day on friday! Which is always good, a three day weekend! Most of the lecturers are nice and interesting people with the exception of the History lecturer. I’m not saying that she’s bad or lousy just abit strange with her lectures. Forcing me to relisten to her lectures on the internet. Thank God for that.

I’ll spare you all descriptions of my university and so on. Lets focus on something else more…hmm…substantial.

Recently a friend and I committed a religious faux pas against another friend of another religion. It involved a frying wok owned by that person and a set of sausages that was fried on that said wok. Now that person who owns the wok is muslim and the rest of us aren’t. She kinda freaked out when she saw us cooking sausages on it. Now we went to check and found that the sausages were beef so no damage there but it got me thinking about such things. I kinda have the feeling that I am going to offend some people with this but who gives? So the general rule of thumb is that muslims cannot touch or eat pork. That much I know but what I find it terribly unfair that we have to keep jumping around that rule. We can’t do this and we can’t do that because we offend some kind of rule from another religion. Consider the fact that we have to keep watch over so many things and juggle so many commitments, I find it funny that we will have to ensure that we are politically correct and religiously correct around select religions. I not blasting anything or anyone, but I am bothered by this…atmosphere of special treatment and mindset that some religions seem to have. While I am Christian, I don’t seek to have special rights conveyed on my religion and I think things would be alot better if all the religions were treated equally and so on *blah blah*. Maybe its all this negative press about religion, religious wars and persecution that I feel strongly for a complete separation of church and state. I think that is the reason why I was slightly bothered by what I saw today in church about the new Australia Prime Minister and the Greens. One issue raised up during the church announcement was that the Greens supported the idea of Gay Marriage and so on. Now I will go on record saying that I support the idea of Gay Marriage and Rights, despite the fact that I am a Christian. I believe that such things are inevitable and we are doing them no big favour in outcasting them and causing them so much annoyance and suffering…..Christians can counter me by accusing me of embracing their ideals and so on but I rather accept them that they are here and not going away instead of attempting to destroy their lives. They are humans.

But what do I know? I’m just an idealistic university student who through the course of his 4.5 years in University be embittered and cynical about the world.

I recently made the decision to start serving in church and I chose to go back to the basics where I started off back home in FGA. Projections. From what I observed, there are slight differences between both projection teams and formats in both churches but aside from that it is essentially the same program and job which makes adapting much easier. But I am not writing about that, something struck me today as I watched people set up church, run soundchecks and practice for the coming service. These are very very dedicated people. The first test would be the fact that the assembling time for everyone to set up is at 6am on a sunday morning. I felt like shit when I woke up at 5.30am to wash up to go church. I would draw a parallel between FGA and Zion Praise, both are manned by extremely dedicated youth teams who basically run the entire service from start to finish. I just think that these people need to be acknowledged more often for making such services possible and running so smoothly. Sometimes too much emphasis is placed on the worship team and rightfully so because they are indeed the main thing that people see when they enter the hall during service but sometimes its best to not forget about the little people who help bring them there, who help make sure they sound good and get their lyrics on time.

I’m tired.

I’ll write more another day.

Why Do We Hate?

I wanted to write this blog post about something else, maybe something reflective on achieving my ascension to that of a university student or surviving the year of Taylor College’s “excellent” Foundation Program…But in the end after a conversation with my friend Aaron over msn helped steer this blog post to something that has been bugging me for awhile. I talked to a fair number of people that I know and read it online through some forums and so on. I notice that alot of them don’t really like the PAP…For those who aren’t very politically inclined, PAP means People Action Party the current ruling party of Singapore. Well since the start of Singapore till now. Anyway I conclude that it has almost become…fashionable to hate Singapore and the People’s Action Party. I am not defending nor am I supporting the PAP but I am just wondering why? Ask any of them who say that they don’t like the PAP or Singapore and ask them to give you a proper reason why they don’t like both the party and the nation, most of them would be hard pressed to give a good reason why…even a specific reason would be missing. Most of the time I asked and all I get are general reasons like the way they ran the nation, some strange reasoning that Lee Kuan Yew is corrupted etc etc. I get close to no specific reason backed up by evidence of not liking Singapore and the PAP.

Lets see, one of the general reasons I get for not liking the government is that it is corrupted and so on. I agree that there is a high chance that the government is corrupted to some extent and you can view some of their actions as dynastic and corrupted in the sense that they are keeping everything within the Lee family but if you compare it against the other countries in the world. Really you don’t have to look too far, look at Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia to see strong evidence of major corruption and how it is screwing up their nations. Then when you look at them, take a nice look at our country and realise the fact that even though there is corruption in our government, it is so small that its almost nothing compared to our neighbours. Come on people. Our nation is so stable and peaceful, cause their corruption isn’t as bad as the rest!

There is this idea of the grass being greener on the other side. The idea that I think most Singaporeans have that other countries have it better off than them. I will admit that I have been guilty of thinking that way in the past, wondering wether my life would have turned out better if maybe I had a different life, different parents or born in a different nation. Then it would change to thinking that so & so country seems to be better than my country and why can’t I stay in that country instead of Singapore. I lived my life in both Perth and Singapore, i experienced the idea of living in the “greener” side of life. But then I find myself missing Singapore, i go back to Singapore and I find myself missing Perth. We can never satisfy that idea in us, there will always be another place that seems better than our place and we can’t do anything about it except to either live with it or complain throughout our lives. Obviously we can see that most of the Singaporeans just complain that they wished that they could live in another nation and so on.

I’m not looking to insult anyone and so on. Just my opinion. Our generation needs to shape up abit and realise that once our parents kick the bucket, that it will be up to us to do something about it. Scary thought isn’t it? That it is up to our generation to fix the problems of the old generation? My geography teacher told us in class with a hint of sadism that it is his generation that sucked up all the resources and dumped all the poisons into the ocean and up into the air and it will be our generation who will have to clean up the mess that his generation caused. And that he will be long dead before he will have to endure any of the hellist conditions that seem set to descend onto our world from Global Warming to financial upheaval. I take a walk around Singapore and I see the people around my age who don’t seem to be doing anything about their lives and so on. They seem to be living for the Now, for the moment instead of wondering about their futures. I wonder what is going to happen to Singapore and the rest of the world when our generation takes over.

50 bucks that we will all combust into flames.

Its my birthday yo. Sigh……

I notice a disturbing trend on almost all my birthdays. I remember before the army a good majority of my birthdays involved me being quite violently ill (I recall one birthday spent shivering on my bed with a 40 degree fever thinking that Dexter from the cartoon show Dexter Laboratory was after me with a laser gun) and during the army being made to do guard duty on my birthday. That is quite depressing don’t you think? Very very depressing. So in Perth I thought it would be different? My first birthday in Perth? Right in the middle of my final exams. Brilliant right?

Okay people will protest that I did have some really awesome birthdays like the one I had i Church Camp where the little british group decided to create an awesome notebook for me. I’m really thankful to them for all that!

So what did I do in Perth for my birthday? Well I ‘celebrated’ it on the day before, Cheeps came over to hang out and then went with the girls to Subi market to eat a late lunch. After that went back to watch How I Met Your Mother before meeting the girls again to go Fremantle for some reason then back to Northbridge for ramen and wandering around. Finally getting our dirty paws on a bottle of Absinthe (Green Fairy) and some beer, we proceeded home to the girls house to sample the forbidden fruit that is Absinthe. Okay first off, it taste like Listerine, mixed with alot of alcohol. Goodness. It was horrible. Research however shows that adding cold water and sugar to the mixture made it alot more drinkable as we have all discovered.

I thought about it. Wow, I survived one full year in Perth studying Taylors College. Its quite unbelievable that I could stand that much horror in that place and in Perth. I know I whine and moan about things that happened to me in Perth and the things happening in school but when I think about the stuff that happened to me, I can say that God really has a plan for me and everything worked out in some strange way. Well, lets see. If I did not go into Taylors College at this specific time and intake I would not have had the chance of meeting people like Syen, Thin and others which at first seemed like nothing but they would go on to make a huge impact in my life in the second half of my Taylors existence. Making the effort to know Nad would then set the stage for me knowing Kaiy even better and that would even lead to my “salvation” and finding a church to settle in Perth. So yeah I guess everything else was part of God’s long and weird plan.

One thing that I’m extremely grateful to God is for letting me know a bunch of supremely awesome people in church. I can safely say if it weren’t for these people, I would have gone insane and killed myself in Perth. Thank you Eunice, Shannon, SK, Shuyen, Kaiyi, Thinn, Wilson, Adeline, Christine and Pauline for being so awesome people! Words cannot describe the fun times I had in cell with you guys. The ninja Shearn and err..Cheeps , these 2 are fascinating people who I am so glad to count as bros. (Stop watching How I Met Your Mother….But I need to finish Season 5).

There was another major reason to go to church today besides the usual reasons of going to church….You know like to worship God and so on but…Okay first some back story to establish context. I go to this church in UWA called Zion Praise Harvest which is awesome. I’m part of Eunice’s cell (still am yay) which is also awesome, there are a number of cells in the church and there are alot of people in these cells. Okay so back to the main story. Today was the day they announced the new cell arrangements for Semester 2. I’m glad that I am in the same cell as before and while we lost alot of people to the young upstart Wilson but I’m happy. . Wilson is gonna be AN AWESOME CELL LEADER!

SINCE ITS MY DAMN BIRTHDAY.

WHERE THE FRACK ARE MY PRESENTS?!

Embracing The Darkness.

So last night I went to MetroCity with a select bunch of people to experience what is it like to club in Perth. I have already been to clubs in Singapore and I guess I should just go and see what is it like in Perth. The bunch of us met up back at Currie Hall and proceeded to move towards MetroCity in a cab. Now there is something different about the cabs in Singapore and Perth. In Singapore we grew up thinking that taking cabs there is expensive, we would think that paying X amount of money is expensive but obviously some people have never taken the cabs in Perth before. I sat there watching the meter rise like a timer. It just kept going up and up and up. Goodness. And people wonder why I take the bus to school and back home.

What do I think of MetroCity? It kinda reminds me of Singapore’s clubs but with some white people. Also there is a stage for stage dancers…We went to MetroCity when there was some kind of dance competition going on so throughout the night, the dancing would stop and some group would come out and dance for the rest of the club to see. I think the names of the groups were Amix, the Tribe and another group that I can’t remember. I did like Amix more though but nevermind, the Tribe won. Good for them. Alcohol here in clubs are quite expensive and this place is no exception, I tried not to think about the prices when we paid for the drinks (which all packed quite the punch!).

I would write alot more but there this is agreement that whatever happens in the club stays in the club, so I shall not say much more. I can’t think of anything else to write.