listening to: this

I always wondered why people would enjoy songs in languages they can’t understand. Doesn’t the beauty reside in the way each line is crafted and how the melody entwines itself around it? well, that song’s different. it’s in nihongo and even though watashiwa nihongo wakarimasen (at least there were english subtitles when the movie aired on tv! excellent movie too), the title says it all.

several saturdays ago, whilst luxuriating in the lush surroundings of sentosa, four foolhardy girls decided to rent kayaks. foolhardy because who on earth in their right minds would kayak at 11.30am on a hot sunny day with blue skies. i was so severely sunburnt that i had hives for the next week. but we are only young once.

anyhow, so C and W took one kayak and F and I took the other. and as we were bobbing along, i saw a life buoy and then it was no more. thinking nothing of a disappearing life buoy, i told C and W, ‘hey, let’s race to the boundary line’. so F and I paddled in sync but we got no where. and then we realised we were paddling in circles! while that may be taken as a sign of extreme powress in some religious cults that worship crop (or in this case, algae) circles, we were seriously clueless.

and then C realised that not only was the lifebuoy nicely lodged in the middle of our kayak, our desparate attempts at rowing in a linear fashion (hey, a circle is an unending line!) had managed to entangle heaps of barnacles onto the life buoy. now i know why the captain in Tintin goes ‘blistering barnacles!’ after more than 30 minutes of struggling (in the hot sun) by heroic C and W, the life buoy was finally dislodged and we had salt crystals on our arms as an added bonus.

not many people get to tell the ridiculous story of being stuck in a lagoon on top of a lifebuoy mangled with barnacles. but it made me pause for thought. sometimes things that appear to give us security and act as safety markers, when caught in inappropriate situtations, may just make matters worse. and they cause you to be stuck and (literally) going in circles. what you need are friends to come alongside, prod those security blankets, declare them mangled with unspeakable botanical features, prise those veggies apart, and help you get along with life.

when i was young. i distinctly remember mummy cautioning me to never look back in life, always walk on. otherwise i’d be like Lot’s wife. her clinging on to the safety nets led her to becoming the greatest saltshaker known to humankind.

so here’s to abandoning life buoys in inappropriate situations, to friends who get you out of barnacle-infested waters, to walking on without looking back.

listening to: this (so ah lian, so good)

18 weeks to write 30,000 words. for the mathematically disinclined, that would be about 1700 words a week. as much as I like the number 17, this does not bode well. sitting between two depressed phd students who say ‘just don’t sleep’ (pearls of wisdom coupled with peals of thundering sighing) does not maketh a happy writer, either.

current word count: zero.

houston we have a problem. we’re down to one engine. i am dazed and confused. mayday, mayday! dude, are we there yet? mufpliesfsdmcoisoidadl (jabba the hut).

(runs out of movie cliches) what did I get myself into, again?

i think i need some inspiration. maybe a drink of “orange juice” and a “jello”. some chocolate, perhaps. to stop swimming in people’s verbal diarrhoea and my own mental constipation. AND TO GET THOSE ENGINES GOING, BUSTERS!

edited to add: this punctuation sign is the best symbol of my life right about now. how awesome is that?

listening to: this

ohmygoodness. i have not had a weekend (by my definition) in more than a month. is so confuzzlingly stressed. but the pockets in between have been pretty excellente. like, planning on being a FONSTER (or as Dr S says, a FONSTERFE). and meeting old old jc friends, where the conversation evokes the same feeling as sinking under the covers with a good novel and it’s all rainy outside.

but garrhs. *spasms out*

dear conceptual framework: please, conceptualise yourself into existence.

dear excel spreadsheets of minion labour: please, get your act together.

dear lit review of doom: please, learn how to read and write.

dear potential participants: please, stop ignoring me. you no lowe me but i lowe you deepdeep.

dear life: please, come back to me.

dear christmas: i really wish you were white and cold this year. but unfortunately that’s not panning out. but it’s ok, a low carbon footprint holiday is defintely better than none. just make sure all the above gets done by then. that would be the best present.

*twitch*

watching: this (well, it is pure parisian macaroony ad-vice!)

one of the best pearls of wisdom i’ve ever read in those random ‘pieces of advice for my kids’ blog is: don’t decline a party invitation even if you were invited alone. and i must say, this advice is golden. it has created many happy pockets of random fun this year and i believe many more in the future. sometimes, there is no need for the security of holding someone’s hand, or dripping from some guy’s arm,just to be socially acceptable at a party. just go and have fun, rather than stay at home mooping that you didn’t have someone to bring along! *woowoo*

listening to: this

I always thought ’sweet dreams’ was the perfect phrase to end the day. A day, spent in all its fullness, should end with the immaterialness of a sweet dream. And the next day has a sweet beginning, an overflowing from the dream that just passed. But what’s so sweet about a dream, if you wake up?  A dream, no matter how sweet, is just that.

————-

and it stops.

in some rare and sacred dead time, sandwiched between the late sleepers and the early risers, there is a miracle of silence.

Everything has stopped.

And silence drops down from out of the night, into this city, the briefest of silences, like a falter between heartbeats, like a darkness between blinks. Secretly, there is always this moment, an unexpected pause, a hesitation as one day is left behind and a new one begins.
—Jon McGregor, If no one speaks of remarkable things (such a beautiful title, innit?)

———–

Yet, the reality we wake up to every morning, can be good as well. As the good people who write my QT material on Exodus say, ‘God dd not send Israel on her way with freezers filled with a forty years’ supply of food. Who needs God when cupboards are full? … The believer’s vision receives each day, each precious, precious unrepeatable day as a gift from God’s hand; and with it our life and salvation, our calling and work, with all necessary enabling resources to be pleasing to God on this day. … Utterly dependent upon the Father, with empty larders and empty hands we go out to him again today’.

So I guess that’s why we wake up from our dreams. To know that it was just that, an empty, immaterial thing. And to face each morning not as a letdown -  that the dream was just a dream – but to look forward in expectation for the day that is just unfolding.

————

but sometimes it is tough to live through those liminal hours, when the heartbeat falters, when you live life in hesitation.

two words: leche flan.

woowoo!

listening/watching: this

the weather i like best is rainy weather.

not the wussy half-hour downpours that do not change the mood of the area. but the continuous rain. the one which began brewing this morning in the financial district which is beautifully quiet at 930 as all the bankers make money and the insurance agents insure us against the bankers making money. the one which makes everything smell fresh and look new again.

the best thing about rainy weather is that it looks the same everywhere. in melbourne when we peer out out of the tram windows trying to figure out which street we’re on in the CBD, in beijing when we were out exactly at the moment when the rain changed to snow and always, always  in Singapore. rain does make a city liveable.

mmmmm.

ETA: and doesn’t the wind smell and feel so much more satisfying after the rain? mmmmmm.

sometimes computer links just come up for no particular reason that my techno-challenged mind can think of. today is a case in point. but oh. murples. murrrples…

—–

Has God trusted you with a silence – a silence that is big with meaning? God’s silences are His answers. Think of those days of absolute silence in the home at Bethany! Is there anything analogous to those days in your life? Can God trust you like that, or are you still asking for a visible answer? … A wonderful thing about God’s silence is that the contagion of His stillness gets into you and you become perfectly confident – “I know God has heard me.” His silence is the proof that He has. As long as you have the idea that God will bless you in answer to prayer, He will do it, but He will never give you the grace of silence. If Jesus Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the glorifying of His Father, He will give you the first sign of His intimacy – silence.

from: here (so bizzare right, 11 oct. wert)

—–

pffbt

watching: this (one of the better shows i’ve seen recently)

So monday marks the real end of formal education – the last ‘first day of school’ for a longlong time to come. the ending leg of the race in cretinuni land. in the cliche cinematic moment, i need to wear a tweed suit, sit on a park bench, open a box of chocolates, murmur about life and eat the bittersweet piece. but no, i live in a hot and humid country so tweed and chocolate outdoors is a recipe for disaster. plus i am female. plus i like going wild on swings…not sitting staidly on park benches. plus the whole point of that scene was that you don’t know which flavour you’re going to get. i know exactly which piece i am getting.

despite not cutting it on almost all counts for a role on the silver screen, the flavour of chocolate still gets to be featured in this reel life. bitter because it is time to take responsibility (such a terrible R word right? should change all R words to like…recycle, or ruminate. same difference.) and not be a flippant student eating breakfast at 2pm. sweet because it is time to see life beyond the (orangeblue) hallowed walls.

but more importantly, sweet because life is full of hope. As Plantinga (2002: xii) says ‘Christians live by faith in Jesus Christ, and when their faith leans forward toward the coming of the kingdom, they call it hope. The person who pursues a college education in hope, and who then shapes his or her life accordingly for service in the kingdom – such a person has a calling that will outlast every recession’.

now if someone lives that out, that’s one real life to live out loud!

listening to: this

i think the king may be wrong when he sang  ‘a little less conversation, a little more action please’.

the first comment, by my literal neighbour ‘the who’, was passed in a dimly-lited bus-stop over a year ago, when i was being a legit stresspot over something in student min. and she said ‘God doesn’t call us to worry‘.

indeed, He doesn’t.

the second comment, by my national neighbour ‘the hibiscus’, was made as we chatted when she stayed over last weekend. whilst the conversation topic was not new, it was the first time we seriously talked about it. and she said ‘God is not a God of probability‘ [or, as the sign i've seen every sunday in church compound puts it, 'no one is here by chance'. punny. heehee]

indeed, He isn’t.

the third comment, was made by an interviewee. [as this interview was conducted in a hut in the middle of landscaped-wilderness, the interview recording had a two minute interval where she went 'is that a monitor lizard?' and then followed by me screaming. haha]. anyhoo, she said ‘God, the creator God, is a creative God‘.

indeed, He is.

or as Peterson (in a book borrowed from the school lib’s closed stacks, who woulda thought!), in explaining Psalm 127, puts it: “The Bible begins with the annoucnement, “In the beginning God created…” not “sat majestic in the heavens,” and not “was filled with beauty and love.” He created. He did something. He made something. He fashioned heaven and earth. The week of creation was a week of work. The days are not described by their weather conditions and not by their horoscope readings: Genesis 1 is a journal of work. We live in a universe and in a history where God is working. Before anything else, work is an activity of God. Before we go to the sociologists for a description of work or to the psychologists for insight into work or to the economists for an analysis of work, we must comprehend the biblical record. God works. the work of God is defined and described in the pages of Scripture. We have models of creation, acts of redemption, examples of help and compassion, paradigms of comfort and salvation. One of the reasons that Christians read Scripture repeated and carefully is to find out just how God works in Jesus Christ so that we can work in the name of Jesus Christ’ (Peterson, E. A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, 1980: 104).

I think God’s character cannot be labelled as multi-faceted, we do not (and will not) know how many is ‘multi-’! and I think these conversations about God can only inspire action. the king was wrong, the King is always correct. (: