Tengan Toppa Gurren Lagann! A must watch.

I just came back from having a meal with my Disciple group members. It's the first time that I really got to talk to them at length, and I have to say that it's also the first time that I enjoyed myself so much in a group dinner with people I don't know well... They're all really easy and fun to talk to, and our group facilitator, Joyce, made a great dinner too! Whiuew.. chatted until my throat became sore. ... =) It's a real blessing to have a group of people who gel so well together, and I think God did answer my prayers for more friends in church!

New firsts

I had a lot of fresh experiences over the past week. On Friday I went for my first driving lesson. I stalled the car a lot at the start, and I cramped my leg by pressing the clutch in too many times, but otherwise it was a good experience. It feels like a dream now, though. It rained in the middle of the lesson and that added a dreamy/hazy feeling to my memory of it.

I also spent two Saturdays practicing amateur modeling/miming by hurling myself against the brick walls of JUSTICE/'the old Supreme Court'. To those who took part in the debacle e.g. (Kheng Wee, Jevon), the prince of Brunei owes up big time.

I feel very tired these days despite my status as a loafer/bum. Haha.

Btw congrats to Marky. You are an example to us all.

Shortlisted

Had a very nice chat with Marky and Jevon today over at Mark's place. It was... enriching. Haha.


After certain events, I remember having spent some time thinking about the characteristics I'd like to have in a girl friend. The conversation today brought back some of those thoughts, and on further reflection, the thought came to me that any series of unforeseeable events could bring two people who were perfect for each other to hate each other in the end. Now, I feel I'd be less specific about what I'd like about a partner, and I only have two things:

1. We must be able to hold many types of conversations together.

2. I must have a feeling of pride about her character (moral fiber) and the way she does things.



Yep. I can put up ads in the papers now.

Pensive

I watched a snippet of Heroes season 2, and found out that Heroes' Hiro's folklore hero, Takezo, is actually a white guy. It reminds me of Tom Cruise's movie, where the last samurai (or the last man who carries the 'spirit' of the samurai code) ends up being an American... Well Jacky Chan's a cowboy in Shanghai Noon. Can't complain.

My recent illness and the poor weather have made it such that I've been unable to get any decent exercise in three weeks. I must point out that I have not been loafing around (much) even though I haven't gotten a job for the holidays. That seems to be the general consensus about me for some reason, haha... Still the days have been dreary, and have not been as fruitful as I had planned them to be. Nothing to fret over, but I just hope that things I'm learning will remain with me as the year passes.

Defragmentation Grenade

A couple of days ago, I installed Mozilla Firefox on my computer. It's a joy to use it, compared to the Internet Explorer browser I'd stubbornly stuck to before. More significantly, I saw this option in my computer called: 'De-fragment your hard disk drive'. After completing the process, almost all of the horrible slow down that I had tolerated over the past year has vanished. My C: drive must have been very fragmented.

Life so far has been easygoing. On one hand, I have not thrown away my days by playing mindlessly for hours on end (in fact, I haven't played anything for days). On the other hand, it feels like there's just not enough learning in my everyday life. I don't feel that I have a very tight grip on my days, but hopefully driving and more cooking will break the monotony.

I just had a very long conversation with Traitor. It looks like he's still willing to go on with the idea of playing as a team, and we got a lot of discussion topics out into the open. Glad that the air's cleared.

Keeping Track

I suppose that the greater majority of people these days have their own textual mediums for introspection, retrospection, and the recording of the high and low points of their lives. Traditionally, one might use a notebook journal to achieve this purpose. A contemporary form of a journal would be a blog, which in comparison to notebooks, offers a range of utilities from the convenient uploading of pictures and music to real-time features such as chat-boxes. It is also said to suit people who have more exhibitionistic tendencies (exhibition of the outward and inward life... Something compels me to write about this at length. Must remember.)

I've lately come to feel that one of the best ways of capturing snapshots of our past is not through a medium that we actively undertake, but one that is present in almost all web communities and utilities, namely the 'SENT' folder.

It is highly unlikely (unless you have a neurosis for virtual housekeeping) that any of us take pains to regularly empty our sent folder, even more so for people who do not engage in the forwarding of chain emails and who thus have relatively empty sent folders. My own 'sent' folder contains copies of emails that I sent from this year, all the way back to when I was Secondary 3 or so. I guess that all of us have been more or less aware of this fact that we have a backlog of the way that we communicated with people when we were in our youth (relative youth).

I am convicted of the effectiveness and potency of this backlog in portraying my youth because of the acute feelings of dread and apprehension I get when I consider opening it and looking at its contents (Although I think this feeling varies from person to person, depending on their maturity growth curve gradient). When we sent messages through email, for example, I doubt that anybody goes through the mental process of subconsciously editting their messages so that it will look acceptable when they read it in their 'sent' folders after a few years. The messages are undistilled and perfect preservations of communications, the style and contents of which reveal our then childish way of looking at the world. The thought of some of the messages that I'd sent in previous years makes me queasy for the utter ignorance, lack of awareness or wisdom, and inappropriate whimsy that was apparent in them.

So noob. It could be described as the noobness of a newborn cow... Though I felt bad reading them initially, the feeling passed and I found myself enjoying the reading and reflecting about the past. Haha. So young, so newb... Still noob though.. maybe a bit less noob...

Something nice happened today. Ha

I had a really enjoyable week. On Tuesday, I met up with kei seen and chris and kei's place. He's started subscribing to a 100mbps bandwith. The connection is flawless, and wc3 character animations were so smooth that the game seemed to slow down. Haha. I've got to get something for his family when I next go there. They're always very accommodating to us. I watched the Big Bang Theory (for the 3rd time) with them as well. Ha.

On Wednesday some very unique festivities took place. We celebrated Raymond's birthday at Fish and Co. (It was not what I'd expected of the glass house, however) during lunch! The FDS guys are still doing well, haha. It was good to see them again. At night, Ooi and Brendan came over to my place and we stayed up till 4am (On Brendan's insistence that we adhere to HIS standard of proper stayovers, ha) playing Gundam and watching the Big Bang Theory ( for the 4th time). Ooi is pretty good at playing Gundam. Perhaps when the war of mecha comes he and I can enlist together in the MechaSAF. We woke up late and had lunch (glad they enjoyed it so much) before heading off to Harbourfront, where I gave them a tour, looked for clothes, and shared a Godiva Chocolixer with them!

For $10, the Chocolixer felt like a product that was reasonably worth the price. It felt dense and full, and had a deep and strong mix of different types of sweetness. At least, it felt more substantial than those confused and diluted drinks they sell at Starbucks for $6. I think I would pay the extra to share a Godiva Chocolixer instead.

I would have gone out with Wanyi and Cherie to watch Juno on Friday, but University work and pressures kept them down, so it got cancelled. I'll try to rearrange, but if it cannot be done then I shall take my friend's advice and experience movies solo! It might become a trend, haha.

I think I've spent too much energy obsessing over the coming Dota competition. It eats me up. I guess we should just go in with a more casual attitude and be receptive to learning, and go at a pace that doesn't exclude all the other important things that one should do during this opportune time of commitment-lessness. Ha. I'll spend less time on it this week proportionately, even though the competition starts next week. Gotta pass ATT =/