failure by design

a beetle was crawling on the desk a while ago and nearly crawled onto my leg had i not seen it and dodged quickly. a few seconds later, i heard a 'click' and saw the beetle had fallen off the desk onto the floor and was stuck upside-down on its back.

now almost 5 minutes later, it's still upside down, legs kicking about aimlessly trying to right itself. it made me a little surprised that after millions of years of evolution, it still haven't figured out a way to get out of this position.

it reminds me of some of the robots i saw on robot wars some years back. they were so strong and deadly, but once they got flipped over, it was the end. but that was a few years of work by their creators at most. this is a million years.

it's still struggling now. i wonder if i should help it out or just let my cat spot it and finish the job. if i helped it, would i be disrupting the path of evolution? one less helpless beetle could be all it takes to make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

sep

taken 18/9/10, 9:56am

so that was it, my vespa finally got too beat up for me to delay any further, especially after the little accident in august that left the front a little mangled. i brought it to the shop for some refurbishing.

$900+ and a bit of worrying later, this is what came out. yes, i do think it looks great, but sometimes when i'm riding it i feel like a prissy little ass on that shiny blue vespa.

it's too shiny, too nice, too clean, too typical. i think i'm too used to riding my old dirty, rusty, beat-up green thing that the transition came as a bit of a shock.

anyway barely a month later my friend crashed it, and that was when i realised, wow it really looks like shit when it's beat-up.

after another $400 of repairs, it's almost back to its former self, except for some cracks here and there. yea, i'd much rather have it nice and shiny.

celebrity crush III

last night i was taking a break from studying and decided to watch tv for a while. one of the evils of cable is that with all those channels, chances are there'll be something to watch. it was 9pm i believe, when i saw 'how i met your mother' and settled on that.

but as i was flipping through the channels, i found out that there were 2 episodes back-to-back, and how could i stop after one? so it became an hour of tv. 10pm i had my dinner and figured i'd just fall asleep if i went straight to studying, and thought it would be a better idea to watch some army training program till 11.

11pm, it's time to turn off the tv and hit the books! but as fate would have it, i flipped through the channels one last time and saw 'fun asia,' which leads me to the main point of this post:


janet hsieh

i remember the first time i saw her was on a 'fun taiwan' advert, and i made a huge effort to remember the timing of the show just so i could see more of her than the few measly seconds in the advert. and oh my, she didn't disappoint.

she's cute, funny, interesting, and really has everything that makes a good host. definitely good enough to make me watch a travel show, and i don't ever watch travel shows. or maybe it's just because i'm a little bit in love with her.

so tell me, how could i not watch her show? between seeing beautiful janet travel around the philippines and reading up on corporate finance, is there really a choice to be made?

well hahaha

if a girl doesn't like flowers and her boyfriend buys her flowers, how is she supposed to react? should she be happy that he actually gave enough of a shit to buy her something, or should she be unhappy that he doesn't know what she likes?

or does she negate her dislike for flowers over her love for him? aka the 'even if you give me a piece of crap i'll still like it' kinda mentality.

if after being together for 2 years he still buys her flowers, how is she supposed to react? should she learn to love flowers, or should she be really unhappy that he still has no damn clue as to what she likes?

how about the guy? is he a useless boyfriend for not knowing what she likes? but how can he be blamed if each time he buys her flowers she says she loves it?

gg

and so today was the last lesson of my first year in school. now it's time to buckle down for the exams in may.

one thing i noticed a while back was how my life's been broken up into a series of mays.

7 may 2009 i passed out from training
9 may 2010 i completed my national service
13 may 2011 last day of my exams
may 2012 last day of my year 3 exams/possible end of school life

anyway speaking of exams, it's been a long time since i last sat for a paper and couldn't answer a shit in it. the last time was back in secondary 4 for my amaths paper. 6/100, i hope my record still stands now.

i'm a little worried that this coming may i'll flip through my exam paper and have that exact same feeling again. it's quite an experience though, a mixture of fear, anger, helplessness, panic and stupidity, all at once.

i'll definitely get to experience it if i sit for the prelims (in 2 weeks i heard?) but good thing there's still time to may. i'll be fine by then.

i think it was the dragon king

i was on a big boat cruising around a lake in china with a friend. we were looking at the fishes through the murky waters, and the fishes we spotted progressively got larger and colours more brilliant until they appeared more like dragons and were chasing each other, jumping out of the water.

i whipped out my camera to snap some shots of this amazing sight, but it was quite difficult, owing to the speed and irregularity of their movement. at last i managed to get a beautiful shot of the entire fish/dragon jumping out of the water, with the setting sun in the background.

at that moment, the sky turned dark and as i was looking at my camera to check the photo, suddenly the door to the viewing platform we were on swung open and in came a little dwarf, probably about 20cm in height. he came to me and spoke in chinese, saying that someone sent him there to offer me a gift of anything i wanted.

i thought about it for a moment before declining, but he got more and more persistent. there was a bald and fat old man sitting on a bench, and since he was the only one around, i asked him what was going on. he told me that the dwarf was trying to cheat me. he would give me anything i want, but after that i would have to exchange my life for it.

after hearing this i got a little scared and angry and chased the dwarf around the boat until i caught up with him and smacked him into the water. i thought it was over, but he popped up again almost immediately. he told me that he couldn't leave until i chose something because he was under command of his master.

again, i chased him and kicked him far into the water, but again he popped up. there was once when i was chasing him, he dropped a piece of paper and on it were a list of all the things he could give me, written in chinese characters. i saw car, money, house, amongst many others.

somewhere along the way, things got more and more freaky because this fucker was so damn persistent in wanting to cheat me of my life, and there was still the issue of that unknown master who sent him to kill me. i asked the old man how to deal with this but he couldn't help me as such big things were out of his hands.

i didn't realise it at that time, but little by little my surroundings changed until i was in an apartment eating dinner with my family. out of nowhere, an orange that was on the shelf started walking and asked me to make the choice. FUCKER! but this time i knew that i couldn't even touch him or it would be considered a yes.

cheered on by my family, i took a hammer and chased after that little fucker, trying my very best to squash him. but he was fast and agile, and he even managed to climb up the pipes in the toilet. i woke up just as i was about to swing the hammer again.

how does it feel?

"cos you'll never be ok
you'll never be ok
you'll always be in pain
you'll always feel this way
coz things they never work out right
you'll always be in pain"
trouble breathing - alkaline trio

recently i was ill twice in a week. first i had a fever that made me feel hot and cold all night. i was very cold, but when i covered myself up i would start sweating. i spent most of the night trying to find an equilibrium, inching the blanket here and there to get the optimum coverage.

and then 2 nights later i had some serious killer stomach ache. woke up at 2am and spent over 2 hours sitting on the throne, being murdered by stomach cramps and lots of shit. normally the stomach aches would be gone when i'm done shitting, but this one stayed with me all night long.

somewhere during my suffering came a moment of enlightenment: it is very easy for people who are unwell to forget how it's like to be normal. doesn't matter if you're sick or injured or heartbroken, you just can't remember how being 'normal' feels like.

i could only think of normal as not being sick, but failed to remember the feeling of being normal. and when you don't remember, it's very easy to think that you'll never be alright again, that you'll be stuck like this forever.

i guess that's why some people decide to end it all, because they're not well and they just can't remember what it was like before. they can't even find a glimmer of hope. they can't live like this forever.

blind

sometimes i see something nice, and i think wow, i just gotta have it!

and when i do get it, i realise it's actually not that great, or i don't really need it, or there are better things out there.

but when i think of it again, i knew all these from the very beginning, but well, you know, there are some things you just have to have.

nomnom

in other news, my sister has recently developed a double-chin. still in its infancy stages, it's not a very obvious sight, but still enough to be noticed by my brother and mother.

watching her eat all that junk food this festive season (and not just this festive season) makes me feel very uneasy and i'm constantly nagging at her whenever i see her munching.

my mother doesn't seem too fazed by this and in fact she's the one providing all that junk food. my relatives were shocked when my mother told them i'm saying my sister is fat.

"noooo! she's not fat!" yea she's not fat... yet.

lovely

"though i'm afraid
afraid that i have made mistakes
now there's nothing here for me
the things you once told me
the thoughts you once gave me
sound like the wind in my ears
that blows out the knots i've got in my long brown hair"
shadows - warpaint