~*my fairy tale*~

Monday, December 01, 2008

Forever 21 :)



I haven't been this happy for a very long time despite crossing over to the wrong side of 20s :) I've decided to declare that i'm forever 21 to whoever who asks for my age from today onwards!!!

Been pretty burdened for some time & in a lot of stress. It's all gone away today! Can't help grinning from ear to ear the entire day. Hopefully it's gone for gd but i doubt so...well i'll just enjoy it while it lasts! Not very much time to midnight! Why does 1 Dec come only once a year!!! Anyhow, i love Decembers, it's a month of celebrations, love, gifts, colours, food, drinks & gatherings :)

This year's celebrations were pretty low key & quiet... miles from what I would prefer but very sweet & heatwarming. Stayed at a place with the most comfortable bed, amazing views, the best company ever, an interesting dinner, a surprise birthday cake & to top it off, an amazing gift that I know loads of love & effort went into it.





I just can't help repeating myself: Feeling extremely happy & very loved today!

Thanks to all who've made it special! Your phone calls, smses, msgs on fb made my day :)

I'm already looking 4ward to the rest of this month... gathering with my fav KKN, KTV sessions in the making, friends coming over 2 visit, zoukout, 2 weddings, xmas & new year! This is totally random, but it feels like London all over again...the best feeling ever :) :) :)

Gift to self: Kate Spade Vote Tote!

Thursday, November 20, 2008

newspapers & magazines

nothing seems to be going right in the world now.

it seems like these days, if u want to be depressed, u read the newspapers, if u want emotional uplifts, u flip magazines...

i'm still holding out for a merry xmas this year, despite 2008 being a year of misery & undue stress.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Adrian Tan's Life and How to Survive It

The author of "The Teenage Textbook" Adrian Tan was the guest-of-honour at an NTU convocation ceremony recently and his speech on life and how to survive it was widely circulated across the internet ever since.

I've met adrian tan once in a court room a couple of months back and spoken to him on the phone briefly twice, never expected anything like this from him though I should have guessed from his book (The Teenage Textbook happened to be my fav book back in sec sch & my fav movie in JC).

Well, i suppose if you have no expectations, everything can surprise u on the upside :)

Anyhow, this speech has touched me in many ways and I took away many lessons from it...posting it here as a note/reminder to self...

Life and How to Survive It
by Adrian Tan


I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.
You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

You’re going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there’s no life expectancy.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Till death do us part?

Attended another wedding over the weekend.

This wedding of a church friend whom I have known since primary school was different from the others I've attended. No rowdy "stealing the bride" antics, no forced drinking at the dinner, only touching songs sung by the groom. All in all, a very peaceful & blissful wedding.

While sitting through the church service, a thought ran throught my mind. At weddings, people say "till death do us part", but to me, if it's true love, even death is not an end point. There's no end to true love.

I remember a funeral director talking about love:
"I can tell whether a couple's love is true, just by looking. And it's not from the crying. It's how much attention they pay to the details of the funeral, the colour of
this, the position of that...It's like they are loving the person as if he or she is still there. And this is what true love is: When you can still love someone without his or her physical presence. "

Relationships are so fragile these days but I remain hopeful that I'll be able to find such true love one day...

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Human Diamonds

I want to be a human diamond... a yellow one.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

我要快乐

I haven't been in the best of moods lately with all these mayhem at home & at work...which resulted in me having a shouting match with one of my bosses a couple of days back...totally unpleasant.

Retail therapy with Xi on Sunday was good and helped, however, fleeting. I woke up the next day feeling extremely guilty and even more miserable than before.

I need a holiday.

我要快乐
张惠妹

又被爱伤了一遍
无所谓当作成长
刚刚走开的人
烟还点着味道却淡了

我并不是天生爱寂寞
却比任何人都多
就算把世界给我
我还是一无所有

我要快乐
我要能睡的安稳
有些人不抱了才温暖
离开了才不恨我早应该割舍

我要快乐
哪怕笑的再大声
心不是热的全都是假的
只有眼泪是真的

把从前想了一遍
谢谢了伤我的人
想做乐观的人
每种雨声听了都不冷

我并不是天生爱寂寞
却比任何人都多
就算把世界给我
我还是一无所有

我要快乐
我要能睡的安稳
有些人不抱了才温暖
离开了才不恨我早应该割舍

我要快乐
哪怕笑的再大声
心不是热的全都是假的
只有眼泪是真的

我要快乐
我要能睡的安稳
有些人不抱了才温暖
离开了才不恨我早应该割舍

我要快乐
哪怕笑的再大声
心不是热的全都是假的
我的决定是对的

Friday, June 27, 2008

Reading

I've just rediscovered the joys of reading fiction after not picking up a novel for at least 6 years...been reading magazines or non-fiction books and have decided that i haven't got the patience for long stories... it's probably the Da Vinci Code that killed my interest for reading...i've only read the first chapter & last chapter of novels ever since i finished my A levels...

Anyway...been trying to get my mind off some things lately and thought of reading to occupy my restless self on long train rides or on nights when insomnia visits me...

Went to kino one lunch time last week and pondered really hard what to get...ended up with P.S. I Love You by Cecelia Ahern... i've always wanted to watch the film but never got the chance to, and besides i've been watching films inspired by novels like Narnia, LOTR, Harry Potter, i thought i mite try reading the book first b4 watching the movie this time...

I was expecting it to be one of those soppy romance novels that I hungrily devoured book after book back in sec sch...it wasn't a bad choice afterall...perhaps it's the style of writing, very personal, i can vividly imagine the sights, sounds, smells, emotions...very engaging.

I ought to go to bed... 2moro is gonna be another long day....

Can't wait to further discover the story of Holly & Gerry tomorrow, 6 more letters to go...