Life goes on.

Its been a little more than a month since I've written here.
Finally have a long weekend, and i can spare some time to write here.
can't remember much, so I'll just write the important things that happened.

not writing here, means that I didn't really have the chance to think through all that had happened.
______________________________________________________
1. Malvin Yap got OOC-ed on the last week of the course.
I don't think that he actually deserves to pass out (and he didn't), but this is plain fucked up cause if you wanted to OOC someone since the start of the course for his attitude, just do it straight. Making him go through shit for nothing... well hopes he learns something from the time with us that will make him a better person.

This taught me the need to think and plan forward before we make a decision, and the importance of being decisive. People get hurt when we don't make decisions just because we are insecure.

Our insecurities shouldn't burden others.
______________________________________________________
2. I have come to dislike the way uniformed organisations work.
I feel like I'm being used for the career advancement of those who are in command.

nvm, shalln't talk about this.
______________________________________________________
3. Received my NYAA Gold Award on 11th October.
had the chance to shake hands with H.E. Dr. Tony Tan. haha.

well, the main takeaway from the whole programme would be the importance of commitment, perseverance, and staying grounded.

hope that I will have the chance to work with other NGOs through the NYAA GAHA and gain valuable insights as to what it really means to help others.
______________________________________________________
4. Officially passed out from my course, and I'm now on Qualification Training Course.

Had my first Super Puma Ride on Wednesday. (:

was supposed to fly on both Tuesday and Wednesday, but my detail got pushed back and when It was my turn, the exercise got cut. (LOL we were in the heli and they decided to end it cause of a last minute activation)
Loading and unloading for so many times is not fun.

I got the best timing on Wednesday though!
Went to the site in the day, ate dinner there, had the chance to see the sunset, and flew back at night.
The view from the Super Puma at night was so pretty. (:

Might need to clock another time before I get qualified though, cause I was supposed to clock heli training twice, but then my detail got cancelled.
so lets see what happens.
______________________________________________________
5. I have this lack of assertiveness when needed.
Need to correct this flaw.

Need to learn to strike a balance for everything.
______________________________________________________
6. It was grandma's birthday last month and like any other family gathering I sat around randomly.

Aunt Pauline was talking to my mum, and she asks how it is like to have her children all grown up.

She replied,"Its lonely."

Need to spend more time with my family.
Time is starting to run out.

Though they annoy me from time to time, they are still family.
______________________________________________________
7. Having big dreams is good.
You'll never know where these dreams will bring you.
Though whether one can accomplish their dreams.. That is another matter altogether.

It is equally important to stay rooted in reality.
so.. yeah.
I need to stop living in my head.

or will that be another stupid mistake?
______________________________________________________
8. Watched Avenue Q with the guys (Ming Xuan, Tiong Ann and Martin) on the 6th.
Its a very good show! It is funny, entertaining, and at the same time it manages to engage issues such as racism, unemployment, and commitment in a very mature manner.

Had a blast that day (:

"Everything is just for now."
______________________________________________________
9. Had a meet-up with Guitar peeps on the 13th.
Had Buffet @ Seoul Garden, Marina Square.

haha it was nice just sitting around and chatting.
though there was a little divide between the guys and girls (just a little) cause the guys talk about NS and girls talk about uni.

haha where got time????

Anyway, the food was good, company was good, and that night was good (:
Ran and caught the last train by a few seconds HAHA (heng.. if not I'd have gotten stranded at Dhoby Ghaut)
______________________________________________________
10. Had an ADWO BBQ some time back as well at Daniel's house.
thank you Daniel and Family for hosting us (and listening to so much of our nonsense haha)

I drank a little, and felt a little weird.
hahah weird thoughts came to my mind. BUT I AM NOT DRUNK.

I merely asked if trees got drunk and everyone said that I was gone >:
______________________________________________________
11. Cousin-in-law gave birth to her son yesterday.
well, new excitement in the family.

hope that the little boy will grow up well.

"When you come in to this world, you cry, but everyone else is overjoyed that you are now here.
It is my hope that when I die, everyone will cry, but I will be overjoyed because I know that I have made a difference."
______________________________________________________
12. watched looper with Martin and Tiong Ann yesterday! (hahaha finally a Thursday off (: )
IT IS A GREAT MOVIE.

Drugs administered via eyedrops, time travel, Telekinesis, a vision of the future (yes things in the movie are still very much the same and that was what made it so realistic).

I kept jumping to conclusions and over-analysing! ughhh.
But I think my guesses would make another good story. hehehe.

The movie really made me think what would happen if my older self meets the me now.
well, I guess he'd think that I'm damn stupid haha.

"Here, I met a woman who would die for her son; a man who would kill for his wife; and a boy, angry with the world."

The protagonist's sacrifice at the end was... unexpected. (well at least for me)
I'd never have done it. I didn't think of it.

well, its a good twist.
very symbolic.
______________________________________________________
13. I've been preparing for Cambridge admissions for the past few months.
doing tys in camp is painful cause I lost touch with everything. SIGH.
Did get the answers to a few questions I have been constantly asking myself. haha.

The interview was alright.
The interviewer (Dr. Saxton) asked me to summarise Paul's Dirac's book and what he predicted.
Well, I remembered that he predicted the existence of the positron, but forgot that his theory predicted spin as well. haha. SIGH.

Next, he took a ping pong ball, dropped it, and asked me to find the fraction of energy lost on every bounce, and the time taken for the ball to stop bouncing, which were both alright, except for me having so many arithmetic errors UGHHHH -_-

oh well, it could have been worse.

essay test and TSA tomorrow!
hope it'll turn out well.
______________________________________________________
14. 2 members of the Zhonghua community passed away the past month.

One of them was an ex-student. I knew him personally, and at one point of time, was quite close to him.
He was a junior BB Boy (one year my junior), and I used to talk to him a lot.

However, as we stopped talking that much when I went on to sec 3, when I became a sergeant and took on responsibilities to be in charge of the company.

He stopped coming for parades, and I tried to persuade him to come back.
Didn't succeed though.

On hindsight, I guess it must have been because I talked to him in the capacity of a sergeant rather than a friend.

He had fits out of the blue one fine day.
And he passed away.. just like that.


The second person was a ZHSS teacher.

I wasn't particularly close to her, but she was my choir teacher in charge at one point of time.
I remember how some of us would bitch about her (haha) cause she didn't agree with us and give us what we wanted.

such immaturity. haha

She was the teacher in charge of my group when I went to vietnam in sec 3 as well.

She got posted out the next year.

I guess a lot of people were shocked when we found out that she passed away.
To many, she was a good teacher. responsible, caring, meticulous.

Her story appeared on wan bao.
I never knew her story until I read the article.

Harvard student, scholar, married to a polytechnic graduate (she's the main breadwinner of the family), her children are still very young.

Her passing away meant something more to her family.
Loss of income, loss of a soulmate, loss of a filial daughter, loss of the children's mother.

It is indeed a great loss to both all of us.

Well, RIP Ms Fu Shu Fen and Louis Mok.

"This is not my thing."

Once my friends and I reached legal bar-going age, I watched as we split into two factions. There were the people who went out to clubs to dance, and the people who went to pubs to sit and drink and talk loudly.
I hated the clubs. The music was awful, thumping electronic noise. I think I made about three attempts to have fun this way, and then I made a long-lasting error in judgment. I made a conclusion about myself I wasn't qualified to make: dancing is not for me.

As it turns out, much more investigation was required. But I didn't bother. I thought I knew. I’d endured three dull nights drinking draft under sweeping blue lights, pretending I was happy to be out and about but silently wondering how anyone could bring themselves to flail their bodies to uptempo remixes of Ricky Martin. So without quite realizing it, I decided I am not one who dances. I love music, but not the music people dance to.

A sweeping generalization like that, if it concerns who you are and what’s for you or not for you, can affect you for a long stretch of your life. For the next twelve years all invitations to go out dancing were declined by default.

That’s all it takes to keep something out of your life, a single instance of telling yourself  “This is not for me.” The problem is we don’t think much about what exactly constitutes “that” and so we’re prone to dismissing, just by association, a whole lot of experiences that maybe are for us. We lose track of our symbols.

Earlier this year it cracked — while traveling, which seems to be what I’m doing at all of the moments in which I become aware that a long-held misconception about myself has just died. I found myself sitting cross-legged on a friend’s floor, talking about music with a woman I’d just met. I liked her right away, and every time she mentioned an act I liked too, I felt closer to her.

When she mentioned she liked electronic dance music I felt a pang of disappointment — a bit less of a connection, momentarily. Somehow, nearly half a lifetime after I first rolled my eyes at a roomful of late-nineties club crowd, I figured some part of what I had seen and hated appealed to her.
And that’s because I already knew that is not for me. I’d known for years. I don’t dance. I think I said so.
I already knew her taste was excellent, though, and so I explored the music she was talking about, and of course it sounded nothing like the electro-pop I had hated as a teenager. It was awesome. Unpretentious and refined.

And now I dance. I love it. I should have been doing it all along.

To that day — and thankfully, never after — the image I had in my mind of going out to dance is the same one I rejected twelve years earlier: drunk teenagers dancing in a terrible suburban club to vapid anthem-pop.
What surprised me was how relevant my opinion of dance music still seemed, up until that moment. It felt true, but it was based on old, inadequate data, like most of our opinions probably are. Still, we tend to view our own beliefs as if they are real knowledge. I hadn’t realized how crusty and obsolete my impression of “dance music” was. In reality, since I’d last actively considered it, the sun had risen and set four thousand times, wars had been fought, borders had been redrawn, great loves had started and ended, eras had died. Children who were five then were now driving cars, and somehow I still felt like I had a pretty clear idea of what I was missing.

I can’t say for sure what my early dismissal of dancing cost me. Certainly hundreds of amazing nights out. Certainly dozens of would-be friendships and connections. Certainly it stifled my progress away from shyness and self-consciousness.

Naturally my personality gradually conformed toward the pub faction’s qualities and away from those of the club faction — toward more passive vibes where you sat and talked to the same few people, and away from more active and intimate social dynamics. I know now that the former is less me than the latter, given the superior vantage point I now inhabit, at 31 years. All I know for sure is that a huge amount of what I love was missed.

So essentially, at thirty-one years of age, a large area of my life — how I go out, how I recreate — was still being decided by a judgmental 19-year-old. I see now what a bad job that 19-year-old had been doing. He doesn't know me. He doesn't know what I value, what really turns my crank, what I ought to be afraid of or what I ought to seek out. My 29 year-old self wouldn't even do a very good job of telling me what to do. I’m a different person than he is.

This happens a lot. Much of what you do today (or don’t do) was decided by the person you were years ago, a person with less life experience and less insight into your values. Your identity — as in who you are to yourself, and who you are to others — changes throughout your life, and the person most qualified to be deciding how you spend your time now is always going to be who you are today.

But we often don’t work like that. We work from conclusions made years ago, usually with no idea of when we made them, or why. Most of our standing impressions are probably based on a single experience — one instance of unpleasantness or disappointment that turned you off of entire categories of recreational activities, lifestyles and creative pursuits, forever.

A conclusion is not the point at which you find the truth, it’s only the point at which the exploring stops. We do it quickly and unconsciously and the effects are long-lasting. In no time you’re left with a standing belief, a sort of surrogate “fact” in your head, left over from a time when you didn't know any better.
A lot of the things that feel like they are not for you are indeed for you. The person you used to be still wants you to be the person you used to be.

Beliefs collect like old magazines, except that even though they direct our behavior, we can’t really see them so we don’t think to clean them up or cull them. You may be familiar with the notion of challenging your beliefs but how do you actually do that in real life? Do you sit down with a big list and think about each one again?

That’s too abstract and too boring and if you've tried it you know it won’t get you anywhere. In real-time, moment-to-moment life, culling beliefs about yourself amounts simply to consciously doing things that feel like they’re not quite a natural fit for you, just to see what happens. If you’re not doing this on a regular basis — things that feel out of character for you — you are definitely missing out on a lot that is close to perfect for you.

Let the phrases “not my thing” or “not for me” become red flags to you whenever you hear yourself say them. How old was the person who decided that? Was it even a decision, or just an emotional reaction? How much do you really know about it?

Ask, or otherwise know that your lifestyle is still being directed by a younger and less experienced version of you who, frankly, doesn't know you at all.