Monday, July 31, 2006

So busy, yet still wasting time...

########################################################################
Due to the massive demands for biographies after the post that I wrote for Justin, I shall not write another biography for a while until the whole matter has subsided....JUST KIDDING!!! Don't worry guys, you'll get your share after I know you all better. Say, another year or two maybe. MAYBE....maybe :D
########################################################################


Aduh, looks like Lower Six won't be a honeymoon year for me ler. So many man, so little time....oops. That was a Dance Dance Revolution song,haha. Sorry for that. *Ahem*. So much homework, so much time..... but I'm wasting too much of it. And I just seem to have so many things to do, though this is relative and might not seem much to you. The thing is that I'm used to having entire months free back in my Form 4 Form 5 days. But now...

In the coming month (August) alone, I've got to study for my coming St. John's test, I have three friends' brithdays coming up, I need to work out the payments for TRU's treasury, I need to attend the SIB Youth Conference and we're not even into August yet!!
College is probably tougher but for me this is just overkill. Just the other day I was worrying that I would not be able to pass the St.John's exam as I only have 2 weeks left to study and I 've forgotten a lot about first aid. Trouble trouble,and I began to think whether it would be worth it to renew my first aid certificate. All the other activities soon came along to haunt me and the thought of not having enough time to do everything bugged me a lot.


However, one night as I wanted to read the Bible, I picked up the red-coloured Bible Bytes (yea I know, it's really old) cause I saw it sitting so lonely among the books in the rack behind my desk. So I just flipped it and read some of the notes. Just a moment later I was reminded of this passage in Matthew 6 that says "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." And yeah, it sure made things a lot better for me. I've finally figured that if it's God's will for me to pass the exam, then I have nothing to worry about. Not in the sense that I don't have to study for it, but that I can rest easy knowing God would provide the means for me to overcome it.

I still lack time management skills but each day has enough worries of it's own I guess. No point thinking bout trying to save time tomorrow when I'm wasting time now. Gotta get going then guys, must try to save time!!

Monday, July 24, 2006

Cousinship at it's best...

This post is dedicated to my cousin, the one and only Justin Lee!!

I had known Justin for as long as I could remember, dating back to when we were just wee little tykes. Yeah, those were the days that I treasured, being young and carefree,or 'freely winged' as Crissy would put it. Justin used to come down to Kuantan (when I lived I Kuantan that time) together with his family to visit us and all the other relatives about once or twice a year. Of the 365 days in a year, the week or so that he would be in Kuantan had always been more memorable and enjoyable than all the rest of the days in the year put together. True enough, I remember little of my childhood days save for the times that I spent with him.

Back then before I knew about videogames, my favourite past time was watching Hindi movies. Yup, the three-hour, action-packed and ala High School Musical kind of Hindi movies. Then came along one of my uncles who brought home a console (can't q
uite remember what it was) and from then on Justin became my gaming partner-in-crime. Oh the many games that filled my childhood memories...

We also bought quite a number of gaming machines together, I bought the Sega Mega Drive, he had an Atari (I think) and later I got a GameBoy Pocket, then we both got ourselves a Playstation and a GameBoy Color. Following that Justin bought a PS2 three years later while my friend gave me a GameBoy AdvanceSP for my birthday. So yea, gaming goes way back in our cousinship because if it wasn't for games, I know I wouldn't have learned to speak English. He only knew how to speak in English so it became a necessity for me to brush up my English every year to better communicate with him. It used to be that we spoke more Malay I think, then Malay-English then English-English as of present. I have him to thank partly for my As in English language.

I must say that Justin had always been a very positive influence on me. As I often dwelled on all the negative aspects of situations and circumstances, to me Justin led a really good life both spiritually and socially. He always seemed to be so happy, with so many seem
ingly close friends . I envied the fact that his life was constantly sunny and enojoyable while I had to wade through thunderstorms and heavy rains more often than I would have liked. So everytime he came back to Kuantan I made it a point to learn something from him and I would experience positive 'high's, so to speak after he had gone back to Kuantan. And now I think I know why: it must have been his Christian upbringing and having been involved with the church's youths that he had developed such a good personality and mentality. Ah....

I think it would take me quite a while to really describe Just
in as he is, but I'm sure that most, if not all of you who know him doesn't need to hear it from me to know that Justin's a great guy. If not, how would he have managed to woo (is that the right word i wonder :D) Miss Lee Xin Xin. It's pretty amazing that both Justin's parents' surnames are Lee and now his 'companion' is also from the Lee family line. Too bad mine's an obscure one,haha. 1 Timothy 5: 24-25 "The sins of some men are obvious, reaching the place of judgement ahead of them; the sins of others trail behind them. In the same way, good deeds are obvious, and even those that are not cannot be hidden."

I think I would end here lah and instead just let you guys comment
on the post. Had Justin done something good to you? Or was he naughty in the past (hmm..that'll be interesting) ? But here's a toast (a real one, not the marmalade toast from earlier) to the decade plus of great cousinship that you've given me dude. And I hope you like this:

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Just some babbling....

The sad thing with writing blogs is that you have to update it often or it gets stale really fast. Then there's the pain of choosing which topic to write about. Do I write about this? Or that? Or maybe...ah nevermind. But I like it when people come to read my blog, it's fun when I've done a good job at making a post that's both nice to read and insightful at the same time, though my stringent quality check ensures that each blog takes more than 2 hours on average...guess I'll have to be more efficient :D Thanks for coming to read my blog guys!

Sunday, July 16, 2006

The ball's MINE!!!!!!

Another week, another Sunday. Time sure flies by whether you're having fun or not. But then again, the past weekend has brought me a lot joy, a great break from the daily grind of battling with Biology and Maths T (teruk). Sometimes, I think that I'd have a lot more time for myself if I didn't need to go for TRU and Sunday worship. I could play Dota with my friends, I could go out and watch movie without the need to rush home before 3 o'clock and ALSO sleep later on Sundays. Sometimes. Of course, weekend after weekend I continue to be proven wrong. If I had not gone to TRU,what would I have done? Play Dota with my friends? Go watch movie? Suddenly, from the perspective of a TRU-er I showed little concern for these kind of activities...and last Saturday at the post COPA-IBA dinner I really had a good time at the session and dinner. If I had stayed home instead, I would have whacked myself hard on the cerebral region....kudos to the ones involved in organizing last Saturday's activities!

On the following Sunday morning, things were like normal except for the Committee meeting and the fasting. Actually, I kinda like going for the meetings,in a sense that it's more fun to be involved in the 'team' but of course ol' Spidey's quote always trails along. Yea yea, with this comes that. With roti canai comes teh tarik.......aih, though responsibility is a good way to build character I guess. But the REAL highlight of the day was in the evening. I went over to Ju
stin's place to deliver his Maggi mee goreng and dropped by to play some games. So we played Naruto first, and he's better lah of course (to explain the entire gaming lagacy between us would take on an entirely different topic, so I'd save it for the future).

So then he recommends Winning Eleven 10, a football game with a pretty good reputation but I've never played it lah cause I sucked at real football, what more th
e digital version. But nevermind, I played along and in the first two games we played I had two of my players getting slapped with the red card. Thats's justified of course if you had seen how I tackled Justin's players. I even injured his player once or twice. Needless to say, I lost (we even played a really close penalty).

But then during one of the later rounds, I got a better grip of the game. I dribbled like mad to get higher ball possession (maybe like 60-70%) and my first goal scored in the game came from...JUSTIN'S GOALKEEPER!!!! I had one person like 3 feet in front of the goal and he had two or three persons there taking the ball. The replay showed his player passing the ball to the goalkeeper right in front of the goal, my player standing there l
ike a banana and the goalkeeper did the most brilliant thing ever. Turned around and dribbled into the goal. YEAH!!! I don't care if it's his fault, I, ME, YOURS TRULY SCORED!!! After a terrible spell of laughing over the own-goal, we managed to carry on.

That game I owned the ball in dribbling and passing, and a beautiful, beautiful goal came not long after. This time I 'orchestrated' the goal, so to speak :D And boy, did we have fun or what! The adrenaline high was akin to taking two shots of hard whisky and knocking your head on the wall repeatedly (NOT that I've tried it of course...no no...nope)

By the time the game was over, I was adrenaline-pumped and
felt giddy and was sweating quite a bit. Good exercise man. But Justin being the "Not satisfied!!! AGAIN!!!" person that he is, we played again. I lost lah, but still the game was truckloads of fun. Man, next week's gonna be a blast :D

winning_eleven2

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Google Adsense? Hm....

LOOKS like I finally decided to put up my own blog, after taking a hiatus from blogging since my early days of playing with MSN's MySpace (not the US one). Of course,I noticed that there is an option to put AdSense into to the blog, so I'll use this to see if it actually works. I'll come back to you guys once I start making a hundred dollars or more a week, heheh :D Here's a toast to the opening of my blog! Ehmmm...that's a good-looking toast dressed in marmalade.

For those of you who has no idea whose blog this is, you can take a look this camp photo (2nd from left)

Here's a recap on the interesting events that happened to me recently...
(a) I had been to an inter-church Bible Quiz and as a member of the floor team (all the five churches that took part had four people on stage and several people off the stage doing separate but similar tasks), I was the one who scored all the points....NOLAH!!!! Haha, kidding kidding...everyone did a great job but too bad my church only got second-place.

The winning team was pretty good, but I think most of us (my teammates)
were pretty mystified as to how they could actually win when in the beginning they had difficulty answering a REALLLLLYY simple question. In layman's terms, it would've sounded like "What is the other name for football in America?" or something like that...BUT, I guess they had a good floor team and with all due respect, I think they deserved to win the quizlah in the end.

For them, they were merely the defending the title that they've been holding for the past two years but for my church, I think the whole magic of it lies in the fact that (well, magic for those of us in the quiz team lah at least) we all worked really hard for the quiz and the second-placing (compared to the previous year's bottom ranking) was really just God patting us on our backs saying well done. Winning wasn't important, as I learned a lot from the book that we studied , 1 Timothy and while on the way home after the quiz was over, the warm and beautiful sunset ended my first Bible Quiz experience on a high and positive note.


(b) Yeah, the World Cup is finally over and boy am I glad or what. Not that I didn't like it but I just thought that the adverts that they had been putting on TV, on the radio, in mamak stalls and practically every nook and corner of available marketing space were starting to get on my nerves. I mean,come on lah, I can only hear the "FOOTBALL MAD NATION, RULLLLLED BY CELCOM!!!!!!!!!!" shouts on the TV so often before I feel like giving those advertising people over at Celcom a piece of my mind.

The most ironic thing is that I was at my cousin's house to catch the uber-late night live match of the Finals (Darn the FIFA members, can't they have it somewhere nearer to Malaysia?) and guess what, I fell asleep through the first seven minutes of the game and brilliantly missed the first goal. Fine, so I sat up and mustered whatever mental energy I had left in me to watch for the next 40 minutes or so until the half-time break. No goals. WHAT?!! Gah, at that point my eyes weren't there anymore...they had taken a holiday and so with scarcely any idea of what happened in the second half, I suddenly awoke in the morning to find everyone sleeping in the hall. The match was..over. And I don't even remember falling asleep in the first place.

So much for the cup..give me a Pixar animation any day lah, World Cup was never in my genetic code and probably won't be. But I liked the hype in some ways lah, in a sense that it's a 'once every four years' thing. Sure livened up the year and I'd look forward to 2010 to watch it again I guess.