Flowers are pretty

flowers are sweet

nectar offerings

bees busy slurping

still,

if you listen carefully

in their hives you will hear

the bees whisper

not every flower is a honey pot

but each is worth a shot

and,

if you listen carefully

in the breeze you will hear

the flowers humming

not a fruit every flower becomes

but a beauty they each once was.

Timak -solo

timak and bowie (2)

 

 Timak is slowly gaining the upper hand in their jovial jousting. When she first arrived, Timak was still small and had to be submissive most of the time. Even then Timak loved to cari gaduh with Bowie who's like at least 11 years her senior. Nowadays I see Timak climbing on top of Bowie often haha. I think Bowie also malas nak layan Timak but Timak's playful nature is very persistent.

 Snapshots can be misleading! In this picture one would have bet that Timak is a done deal.

 Then sometimes they become nice pals again and start licking each other. I have seen Bowie helped Timak groomed her fur with his teeth before (that's what dogs do, though I can't describe it properly), but never seen Timak do it for Bowie. Perhaps Timak is too young to know the trick yet? Hmmm....

I was surprised that Timak didn't pounce on my camera right after this picture.

But she ran over to the palm branch and began to fight it. What a worthy challenge!

we be our own judges

when you are wrongly accused, 

when you feel unjustly judged,

don't lash back 

not immediately

stop, think, cool down

then act.

I assure you that you won't regret that moment of calm.

when your good will is ruined

when your gifts are mocked

when your tears flow in vain

don't blame

don't be ashamed

for everywhere there needs more people like us

give, and give, and give

and then

we give again.

we be our own judges

the hammer's held in our hands only

if slacking is what you wish today

then don't work

if breaking your back without pay is your desire

then don't stop

At the end of it all

nobody else goes into your mind

and tells you what you were
but your voice alone

as you heave 

your last breath.

Boom boom~

Thirteen minutes left in my lunch break, wonder if I can write a blog post before it ends?

A few days of last week were freakish. In terms of weather.
First it was super hot before 3pm. Well, about 33-35 Celsius la. The glare of the sun was so relentless that just standing out there gave me a headache in 5 minutes. Of course I needed to protect what's left of my little hair so I only challenged the sun with my scalp once.

Then after 3pm, you could see the dark clouds gathering in the sky and then...you see no more. The whole sky became just a piece of blurry, dimensionless dark gray. You knew then the storm would be one of a kind (at least to us in Malaysia anyway,,,,takkan nak compare to those hurricanes and cyclones meh?).

Still, when the first crack came, it was startling.
Lightning flashed across the sky in symphony, east, west, north south, a lightning in every direction you cast your eyes to. Thunder, loud booming thunder shook from above and if I didn't know better, I would have believed that the thunder took physical form and was cracking the clouds from the top. Before one roll of thunder ended, another lightning lit up the sky, heralding the coming of another thunder.

I was reading at first, then realised that the incessant sounds and flashes were quite abnormal. I ran to the balcony and stayed there longer than I expected. Raindrops wet my face and head, washing away the heat of the hours before. It was a sensory feast!

Tropical thunderstorm. Yeah baby!

the end is funny!

My best friend has left my side, but I am sure her phone calls will still plague me for a very long time.

Before she left, we had a ~2.5 hour chat over dim sum. Apparently she loves dim sum though I found that specific place just 'meh'.

We were both single (and still single haha), so naturally in between talking about ambitions/dreams (it was her birthday after all) we touched on our prospects of eventually ending our singlehood.

It was something we both hope for, yet also something we both don't dare to hope for.

This Saturday I will be part of my friend's wedding ceremony from start to end. I will be part of his Brothers Group (we will just get played a fool by the Bride's she-guards) in the morning and come evening I will be the emcee of his wedding dinner. I hope that the AWESOME positive energy of his wedding will blow away the dark clouds and perhaps...at the end of the ceremony, someone will tell me, not in a shy way,
"Eh, you quite good la. Still single? Me too. "
"Yeah still single ar. Interested in me ar? "
"Not interested la...just want to know you."
"Can, good good. Let me grab my angpow then we can go get a durian."


Wrote this post after I needed a break from correcting undergraduate's English for their FY project....

It's Alive~!

In how many days of the past month did you feel alive?

Beneath my often rational reasoning, there runs a river of emotions.

I may be happy, I may be angry, I may be worried. I may be all of these at the same time.


Yet to feel alive, that's uncommon.

Thus when Life kicks in, I take in every single sensation it can give.

When I like someone, I feel alive.
I never felt the same when someone likes me. Only when I like someone, I feel alive.

When my actions helped to grow the confidence of others, I feel alive.
One of the strongest emotions I felt in my life was the pride that swelled in me when one of my students, she who was timid, shy and awfully indifferent to everything, raised her hand to ask a question in class. If my life ended there and then, I would have died a very content person.

When I develop a vision, I feel alive.
This was how I felt today. As I enjoyed dinner alone [my dad's herbal chicken was unbelievably delicious] tonight, my mind drifted to thoughts of my future. I remembered that I had wanted to start a business a short while ago. I told myself that I love to teach. Last week it occurred to me that I should help out at orphanage(s). One thought latched on to another, accelerating as they danced into a swirl in my mind even as I continued to eat. Before I finished the drumstick, the swirling stopped, and I had a vision. It was a philosophy- and passion-driven goal, equipped with a (general) practical plan and a healthy dose of romanticism. That's what I call a vision. For the second time in my life, I stamped an 'to do by X age' mark on something*. This time, X = 40.


What makes you feel alive?
Yes, you can reply "Reading your words make my cells dance!'.
I know it's true.


*1st time was 'to get my Ph.D. before 28'. I got mine at 27.

 

Volunteering for a positive purpose is a rewarding way to put life into your life.

weddings

A close friend registered his marriage on Saturday.
I will be emcee for another friend's wedding in 3 weeks' time.

Time to dial my friends in India to check on their progress with mission "Find me a wife".

I am hoping that during my friend's wedding, there will be an overflow of charming, single ladies. If I can dazzle them with my awesome emcee skills on stage, perhaps I will be the second happiest man next to my friend that night :).

On the other hand, the excitement and pressure of hosting someone's wedding ceremony/dinner is scaring me...I hope I can sleep well over the next few weeks!

No picture for this post. Just imagine me with JEALOUSY painted across every cm2 of my face.

the mismatched

Kind of silly being a candle to the blind,

when the walking stick is the true need.

March 20, 2011: Tamil Nadu trip, in Kanchipuram

Notes added while typing this are indicated in [...]. Otherwise the rest is copied directly as is from my travel journal.

********************************]

March 20, 2011. 10.38pm.

Last night of my stay in Kanchipuram [I stayed a week in Kanchipuram volunteering for a local NGO]. Tmr morning I head off to C.M.B.T. of Chennai [CMBT stands for Central Mofussil Bus Terminus, the largest in Asia. Don't expect much though] by bus and from there catch a 1pm A/C bus to Chidambaram. I've enjoyed my time here in Kanchipuram, particularly so because my teaching in rural schools and my two German friends here. I got along really nicely with them, and Mathias is a really nice boy w/o the usual antics you would expect a kid from a developed country might have. Today he cleaned the room so thoroughly I was impressed [and embarrassed too].

Last Wednesday I went for a Kaittaikuttu performance of the local Kanchipuram Kaittaikuttu Sangam. The actual show was performed by another group, not the local Kanchi troupe [the local troupe was apparently very famous, they performed on Tuesday]. I knew of this academy before I came, it being one of the places I'd like to visit. So happen that this week they are holding a 'kuttu' (drama) festival and seminar--shows 8pm and 10pm daily. It was still out of the way w/o buses, luckily Alex was interested & got her friend's husband who's an autorickshaw driver to do our driving [even the driver thought we were lost! luckily we didn't decide to walk hahahaa]. The performance was really nice, though I only understood little of the Tamil dialouge [but I could catch many words, just couldn't catch the sentences!].

that was a guy.

I found the character 2nd from the right very cute!!

The costumes were very decorated with huge headsets & skirts. All male actors, even for female roles. There was a lot of singing, vocalization, duet dialouges.

The character on the right was Rama. First time I saw a greenish Rama~

 Interestingly, a 'clown' existed throughout the play and seemed to serve a peculiar role of threading the plot along as characters conversed with him, and also a comedian role by doing funny physical stunts that were not only unrelated to the plot but very distracting too [the children loved it though]. The 4th wall was broken w/o hesitation.

this was at the beginning when they sang a series of verses. The guy sitting behind the purple stand sang for 2 hours straight...unbelievable.

  Monolouges were almost all sung.  Actors also served as musicans and would join the band on center stage to do some instruments or sing the lines.

Check out the hands of the actors at the back =)

They would blatantly drink tea on stage [the director of the academy actually went on stage and served them tea at the back. So nice] & wear modern tshirts--totally out of sync with the play. Thus I think this form of performance--at least the one I enjoyed--was very less formal than bharatanatyam, required less effort to appreciate, and is much more flexible than many old, classical formal arts [Kaittaikuttu is centuries old itself and has been a continuous evolution].

It was a village style performance, a once common fare in South and Southeast Asia.  Performances used to draw huge audiences from the surrounding villages and last eight hours through the night. Now we urban kids never see such things no more. Oh yes, we have the cinema and LotR's 3 hours were a pain in the butt (literally).

I also went to two temples this past week, but I shall leave them for tmr night's writing., since I don't expect to have much to write about the trip to Chidambaram.


10.54pm.