1. pick up drums from where i left it 8y ago
2. golf
3. swimming so i can do other water sports e.g. wakeboarding, kayaking etc
4. cycling, in case i move to the dam
5. sky diving
6. have an extremely cute kid.. >> this means if the kid is not cute i might have like 200 before i give up. :O
7. stay in a few countries for a couple of years each before finally deciding if i wanna return.
8. backpack in at least 50 countries
9. speak 5 languages fluently
10. i think i seldom wish for anything or actually sit down to think cos i cant even fill the 10th up… boo.

this whole judgemental thing has gotten so bad that i’m feeling this way even towards my relatives. i’m hating that i stay in the heartland full of stupid assholes. hating all that anti-government coffeeshop talk with no proper grounds. hating the bad service everywhere. hating how people are so inconsiderate. everyday when i speak to marcus, im complaining how much i hate something. i think i’m just dissatisfied with the world, but more so in singapore.

i even speak of leaving the country infront of all my loved ones. then my relatives started asking, what about your dad? i just said there’s skype. i think im hurting people around me. what do i do? i dont know..

i stop being happy. i kinda forgot what it is. the happiest thing that has happened to me in months was yesterday night when someone told me we could do an MBA together in US and just fuck off from this country.

sighs. something is definitely wrong with me. i feel myself changing into someone i dont recognise yet i cant stop feeling this way about everything. the only good thing is i know and i’m trying to stop but the bad thing is it’s getting worse. so what do i do now? i dont understand. i’ve always thought i’m a pretty nice person. now im just full of angst. perhaps it’s the lack of sex. perhaps, like what marcus said, im just out in the workforce so im hungry to succeed thus i start filtering everyone whom i think is not good enough so i dont waste any time on them.

whatever it is, i think i need to do something about me…

Eduardo Calasanz was a student at the Ateneo Manila University, Philippines, where he had Father Ferriols as professor. Father Ferriols, at that time, was the Philosophy department head. Currently he still teaches Philosophy for graduating college students in Ateneo. Father Ferriols has been very popular for his mind opening and enriching classes but was also notorious for the grades he gives. Still people took his classes for the learning and deep insight they take home with them every day (if only they could do something out the grades…) Anyway, come grade giving time, (Ateneo has letter grading systems, the highest being an A, lowest at D, with F or flunk), Fr Ferriols had this long discussion with the registrar people because he wanted to give Calasanz an A+. Either that or he doesn’t teach at all…Calasanz got his A+. Read the paper below to find out why.
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PARTNERS AND MARRIAGE
By Eduardo Jose E. Calasanz

I have never met a man who didn’t want to be loved. But I have seldom met a man who didn’t fear marriage. Something about the closure seems constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for what it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes possible within our lives.

When I was younger this fear immobilized me. I did not want to make a mistake. I saw my friends get married for reasons of social acceptability, or sexual fever, or just because they thought it was the logical thing to do. Then I watched, as they and their partners became embittered and petty in their dealings with each other. I looked at older couples and saw, at best, mutual toleration of each other. I imagined a lifetime of loveless nights and bickering and could not imagine subjecting myself or someone else to such a fate.

And yet, on rare occasions, I would see old couples who somehow seemed to glow in each other’s presence. They seemed really in love, not just dependent upon each other and tolerant of each other’s foibles. It was an astounding sight, and it seemed possible. How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many years of sameness, so much irritation at the other’s habits? What keeps love alive in them, when most of us seem unable to even stay together, much less love each other?

The central secret seems to be in choosing well. There is something to the claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to succeed. It is important to find someone with whom you can create a good relationship from the outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see clearly in the early stages. Sexual hunger draws you to each other and colors the way you see yourselves together. It blinds you to the thousands of little things by which relationships eventually survive or fail. You need to find a way to see beyond this initial overwhelming sexual fascination. Some people choose to involve themselves sexually and ride out the most heated period of sexual attraction in order to see what is on the other side.

This can work, but it can also leave a trail of wounded hearts. Others deny the sexual side altogether in an attempt to get to know each other apart from their sexuality. But they cannot see clearly, because the presence of unfulfilled sexual desire looms so large that it keeps them from having any normal perception of what life would be like together.

The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long-time friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each other’s laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. They share time together before they get swept into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality.

This is the ideal, but not often possible. If you fall under the spell of your sexual attraction immediately, you need to look beyond it for other keys to compatibility. One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy each other’s company over the long term.

If your laughter together is good and healthy, and not at the expense of others, then you have a healthy relationship to the world. Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other. And if you can always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new.

Beware of a relationship in which there is no laughter. Even the most intimate relationships based only on seriousness have a tendency to turn sour. Over time, sharing a common serious viewpoint on the world tends to turn you against those who do not share the same viewpoint, and your relationship can become based on being critical together.

After laughter, look for a partner who deals with the world in a way you respect. When two people first get together, they tend to see their relationship as existing only in the space between the two of them. They find each other endlessly fascinating, and the overwhelming power of the emotions they are sharing obscures the outside world. As the relationship ages and grows, the outside world becomes important again. If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way you can’t accept, you will inevitably come to grief. Look at the way she cares for others and deals with the daily affairs of life. If that makes you love her more, your love will grow. If it does not, be careful. If you do not respect the way you each deal with the world around you, eventually the two of you will not respect each other.

Look also at how your partner confronts the mysteries of life. We live on the cusp of poetry and practicality, and the real life of the heart resides in the poetic. If one of you is deeply affected by the mystery of the unseen in life and relationships, while the other is drawn only to the literal and the practical, you must take care that the distance doesn’t become an unbridgeable gap that leaves you each feeling isolated and misunderstood.

There are many other keys, but you must find them by yourself. We all have unchangeable parts of our hearts that we will not betray and private commitments to a vision of life that we will not deny. If you fall in love with someone who cannot nourish those inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in her, you will find yourselves growing further apart until you live in separate worlds where you share the business of life, but never touch each other where the heart lives and dreams. From there it is only a small leap to the cataloging of petty hurts and daily failures that leaves so many couples bitter and unsatisfied with their mates.

So choose carefully and well. If you do, you will have chosen a partner with whom you can grow, and then the real miracle of marriage can take place in your hearts. I pick my words carefully when I speak of a miracle. But I think it is not too strong a word. There is a miracle in marriage. It is called transformation. Transformation is one of the most common events of nature. The seed becomes the flower. The cocoon becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes spring and love becomes a child. We never question these, because we see them around us every day. To us they are not miracles, though if we did not know them they would be impossible to believe. Marriage is a transformation we choose to make. Our love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins to flower. We cannot know the flower that will blossom, but we can be sure that a bloom will come.

If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the bloom will be good. If you have chosen poorly or for the wrong reason, the bloom will be flawed. We are quite willing to accept the reality of negative transformation in a marriage. It was negative transformation that always had me terrified of the bitter marriages that I feared when I was younger. It never occurred to me to question the dark miracle that transformed love into harshness and bitterness. Yet I was unable to accept the possibility that the first heat of love could be transformed into something positive that was actually deeper and more meaningful than the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in was the power of this passion and the fear that when it cooled I would be left with something lesser and bitter.

But there is positive transformation as well. Like negative transformation, it results from a slow accretion of little things. But instead of death by a thousand blows, it is growth by a thousand touches of love. Two histories intermingle. Two separate beings, two separate presence, two separate consciousnesses come together and share a view of life that passes before them. They remain separate, but they also become one. There is an expansion of awareness, not a closure and a constriction, as I had once feared. This is not to say that there is not tension and there are not traps. Tension and traps are part of every choice of life, from celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers. Each choice contains within it the lingering doubt that the road not taken somehow more fruitful and exciting, and each becomes dulled to the richness that it alone contains.

But only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and be leavened by the knowledge that two have chosen, against all odds, to become one. Those who live together without marriage can know the pleasure of shared company, but there is a specific gravity in the marriage commitment that deepens that experience into something richer and more complex.

So do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush into it for the wrong reasons. It is an act of faith and it contains within it the power of transformation. If you believe in your heart that you have found someone with whom you are able to grow, if you have sufficient faith that you can resist the endless attraction of the road not taken and the partner not chosen, if you have the strength of heart to embrace the cycles and seasons that your love will experience, then you may be ready to seek the miracle that marriage offers. If not, then wait. The easy grace of a marriage well made is worth your patience. When the time comes, a thousand flowers will bloom…endlessly.

Social Psychology taught me that everytime you feel upset you should write down all the negative emotions as and when and after something like 20 days, you’ll feel much better. But the thing is, I don’t even know how to pen down these negative feelings.

Anyway besides that, my grandpa is in hospital due to a heart attack. I feel like I’ve been going to the hospital alot this year. I never knew why people hated the hospital but after spending 123123 days in the hospital, I finally got it. It just upsets you to see patients in ICU, knowing that some of them might not survive. All the machines attached to the patients and every single beep the machines make make your heart skip a beat. You are afraid… Afraid that you might witness someone die.

I still regret not crying when my grandma passed away. I was two. I shouldn’t blame myself for it because most kids don’t even have much memory of themselves at two, much less understand what a funeral is. But my grandma is my only memory from 0 to 2 years old. I could still remember vividly what happened on the first day of the wake. I was in the car and I asked my dad where we were going. He told me it was my grandma’s funeral. I guess I didn’t know what funeral meant then so I just said ok and went along. As I got older, somehow that conversation kept ringing in my head, and guilt engulfed me. What made it worse was I kept getting the same dream of my grandma playing with me in this particular playground yearly till I was 12 and a friend said it might be my grandma watching over me, making sure I was fine before she decides to reincarnate. Thank you friend but I did not feel better. I just cry buckets everytime I think of it.

You know sometimes you need to let it all out but refuse to cry because you think the issue is not worth your tears or you just have too much pride to cry even when no one’s watching? The best solution, for me at least, is to think about every other sad thing in this world that makes you cry and indulge in it. It makes you feel better because you have cried and (delusionally) it’s not over whatever issue you were upset about.

The other thing you can do is to read the Bible and speak to God. And that is exactly what I am going to do now.

Tomorrow will be a better day.

So I was at a photoshoot today with Tim. He is the photographer for this yet to be launched blogshop. It didn’t help that one of them was someone I used to know and my impression of him wasn’t the best. Our brains usually make schemas about people and fill in the blanks automatically for information that you don’t have with what you already know and start deriving at a possible judgement of someone. Anyway, so the couple was either dishing out fake laughters and responses at times or ignoring you altogether. The offer to send me back was such a bad attempt at sincerity I think Bush did better at convincing the Americans that the war against Iraq was really for the good of humanity.

This is totally irrelevant but does anyone know of something called armpit cancer? I have this HUGE lump, something like 15-20mm in diameter, that is almost rock hard. And no, it’s not a pimple. There are no white spots around the area where it looks like you can squeeze and spurt all that white pus onto the mirror 123123m away. I know I’m being disgusting but Tim kept mentioning that whole pimple and mirror thing whenever he gets a pimple and it’s stuck in my head.

Charles was right. It is different. You can’t see a lot of things over skype. I regretted being so sure and telling him he was wrong. I hate predictions like these coming true. I hate ‘I told you so’.

Things would have been so different. Nothing would have started. If I have to apply what I’ve learnt in psychology to manipulate minds so things work out, am I exploiting the use? And if I have to use psychology, isn’t it already trying to steer something somewhere with controlled thinking? Chemistry is not supposed to be like this. Counterattitudinal advocacy is supposed to be used for good e.g. to discourage discrimination of genders and races, not for relationships to work.

Thinking of good times is not applicable if good times are countable by your fingers and bad times seem infinite. Also, the damage per bad time is not quantifiable. Even if it is, the one bad time is sufficient to counter all good. You start doubting and asking yourself why you put yourself through everything.

Why let someone blow his fuse at you so often when you control yourself not to lose your temper at him? Why when you ask why he often gets impatient he said since you know asking makes me frustrated why still ask? Why doesn’t he think that a lot of things he do frustrates me but losing temper is something I’ll never do cos it only makes things worse? Why is it that when we are happy I can’t clarify my doubts and when he’s in a bad mood it’s a bad time to bring anything up? Why say communication is important when he only chooses to hear what he wants to hear? Why all answers to any doubt is I love you and don’t ask anymore before I get frustrated when the questions weren’t even about love?

Why did he have to put his fb status to in a relationship with privacy settings only visible to my friends and I? Why is the difference between week 0 and 1 (decision to put me up at grandparents’ place) not felt? Why is it that the only progress at week 1 was the need to ask every other stakeholders (who have a share in the grandparents’ place) involved? Why isn’t it already done cos he’s concerned over my well being? Why did he say it was not being pushed cos I was emoing too much and the relationship was not stable? Why did he make me felt like he was more worried if we broke up at some point when he pushed the decision rather than if I have a shelter over my head? Why is it that everytime I get really upset over the family situation he gets sick the next day and can’t meet? Why when things are over and I am no longer emo he doesn’t fall sick and say not meet me anymore? Why does he make me feel like he only wants to see me when I’m happy? Why when I explicitly stated long before vday that I want flowers it just didn’t happen even though he said he knew what to do? Why was his excuse flowers were unattainable on cny day one when he knew in advance that I wanted? Why did he say I thought your ex-es didn’t do much? Why did it feel like it doesn’t matter as long as he did more than the rest (when in actuality, I had better)? Why did he make me feel like he didn’t care enough all the time?

Why am I writing this when I have an uber important interview tomorrow but he is sound asleep cos he loves me even lesser now than the little love he had to even care?

Too many whys. The right thing to do now is to sleep because no one is going to give me a chance if I don’t do well tomorrow.

A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.

Praise Him for His glory and thank Him for His thorns.

That’s my favorite quote. It makes me feel better about everything bad that’s going on in my life. You can only feel better when you truly want to. It’s all in the mind and I’m in control. If I have to learn it the hard way, I will. Cliches, like the following, do actually work sometimes.

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.

I’m a little happier. :)

The song I’ve never heard…

Jason Mraz – I’m Yours

Well you done done me and you bet I felt it
I tried to be chill but you’re so hot that I melted
I fell right through the cracks
Now I’m trying to get back
Before the cool done run out
I’ll be giving it my bestest
And nothing’s going to stop me but divine intervention
I reckon it’s again my turn to win some or learn some

I won’t hesitate no more, no more
It cannot wait, I’m yours

Well open up your mind and see like me
Open up your plans and damn you’re free
Look into your heart and you’ll find love love love love
Listen to the music of the moment babay sing with me
I love peace for melody
And It’s our God-forsaken right to be loved love loved love loved

So I won’t hesitate no more, no more
It cannot wait I’m sure
There’s no need to complicate
Our time is short
This is our fate, I’m yours

Scooch on over closer dear
And i will nibble your ear

I’ve been spending way too long checking my tongue in the mirror
And bending over backwards just to try to see it clearer
But my breath fogged up the glass
And so I drew a new face and laughed
I guess what I’m be saying is there ain’t no better reason
To rid yourself of vanity and just go with the seasons
It’s what we aim to do
Our name is our virtue

But I won’t hesitate no more, no more
It cannot wait I’m sure

Well open up your mind and see like me
Open up your plans and damn you’re free
Look into your heart and you’ll find that the sky is yours
Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t
There’s no need to complicate
Cause our time is short
This oh this this is out fate, I’m yours

Through my eyes
Time goes by like tears
My emotion’s losing the color of life
Kill my heart
Release all my pain
I’m shouting out louder
Insanity takes hold over me

Turning away from the wall
Nothing I can see
The scream deep inside
reflecting another person in my heart
He calls me from within
“All existence you see before you
must be wiped out :
Dream, Reality, Memories,
and Yourself”

I begin to lose control of myself
My lust is so blind, destroys my mind
Nobody can stop my turning to madness
No matter how you try to hold me in your heart
Why do you wanna raise these walls
I don’t know the meaning of hatred
My brain gets blown away hearing words of lies
I only want to hold your love

Dry my tears
Wipe my bloody face
I wanna feel me living my life
outside my walls

I think that was the first hearty laugh I had in a long time. Anyway, if anyone has a room to rent me on credit till I start work, please tell me. :(