Friday, April 9, 2010

A Noteworthy Friday

Today, was an eventful day.

I copied during my physics test while my lecturer was busy with her breakfast.

I boldly wrote "poem writing" as one of my hobbies for my resume.

I ate chinese food with PORK for lunch.

I lost feeling of my neck as I sat in the 4th row during Clash of the Titans.

I snapped two photos for my Visa and resume.

I snapped two photos which were really freakin expensive.

I ate chinese food with PORK for dinner.

I owned my roommate's Doombringer.

I murdered the bastard cockroach that crawled, for some reason, on my newly-snapped photos.

And last but not least, i'm glad i'm alive after all that has happened -.- happy?

Monday, April 5, 2010

So as It is

As the lands a raven scours
for insects little and some
So longs my heart for those hours
that surely wouldn't come


As a carpenter heedfully checks
if tarnished is his wood
So ponder I the facts
has this ended for good?


As a nail in steel is hammered
that resists its new-found tune
So finds my being asundered
by this pain I'm now immune


As a wanderer on his trail embarking
where the skies the limits set
So attempt my pointless besetting
where a yes thus wins the bet


As a tree its roots firm planted
in the earth itself to nurture
So leave my soul departed
to search for greener pastures


As the winds of March strong churn
and time so meekly flies
So unwilling did I learn
that love can't never die.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Freies Schreiben: Was gefaellt mir am meisten?

Wenn ich mich mit den anderen vergleiche, denke ich immer, dass ich nicht so viel habe. Zum Beispiel besitze ich wenige Besitz und auch wenig Geld im Konto, weil ich immer versuche, meine Eltern darum nicht zu bitten. Sogar auf meine Talente kann ich nicht so stolz sein. Quintessenzweise kann ich kein Klaview spielen, nicht wie die meisten Leute.

Aber obwohl di Dinge, die ich besitze, wenig und klein scheinen, bin ich trotzdem gluecklich mit ihnen. Ich mag Dota spielen und bin gut dabei (hahaha). Ich schaetze die Sprache Englisch, aber das wird leider ein bisschen vergeblich sein, wenn ich nach Deutschland gehe. Am meisten gefaellt mir aber meine Einstellung zum Leben.

Ich bin, was Leute sagen, unbeschwert und sorgenfrei. Und diese Einstellung passt eigentlich ganz gut zu mir. Ich gebe zu, dass ich etwas bequem bin. Trotzdem bin ich irgendwie noch erfolgreich, obwohl ich mich nicht so viel bemuehe. Vielleicht ist das nur Anfaengerglueck, aber jeden Tag bedanke ich mich bei Gott oder wem auch immer, der von oben mich hoeren kann, dass dieses Glueck nach 19 Jahre noch frei fliesst.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

There's no title 'cause this post is too long

Life is but a big fat gamble.

Who has gone fishing before? Hands up! If u haven't be warned: it's no activity for the impatient-hearted. Fishing is - i'd like to apologise to all reel-happy enthusiasts out there - an extremely boring, mundane and downright stupid activity. Can u figure out the point of sitting by the beach or in a boat for hours at a time, waiting for a moron of a fish to bite the bait? Well i can't. That's why i don't dislike it.

Here's the story. Couple of weeks ago my two cousins and i went on a miniature fishing escapade. Miniature coz our plan to fish overnight was foiled by fuming parents. Still, 7 hours by the sea, smelling the salt, being eaten by mosquitoes and intruded by unwelcome nostalgia is no small feat. And all that when the only thing keeping you busy is holding on tightly to a stick, whose every wobble sends your heart apounding but is more often than not caused by the wind or waves.

As i was 'fishing', thoughts began flitting into my head. Stuff like, "how the friggin hell am i sposed to know if the bait is still there?" You see, this is the biggest dilemma while fishing. The bait, usually a prawn, is pierced with the hook and thrown surreptitiously into the ocean. Henceforth, you wait. There is absolutely no way of knowing if the bait has been washed away by the tides or eaten by a fish that got away. OK, maybe there is and i'm just noob. Still.

My point is, it takes a l-o-t of nerve, to keep believing that your bait is still there. If you lose patience and pull the rod up early and the bait is indeed gone, lucky you. If you pull and the bait is still there, chances of catching fish decrease and sense of self stupidity increases, and all your built up effort is in vain.

Life is but a big fat gamble.

That i noticed while i was fishing by the sea. And that i noticed as i was kneeling down in church tonight.

Religion. God. Faith. All three are interwined, but not the same. Religion is a man-founded institution. God is, er, God. And faith - this was what stirred up my thoughts tonight.

Let's talk about faith per se. What is faith? With no reference whatsoever to the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, i define it as the belief in something that cannot be proven. So as in the case of fishing, it takes faith to leave your rod be and not reel in your line. And of course it takes faith to believe in God.

Why do we strive so hard, go to such great lengths, lecture our children endlessly to believe in God, let alone that there is a god? There has never been solid proof that God exists, so he or she might as well be a figment of our imagination. God has never given a press conference before. He has never spoken to us before (He has to u? Schizophrenic?). Then why do we pour so much effort into believing? It'd be so much better to work on something whose effect you won't have to wait until the next world to enjoy.

The longer i type, the more i feel my spare faith sapping away. *pull myself back together* The only explanation, or rather defense, that i could come up with to the above which sounds right to me is thus: probability. Yes, the math kind. Everything in this world is affected by probability. Why? Because probability does not aim to prove or disprove, it merely shows the possibilities. Probability = number of successful events / total events. As total events are infinite, the probability of something at every instance is never the same, and hence, probability can never be deemed incorrect.

A little more elaboration. Say, Assho flips a coin 10 times. 9 times, he gets heads. So the probability of obtaining heads is 9/10. Now Assho has a friend, say, Astard. Astard says that Assho's conclusion is false, as the coin has an equal chance of falling heads- or tails-side up. Who got it right, Assho or Astard? Assho formed his deduction from real-world results, whereas Astard merely used math.

In my opinion, neither of them is wrong nor right. I know this sounds like a goody-two-shoes remark, but hold your horses. Both their concepts, though logical, are not the only available set of answers, for they only considered TWO possibilities: heads and tails. But what if the coin landed on its side? What if the coin never reached the ground? What if it got destroyed in an Iraqi suicide mission? These outcomes, though admittedly absurd, are nevertheless still POSSIBLE. And so, they should be plugged into the probability equation under 'total events'. But they weren't.

What does this prove? It proves that nothing has a fixed number of outcomes and everything is possible. Right now, i'm lying on my bed with my fingers skimming across the keyboard. The chance of my laptop short-circuiting and exploding is like, 1/10000000000000. But just because the value is so infinitesimally minute, doesn't mean it won't happen. In fact, my laptop self-destructing could very well be highly probable, but i wouldn't know it.

So. Faith is nothing but a gamble, a guess, a bet. Why do people choose to believe in God? Because God has empowered their lives and shown them absolute proof that he's no hoax? Rubbi- oh wait, if i type that, i'd be contradicting every darn word i just painstakingly typed. I mean, that is very improbable. The most probable answer would be, we humans want to believe so. We want to be sure there's a higher being up there who watches our every move, who guides us through the darkest of our days and who forgives our many faults. We find consolation in a friend who never turns away from us and relish from the idea of heaven, that our woes will be justly repaid after going through a fcuked-up day at work.

Faith exists because we desire something to be true as we thought it to be. We have faith that dinner will be ready in 5 minutes - but that is easy faith, because we can observe see mum as she cooks in the kitchen. We have faith that we will ace a test - this is a little harder, coz although we prepared really hard, we do not know the questions yet. We have faith in the Higg's Boson, a hypothetical fundamental particle that gives matter mass - this is also easy faith, coz we would buy pretty much everything scientists tell us, and a scientist would never doubt himself. We have faith in love in a relationship - this is difficult faith, for it takes two to complete the belief. And lastly, the toughest of them all, we have faith in God - for then we would all be saved. Seriously?

Do you have faith in something, not because the world around you shouts "believe this!", nor rules and tradition deem it obviously so, but because you want it yourself? Can i?

Life is but a big fat gamble. So is believing in love and life. And personally i.... do choose to believe. After all, if i believed wrongly, what's the worst that could happen? I'd have to re-bait the hook. Known what it was like to love. Get laughed at by atheists. But if i'm right, a delicious fish will be caught, life would be happy and whole, and i get the right to bellow, "I told you so!"

And i really, really, enjoy the thrill of gambling.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

School Skipping is Fun!

Tomorrow is Holy Thursday, a day before Good Friday. It's actually a day i quite look forward to, because that's when my parents and i almost without fail go on our annual 'pilgrimage' around Malacca City. The so-called pilgrimage has the same schedule each year: mass at St Francis', dinner somewhere without meat (=( ), adoration at St Peter's, then back to St Francis' for Holy Hour, by which i'd usually be wishing i had toothpicks to force my eyes open.

Perhaps i'd gotten used to the fact that SFI takes a day off on Good Friday. But since coming to INTEC, holidays, let alone Christian-related ones, have been very hard to come by indeed. This year however, i'd be throwing caution and my German, Ethics, and half of Mechanics classes to the winds and go back home in time not only for Holy Thursday mass, but also hopefully for a nice long nap in my much-missed aircon room. Ahhhhhhhhhh. (seriously, somebody should start controlling the weather in Shah Alam, it's far too hot for habitation)

Surprisingly, my lecturers don't really mind me skipping class. *

OK, before you start going 'WHAAAT but i thought u're in a college!', let me remind you that i am in INTEC. A government centre. A close relative of UiTM, both in distance and ideologies. Hence, i feel more comfortable by calling it a school rather than a college, for numerous aspects of it uncannily and regrettably resemble those of a school.

*I'm not a teacher's pet and three quarters of my exercise books are spotlessly clean. Maybe it's got something to do with the fact that i -unlike a few of my classmate, say, 13 of them - make it to school at least once a week. For the record, my attendance is quite commendable, lol. Perhaps that's why the lecturers turn a blind eye and, as in the case of my Chemistry lecturer, mark me "absent with permission" even though i admitted i felt too lazy to drag my ass out of bed that day. Mmmh it's little things like that that make life worthwhile, eh?

After all, my Mechanics lecturer did shoo me out of class last week for my excellent grades. XD

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Frau Ogasa

It's 11.07pm. I just finished playing two games of dota with my surprisingly very willing housies and had fun ks-ing them as usual! And my german homework is untouched. Damn, this reminds me to never give this blog's address away to my lecturer.

But that is why Nicole is my favourite teacher. Of all time. Here's a brief preview of her: she's a native german from Hamburg, is a master of umpteen languages, has probably traveled to the darkest ends of the earth to teach, and is the sweetest person you will ever find. Prove it, you say?

Well, her most famous line is "Hausaufgaben sind egal", meaning "homework doesn't matter". Now isn't that just freakin awesome? Whether you do your homework or not, the class goes on as usual. Even if you skip a month's worth of homework which 'you must complete or I'll get really mad!", the worst you'll receive is a minute or two of anger flare which evaporates faster than methanol.

Some might think her ignorant or lazy, but i beg to differ. Her view on this is something like - i can't remember her exact words - 'you are who you are. everybody has their own personality. why force them to change?' I really like her way of thinking, though i don't agree with it at times (How can a person still converse in a singsong voice after a student so obviously lied about his homework?!). Perhaps teaching students of various attitudes and backgrounds and working on a PhD in psychology have toughened her up and led her to that conclusion.

I see 11.30. 20 minutes well spent. After all, anything's better than homework!
I'm not done with my previous post yet.

You see, this is one of the reasons why i don't really like blogging. My thoughts are never coherent with the speed of my typing. Sometimes i have ideas waiting to spill outta my brain. And at others (this being the majority) my fingers are drumming the keyboard impatiently, waiting for my cerebral cortex to issue a instructions as to what to type next. When 'pause dumbly in front of laptop' >/= 10xx, that's when i usually think, to hell with blogging. Boring my friends around me is so much easier and rewarding.

I really do admire people who update their blog regularly. In my opinion, it takes great discipline, not to update regularly, but to continue writing, despite knowing that you haven't been updating in donkey years. Makes sense?

Before this, i used to "a lighter word for scorn"

My Ears Are Killing Me Right Now

Hi! My name is Jude. As i compile this post, my housemate, HF (sorry, i'm not wearing a shirt now, and am very vulnerable to attacks) is singing a german song in a very... rain-summoning way. Ah, here he comes again, checking if i wrote his name.

Anyway, the reason i'm topless is because i just came back from playing badminton. Played a couple of tough matches earlier, thanks to my roommate who needed 98% court coverage. Perhaps it was the wasted energy, or the pounding rain, or the fact that i scrutinised religion with my classmate Ostan today, that inspired me to start blogging again. Note: previous blog failed miserably, and so did the countless ones before it. Well who cares, i'm not gonna try to make my posts drop-dead interesting anymore - is there even such a phrase? - but just type away whatever is on my mind.

Here are the reasons for my revival:

1. I'm fkin bored, waiting and waiting as my A levels loom closer
2. I recently have a lot of thoughts in my head, and as i don't wanna scare away my friends by talking too much, i turned to the internet
3. I must repolish my typing skills
4. I need a method of maintaining my english, as i won't be using it much when i go to germany

Hence this blog. If you wonder about its name... it's pretty obvious ain't it? I just love the song Vanilla Twilight. Though love songs are ironically poison for me nowadays. Well then, off to the bathroom now. The downside of playing badminton and enjoying my roommates theatrical mishits are that i have to wash my own clothes after that, which always end up stinking to a certain degree.. What can i say, i just didn't have my mother's washing skills - or maybe only a washing machine.