Tuesday, March 21, 2006

The Perfect Fever

I've recently been down with a fever. A perfect fever.

I had the whole package that comes with a fungal infection:

-coughing fits
-sneezing bouts
-food tastes sour and terrible
-cant smell nothing
-head feels heavy
-body feels cold, yet hot

It's terrible being sick. heh. Days just seem to flow by wastefully. Lucky thing I don't have school now or it'll be terrible time lost for a project =/.

BUT the kicker has to be how terrible my body felt. Like I am 70 years older, limping, head swirling and begging to be set on a pillow, feeling cold n needing a blanket. And when on a bed I felt like a beached whale, as if i were melting into the bed, or 'one with the mattress'.

Okay enough about weird posts about my sicknesses.

"The effect knowledge and experience has on a human being is one of the most serious differences that an adult has to a child - cynicism."
-Me

jOhn thought at 2:55 PM

Monday, March 20, 2006

The 8th deadly sin: Television

My flat has no TV. That's right folks. NO. DARN. TELEVISIONN. Surprise surprise. Well, in my almost a year of nOt having any TV, I have discovered, and largely agreed with my dad on the evils of TV.

TV WASTES TIME. Seriously. The average adult spends 24 hours a week glued to the television. Just imagine what you can do with the same 24 hours of perfect, usable, fully-functional, fully-awakened time? Go, write a book, read a book, help somebody, make new friends! You only spend about a quarter of your life in school. so tRy to make the most of it!. Instead of watching Desperate Housewives. Seriously, who needs Naruto in his life?!

Contrary to arguments for TV, what can be learned that is helpful to you is very limited. I think the only truly adult educational channel is Discovery Channel (no, not the Playboy Channel..)

My take on some of the few interesting channels.

News. Yes they have videos and slick presentations. But the same, or larger amounts of info can be gleaned from newspapers and the internet.

MTV. So you have awesome dance moves, videos of people doing stupid things like shooting firecrackers at each other, and hot underdressed babes. hmm. Watch to get inspiration for performance arts.

Discovery Channel. This one's awesome, and can provide a glancing, trivial knowledge of a little bit of everything. But with all the heavy machinery, ocean exploring, American Choppers... you'd think that it was a channel made bY guys/geeks fOr guys/geeks. Thay should include a show called Fashion: A Nerd's Take or something.

Sesame Street!! A stunning revision of your childhood, where the world was cheery and colourful, and everyone sang songs and danced the whole day, and fussed about broken plastic alphabets!

Okay disregard that last one.

Impossible in this day and age? When TV was first introduced, people mocked at it. They said that no one would ever want to sit in front of a wooden box watching videos for hours on end, doing nothing else. TV would fail, they said. And yet, many decades later, the converse is true. People actually dO want to spend hours on end sitting idle in front of a plastic (haa.. new material) box when they could be out doing something more productive.

Well, conclusion is, cut down your TV time by 90%, cut away all those soppy chinese/japanese/korean dramas, how the heck can someone else's (scriptwritten) love life be of any help to how you conduct yours, cut away all and every anime/cartoon, cut away anything that is in any way unproductive to you, and you'd find much more time on your hands for doing things that are actually helpful to you, and an investment to your future.

I do sound wise, dont I.
Muhaha.

jOhn thought at 9:30 PM

Friday, March 17, 2006

The first blog in a long time, and what do I talk about? Love.

Christian Publication Our Daily Bread says this about Love.

"Sometimes love sure hurts!" The mother and father were expressing the difficulties and heartaches of guiding their children through their teen years. "Maybe if we didn't love them quite so much it wouldn't be so hard," the man added.

Even though love brings pain and sorrow, what would life be without it? In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis wrote:

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness... The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love... is hell."

To love is to take risks, to expose our hearts. Sometimes it hurts! it hurt Jesus Christ, but He kept on loving - even at the cost of His life. And He asked us to 'love one another as I have loved you." (John 15:12)

Truly loving that spouse, that teenager, that neighbour, that colleague is Christlike, and it's better than locking your heart in the coffin of self-centeredness.

-----------------------

Well, before this post is dismissed as overzealous evangelistic preaching, I'd like to add that currently the numbness in me's made me feel exactly the opposite to what the article said I shoUld do. Whats more, that issue of Our Daily Bread was given to me by kristy. Ah, the sheer irony of it all.


But lets lighten the mood!

The last time I blogged was last year (whoa!), and currently im straddling Year 1 and Year 2 of my polytechnic studies, smack in the middle of holidays with not so much as a teeny assignment to bring a dark cloud over my blissful slackdom. =)

Lets see, so far ive..

1. Read a lot.
2. Resumed slow construction on my 1/350 scale IJN Yamato, a monster of a WWII warship..
3. Hung out with friends.
4. Slept beyond 10am everyday. (Virtually unimaginable during school days)
5. Turned down calls to join this year's POS (dun wanna watch my hols disappear), an annual cheeerleading event by City Harvest. Last year's one was described extensively in my June archives =)
6. Played CS: Source heh. Ol Skool man.
7. Contemplated an assortment of life's questions.

(The following paragraph was written without much thought and should be read with viewer discretion)

Oh yea, that last one about contemplation. Haha. Weird thing that is. Ever felt melancholic one day and just wanted to spend it thinking and hopefully come to some great conclusion to life's great questions? Yea well, most do. But sometimes its so hard to find any answer, like with any other theory, its only a theory, and correct until proved wrong, which often happens very fast. The key to a happy life is balance, and there's no tightrope thinner than life. How do we define success? I concur with the Bible's sacred words that 'Without vision, men perish'. Well, imagine having no purpose in life at all. No exam to study for, no ball game to beat, no TV show to catch, no hobby, no friends to care for, no one, nothing. You'd freaking die. Yet Life is just that, an endless chase of goals that give immense saticfaction when achieved, even though it is obvious that any satisfaction at all, is temporary. People move on. Times change. If you are successful at doing something, you cant survive on doing that same something for life; people can copy you, come up with something better, force you to imnprove yourself to 'stay in the game', an endless rat race.

So, some many centuries ago, some wise people recognised this universal law, and decided to give up on life altogether, shave their heads and become monks living in a secluded monastery, free of any of life's desires, until the day they lose their life itself. Heck, even my successful-architect lecturer wants to become a monk.

Well, life's not all about doing nothing. We must spend it DOING SOMETHING, not slacking or sleeping the whole day. Sooner or later what you have will be gone, all the people you know would have moved on. If you don't keep your neck above the water, sooner or later life's gonna come and dunk you BAD. =/

Peace.

"People want what they can't have, and when they get it, they won't treasure it, their minds wondering whether their life would be better without it.."
-Me

jOhn thought at 10:18 AM