Friday, September 23, 2011
at
12:39 AM
| Posted by
Juwen
Just bought the highly anticipated album from Hugh Laurie on various blues covers. I'm telling you. It. Does. Not. Disappoint. Crazy crazy album. For a person who has not lived and breathed blues in the South to replicate the soul of genre, he has done a tremendous job at doing just that. His vocals are very distinct (picture House singing the blues) but still oh so soulful. So worth my $20 and more.
As promised, I'll talk about the results of the Johari and Nohari windows I posted up two weeks ago. Not surprisingly, numbers have not changed at all since the last time I mentioned it. You guys (mostly) are stalkers, aren't you? Let's see what the 6 people have said about my positives. The most dominant trait as voted by the people is intelligent. Funny, I'd thought I'd be more silly than anything. So far all of them have managed to pick up the traits that I think describes me so I guess that is a good thing. To the person who thought that I was organised, I'm pretty sure you haven't seen my room on normal days. So. Far. From. It. The rest of the attributes are ones that I'm pretty sure that I have exposed it one way or another. Moving on to the Nohari window where only 4 people said something about my negatives. The other two must have found it hard to limit their choices to 6. The most dominant negative trait is that I am insecure which is not a big surprise there. Anyone who reads this blog long enough can sense it straight away. The rest of them are also fine except one that said I was intolerant. I did not see this coming. I'm trying to think of the things that I am intolerant about but come up with nothing. Interesting. Enlighten me. Perhaps I'm intolerant about not being intolerant?
I will be starting a new area of life that has so far been left untouched. Excited but also not really knowing what it is going to be like, how stressful it can be or how great it is. I hope this will break down a lot of the apparent barriers that I have been experiencing over the past 3 years. And certainly I didn't expect it to come this fast (less than 2 weeks!). I certainly thank God for providing and being gracious to me after all the rubbish that I tend to do. Need to trust Him more.
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Recently, some of my friends decided to cause a riot with me which is starting to worry me a bit. And it all started from a small but apparently significant domino effect set-up. It's amazing how one casual conversation gave the motive and just ONE unrelated tweet to start the domino tiles falling. And now suddenly I have a "marketing team/think tank", a "fan base" and now a QR code for a crowd-source based effort to make me more awesome than I actually am. Fact: Refer to the title of this site.
You know what the funniest thing is? This really started from an ex-housemate of mine and graduated with a photography diploma who has said, and I quote him, "...spends too much time making him [me] look good." when he used me as a subject for some of his assignments. This time, he's got some solid support to give it another shot. Not sure if this will ever succeed.
Friends. You gotta love 'em for being a little...rowdy.
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int size = group.getSize();
if (size % 2 == 0 || (size % 2 == 1 && size > 10)) ju.setComfort(true);
else ju.setComfort(false);
return;
I really need to fix this.
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Saturday, September 17, 2011
at
4:00 PM
| Posted by
Juwen
I've recently watched a film called Divided which makes a pretty bold statement about the church and the youth. At the core, it asks the question what is the reason that causes up to 80% of youth from churches to walk away from the faith once they leave for college. Their proposed answer was a little surprising, youth service or Sunday school. The premise is that how majority of churches in the United States conduct Sunday school or their youth programs are flawed. There is an awful lot of fun and games programs conducted within Sunday school with very little substance in the end that by the time the kids hit the real world by going to college, there is no solid grounding in the teachings of the Bible. Not only that but parents almost treat Sunday school as a glorified day care centre where they provide a service to educate their children in spiritual matters. When the sermon ends, they come and pick up their children and go home. Hit repeat every week until college. It goes even further to say that how Sunday school that has age-separated classes fundamentally contributes to this problem. In fact, the primary mission of Sunday school when it first started wasn't for the Christians but for those kids on the streets wasting their lives away in crime. So they argue that Sunday school was a means of outreach rather than edifying the Christians and so shouldn't be there in regular Sunday service. The idea of a youth service or even Sunday school for that matter was not a model illustrated in the Bible (ie. not a God ordained model, in their words) and so does not guarantee it works.
Whoa.
I recommend watching the film (it's free anyway after e-mail registration) as there are quite a number of things presented that I think are quite relevant and certainly the take-home lessons of the film. Some of the things may sound like a bit of a stretch, for example, how Sunday school children are getting more and more attached to their teachers than their own parents and because of all the fun activities they do, the children will get whatever spiritual teaching they can get from their teachers, if any at all. I can honestly say, after much thinking, that this is somewhat true from my own experience though not in the same "extreme" behaviour portrayed in the film.
In my old church, the one that I went to for the first 18 years of my life, Sunday school was a big deal for pretty much all the kids. Plenty of fun activities, sing songs etc. Most of us love our teachers because of it. This is not even including the Royal Rangers (think Scouts but with a heavy Christian slant) program my church had which most of the kids did join. So, if you were a regular church kid and joined Sunday school, your whole weekend and sometimes most of the holidays are filled up with fun church activities. By the time puberty kicks in, Sunday school classes for the teens start getting smaller and more awkward, even though there were plenty of kids my age. Activities became less fun, most of us started getting bored but the one saving grace was if you had been in the Royal Rangers program. You start to see more lukewarm Christian behaviour among friends and eventually most of us went to the main service and some eventually disappeared. I was quite fortunate during my teen years that my high school Christian Fellowship helped me a lot and much of my faith was built up here. The point is that while the Sunday school ministry in most churches meant to educate children in the faith but the reality is that with the overemphasis of the fun factor means that we are trading the gospel for something else. Which was what I started to see though not very conscious about it. It became even more apparent just before I finished high school that our church decided to revamp the youth program in order to get more of the youth back into church. Their approach? More fun factor. We had a games room (complete with a pool table, table tennis table etc) all of the sudden, food was catered to us, organizing highly publicized youth events and the lot. It wasn't long before I realized something is still not right.
It seems, based on the film, that one of the major contributors to the kids leaving the faith was the failure of fathers to educate them in spiritual matters. Because they treat Sunday school as a spiritual day care centre, it frees the hands of the fathers to educate, one less thing to worry about. Which again, is not a model ordained by God. I can remember clearly several months before I was to come to Melbourne that my dad said to me to be careful of teachings behind the pulpit for they are not always right. He then went on to explain the fallacies of sermons coming from the senior pastor of the church. Since then I was very careful, listening more intently to the sermons than I had before in my entire life. That one short session with my dad did more to my spiritual life than possibly all the Sunday school lessons combined. Because that was the beginning of handling the word of God properly which is far more important than fun Sunday school activities. It was said in the film that even the best Sunday school educators cannot replace the father which I find to be true.
As the film goes on, the suggested solution is to train fathers to be the primary spiritual educators instead of pouring into youth pastors or develop youth programs that are "fun and engaging". I hope that if the time comes that I were to have my own family that I would be just that. That I will not neglect my responsibilities of being a father and provide the spiritual education and grounding to my children and not sign them away to a day care service.
But I'm not there yet. Not even sure that I'm meant to get there. But it doesn't matter.
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Why is it that I find two different reactions when it was announced that the ISA will be repealed? One is that people see it as a victory of recent events while still not being overly naive and celebrate and the other being completely cynical that nothing will change at all. And the two reactions were also mostly divided into two regions, people staying in Malaysia and those who are not. A step in the right direction does not demand cynicism but caution regardless of the proposed implementation of the step. I also guess it is because few care about a country outside the one they are in even if it is your home country.
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Monday's a big day. Scared.
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Thursday, September 15, 2011
at
1:38 AM
| Posted by
Juwen
Occasionally you get one of those days, much like the recent Canberra trip except on a smaller scale.
Yesterday I was supposed to have a drive test to convert to a Victorian drivers license. So I rented a car for the day just to do the test and maybe travel outside the city for once. Everything seems to be peachy until I showed up for my test. It turns out that I brought everything for the test except my passport which was the primary document that one should bring. Felt so stupid. I quickly went back home to get it but because they were full for the day, I had the option of waiting for someone to cancel the drive test or to reschedule. I, of course, chose to wait. About two hours went by and it seemed like I was not going to get lucky and was going to reschedule.
But I did get lucky at the very last minute and manage to get a tester. All the administration stuff was handled and I headed to the car waiting for the tester to come. Now the confusing part: the tester came to my car and asked me to roll down the window and started heading back into the building as if he had forgotten something. Half way there, he turned back and walked towards me and notified me that I cannot do the test because the car's registration had been suspended. How on earth did he suddenly know about this when there was nothing to indicate that someone had just told him en route back to the building? The bigger question mark was why did the car rental company give me a suspended car?
So of course I was questioned and they thought it was pretty strange and I thought I was going to be in serious trouble. I called the car rental company and told them about my situation and they said it was fine on their side. I gave them my contact number to let me know what had happened and what they were going to do about it. Apparently phones on their side were ringing all the way up to the head office. Eventually I spoke to the manager about it and said that there might have been a discrepancy somewhere, just that one of the parties involved may not have updated the records correctly. Or something like that. The tester told me that I was not to drive the car at all because it is now illegal and had to urge the car company to get the car and possibly get me a new car. So stressed.
By that time, I cannot do the test for sure and so I had to reschedule to the next available time which is in 6 weeks time. Man, and I waited 6 weeks to get to this point already. So because there is no point in getting them to bring in a new car, I told the manager of the company to just take the car and I'll just get back myself. Everything was refunded (hopefully) and I've just wasted half the day. Even if I did bring my passport the first time round, I'd still wouldn't have done the test because of the whole registration issue. Wow. The tester who was with me when all of this happened was very helpful and overall great guy even though he had this slightly intimidating presence. Looked a lot like my Java lecturer mixed with Craig from Masterchef.
Meh.
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I never did like the term "stock market" or any similiar metaphor/analogue of potential...erm, pairings. Though it is "nice" way of putting it, I find that it's a lot of bull and think it has no real value. Much like me in one of them "stock markets". Not that I care about it.
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I wish I had read this before I went to try and do my PhD. If I did, I probably would have recognized the signs that this is not what I should be doing. At least not right then. And might have ended up in a completely different future.
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I think I'm even more scared now after an in-passing conversation because I'm pretty sure that I don't have it. And I'm nowhere brave enough to gamble. And will probably be shot down if I did.
Petrificus Totalus.
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Monday, September 12, 2011
at
3:06 AM
| Posted by
Juwen
Another weekend gone, another two days where I should be doing other things but end up not getting them done. Super lazy and procrastinating a lot in addition to the new Worms game that I have been playing. Did I mention that I also haven't been getting much sleep too?
This was one of the few rare occasions that I had a meal with some of the *much* younger OCFers. A nicely sized group of 6 people all with an age gap of at least 4 years. And I think I am quite happy about it. None of those 20+ people gatherings where all you pretty much get is silliness, rarely anything of substance. Oh and the noise too. Discussions were made about various things that you'd probably will never get in big group settings. Makes you know more about a person and perhaps in an efficient matter too.
In fact, I can't remember when was the last time I had a decently sized conversation where no one was attached or had some "weird" dynamics between a few people (myself including). This might not seem to be like a big deal to most but given the circumstances in the past couple of years and how terribly lost I felt, this small simple meal together was something very refreshing. Also, given a person of my age, you start to "lose" a lot of your friends who you used to have these same types of conversations years ago by virtue of being attached, getting married or raising a family. You can still have fairly decent conversations with them but it is not the same anymore. How and why is it not the same, I lack the vocabulary to describe it. But being able to relive that moment for a short while, has been worth while.
For a person in my position, "losing" friends extend beyond the realm of relationships. Things of stereotypical status value like a job and a decent income, years of work experience, cars, property ownership and many others are also grounds for this phenomenon. I once describe this to a friend that it is like being into an exclusive club where membership starts by ticking the right boxes as described above. As though you were treated like a proper adult and no longer a student which seems to have a level of immaturity stigma attached to it. Once you've made it into this club, a whole range of events and activities are right at your doorstep for you to choose from. Or maybe it's because I'm just boring.
But like most of the time, I have to put up a front that say everything is peachy and I don't care about such things (but actually do, a bit) while deep down there are many things that need fixing. I've also mentioned to some close friends of mine that events in the past 3 years have shaken me pretty badly. Even closer friends tell me that they can see through me and one has gone to the extent of saying that the change of my blog background theme and how I write on my blog were reflective of my changes in response (never really thought of it that way. I thought it was just cool to use this theme). These friends are the ones who keep me sane whether they know it or not. They make me feel that none of these meaningless things that I have been thinking or worrying about matter and it soothes the soul of this aging man. The best part? They are a very small group of people, around 6 of them.
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Even more generic poking! This time by the "kids". Deploy deflector shields and evasive maneuver beta. Engage!
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To the 6 people who have filled in my Johari window, thanks for your input. Most of them I am not surprised by except for one or two. To the two of you have haven't filled in my Nohari window yet, it must have been difficult to narrow down my negatives to 6 choices but please do try. I think I know all of you.
To the rest of you, refer to the previous entry and please complete your analysis of me and let me know. I think it's about high time that you criticize me in 6 words or less online. Links are here again if you need it: Johari and Nohari.
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Thursday, September 8, 2011
at
1:32 AM
| Posted by
Juwen
After helping out a friend to select 5-6 words to best describe him, both positively and negatively, I thought this might be a good time for some role reversal. Many times in my entries or sometimes talking with others, I've been analyzing them on what makes them who they are in a nutshell. And of course there are times where I will do some extensive self-analysis but rarely do I hear much from other people analyzing me or at least such analyses were few and far in between for me to remember what were the results.
So here is your chance to critique me using a very little subset of descriptive words. Say what you really think of me (be truthful now) to my positives and what you also think of me negatively (seriously. Be truthful and don't hold back). If you think the words given do not reflect me, state it in a comment here. My only request is that when you write a name, please don't use "anonymous". That's just no fun.
So here we go:
Positives (known as the Johari window) here
Negatives (known as the Nohari window) here
I shall analyze the results and present what I think about it in 2 weeks time.
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Sunday, September 4, 2011
at
10:50 PM
| Posted by
Juwen
The Carlton Community Cookbook launch a couple of days ago was good, featuring a number of recipes from people around the neighbourhood. Also a good time catching with people that I haven't seen in a long time. Of course there was food and I was fortunate enough to bring mine in as well. I think the most interesting comment about the cake I made came from a friend who said "I don't like green tea but shit...it didn't put up a fight against me". Classically funny stuff.
After the launch we went out for some drinks which then turned into bar crawling. It was all to do with the person who we had drinks with. It was also funny because during the whole bar crawling I didn't have enough cash on me and I was traveling with an expired debit card, so I can't withdraw money either. Fail. Met some interesting people along the way and it is probably the first time in a very long while that I've spoken to more Caucasians than I have fingers in one night. And then came the last stop (at least for some of us) which had a DJ going and virtually everyone is dancing. Friday retro night it seems. And the group I came with all started dancing and I've got no backup. I tried to stall the immense awkwardness by pushing for drinks at the bar but that was not to last. A Jager bomb later and I tried blending into the environment and frankly speaking I'd rather start a fight than do this. Thankfully, like any bar crawls, the stop at that place wasn't very long and soon a few of us went out for supper.
Refueling started a whole conversation on being self-aware in various situations. Naturally, it started I told them that I felt like this (Asian) elephant in the room at the last bar. They reassured me that no one really cares and I'm sure they are right but I'm just too aware of my lack of movement. Then it moved on to other things like saying stupid things to a person they like online, over the phone or even face-to-face. Some have stated that they have sent a message without really thinking about it and later finding themselves wondering why did I do that. I think it is safe to say that I haven't done anything stupid because again I am all too aware of the things that I am going to say and what might look like if I sent that rash message. It seems that I'm the only one who has the problem of not saying anything as compare to them being on the other end of the spectrum. I (over?)think and analyse things and often times the magic 8 ball in my head comes with "Can't decide. Ask again later". Aside from that, many other things came up on the table like MSG and creepy/weird pick-up tactics. All of which I would like to have nothing to do with.
This is the last time I'm ever going to a bar with dancing even if the DJ was awesome (which he mostly was).
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I am starting to dislike "grilling" or at least how we make it out to be now. There is no initial slack given to the persons in question. I don't know, it seems there's a lot of pressure from the get-go from a large number of friends (this is an important note: large numbers) because, you know, news travels really fast these days. And it is not a gradual sort of thing, it's just *pow* smacked with this giant wave of questions generated by pure excitement and I think has gone past the level of comfortable. And all in the name of we-really-want-to-know-the-details fun? It's like suddenly you are being "married" to this big group of friends. Except not really.
I was under the impression that it should be gradual, small groups and at least a couple of weeks into it. They've just taken that big jump and I'm pretty sure most of the time, they are still scared shitless about it or still suffering from the repercussions of it. The least we all can do about it is to give them a little breathing space and let things settle a bit. There is a point in time after which can be treated as public information and how we act about it will change appropriately. Even though status-wise, like a switch is either on or off, in reality I think for the people in question it rarely feels that way apart from an official question and answer. Cut them some slack please.
Perhaps I'm over-romanticizing this in the same way that I over-analyze things. Perhaps I'm a little bit old-fashioned. Perhaps it's just the very introverted me. Perhaps I'm just disappointed. One of the things that got me down the last time was peer pressure and certainly with the way things are now, it is only adding to that. Suddenly out of nowhere external expectation collides with them head on and though they say that it is no big deal but does it really not creep up on you in the long run? I have had the unfortunate incident of being labeled as a "bad" person just because I failed to meet the external expectations dictated by a collective. Don't tell me that doesn't affect you the slightest bit because it does on some level. To this day, I'm still haunted by this concept of the added external pressure that it paralyzes me. The pressure might be virtual in that it isn't actually there but like anyone who has a genuine phobia will tell you, even thinking about it scares them.
At the end of the day, it is really up to them. If they are fine with it, so be it. I'm just saying I don't think how we are approaching situations like these to be helpful or encouraging. You may or may not agree with what I say, it is just an opinion. An opinion that, I think, does not carry much weight. I'm just a lowly worm who eats coffee grounds and leftover food, pops up from the ground to say "O Hai!" and burrow back down, or get pecked by the birds of scrutiny. Feel free to discuss this further.
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I find it funny that people have more confidence in me than I do. Either they have absolutely no idea what they are talking about or I don't. It's funny either way.
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If there were such a thing as a past life, I would most definitely be a China factory worker. I would totally own my job.
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Friday, September 2, 2011
at
11:50 AM
| Posted by
Juwen
Was at a friend's housewarming party last week and our pastor's family came by as well. One of their daughters apparently is on a roll of riddles and jokes that are probably not really funny (even as far as lame) to us adults. Things like "What is the tallest building in the world? A library, because it has many storeys" and other such jokes were frequently dished out by this pint-sized daughter of theirs. We (the oddballs) cringed and all and even tried telling her to not be like us oddballs who revel in lameness etc. It was quite cute and funny actually.
The thing that caught me after that was the fact that these are the very same jokes that I grew up telling my parents, older ones and friends to. I used to go to bookstores and find the latest joke/riddle books and read them for long periods of time. Some even for hours when I got a little older. I remember thinking these are the funniest things in the world, how can anyone not laugh at such comical brilliance? I would go on and on to my parents and friends, telling them lame joke one after the other and I would laugh myself silly about it while my parents were, erm, less enthusiastic about it. But of course that never really bothered me. I just kept doing my thing.
Like all things, doing your thing will eventually be not your thing. We grow up, tastes change (certainly humour), so not surprisingly these lame jokes were a thing of the past. Which got me thinking, why is it that 5 year olds find this stuff so absolutely funny? Perhaps it is that now armed with a couple of years of solid language skills that they start to make the connection that some words have a double meaning or that some words sound like other words. That probably is a moment of epiphany and for some reason, celebrates this new found discovery with laughter. If that is the case, it is no wonder jokes like these stay on even to the next generation, because kids, regardless of times, love this stuff. While I'm sure parents will get to the point where they will get sick of some of these jokes, I suspect that it is important to humour them or at least acknowledge the jokes. It is at a period of time where kids learn and new connections are formed so it must be encouraged. Humour will follow them through the rest of their lives and it is important for them to learn that laughter pierces through age barriers and sometimes, transcends time. I wouldn't be surprised if kids two generations after me and beyond will use these same jokes.
How we developed humour through sarcasm, exaggeration, slapstick and sometimes crude forms from there becomes a little fuzzy to me. Of course there is some higher level cognition going than how we approach our first experience with humour, word play, that can only come as a result of ongoing maturity. Sarcasm requires context and at the very least recognize tonal changes in speech, exaggeration requires out-of-the-box imagination and the link between that to reality, slapstick requires a little indulgence to our sadistic self (no sane kid is really sadistic) and crude forms requires a certain level of angst coupled with a few other things. These forms of humour don't tend to repeat itself (not word for word exactly) as generations go by, only the principle of the humour remains true. All of which we can only get through taking a bit more salt in our growing minds. And this is where our individual personality takes over. Some hone their humour towards one area, others in different areas. But we will almost always have the ability to do one thing and that is humour through word play, it is the first encounter with non-physically induced laughter and like most firsts, we remember them the most.
Lolz.
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So my current short-term plan dream job just popped up. Super long shot.
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I might need to find another pool kaki soon. I'll put up a job description later on Seek.com.au.
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