My Feelings 29.9.08

Background playing: [Babyface feat Kenny G-Everytime I Close My Eyes]

I first had a random encounter with this girl when I was smoking at the parking lot situated below my company. She was this tall, elegant-looking lass who obviously stands out from the rest. I just admired her from afar because the thought of approaching her with a “Hi, how you doing?” just sounds a bit too daring to me. She will always be dressed in long straight pants which show the length of her legs perfectly. Above all, her long straight hair and the fairness of her skin is what attract me most. I was secretly in love with her.

Chances has it that she appeared in a TV series which I managed to catch a glimpse of her out of the blue. And chances has it too that she is actually a friend in my friend’s Facebook list. By fate, we became acquaintances and led on to become a pair of lovebirds.

She has this love for food which I find incredibly cute and amusing. The thought of her smile and excitement everytime she sees food brings heartfelt pleasure to me. I would spend time just analyzing every part of her facial expression as she smiles. She would always ask me “Why do you smile at me like that?” Well, I guess she did not realize that deep down inside, I actually felt this indescribable happiness everytime I see her face.

The very first greeting that I got from her was “Haroo, is it you who added me on FB?”. I still remember the very first time we met. She was dressed in a black three quarter leggies with a striking pink blouse. Initially it was a meeting for some light snacks as she put it, but eventually it led on to Sakae Sushi. I still remember vividly the smile on her face when she told me that she’s of Japanese origin.

The following few nights were the happiest I haven’t experienced in a very long time. Watching Money No Enough was one of it. The nights where she introduced me to SS15 were a bundle of it. I still remember the words she came up with when I left my backpack in the car. She said “No brains one ah? Leave your backpack in the car, use your brain lah.” Haha, I laughed inside. It is really funny and comfortable hanging out with her.

It is true that two persons habit will become intertwined together if they hang out for some time. If there is one thing that reminds me of her, it’s definitely gotta be “Maggi Goreng”. Much to my surprise, for the days that come, Maggi Goreng actually became my favourite food. I even had that as takeaway during my weekends when I was alone. And I remember the first day we got together on Merdeka eve, we watched (sort of) fireworks in my room. If there is one song that reminds me of her, it’s gonna be Babyface’s “Everytime I Close My Eyes, which played for the whole night. And which I’m playing now, thinking of what she is doing right now.

She has this set of very cute rules that she wants me to adhere to. She would go like “Rule #1…..Rule#2….until Rule#8 or so”. She did not know that deep down inside, I find her really cute. And speaking about cute, let’s not forget the Sudoku game we had in front of GSC MidValley. That was really smart of her. And the Gelato ice-cream we had where I dropped my spoon from the 2nd floor. She actually dropped a fork the other day from a 2nd floor at a SS15 mamak as well.

Every now and then, she will complain and have some temper when she talks to me. There was once when we worked together in the office until 11:30 and she was having her PMS. She got abit agitated when I woke her up inside my car to ask for the directions. But then after she apologized. For me, I did not feel even a single bit of dissatisfaction towards her. Instead what I thought was her PMS, that she was having it and for her to work till such a god-forbidden hour, it must have been hard on her. That is how much I love her. I somehow feel that it is nicer to write this using a Malay word “saying”. It feels more intimate. Every moment that I see her, in my heart there’s just a feeling that tells me that I really do “sayang” this girl. I want the best for her.

There was once in Malacca when I saw this miniature set of cups that I thought of her. I wanted to buy her those as she likes it. However, due to it being not so exquisite and up to her taste, I decided not to. In other words, it’s kinda cheap stuff. I missed her every minute that she was in Bangkok.

Have you had that moment in your life (as a man) where you meet a girl and nothing else seems more important to you as she is the one you will want to love? She may not be the Miss Right, it’s not important, but she is definitely someone you wanna love with all your heart. You feel heartache when she is unhappy and the mere smile on her face brings infinite happiness throughout the whole of your day. This is what she does to me.

She is someone who makes me feel that finally I can be a better me. I actually felt that drinking may not be the only leisure I should have. That was the first time I derived comfort from just hanging out having some tea. That there is someone in future worth me making sacrifices for. I bet she certainly doesn’t know of this as I only told my best friend Joe about it. One night after gym, I was headed to Jusco foodcourt all by myself. As I sat down alone chewing on my wantan mee, a thought consumed me. It was so strong that it nearly brought me to tears. It’s that I’ve finally met this wonderful girl in my life but I’m bombarded with worries of not being able to provide enough for her. Those thoughts were reflected into strength in which I hunted non-stop for job opportunities. Here I am thinking that I don’t want to lose a girl as wonderful as she is, and I want to give her a good life in the future, which is probably why I feel so sad now.

I was walking through Giant just now and my heart was just consumed with this indecipherable sadness. What she told me today is just too heart-breaking. As I walked through the shopping mall, I peeked into Sakae Sushi at the place we sat to reminisce the memories. As I waded myself through the people walking around the mall, I felt so empty and even emptier by the noises around me.

Do differences between couples really matter? Every couples is bound to have differences, and it has made me realized that the differences we face is indeed a very minimal obstacle which should be overcome and not brushed aside. This is because the agony of her not being by my side is much more to handle than the mere thought of posting my tattoo-ed picture on the internet or concealing our relationship in public. The genuine, purest feeling that I feel for her, which is love overrides all these trivial obstacles.

Somehow, I’m not mad at her. I’m very sad and my heart felt it was slumped into a deep recession which is not going to rebound anytime soon. But astonishingly, I’m not mad at her. I kept thinking of her smile. The one month that we’ve spent together, every bit of it, means a lot to me. And because of that, trivial differences to be compromised are of little importance to me because I’m happy with her all the time.

It is saddening to know that all my plans for her are going to the drain. I bet she didn’t know about this too but when she was asleep on my bed on Saturday night, I was busy searching for nice places to dine in at food blogs. One such was this place called Full House at Ara Damansara. I was gonna bring her there the weekend after going back to Muar. And being a beach lover that she is, I’m actually planning for Bali trip on January, where I was criticized as she said “Who goes to Bali on January???November or December lah…..” But I understand she was a little grumpy having just woke up, so I’m fine with it. I really just want her to be happy, want us to be happy. This is a picture of Jinbaran I got from my friend. I can visualize how happy we are if I were to bring her there, having candlelit dinner on the seaside.













































Jinbaran at Bali











I couldn’t say anything to her now that she’s so determined to make the final call to our relationship. Somehow I sensed that she is afraid of getting hurt again and that she is not so sure of what this is going to turn out. But I hope she can feel that what I have for her is real. It’s not something fake, which will go away anytime. Maybe she doesn’t understand that when I love her, I love her with all my heart. Lord, please give me some pointers as to how can I convince her that I’m really happy with her, that I am willing to sacrifice things just to be with her, willingly.

Having said that, as she is someone I love with all my heart, I’m going to prove to her that I’ll fight for her love. This is not something which I want it to end just like this. I hope you feel my love J. (Btw, lastly, I still find it cute when she wakes up during midnight everytime just to drink water from her purple bottle).

Art

Background Playing [Cold Water by Damien Rice]

Is suicide a piece of artwork? Tristan Reveur [a fictional artist] from the movie "Stay" [2005] once said that "an elegant suicide is the ultimate work of art". He burned all his works before he committed suicide and killed himself at Brooklyn Bridge on his 21st birthday. That way, his final suicide would be the most elegant of all and it did not matter at all what his previous works are. It takes great minds like Tristan Reveur to come up with such a disturbing yet intriguing quote. Strong emotions must have flowed through one's mind and body to think of suicide as an art.

Chronologically, it would have taken the form of unhappiness-sadness-depression-absolute resignation of hope-deciding-strength-belief-final release. When a person attains what I like to call absolute resignation of hope, he decides on suicide. Strength is thus present to motivate and encourage the individual that his choice is a worthy one. Still, belief is the most important factor to trigger the final execution of the elegant act.

An art........the movie is filmed and directed in such a beautiful way it brought tears to my eyes on several occasions. It's beautiful yet sad. There is this part where the blind old doctor [Dr. Patterson] is miraculously healed by the suicidal teenager [Henry]. The amazement in his eyes when he sees things in life for the first time is just so heart-warming-being able to look at his watch and telling the time, "It's 11.33pm" to Sam. There's another quote in the movie where Dr. Patterson said to Sam "The world is an illusion". The world is indeed all but just an illusion. Most of the times, things are just surreal, phantamagoric. That kinda explains why people commit suicide in a way. What is there to lose if the world isn't real? It is actually a wise thing to do-wiser than the what the ordinaries would think of it is.

In this world we live in, what is the ratio of happy people to unhappy people? This is a very contradictory question. On one hand, I would like to think that most people are generally unhappy. On the other hand, I would find that most people are generally quite happy-judging from the happy faces and smiles I see everyday from these "fake" people. Or sometimes I categorise people into two groups -

1] The ordinaries who gets through their everyday lives with laughters and smiles-as if they do not have any worries and most importantly do not ponder on what life really is about

2] The extraordinaries who try to decipher the true meaning of life, psycho-analyse the beauty of it and to extract joy out of little details of life most ordinaries would have missed out. The 2nd group of people are mostly avid readers, writers, song-writers, philosophers and script-writers. They are able to come up with songs and movies that could bring audiences to tears.

Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah is such a powerful and beautifully written song that delivers a message about holding on to faith [and the way I see it, a man with a broken heart]. He drowned in the Mississipi River in the 1997. A part of his lyric goes:

"Well I heard there was a secret chord [1]
That David played and it pleased the Lord [2]
But you don't really care for music, do ya? [3]
Well it goes like this : [4]
The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major

lift [5]
The baffled king composing Hallelujah" [6]

The 5th line caught my attention as he was referring to the chords F-G-Am-F. He is delivering the chords he was playing in words. It is clever the way that not only the chords line up in the lyrics and in the music, but also because the connotations themselves of "major" and "minor" add to the meaning of the song. The "fourth" is a major chord based on the fourth of the key Buckley is playing in. Likewise the fifth is the major chord based on the fifth tone of the key. The "Minor Fall" corresponds to Buckley playing a minor chord based on the sixth of the key. "Major Lift" corresponds to playing the major chord on the fourth again. In a separate part of the song, Buckley said that "Love is not a victory march, it's a cold and broken Hallelujah". It is very beautifully written in the sense that love is not something to feel victorious about; it is more than that.

Brandi Carlile's "The Story" is yet another piece of art. In the lyrics, she describes the importance of having someone to tell your stories to in life. No matter how far you have been to, how great your achievements are, it is joyless unless you have someone to tell them to. Listen particularly to the part where her voice cracked. It is the best of all. Having found that soul-mate in life is the greatest blessing one could ask for-telling them about a road-trip you have just taken, the sunset you've just witnessed, the details, texture of the sky. It is all these little beautiful details that makes life beautiful, when you have someone to tell them to.

Irish songwriter-singer Damien Rice has an impeccable taste for music. His music brought tears to me on many occasions. A list of his work includes "The Blower's Daughter" from the movie "Closer", "Cold Water" from the movie "Stay" and "The Blower's Daughter Part 2". You will have to listen to his music closely to be able to feel the emotions he is feeling at that point of time. The emotions are very well-depicted in "The Blower's Daughter" video where he longs to love this girl but something comes in between them. And the part where the girl sings

"Did I say that I loathe you?

Did I say that I want to

Leave it all behind?"

is so beautiful yet sad.

This is a picture I took on a Friday night. Somehow it is filled with emotions for me. It looks peaceful and translates into having a sense of belonging to me. I feel joy just from looking at it. It's beautiful. It's an art.

Reminiscing Adelaide

Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia. This is the place where I spent three and half years of my idling and just-brush-it-away life in. The first day I arrived in Adelaide, it was in the summer of 2004. It was a breezy 24 Celcius at 7 o’clock in the morning. I was greeted by a foreign ‘G’day Mate’ accent in which I had no idea what it was back then. A few days back, a very good friend of mine shared pictures of Adelaide with me which made me reminisce the times back then. It was really a good feeling being there.















A freezing 11 Celcius at the Strawberry Farm in Hahndorf, German settlement - Adelaide
















Fairies in the garden living in straw houses in Hahndorf - Adelaide
















A breezy summer morning - along the tramway in Victor Harbor - Adelaide



















An antiquated photography shop in Hahndorf - Adelaide
















Newsstand along Rundle Mall, Adelaide's busiest street - The Advertiser being Australia's biggest daily
















Nightview of apartments facing the seaside at Glenelg Beach - Adelaide


















Free Shuttle bus service, 99B & 99C along King William's Street - Adelaide


















German leathersmith in Hahndorf - Adelaide





















Charlie's Shack famous Vietnamese beef noodle in Chinatown - Adelaide

Challenging the Impossibilities of Life

People are faced with self-defined impossibilities in life everyday. Disability is one road-block which often deters human beings from doing normal everyday tasks, let alone achieve something significant.

One extraordinary human being breaks the belief. Kevin Connolly, a 22-year-old Montana native is born without legs. He often gets stunned looks from the world as he propelled himself with his hands around on a skateboard. Despite his disability, he is an exceptional photographer who traveled around the world shooting images of people staring at him. To date, he has crossed boundaries across 15 countries and has gathered 32,728 priceless images. In order not to startle people, he places his camera near his hips and looks away from them while shooting their pictures. The quality of the pictures taken can be well-assured as Connolly has memorized frame shots even without looking at the targets. It took him 12 years to be able to completely memorize frame shots according to the positions of passer-bys. Direct sunlight is another deterrence for Connolly as he needs to position his camera in an upward 45 degree to capture those images. Often enough, it compromises the quality of the pictures taken. He overcomes this by looking for suitable spots such as areas with shades to photograph passer-bys. In addition, his digital SLR with 20x zooming ability eliminates all worries of not being to capture an image should it be too far from its perfect spot.

Recently, Connolly has successfully completed ‘The Rolling Exhibition” where his photos are displayed at the Kennedy Center, Washington DC for people to understand his unique work. The term “Rolling Exhibition” stemmed from the fact that Connolly endeavored around ‘rolling’ on a skateboard while taking pictures of curious on-lookers. It is indeed awe-inspiring for a disabled person to achieve such great accomplishments. When asked for his formula for success, Connolly humbly quoted two words, “willpower” and “determination”.

It is very easy for people to give in to life’s challenges but if there is one thing Connolly has taught us, it is to eliminate our self-defined constraints. Instead we should position our thoughts towards challenging the impossibilities in life in order to attain significant achievements. As Connolly put it, having a strong willpower to get things done coupled with absolute determination is the key towards achieving great results in life. We should rise above the ordinaries and make a mark for ourselves starting from now on.