Moonlight wood silk-lined clutch
Lovely gold lining
Vintage skirt
AM very pleased with these buys — I’d been looking for a nice high-waisted skirt for a long time, and I didn’t need to alter this vintage piece at all — it’s very flattering, especially with a thin black belt.
And this outfit will go well with that clutch from Etsy, which is still in the mail. Yay for finding pretty things.
WAS reading a book on prayer, thought Philip Yancey’s point is very valid –
To pray “God, please help my neighbour cope with her financial problems”, or “God, do something about the homeless in the inner city” is the approach of a theist, not a Christian. God has chosen to express love and grace in the world through those of us who embody Christ.
As a journalist I see this principle at work in inspiring ways. While writing this book I have made trips to several different countries. I visited a church in South Africa, 35,000 members strong, which runs outreach programmes including a prison ministry, a hospital and a rehabilitation farm for addicts. In the same city I visited a woman who recruits volunteers to come in daily and act as surrogate mothers to children afflicted with AIDS. Two months later I travelled to Nepal where I met with health workers from fifteen nations who serve under a mission specialising in leprosy work. Historically, most of the major advances in leprosy treatment have come from Christian missionaries — mainly because they were the only ones willing to treat the dreaded disease….
I learned that many begin with a crisis of faith, indeed a crisis of prayer. God, why don’t you do something about the homeless families in Roanoke…or the AIDS orphans in Johannesburg? Don’t they break your heart? Inevitably, there followed a prayer echoing the one prayed by Bob Pierce, founder of the global charity World Vision: “Lord, may my heart be broken by what breaks your heart.” Those who responded became the answers to their own prayers.
It’s the willingness to be out there on the ground, contributing in whatever way we can.
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Les journees passent si vite! Je n’ai le temps de rien, sans cesses aspire dans une suite hypnotique d’evenements sans rapport les uns avec les autres. Au sens en tout cas des agites, des vivants, des penetrants, de la turbulence absurde qui vrombit au dehors.
Images © here
THIS period of time back home — five years — has been good in terms of touching base. Base is where you feel comfortable, secure, loved and restored. It’s fine to have ambition and move forwards, but it’s also important to know who we are and where we came from. It’s a place where we grew up, where you’re reminded of the feelings of growing up, the hopes and the fears, the younger me.
It’s not just Singapore. There are other places that I go back to, where I dreamed it all, planned it all out, where I was before I got lost. And it might be a person who provides the base — some friend who can remind you of how you were before it all got so confusing, someone who reminds you of what’s really important.
I’ll admit it hasn’t all been sunshine and roses after I returned. But the 坎坷 portions have made me learn, and I’m ready to go at it again. Now it’s time to stretch. Time to start planning, drawing up the maps, guides, targets, focus, route, directions. Work out what I want to do, plan it, work out the steps to take to achieve the goal, and get on with it. I’d worked hard in school for the chance to study where and what I damn well please. Now that the bond is almost up, I’ll work towards being able to pursue my dream career anywhere in the world that I like. And I’m confident that whatever I end up choosing will provide intellectual stimulation, exciting adventures, and a comfortable living.
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Still coming across the odd 山歌 here and there. A nice rendition of 木兰从军.
人的感受是多元的，要用语言表述出来，就须经过句子的梳理；即使不成句，也是一些词的连缀，即所谓自由组合、自由联想，但最后它还呈线性，要一句句读下去，而且还要按时间顺序。感受纷繁、多方位，是同时性的，所以从理论上讲，我觉得意识流行不通。
但有这样一样文字，它不舞文弄墨, 不高深， 也不逢仰，它不媚俗，也不媚雅。它只安静地呆在你面前，不出声，不哭，直到你读得心痛。
YOU can make online donations to the Red Cross for the China quake or Myanmar cyclone online here, as A. let me know.
Every small bit that we can give helps in this difficult time. Thank you for your generosity.
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And this report of the junta in Myanmar stealing aid just takes the cake. Time has some pretty good articles too, on aid not reaching Myanmar, and on intervention.
IT’S been hectic at work, with cyclones and earthquakes and stories of sensational evil. There’s hardly been time for the stories to sink in.
Take the outpouring of horror over Fritzl case, for instance. How do you begin to make sense of it? Somehow a fascination with this tale feels like prurient intrusion, gawping at the unique misery of the mother and her children. In the absence of anything constructive to say about the horror, it is too easy to take refuge in cliché and banality. None of us has anything useful to add, there is nothing we can do to help, except to leave the family in peace. And maybe try to affect the lives of those — vulnerable children, perhaps, or the elderly — we have got in our power to change.
And the cyclone.
On Sunday, the day after Cyclone Nargis hit the Irrawaddy River Delta in Myanmar, officials from the country’s ruling military junta said the storm had claimed 351 lives.
By Monday, that estimate had been revised to 10,000.
By Tuesday, it stood at 22,500.
On Wednesday, a U.S. official said the tally could climb as high as 100,000. There’s no telling where the death toll finally will rest.
Blame the death, destruction and displacement in Myanmar on the caprice of nature. But in this case, the toll has been compounded by the astonishingly callous disregard that the Myanmar government has for its own people.
Myanmar’s rulers have kept their people isolated for five decades. A flood of outsiders threatens that — and perhaps threatens the leaders. And so the government moves slowly, cautiously, to keep wraps on foreign aid workers, even if that means sacrificing the health, the safety, the lives of its own citizens. That’s the catastrophe that hits Myanmar every single day.
A: Ah, the burden of being a genius trapped within this imperfect world.
B: Don’t cut off your ear.
B: Love minus chemistry equals friendship.
A: So if chemistry is very low, then love = friendship?
B: Yes. Platonic love.
A: I think it makes more sense as love = friendship + chemistry
B: It’s just rearranging the components.
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Looked for Minzhi’s essay on loving:
thinking about where, in king lear, the king of france says: “love’s not love, when it’s mingled with regards that stand aloof from the entire point” and thinking that this is where i am, this is what i believe.
and to believe this is not to pretend that those regards aren’t - important - too. and it is neither that we should refuse to think about them, to deny their heaviness, nor to say, to hell with all that, because the former is foolish and the latter is callous.
but that we must not allow those regards to become priorities, and to allow our minds to be cluttered by fear and doubt and cynicism - for then how will we be able to open our arms and ourselves, to love unreservedly? how can we live if we opened our eyes each morning and feared the impossibility, feared the end? “we are here, now, and those other times are elsewhere” and that too is not the same as “enjoy it while it lasts” - no, not at all. what it means is that we must learn to love fully while we love - or, alternately, as one of my friends said, in the language of merchant of venice - “to give and hazard all”. not to hold ourselves back because we are afraid of loving too much and then being hurt. not to put vetoes on our choices because we think there is no future.
to learn to love in spite of rather than because of. to learn to love, the way neruda says - simply, and without problems or pride, because we know no other way of loving.
we go through stages - of trust and distrust. to say, first, bright-eyed, that we will never be hurt, how can we be hurt? and then with darkened eyes we say, we are hurt, how can we trust again? how can we not fear to be hurt again? and then you finally learn that it is both, and to answer that you still trust. what do you trust? you don’t trust that he wouldn’t leave - you trust that, if he did, the pain then will be preferable to the ignominy of having loved in parts and with reservations.
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I’ve already come full circle from semi-rebel back to nerd, and now I’m turning into a crunchy-granola nerd quoting M. Scott Peck. Yargh.
A: …I spilled wine all over that lovely white linen skirt, and it didn’t wash out.
B: Farewell, skirt. This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.
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Just finished reading McEwan’s Atonement. The best book I’ve read this year. Go read it.
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“True listening, total concentration on the other, is always a manifestation of love. An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside, stepping inside his or her shoes…since true listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also involves a total acceptance of the other. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will fell less and less vulnerable and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener.”
- M. Scott Peck
I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three
The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine
For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic
I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality
When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three
As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer
We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands
Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed
- David Feinberg
“Rejoicing as an integer” — laughed out loud when I heard this line being recited in the Harold and Kumar film.
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A (chatting about Deep Subjects): Are you being bored?
B: Oh no. I enjoy talking about deep and meaningful things, like the soul, and life, and relationships. I feel I am a well-rounded person in that sense.