don't get cocky!

right so here's one cocky fellow.

ok well the images don't seem to be loading on stupid blogger. 

suffice to say, i found out that jeremy quek and a few others (like joel ong and tim wan) have been right about my intelligence all along. or rather, the lack of it. because genius me intended to bring my mac along, snickering happily that THIS YEAR i have something to fight the immense boredom in malaysia.

i DID bring the mac. i stuffed it in my bag and everything. in fact, i intended to do this 'photo journal' during the malaysia trip. the only problem was that i forgot to bring the adaptor. so with 4 hours of battery life on my macbook, i ended up with a 3kg ipod and little more than no self esteem.

this year was pretty good. my usually unreasonable mother decided to be a little more motherly and less unreasonable, and we did not visit any relatives save for our immediate cousins. (does that mean that we can decide to be cousins at a later stage in life? or have i used immediate wrongly?)

after Batu Pahat i travelled to malacca. and it was there i found out that gula melaka(the magic stuff they put into their chendol that makes their chendol taste so foreign compared to singapore) is just plain old boring caramel. probably with some other parts. but oh, if I can taste caramel, it means there's a hell lot of caramel. that said, malaysia's food is waaay better than singapore's food. hate to say it, but it's true man. 

what made my experience a little more tragic was that my cousin's house had wireless! not to get all patronizing, but last year when i visited, their means of connectivity was just via the LAN cable. and this year they had wireless!!! imagine if i had my macbook AND adaptor! i was probably more green than the pomelo on my cousin's table, what with watching my sis go on msn, facebook, getting all sorts of messages(ok i'm also jealous that SHE gets messages while I don't because she's a pretty girl and i'm not.) while i had to watch malaysian chinese sing new year songs and trying to convince people that they were very happy and enthusiastic about continuing the great legacy of chinese tradition.

by the way, the original plan was to have lots and lots of photos. but until now, i couldn't really upload any. this sucks man. 

Malaysia has a lot more stripes on the road than singapore. and i don't mean the pedestrian crossings. i mean the kind that ridge out, and made me think 'HEY THAT WAS FUN LETS GO OVER MORE' when i was a kid. but now, it just made the urgency of my toilet break even more urgent. fortunately there was no loss of self control.

the journey back was like 6 hours. there was actually an accident in between the countries at the 2nd link(TAKE THAT YOU LANE CUTTERS) which caused the entire queue to come to a standstill for twenty minutes. and then the horny buggers started their stuff. i hate those car horns. it doesn't improve the traffic situation, but it sure fires you up! 

ok that seems to be all. blogger apparently doesn't seem very keen on letting you upload your photos, just to let you know. 

something comprehensible!

alright here's something comprehensible! my new year experience! 

it's not that new, since it's been going on for 20 years(1 year was when i was forced to miss it cos my passport expired, and i ended up collecting extra money cos i visited my cousins' relatives. yummy.)

so here's a coherent(i hope) post that is not at any risk of having any incorrect christian doctrine!

For the first visit, we had to visit my granny's house in Batu Pahat(rock white)

So here's the road to the Kampung. can't see the house right? 

well here's the house! 3 cars too, i think all of them belong to my cousins. 

Found

here's a trip down memory lane!

so

i've been reading the book Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller and i came across something he wrote.

anyway, this is the background info/ context/ of the bunch of italics, according to him.

'I had been working on a play called Polaroids that year. It was the story of one man's life from birth to death, each scene delivered through a monologue with other actors silently acting out parts behind the narrator as he walks the audience through his life journey. In the scene I had written a few nights before, I had the man fighting with his wife. They were experiencing unbearable tension after losing a son in a car accident the year before. I knew in my heart they were not going to make it, that Polaroids would include a painful divorce that showed the ugliness of separation. But I changed my mind. After talking with Paul I couldn't do it. I wondered what it would look like to have the couple stick it out. I got up and turned on my computer. I had the lead character in my play walk into the bedroom where his wife was sleeping. I had him kneel down by her and whisper some lines:

What great gravity is this that drew my soul toward yours?

What great force, that though I went falsely, went kicking, went disguising myself to earn your love, also disguised, to earn your keeping, your resting, your staying, your will fleshed into mine, rasped by a slowly revealed truth, the barter of my soul, the soul that I fear, the soul that I loathe, the soul that: if you will love, I will love. I will redeem you, if you will redeem me? Is this our purpose, you and I together to pacify each other, to lead each other toward the lie that we are good, that we are noble, that we need not redemption, save the one that you and I invented of our own clay?

I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.

I went looking, I wrote out a list, I drew an image, I bled a poem of you. You were clever, but I was smarter, perhaps the only one smarter, the only one able to lead you. You see, love, I did not love you, I loved me. And you were only a tool that i used to fix myself, to fool myself, to redeem myself. And though I have taught you to lay your lily hand in mine, I walk alone, for I cannot talk to you, lest you talk it back to me, lest I believe that I am not worthy, not deserving, not redeemed.

I want desperately for you to be my friend. But you are not my friend; you have slid up warmly to the man I wanted to be, the man I pretended to be, and I was your Jesus and, you were mine. Should i show you who I am, we may crumble. 

I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.

I want to be known and loved anyway. Can you do this? I trust by your easy breathing that you are human like me, that you are fallen like me, that you are lonely, like me. My love, do I know you? What is this great gravity that pulls us so painfully toward each other? Why do we not connect? Will we be forever in fleshing this out? And how will we with words, narrow words, come into the knowing of each other? Is this God's way of meriting grace, of teaching us of the labyrinth of His love for us, teaching us, in degrees, that which He is sacrificing to join ourselves to Him? Or better yet, has He formed our being fractional so that we might conclude one great hope, plodding and sighing and breathing into one another in such a great push that we might break through into the known and being loved, only to cave into a greater perdition and fall down at His throne still begging for our acceptance? Begging for our completion? 

We were fools to believe that we would redeem each other. 

Were I some sleeping Adam, to wake and find you resting at my rib, to share these things that God has done, to walk you through the garden, to counsel your timid steps, your bewildered eye, your heart so slow to love, so careful to love, so sheepish that I stepped up my aim and became a man. Is this what God intended? That though He made you from my rib, it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and in so doing revealing Him.

Will we be in ashes before we are one?

What great gravity is this that drew my heart toward yours? What great force collapsed my orbit, my lonesome state? What is this that wants in me the want in you? Don't we go at each other with yielded eyes, with cumbered hands and feet, with clunky tongues? This deed is unattainable! We cannot know each other!

I am quitting this thing, but not what you think. I am not going away.

I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery, save God's own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me.

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again.

God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.

Come, O thou traveler unknown

   Come, O thou Traveler unknown

 Come, O thou Traveler unknown,   whom still I hold, but cannot see!   My company before is gone,   and I am left alone with thee.   With thee all night I mean to stay,   and wrestle till the break of day;   with thee all night I mean to stay,   and wrestle till the break of day.  

        I need not tell thee who I am,   my misery and sin declare;   thyself hast called me by my name,   look on thy hands and read it there.   But who, I ask thee, who art thou?   Tell me thy name, and tell me now.   But who, I ask thee, who art thou?   Tell me thy name, and tell me now. 

 Yield to me now, for I am weak,   but confident in self despair!   Speak to my heart, in blessing speak,   be conqured by my instant prayer.   Speak, or thou never hence shalt move,   and tell me if thy name is Love.   Speak, or thou never hence shalt move,   and tell me if thy name is Love. 
 'Tis Love! 'tis Love! Thou diedst for me,   I hear thy whisper in my heart.   The morning breaks, the shadows flee,   pure, Universal Love thou art.   To me, to all, thy mercies move;   thy nature and thy name is Love.   To me, to all, thy mercies move;   thy nature and thy name is Love. 
came across this oriental sounding hymn. really nice lyrics, and somehow i get the 
insight that some of those english gentlemen with the funny hair and cardboard clothes
are not as prim and proper(and forever grammatically correct)as I imagine them to be.
that there's a similar sense of that humble longing for familiarity with God.

an excerpt from Blue Like Jazz

an excerpt from Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller

From Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller

 

I felt like both churches came to the table with a them and us mentality, them being the liberal non-Christians in the world, and us being Christians. I felt, once again, that there was this underlying hostility for homosexuals and Democrats and, well,  hippie types. I cannot tell you how much I did not want liberal or gay people to be my enemies. I liked them. I cared about them, and they cared about me. I learned that in the woods. I had never felt so alive as I did in the company of my liberal friends. It isn’t that the Christians I had been with had bad community; they didn’t, I just liked the community of the hippies because it was more forgiving, more, I don’t know, healthy.

 

The real issue in the Christian community was that it was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the Bible was true or whether America was a good country or whether last week’s sermon was good, you were not so loved. You were loved in word,  but there was, without question, a social commodity that was being withheld from you until you shaped up. By toeing the party line you earned social dollars; by being yourself you did not. If you wanted to be valued, you became a clone. These are broad generalizations, and they are unfair, but this is what I was thinking at the time. Bear with me, and I will tell you what I learned.

 

I began to attend a Unitarian church. All-Souls Unitarian Church in Colorado Springs was wonderful. The people were wonderful. Like my friends in the woods, they freely and openly accepted everybody the church didn’t seem to accept. I don’t suppose they accepted fundamentalists, but neither did I at the time. I was comfortable there. Everybody was comfortable there. I did not like their flaky theology though. I did not like the way they changed words in the hymns, and I did not like the way they ignored the Bible, but I loved them, and they really liked me. I loved the smiley faces, the hugs, the vulnerable feel to the place, the wonderful old gray-haired professors, former alcoholics and drug addicts, the intellectual feminists who greeted me with the kindest, most authentic faces that I understood as invitations to tell my story.

 

I began to understand that my pastors and leaders were wrong., that the liberals were not evil, they were liberal for the same reason Christians were Christians, because they believed their philosophies were right, good, and beneficial for the world. I had been raised to believe there were monsters under the bed, but I had peeked, in a moment of bravery, and found a wonderful world, a good world, better, in fact, than the one I had known.

 

The problem with Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, we called it unconditional, but it wasn’t. There were bad people in the world and good people in the world. We were raised to believe this. If people were bad, we treated them as though they were evil or charity: If they were bad and rich, they were evil. If they were bad and poor, they were charity. Christianity was always right, we were always looking down on everybody else. And I hated this. I hated it with a passion. Everything in my soul told me it was wrong. It felt, to me, as wrong as sin. I wanted to love everybody. I wanted everything to be cool. I realize this sounds like tolerance, and to many in the church the word tolerance is profanity, but that is precisely what I wanted. I wanted tolerance. I wanted everybody to leave everybody else alone, regardless of their religious beliefs, regardless of their political affiliation. I wanted people to like each other. Hatred seemed, to me, the product of ignorance. I was tired of biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them. I was tired of Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand separating the good army from the bad one. The truth is I had met the enemy in the woods and discovered they were not the enemy.  I wondered whether any human being could be an enemy of God.

enigmat

tell me, O Mysterious One

am I an enigma,

bits of conundrum, pieces of riddle?

that between the 2 of us, it might be easier, if not already better

to spend this span

figuring You?

that it would take eternity and then some

to decipher us

eternity for Yours

and an age for mine

maybe we're truly accidents that were waiting

once one examines the world we're inhabiting

and if not for You, I'd have bought into that 

are we to be figured out

or are we to question the answers

all already given out?

now this is really rather random