everything in
it's right place

as i said earlier, i couldn't stand how blogger inserts dumbass clear:both tags into each post. i decided to completely change the template (well almost), but was really too lazy to think of a new one. so thanks to blogger's premade template selections, i just chose one and with some slight tweaking managed to match it to my tastes. well almost. now it'll show 3 days at a time too! because i was too lazy to figure out the formatting - if there's only a very short single post, the page would look all screwed up. heh.

watched hitch this morning after waking up (at 10am by tsh, nonetheless). if only love was as simple as in the movies. but that's what movies are for, to physically recreate and realise fairytales and dreams. which are of course, just fairytales and dreams.

my platoon commander just called to tell me that i'll be going taking part in the army half marathon, all 22.5km of it, competetively. i think i'll just die i'm quite crap at running, so i just had to drag kanghao's and joshua's names (because they both run faster than me) in to it along with mine. oops. but not sure if he'll remember. maybe i shouln't have told him that i was taking part in a triathlon...

21km under 2hrs. or 21km under 1hr45mins. is there any option for 'verybeginner'?

another really nice movie. about living your own life, overcoming and perservering. and the ending was so nice. but this week i've been having lots of strange dreams, and somehow if you've watched the movie before you'll realise the really obvious connection. bah.

have to go back to camp later for an ippt test. probably cycle there and have a few laps at the pool to make sure i haven't forgotten how to swim. haven't swam for a week plus already. given my mediocre swimming skills that degenerate so quickly (the strokes get really bad when i get lazy), i'll need all the help i can get.

the phrase is getting way cliched in this blog.

carnival@marina recce yesterday was a terrible flop (but it went exactly as i predicted). the cohesion time we had after that was better than what usually happens though, because now the guys were just left to do whatever they wanted and with whomever they wanted. had bowling after that which was quite funny too. ok, i meant really funny.

kinda skipped the rest of the evening (learnt some new skills from my pc) and joined jon to go for the osim triathlon briefing. impossible wishlist for the future: osim massage chair. but my dad disagreed immediately, quoting me the $6000 price tag. heh.

had a reenactment of the 'seoul garden rush' with jon and some jap place at crown center. sheesh it was quite embaressing cuz we ordered sooo many dishes in 15 minutes. we arrived there at 9.30 and last order was 9.45pm! bad planning, or rather the lack of. but food was really good and i was quite stuffed. too bad it cost like, $30! but still, it was nice.

triathlon's on saturday! argh. goal of the week: don't get last for the tri.

due to my lack of css layout skills, i'll probably have to create a new template for this due to blogger's irritating editor.

why on earth does it have to automatically insert a clear:both div before and after each post? and why does it have to be the one property i know nothing about?! why?!?!

if you noticed of late, the comments line is way off below the links and flick tab in firefox, and in internet explorer it's even worse, the post is wayyy below the links! so all you see is the heading and lots of blank space. being the perfectionist i am (only when it comes to all things visual), this is intolerable!

cruelty to animals is one of the things that just kick me in the stomach. especially videos realising cruelty in our world. becky sent some stupid video about fur that made me want to die, so i close it just 2 minutes into the video.

yes, people that do these things should be killed (not really lah). but it's sad that these people have become so desensitised, and that these people have to actually resort to doing this line of work to earn a decent (maybe more than decent, grr) living.

going for a funeral rehearsal now. such a solemn occasion on a day which should've been so happy.

triathlon's this weekend (i think it's kinda screwed).

freaking irritating. asked him: do you have any dvds to watch? (which was more out of politeness than "i'm going to take your dvds now") and he just shook his head, couldn't care less and slammed back the door. lock yourself up in that damn room of yours lah. whatever man. and there on top of his tv is sitting two more new dvds, and above his ps2 a stack of old ones (by which i wouldn't mind watching either).

note to self: call cab at 7.50am.

had a nice dream yesterday. to be more precise, i had a nice dream between 6.05am and 6.47am, when angie (my brother's mad, now our maid) promptly reminded me not to oversleep (i almost did). and i remember every bit of it. but reality is never as nice. sigh.

preparing to go to mandai crematorium/columbarium soon to recce for a funeral to be held on sunday evening. i was more hoping for it to be in the morning so i'd be able to go to for a church service (new creation) in the afternoon, but it's ok i guess. i've been chosen among another 24 others from my company to be part of the parade for some guy who passed away recently (suddenly while running, nonetheless). and because i didn't happen to be acting busy at a very particular moment (unlike anwar), i was chosen to be the firing 2ic. the firing contingent is 12 guys from 46sar, so it'll be really weird to be helping be in charge of a whole bunch of guys i've never seen in my life. got to draw the no.1 uniforms which was pretty interesting, but it also leads to another gripe:

how crappy and ineffecient our army is. went to the army LOGISTICS base to get our uniforms and they didn't even have enough pieces of a certain size of cap! same goes for the trousers as well. you mean the main warehouse of all our army goods doesn't even have 4 pieces of 22 3/4? if the ALB - by which all means would definitely be the standard - works at this level, it's no surprise why the place is work in is the way it is.

note to self: don't forget the beret.

these few days have had lots of ups and downs (ok more like, all downs). found out that i wouldn't be able to play for worship quite a lot for the next few months, and that they rest of the year is going to be quite eventful (translation: more army crap). also my dad has a problem with his right eye. turns out to be a torn retina. which is quite scary. i mean what would you feel like if you suddenly couldn't even see in one eye? something you've lived with for 50 over years suddenly taken away from you is not something to take lightly. but he went for an operation yesterday and apparently the doctor said that it was succesful. but everyone's been praying really hard so it's in God's hands.

and the funeral on sunday. there's rehearsals on friday, saturday and sunday. which means i'll have not much freedom at all. and live firing on monday, and another recce for ndp on tuesday (with bowling night?!). come on, get real!

i hate things interfering with my life, my plans and my schedules. but i like challenges. things that make you angry, sad, pissed off and homicidal. it's a chance to prove that yup, you can do this. no, are you going to give up? haha of course not, right? impossible. and eventually these are the things that make you grow as a person, hopefully maybe even as a christian (i need all the help i can get).

7.50am, time to go. note to self: eat breakfast.

surfed around friendster for a while, just to remember who my friends are. and realised how much i miss a lot of them.


things are going at a snail's pace of late. but sometimes the solitude feels nice. to lock myself up in my room and have nobody disrupt my time with myself. or rather just disturb me at all. i have been actively avoiding company (especially the army kind) recently. not only saves money but saves my breath on many ocassions.

i never knew talking to certain people on msn could make a person so frustrated. maybe i just shouldn't bother so much anymore. i'm sure i'm just Thinking Too Much. argh. (so we insert hahahas to make it sound like a Positive Experience!). sigh.

spent two hours after dinner at this website learning how to be anal with english grammar. fortunately i know most of it, but still managed to learn a few things! but i think i've probably forgotten almost all of it already - my academic capability has been ridiculously diminished by the organisation known as the army.

today's been so unproductive - i didn't even exercise. note to self - go cycling now.


-11.51pm
the ride was short because the traffic sucked. only about 15km, averaged around 33km/h.

sometimes it irks me how moody i tend to be and how oversensitive at times. someone said that when you're bumming around bored, or lackadaisical, you tend to think excessively about unecessary things. but that word is getting too overused and cliched in my blog. really need to cut down it's usage - it's detrimental to my mental health.

(basically, sorry lah)

as a fan of local band electrico, it was quite a delight to find this in my inbox this morning:

hi christopher

thanks for your query. there's an older set up i discussed in an interview in Aging Youth issue 2

things have changed a bit, and will keep changing. right now though, it's this:

- Real McCoy RMC-2 wah
- Digitech Synth Wah
- [here the chain gets diverted to a Keeley A/B footswitch, one output to a Boss
TU-12 tuner, and the other to the rest of the chain]
- TS-9DX Tubescreamer (Keeley mod)
- Crowther Audio Hot Cake overdrive
- Keeley Compressor
- Boss DS-1 Distortion (Keeley "Seeing Eye" mod)
- Boss HR-2 Harmoniser
- Boss CE-2 chorus (Keeley "Speedy + Hi Fi" mod)
- Maxon AD-80 Analog Delay
- Electro Harmonix Micro Synth (w true bypass switch)
- Digitech Digidelay
- Boss PN-2 Tremolo/Pan
- Line 6 MM4 Modulator

hope this helps

daniel

www.electricomusic.com

From: christopher ong
To: electrico@electricomusic.com
Date: Jun 19, 2005 10:01 PM
Subject: effects set up

hi,

just wondering about danial's effects set up. some interesting sounds
there, could i have a pic or list of your pedal board and the order?
thanks a lot man

chris

i hope they actually check their mail. i don't think my brother really bothers with his akatones email anymore

wayy too lazy last night, so i decided to do a brick at 5am this morning instead. 25km bike and 3.5-4km run. i can't believe how disciplined i've become hahaha.

the bike split was really slow, haha blame it on the early morning and sleeping muscles. quite a struggle just to maintain the speed, but i managed to average 30.5km/h for 40 minutes. and the race goal is 40km/h! just fairytales and fluffy dreams. cycled from coronation to kingalbertpark to newton circus to kingalbertpark to coronation, a route which starts to get boring really fast. at least it's super flat.

but the run was pretty fast, i managed to get 17 minutes for about 4km (can.com.sg tells me it's 3.5km?) which equates to doing a 10min50sec 2.4 after 25km of cycling. and the transition was under a minute, including fumbling for my keys and opening the gate. thank goodness for ankle socks (i'm way cool). ok this is way too much mumbo jumbo and numerics.



got to use my new effects set up for church today, which got paul all excited over the spacey stuff. kinda copied the guitarist from reuben morgan's band (which after lots of searching i still couldn't find out his name). basically just a mix of phaser and analog delay with modulation. so it's doubly phased with different timings, and the delay has a strong feedback to it which makes it sort of partially 'self oscillate'. the latest keyword in my guitar effects experiment!

was telling paul how much cooler it would be if someone actually configured the phasers and delays on the korg triton keyboard, so someone else could play my role! this way they'd only need 4 players (bass drums main guitar and keys/2nd guit). but surprisingly today wasn't that messy, considering that karl and wayne were just filling in more or less to the noise (sadly i don't think many people noticed much difference). was quite a cool idea nonetheless.

elaine kinda messed up my guitar when it just fell face flat on the stage today, the toggle switch kinda just snapped off. still workable (barely) so i'll have to change it soon. but really lazy to bring it to sweelee heh. realllly lazy.

had a super 6 star buffet at a 6star ritz carlton for lunch. woah the spread was unbelievable, i kinda went crazy on the oysters lobsters champagne desserts gourmet meats oysters sausages foi gras cheeses oysters sashimi. it was $90 a head but i think it's more than worth it.

jack johnson is really nice (sarah, hope you like it!). recently i've been into all sorts of guitar music. but listening more to hillsongs united and mercyme. maybe sometimes more just to hear the guitar and bass lines. but there's nothing wrong with that i guess.

this is getting a bit... long.

had lunch with my parents today and condury&finch, a very nice cafe/restaurant along bukit timah/sixth ave, next to the bike haus road bike store. the food there is pretty cheap too! except for the desserts. but perhaps the portions aren't really that big (which is sort of acceptable, i guess, condsidering singaporeans' appetites). my brother's kid just HAD to poop halfway though, and they even changed his nappies over there on the sofa. i think i almost puked looking at his shit whilst sipping my cappucino.

spent a reallllly long time walking around orchard looking for stuff today. anyone would be quite peeved when a bookstore as big as borders, with it's massive cd collections doesn't have any they're looking for. but it was all ok in the end. met cheuk and jon and far east shopping center for a reluctant hour of lan, then proceded down to holland v for yet another unnesecery purchase.

jon got two boxes of myoplex sport (using my 40% birthday discount, heh!) and since it was only a one time discount i decided to split a bottle of eas creatine plus with him. i'm a bum for discounts - the original price was $60 and discounted only cost $35. so split among both of us it was $16+ each, which is really quite cheap considering how expensive every other damn thing in the shop is.

mom cooked many many pizzas for dinner :) hope it's delicious. it's a good thing my mom's cooking is really good, because it looks like i'll be eating home a lot more (read: all the time till july 9th, next pay day).

i think it's funny to say 'the music was great; we really felt God's presence there'. maybe not funny, but more like wrong. would it be any different if the music wasn't great? or if there was no music at all? so is God's presence just a feeling? do we have to feel to know that He's really there? our family was discussing about it - the prosperity gospel and promoting purely emotional services in churches like cityharvest and sometimes new creation.

city harvest actually has the option to let you give (notice i didn't write 'pay') your offering via credit card. valid nonetheless, but what does it mean when you give to God on credit? perhaps more of the morality of it all then the actual outcome, which is donating money to help the church fund itself. and apparently their church building cost some $50 million or so - it's actually covered in some titanium stuff. so much for a community who actually believes does not place priority in worldly possesions (check out luke 14:33).

however today started off rather badly. had a platoon cohesion around lunch time, which by army standards now starts at 11am. i thought it was gonna start at 11.30am, but because of the following incidents i got there pretty late (around 11.35 actually, wasn't that bad).

firstly, i woke up late.

and then it started raining. more like, pouring cats and dogs. like the whole ocean was falling down above my neighbourhood.

just as i was to leave the house, some lorry appeard in front of my gate to deliver a washing machine. and nobody knew a thing about it. so i called my mom, who after many unanswered calls finally picked up. and told me that she knew nothing of it. so fine, i let the guy in with the damn washing machine. and he said i needed to pay him $40. hello?! i'm already dead broke and now you need me to pay you. but it's your job, my fault.

realised i had no coins whatsoever, and neither could i find any in my house. so took a damn taxi (fortunately for me it only cost $4.60. which was still blown cash) down to bukit timah shopping center only to find that lunch was at karu's curry outside my camp.

thanks to the taxi ride i had coins, so i took a bloody bus down there.

reached the place to find out that everyone had finished lunch. great luck. soon hong was also late so at least i had someone to share the misery with.

then had farhan tell me that he couldn't do the saturday COS because he sprained his ankle. come on, this is really last minute stuff! called my mom about it but as usual she didnt answer despite the 2342346987 calls. but fortunately he was really nice and made me feel like an asshole in the process.

no lunch, so went home to eat. didn't know if there was food at home (because on a typical day there isn't any at all. either that or it's frozen rock solid). so called my mom who didnt answer despite the 239384759 calls. walked to coronation to buy some tenderfresh chicken.

reached home and found my mom at home. hello? the phone's just a table away and you couldn't hear the ringing? not even the bvrrr bvrr bvrr of the vibration? got quite fed up and let loose on her after she scolded me for some insignifcant thing. as usual.

fell asleep on the couch after that. THE END. the rest of the day went a lot more uphill thankfully.




just got back a while ago from a 25km recreational ride with jonchan. went to orchard and holland rd and ulu pandan and clementi and kap and bukit timah and who knows where else. haven't ridden long distance (or any distance at all actually) for a really long time, so it was nice to have the feeling of wind blowing past you at 50km/h.

now jn's persuading me to go to her clubbing party, ZEST @ RAV tmr night. still thinking about it. usually i wouldn't go to anything of this sort, but since i haven't seen her for really long i'm still considering. because it's only $15 hahaha. so much for being super poor.

What are you going to do after the army? Didn't you at one time want to go to school for medicine or something like that? I am up here at Clemson University now working for the summer just like the last two summers. I am about to be sent away to Erskine where I received a full academic scholarship. I really didn't want to attend there but hey when all expenses are payed what else am I to do. I am going to major in business financing. I have decided that after I get my masters I will move to Charleston or Green-ville. I want to either have my own accounting firm or follow my minor which will be in hospitality and live in Las Vegas and run one of those nice hotels. But for the moment I am here doing maintenance on dorms once again I am the only girl in my line of work other than Rene and she just got on recently. Well I guess I have rambled enough I should of stopped sooner since you stated you were busy but I have a blabbing condition.

BECKY

i really have no clue where those places are at all (nor very much the desire to find out really). we usually write once a year (maybe twice if you're lucky). there's a certain sense of freedom when you dish out your life story to people whom you do not know at all; that sense of anonymity. and this will go on until one day neither part decides to reply, and that day will feel like no other, lives will go on without a twitch, without any sense of loss at all. just like any other day.

i don't usually blog in camp because of many reasons, particularly that i usually couldn't be more bothered to use the computer in the office and the loss of my k700i and it's email capabilities - i've traded it with my dad for the more lowly nokia 6610 (i think? not too into phones, these days)

have been really tired the past few nights. so tired, in fact that last night i didn't even remember to take out my contacts. AND i fell asleep on fish's bed (the guy/animal/thing/whatever who sleeps below me on the double decker), who promptly kicked my ass out of there in the morning.

so tired that when i brought kelvin neo down for a swim (the so called sports and games), i think i almost drowned when i tried to swim a 500. so i just sat there and stoned and relac one corner in the pool. quite shiok haha but the dumbass company people were trying to call me while i was there. it's quite irritating that however much you try to escape from them, they'd still find some way to come and kacheow you.

went to queensway in the evening to find a pair of tri shorts, or even just cycling shorts. but can you believe it, out of the entire whole damn queensway, not one shop sells either. then i trotted down to orchard but world of sports in taka didn't have it. but it had a lot more cooler stuff than queensway haha. and the big world of sports in wisma was closed, like 30 secs before we got there. crappy heh.

going to reuban morgan's (hope i spelt his name right) concert on thursday! good thing sarah reminded me. was talking with wayne about it on sunday (because we were reallllllly bored at one point). and the funniest thing is that my mom might be going too! haha so she can send us along the way. maybe. but probably not though; my brother's dropping off his kid with her that day :/


8km run tomorrow (today) and it's ALREADY 1.06am

coldplay is quite nice... along the lines of clocks
so is lifehouse
and so is david tao
and so is my chemical romance
and so is hoobastank (a bit)
and jay chou is not bad
but lifehouse is the kind of music i would want to play
because you can make lots of money playing music that sounds like that
and if you realise the sentences here are getting longer and longer just like this one

just got back from a brick workout (which wasn't really brick-y, because the running was more like a recovery jog). but this is the first time i was riding with jon, and he was mashing the "hills" along ulu pandan/clementi like a madman. but he hasn't run for really long so his running skills have deteoriated to something more like speed walking.

went for lunch with ygone, charles and jason after the worship prac at brekos today. was quite stuffed but it was quite nice. and wayne was nice he treated us :) as in, sarah and i because we're one year older tomorrow and yesterday respectively.

ok suddenly i've lost my muse or whatever they call it. sigh whatever man.

decided that the day after pay day would be really good to buy lots of stuff! so i think i'll have to ban myself from going out for the other 29 days of the working month...

1) PODxt Live

still have yet to make the presets for sunday's practice! arghhh been sleeping wayyy too much

2) Books! Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer and Kitchen by Banana (!!!) Yoshimoto.


3) A digital watch to record some times... have been using my handphone for the past month, which is pretty pathetic.



4) more contacts... another box which should last for 3 months. instead of 1 and a half!?!? i lost the left side of my last lens because i slept in it and rubbed it out accidentally. only putting it here because it cost more than $20 and isn't edible hehe.


i was sort surprised at how many people remembered yesterday. like some army people (urgh..), almost the entire ygone and even emily (haha this was the most surprising). it's an annoyingly pleasent feeling... you don't really want people to remember yet you just like to see how many people remember.

still haven't preset my podxt live for any reasonably usable sounds yet. have loads of sounds to do. i think i'd use up at least 16 patches. and then there's the sound effects stuff which would take another bank or two but it's really cool because there are synth effects. so i can play the SUPER MARIO THEME on my guitar and have it sound just like a video game. ridiculously cheap thrills, yes i know.

had a stingray assault course event on friday, with my platoon winning. it consisted of a 50m swim in uniform (but with lifejacket), then a run to the field in SBO attire (but with organic weapons so we took turns with the GPMG!!!). at the field we would do a leopard crawl - gee crawling with the machine gun can really kill people. the rest wasn't really hard, a march around the place in a few circles first up some hill, to the standard obstacle course ground, then out of camp and back to the parade square.

the event was held time trial style, meaning two at a time which wasn't really fair. maybe they should hold it one at a time next time, so the teams would put it purely their own mental effort instead of chasing down another team like my platoon did. but we still won anyway. partly because the CO was sort of taunting us in the beginning saying how our company was pretty crappy. so everyone got damn dulan and went into crazy mode. we actually got a MEDAL award for this thing which would mark the first time i've ever won anything in our company. but unfortunately i didn't bring it home, because i was in a rush to book out (for my podxt live, nonetheless). because truthfully, booking out to me is more significant than anything else you could possibly do in the army.

but my entire body is still aching. didn't do enough stretching perhaps. and didn't wake up to run last night (and what happened to this morning's brick workout?! chris you lazy dumbass, you should do it before dinner)

it's like 7.08am and i have pretty much about two hours to tweak the effects. hopeee i don't fall back to sleep again.

dad gave me $300 today (: which is really a lot but not quite enough yet to clear my debts haha.

Accounting for June:
$50 (savings savings) + $18 (savings) + $710 (june pay) = $778

$778 - $500 (podxt live) = $278 balance

$278 + $300 (thanks dad) + $300 (extra loan from dad) = $878!

without so-called-loan: $578

i think i should be able to live without the loan... scrap last week's shopping list, maybe all i might get is a digital watch (the timexs' are really cool) and at the most but very unlikely, a pair of tri/cycling shorts (because jon's stock trek seat is going to make me impotent soon).

fivehundredandtwentyeight now, still another thousandeighthundred to go. this is going to take forever...

it's here!!!!!!!!!!

in my anxiousness to get my podxt live i accidentally left my tumbler/shaker/whatever you call it at the coronation posb atm. so duh. but fortunately it's not really something anyone would want to steal so it was still sitting there when i went back an hour later :)

ok changing strings (hmmm karl?) and tuning now havent even opened the box muahaha

have been living on a really tight budget recently. last night's splurge was peach flavoured yami yoghurt with fruits, a grand total of $3.45. just rediscovered the yumminess of yami yoghurt. i ALMOST walked back all the way from borders to scotts just to buy another cup because the regular size is really ridiculously small. but took a bus back after that (met winston on it). fortunately i'm getting used to the tediousness of doing everything long - swimming,
cycling, running, sleeping, and now walking home from the bus stop too (no more taxi trips!).

didn't feel like staying in camp last night. need the cool comfort of the air conditioner and a queen sized bed.

my company (?) is having a social night on the 24th but i think it'll most probably be cancelled anyway, because at $100 a head (or so i head?), it would be a little outrageous especially for people who receive only $450 a month. asked christine smartypants if she would go with me, partially just to see her reaction. i think she'd probably get nightmares just thinking about it anyway. she wants to watch mr and mrs smith next week. the plot seems like something along the lines of 'true lies' plus added overkill and violence?

shopping list for the month:
1. podxt live (getting it tomorrow)
2. oakleys
3. guess jeans
4. those shoes from zara
5. a pair of tri/cycling shorts because my balls are dying from jon's seat
6. (borrow) a digital watch

to do list for the month of june:
1. buy presents
2. go running a lot more
3. stay home and save money (the irony, see above)
4. change the eguit strings, fix both acoustic guitars.
5. play more guitar (podxt live!)
6. play more of Lock On: Modern Air Combat since i already wasted so much money on it.

had a couple of weird dreams this week too. really weird! one of them was a somewhat twisted version of the youth camp, this time held not in sentosa but some super ulu hdb block(!?). another was some nightmare about sarah (hahaha okok proverbs 26:18-19) and yet another with my sweat tasting like chlorinated pool water which was overly gross. had one about an australian experience but i can't really remember anything about it anymore.

chanced upon this site of a local triathlete jeanette wang who's s a bit on the insane side , training wise. i bet just seeing how fast she runs would make every guy in singapore super damn du lan.

it's 7.58am, and now i'm wondering how i'm going to get back to camp by 9am. right.

going back to camp tonight and really dreading it despite being one of the most slack months out of many recent months. somehow it's just the intimadating (no, that's not really the right word. dauting?) atmosphere in camp that gets to me. people telling you to do this and that, responsibilities shoved piled on your shoulders and the very irritating constant need to appear busy.

staying at home (or anywhere else besides in an army camp, for that matter) just seems so much more delectable at times. had a swim today, didn't really keep count (i think it's between 40-50) but i did lots of laps with the pull buoy; they don't allow paddles in public pools and i don't really understand how it's dangerous to use paddles even though the only other person in the pool is 10 meters away and in a different lane. at least you can admire the guards for keeping the rules black and white.

listening to my chemical romance. their wacky pop-goth style is kinda growing on me. even their morbid lyrics ("would you marry me, would you bury me") are having their appeal. which is pretty scary, if you know what i mean.

i think it's funny how the smallest things (like gee, receiving an sms) can affect me so much. sometimes good sometimes bad. it's like travelling between the extremes, the fiery center of the sun and the dead cold of the arctic.

talking to debbie now about relationships, perservering and determination and giving up and things we get out of relationships both succesful and failed. quite enlightening a bit saddening but altogether entertaining. some memories you just erase, i guess.

why even bother with speed laces when you don't even tie your shoes?

started off the day by playing acoustic for holy communion service today. it was really funny because wayne and i were so appaled at our standard of playing we actually declared today the worst worship ever. his bass was all over the place and i was plucking all the wrong chords and getting dead notes everywhere. you know how when you screw up you start to get nervous and screw up even more. even though i've played for worship so many times recently i still get a bit jittery especially when playing solos - electric guitar solos to be exact. they're always so damn loud and obvious and everyone, i mean everyone will start looking at you because guitar solos are supposed to be cool. but not as if i'm playing guitar for the little kids who are looking, anyway.

went for some flyer distribution thing which turned out to finish pretty fast. our church is having an arts and craft workshop and parenting seminar in june, as part of an outreach to the local community. altogether our group had to distrubute flyers to only 3 floors - steph saw, hian liang and alan ong got caught up by this really old ah mah who kept talking non stop about god knows what (i think she must've been really lonely). luckily karl and i escaped their fate and we managed to give the flyers to -two entire floors- and when we were on our way down steph was still talking to the ah mah! we kinda just flashed them a wave of the hand and ran away through the lift. there's this lady in our group too called joy (she was around for the youth camp) and somehow i keeeppp mistaking her name as evelyn. she doesn't really have the 'joy' look (i have prefixed faces to various names, michelle, elaine, whatever).

was soooo disappointed in orchard because my mom told me that they were having this great singapore sale (duh i think i'm the last person to realise) but not much of the guys stuff was on sale. and all of the ladies stuff was on sale. argh the is sexism at its worst. watched a jet li movie titled 'unleashed' after that, though. initially thought it was a chinese movie (it starts jet li) but turned out to be quite an interesting show. the ending sucked donkey balls though; really abrupt.

just got back from a 5plus km run which was really quite pathetic. around 23-25 minutes. i thought it felt quite fast at first then when i saw the time it wasn't that much faster than my brick set (running straight after cycling). but perhaps this is because i just did that yesterday.

i've been doing some thinking and with this saturday coming up i've realised that there's so much that i feel has changed with me and so much at the same time that hasn't changed too. somehow nowadays i prefer the peace and quietness of solitude, something that i was really on the other end of the spectrum with a while ago. i just can't stand people budging in when i don't want them to, or noises disrupting whatever i'm doing. call it being a control freak, but i don't think so.

a good part i really noticed is that i've been doing my qt a lot more often than secondary school days (zero), which i'm quite happy about heh. but perhaps is because i'm not really quite as content as i was then, and since we're just pathetic humans we have our faults and wants when we're down too. and there's also relationships too. i've quite given up completely on talking to nikki even though we can handle a decent conversation quite well; it just doesn't click you know? i've grown a lot closer to the sonny gang, because you finally realise after years apart and different situations we all face everyday that we can still sit down together at a table and be the same friends we always were. there's also sarah who always thinks that we're always on different wavelengths which is really quite true sometimes. but you can never have answers to everything.

the parts of me that haven't changed are harder to spot, i figure. one is probably that i'm just the stupid sensitive little boy i always was. it's amazing how such small little statements can affect me so greatly, but it's always better than to be sensitive than insensitive i guess. and there's stuff too which i can't really be bothered to think about.

i'm just moody. irritable silly jealous maybe grumpy unsatisfied. but who isn't nowadays, anyway.

wednesday till friday morning was spent at sentosa having our youth camp. i was in the committee as the treasurer (heh luckily i think it was the easiest job!) for the first day i organised some games together with ailene. actually she did most of it, but she had to go for an education exchange so i took over. i guess i kinda screwed a bit of it up, because the walking was tremendously far for most of the groups who didn't take bus. but i mean with all those distances, isn't it obvious? bus rides are free, too. so in the end most of the teams only managed to finish 3 or 4 stations.

my station was a twister game, where teams have to twist and turn placing their body parts on a mat with coloured circles according to whatever order the gamemaster chooses (me!). but my version was with paint on plates, which was wonderfully fun for me. it was really funny when this guy hesitantly plonked his head into the middle of a plate of yellow paint. even funnier (in the sadistic sense) when another couldn't reached the red plate with his head, so i kindly helped by dumping it on his head. there was supposed to be some christian connection from this game, as in a moral, but the one ailene came up with was quite full of crap so i just forgot about it.

wayne rostered me for every single electric guitar position for the entire camp less one. at first i was pretty happy, but there were quite a few kids who didnt get to try and i sort of wanted them to try out. but neither of them could play properly (or even play...) electric guitar despite coaching so i figure i'd just give them more time to practice at home. i think wayne wanted all the worships to rock and be super cool so... not exactly my cup of tea because of the younger kids but i guess it's good to do things as best as you can.

met quite a few people who were really friendly, namely suyee, jonathan and his quieter friend junming. suyee's 19 in j2, and i was thinking about how different it would be to be older than everyone in your class. it'd probably be that way for me next year too, when i get to uni.

i digress. today went for an early brick workout at 10am. 14km cycle and a 3-4 km run... first time i actually did this, and let me tell you it was mad shit. my quads were so tired after the bike i could barely lift them up to open the stride for the run. it's a really funny feeling, like running 5km after climing up 100 flights of steps and going back down again.

i'm online now and everyone online is so lackadaisical (or maybe it's just me). after a while i have grown quite fond of this, and sometimes i prefer the quietness more often than otherwise. not so much being lonely, but being alone. its quite crappy when you just feel like talking to someone but you don't because you have nothing meaningful at all to say to them, or when you cannot talk to them about certain topics. it is quite sad, not only for me but for the other person.


perhaps i think this could be an exercise in Positive Thinking.