June 2012
1 post
Thoughts Upon Rising
Bed head and morning breath can wait. Pillows and sheets can be tucked in later.
Is it Tuesday? Friday? Saturday afternoon? Are there chores to do and errands to run? People to meet and work to be done? What’s the weather like and will I need a coat or umbrella or scarf or hat?
No matter. It’s no matter at all.
Instead, I think about all the ways I can save the world today....
April 2012
4 posts
“It’s not that I can’t fall in love. It’s really that I can’t help falling in...”
– Jack Kerouac
Favourite Colours
The liquid gold oozing out of a perfectly poached egg,
A winding path of frothed milk cutting through an espresso landscape,
Pomegranate jewels and chopped pistachios over vanilla yoghurt,
A mixed berry smoothie on a hot summer day,
Fresh broccoli (or a just-cut lime wedge) (or pesto, you can never forget pesto),
Honey-glazed anything,
Caramel, caramel, caramel.
“Television is founded on the principle that people don’t change, but we know in...”
– Hidden life lessons in the Community reviews on AV Club.
WatchI know I tend to cry a lot at everything, so for me to introduce a video with the words “So I teared up at this…” slightly diminishes its full effect, but I’ll say it anyway: I cried at a video about a McDonalds store closing down.
I’m not a crazy person who just cries over McDonalds, of course. This particular store in the video wasn’t as special to me as the...
March 2012
2 posts
1 tag
February 2012
2 posts
9 Almost Impossible Dreams You Can Never Give Up... →
1. The Dream of the (Tiny Little) Thing You Were Meant to Do
Hot baths with scented candles. Museum outings on Saturday afternoons. Find your one tiny little thing and make it a big part of your existence.
2. The Dream of Having a Child in Your Life
Your own. The neighbour’s kid. The teenager working at the corner store. You have something that a child not only will find instructive or...
“If I’m not between a three and a seven on the emotional scale, I’m...”
– - Kristen Bell
Finally someone understands my tendency to cry while watching street buskers perform or getting a really good gift.
January 2012
1 post
December 2011
3 posts
In Conclusion
At this point, it seems almost cliche to make a Year in Review post on the last day of the year. But New Years’ Eve tends to make me sentimental, and 2011 has been a year certainly worth reviewing.
I feel like I’m at the end of one of those grand rapturous movies that wrenches your heart and lifts your soul at the same time. There have been heroes and villains, the memorable quote...
Eyes Wide Open
There’s thousands of songs about the moment of revelation. About the instance when perspective shifts, when the hidden becomes unveiled, when the darkness turns into light: Suddenly I see, this is what I wanna be…; And at last I see the light, and it’s like the fog has lifted…; I can see clearly now, the rain is gone… It all seems to be connected by this huge...
“(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me...”
– e. e. cummings
November 2011
10 posts
On Coincidences
I do not believe in random strokes of good luck, or in flukes of good fortune.
And most of all, I do not believe in simple coincidence. I think that there is always a reason for when certain things happen and when they don’t, and more so, in the timing in which these things happen. That there is a source to thank every time there seems to be a rainbow for me to smile at on the bus home...
“Courage - it’s from the Latin word “cor”, meaning...”
– Brene Brown, The Power of Vulnerability
The Build-Up
Ever noticed how the longer you put something off, the scarier that thing becomes? That during the build-up to it, you get more and more nervous at how impossible it is, even if it isn’t really that terrifying in the first place.
This happened to me when it came to driving. I let other people scare me into thinking I was terrible at it, so I stopped trying to learn. Weeks became months, and...
“I hope someday somebody wants to hold you for 20 minutes straight and...”
– Waitress
The List
I had a conversation a few days ago that revolved around listing our respective criteria for boyfriends and husbands. People have different names for this List (“Husband shopping list”, “Wish list for Mr. Right”, etc etc) and scoff if you will, but I’m pretty sure everyone - even guys - has an idea of the characteristics and personality traits and must-loves and...
“There is nothing you’re going through that someone else hasn’t been through and...”
– HelloGiggles
October 2011
4 posts
Countdown
No other date make me panic more about the year coming to an end than 25 October.
It’s the “Guys, can you believe that it’s only two months till Christmas?!” date. Suddenly, you feel less bad about listening to Christmas carols for no reason. The fairy lights are starting to emerge, and the lovely white and golden gift wrapping paper that you can only use for holidays and...
“There’ll be days like this, my momma said. When you open your hands to...”
– Sarah Kay’s If I Should Have a Daughter
RE: The Future
“To have faith is to depart from the path most taken. It is to venture, uncertainly, down a road where the trees are a little bigger and night is a little darker. It is to come face to face with monsters, yet to hold on to the promise that this is our story and we are the hero and the hero always wins. It is to embark on adventure which, I believe, is the core of what our hearts search...
Videos I've cried irrationally over recently
A group of Japanese gymnasts giving a mind-blowing synchronized performance.
This Emmy trailer for Friday Night Lights: “Sometimes we fight. Some days we dream. But there’s one night we can all believe in. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” Oh favourite show, you are so dearly missed.
This little girl having the most genuinely grateful reaction when her parents tell...
September 2011
4 posts
Facts and Figures
I’m terrible at remembering figures like birthdays and anniversaries and phone numbers, but one thing I’m good at is remembering the random little facts about the people I know.
This is how I love people: By collecting tiny treasures of their habits and idiosyncrasies and quirks that are essential to who they are and that endear them to me, that separate them from other people.
And...
A Movie Script Ending
It’s a professional hazard that sometimes I find myself having to script out fictional endings to real-life affairs, that I have to write us movie script endings when you or I don’t play the parts the way I think it should go.
I wrote a version with the things I should have said, with lines that I should be saying, but can’t bring myself to. I wrote about a girl with much more...
August 2011
10 posts
The Future Has an Ancient Heart
There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here: “The future has an ancient heart.” I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true - that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives. (via)
My convocation consisted of awkward small...
Routines
I am the girl on the morning bus, hair still knotted and unkempt from rolling around in bed until the last possible moment.
I am the girl sitting alone with the strawberries and Vietnamese rolls, pen over notebook, in her favourite break spot. My legs already ache at 1.30pm.
I am the girl alone in the shop, disorganized and disheveled in the late afternoon, a million things still to be done...
“We are souls who have been deadened by something, and require being awakened....”
– Time to wake up. Time to wake other people up. Time to be alive together. Time to be enchanted.
On Incontrovertibility
In stories and movies and books and songs and real life, the girl always asks the boy: ”Do you love me?”
In my story, I don’t want to be this girl. I want to be the girl who is loved so visibly and deeply and ferociously and undeniably that she already knows she is loved without ever having to ask or be told.
“There are leaders, and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of...”
– Simon Sinek
Having a TED Talk night.
Lessons From Waking Up at 5.45AM
- How to sleep standing up on moving trains, with a barely-there grip on a pole to steady oneself, and the ability to be startled awake exactly when the train pulls into the right station
- Coffee before noon: Indispensable. Coffee after 5pm: Immensely regrettable.
- How to yawn with my mouth closed, so that I never need to stifle one even in up-close conversation
- Setting three alarms might...
July 2011
19 posts
“I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear of falling
Or of...”
– Dawna Markova
All the Things That I Am Not
I am not an engineer or biologist or accountant or computer scientist or lawyer or psychologist.
I worry that I am not those things. Admittedly, I have been worrying about it for the last few months (the kind of worry that you leave to fester at the back of your mind, because you assume you still have the time to leave things at the back of your mind).
I worried about it as I wrote thousands of...
A Love Letter to Airplane Food
Almost everyone whom I’ve told about my love for airplane food have reacted with “Airplane food?? Why?” accompanied by a cringe and shaking of head.
It’s one of those little joys that I love getting excited over, and I find something to love in every aspect of it - The rarity that you can have it, unless you’re a frequent business flyer. The wonder of how...
1 tag
Today in Numbers
Approximately 24 hours till I arrive home
6552 1111 - The booking hotline number for my cab to the airport
11AM - Brunch with the besties before leaving
2 flights
Seats 15D and 24H
20 kilograms - the weight I hope my luggage is under
Total time spent up in the air: 6 hours and 20 minutes
4 hours and 15 minutes of wandering Kuala Lumpur Airport in transit alone
Armed with...
1 tag
“There will come a time, you’ll see with no more tears.
And love will not...”
– Mumford & Sons, After the Storm
“The greatest stories are lived in the desert. The great lives are lived in the...”
– Don Miller 