A Better Title

This is meaningful… Got it from a friend long time ago. Read it, like, twice then. But it’s just so hard to follow…

Make TODAY the best day it can be, and live one day at a time!

i wonder, when and where in the world is national friendship week?

almost every week i receive at least an e-mail from my friends that say that the week is national friendship week, and the e-mail basically asks the recipients to forward the e-mail to their friends, in accordance to this particular week. you see, this kind of e-mail circulates around the world. so which NATION is it that is celebrating national friendship week?? and which week is it? i receive the e-mails almost every week! is it possible that EVERY week, in ANY nation is national friendship week?

and in any case, not everyone checks their e-mail everyday. so assuming that everyone in the world checks their e-mail on average every 2 days, the e-mail should have expired within 4 forwards! it’s irrelevant to say that THAT week is national friendship week, since that particular week has past! of course, the e-mail can be altered so it now says ‘last week was national friendship week’. but after more than a hundred forwards, the line would say ‘the last two-hundred-and-forty-two weeks ago was national friendship week’ or ‘national friendship week is coming in twenty-two weeks and five days time’, together with tons of ‘>>>>’ signs indicating a massively forwarded e-mail, which is not appealing at all!

Hmm, ok.. i’ll be going back to singapore tommorow… hmmh.. feel like staying here a little bit more. just to stay in the comfort of a home. but anyway there’s nothing much that i’ve done here… except for staying over at mum’s place, sleeping till past noon, sitting in front of my computer, blogging away, playing games, tidying up some stuff, chatting with some friends on icq and msn, and maybe stoning in mirc for hours in the night with noone else in the channel. hmmh…

monday is the beginning of term 4. great. hope that all those things that bothered me wouldn’t repeat themselves all over again. i hope.

welcome back to school, everyone… hope you had a great break…

i had a couple of weird dreams last night… as always, only a few stick in my mind.

first had me wanting to go from an mrt station to some place. and i wanted to take a taxi. so i put my camera (which came out out of nowhere) on top of the trunk of the taxi. then somehow i walked away, and the taxi pulled away with my camera on the trunk! so i flagged another taxi, and i talked to the taxi driver, who told me taxis at that particular place only serve the stretch of road from the mrt station to the place i wanted to go. in other words, it’s like taxi with bus route. so i went with this taxi, and i saw the taxi which had my camera, still on top of the trunk, speeding past us on the other side of the road. the rest was very blurry, but i think i had the taxi to make a u-turn, but then couldn’t find the taxi anymore.

the second had me walking around at plaza singapura, on a call with my mum. i was talking something about bombs in singapore, which apparently already happened in the dreamworld. and then suddenly there was chaos. people were running around while shouting ‘bomb!’. they seem to be headed towards this place behind a wall on the other side of the entrance, and so i followed the crowd. on the way, i could see some of the lights flickering before they finally turned off. and after everyone gathered behind the wall, someone suggested that we jump on the spot at the same time, so that there will be vibrations which hopefully will trigger off the bomb. so someone shouted “one… two… three!” and at the third count everyone just jumped on the spot, causing tremors on the level, and then i heard a bang followed by some debris flying at the sides of the wall. and then suddenly, everyone just calmed down and walked out of the building. strangely, everything seemed to be in order, no signs of any kind of bombs were there.

well, i guess anything can happen in a dream, right?

and interestingly enough, i woke up and a few minutes later, dad told me that there was fire at ‘jambu dua’ (literally translated to ‘two guavas’) shopping centre at a city nearby in the morning… hmm…… for now i assume this to be just purely coincidence…

I took another, more advanced enneagram test, and here’s what i got: (a little bit different from the first test i took earlier)

Conscious self	Overall self

Take Free Enneagram Test

gosh… downloading a 57 mb file here is surely a chore.. what do you expect from a 56 kbps connection anyway? anyway, here’s a result of a test i just did…

Conscious self	Overall self

Take Free Enneagram Test

“Ohana means family… and family means nobody is left behind”
- Stitch, in “Lilo and Stitch”

as dad and i changed the gas tank before i went to shower just now, a thought ran through my mind. a thought that has always been in my mind for quite some time, but never been brought up before. being a pessimist that i am, i’ve always been, and probably will always be doubting the safety of heating units.

in the course of my life (yeah, as if i’ve lived for THAT long), i’ve experienced bathing using 2 kinds of heaters: one gas, at my home in indonesia and the other one electric, at the boarding school. as dad puts it, gas heating units are safe, as long as there’s no leakage. but the thing is that there’s always this possibility where, say, the safety ring gives way, and lets gas to leak out, filling the bathroom with flammable gas. and the next thing you know, you switch on the lights and you’re fried, together with your house. or maybe it’s also possible that the mechanism controlling the gas flow fails when you’re showering, allowing access of flame to the pipes and, well, the gas tank. although there’s little or no case of such thing happening (at least none that i know of), the thought always makes sure i shower quickly and switch off the gas water heater when i don’t need it anymore.

as for electric heaters, it’s also possible that the protective layer separating the filaments and the water pipes inside the unit to be corroded over time, allowing electricity to pass into the water flowing, which ultimately will come into contact with your body. or maybe you happen to point the shower head to the heating unit, as i did accidentally before, wetting the filament and allowing it to come into contact with water. i mean, being electrocuted while naked with soap all over your body is not something that anyone would like. being in the bathroom, it would also take some time for people to realise that something was amiss and come to your rescue, unless you can manage to make enough noise while you’re being electrocuted. luckily for my case of me wetting the heater, no water seeped into the unit, thus nothing exciting happened. but of course, you can imagine my horror as i frantically turned the tap to stop the water flow.

oh, in case you’re wondering, yes, gas leakages did happen a few times at my house, but they were detected quickly and were put to a stop before anything bad happened.

oh, there’s a question that i’ve wanted to ask for quite some time too. that’s regarding dubbing of a movie into another language. as you know, there are background noise, background characters chatting etc. etc. in addition to the main character speaking, which is the one dubbed into the different languages. my question is that, do they re-create the background noise when they’re dubbing the movie? or does the producer provide a template for the dubbers to fill in with their voices? i tried observing a bilingual movie (that is, a movie which is broadcast in 2 different languages which you can choose, in case you don’t know), and it seems to me that the background noise in the two different languages are the same…

let me end with this interesting picture that a friend sent in a yahoo group message. yes, this isn’t new for those who are from the class, but i know there are a few readers who are not from the class. so here it is:

went around town with my mum shopping the past 2 days. and went to my old junior high and high schools too. met a few of my old teachers. too bad that they’re renovating the building, so i couldn’t really see the place where i had my 3 years and 3 months of education. it’s a pity too that all my friends are no longer studying at the high school. in fact, they’re probably going into the third semester of university now. now that’s a bad thing of getting a scholarship to singapore. you have to repeat a year of education, and due to the difference in school time in indonesia and singapore, you’ll be 2 years behind your peers by the time you enter university. anyway, back to the topic: it seems that none of my friends are in universities nearby, so i can’t any of meet them either.

whoa… i’m watching the tv while typing now… just heard the f word on tv. it’s quite amazing that the indonesian board of censors didn’t censor that particular word in the movie… in case you’re interested, it’s called halloween h20. but i don’t know what the story is about though.

speaking about the movie, i think very few indonesian productions are good enough to qualify as good shows. most are just plain ridiculous, something like a horribly exagerrated slapstick. and their acting are just weird.

back to my school: quite interestingly enough, i saw a few people from both the junior high and high schools who look a lot like some of my friends in singapore. well, maybe that’s because the school has chinese as a majority of the students, so the chances of me seeing anyone who looks like anyone from acjc is quite high. saw one who looks like someone from sc1… someone from the jc1 class… and some others too… and by the way, another thing i notice is that indonesians are loud.

oh anyway, talked a lot with my mum while waiting for my sis to be dismissed. i was told that she has two tuitions to help her. one is for english, the other one maths. yeah, she’s quite weak in those areas i guess. but she’s a very good artist! i guess that’s the diversity that exists in my family. anyway, i was told that the english tutor is a jehovah’s witness. i was frightened at first, because of what mr perrin told us during gp class. in case you don’t know or you’re not one of the people in the class or if you were absent, he told us that jehovah’s witness are… not so good people. one of the things that i remember is that they attract guys by using girls. ok fine, my memory fails me this time, as always. i’m not very sure about this, but i remember him saying that they’re not good people. people in singapore who wants to belong to this religion (or sect or cult or whatever it is) must serve a two-year jail after he declared that he’s a believer in this. i mean, i don’t even know that such thing exists in indonesia!

i heard from mum too that she actually did try to spread the belief to mum and sis by bringing books relating to the belief, but my mum rejected politely, with the reason being that we’re already catholics. mum said that she didn’t bring up the topic anymore after that, but anyway i told them to be cautious about it. i met her later on in the day, and she does seem like a nice person.

oh, by the way, she’s actually a tutor in lia (an indonesian-american association thing, where they provide english course too). so i suppose her english is very good. and she’s privately tutoring my sis as she’s on maternity leave. when she spoke to me in english, my first reaction was: code-switch to english. then my further thought was: code-switch to STANDARD english. yep. it’s hard to use standard english when all you’re used to are stuff like lah, lor, and ah particles. but anyway, talked to her a little bit in standard english, and well, she is nice.

hmmm, ok, those who haven’t watched halloween h20 or are thinking of watching it, please skip this paragraph. basically it tells the story of a psychotic serial killer in a family who only kills the members of the family, one by one, only at halloween. it turns out in the end that the killer is actually a member of the family who was thought to be dead 20 years before. and my, he’s damn strong! even after being attacked by an axe, he can still walk around. and one scene showed him hanging on a pipe with only one hand. as a comparison, i can’t even do one pull-up! it’s quite a gripping story, especially if it happens in your own family.

y’know, sometimes i wonder how it feels like to die. and how i would die. will i die peacefully due to old age? will someone stab me? will i be involved in a fatal plane crash? will some terrorist drive a car fitted with bombs and i happen to be standing next to the car when it detonates? and when you die is also a problem. it’s not impossible that today we’re still chatting away with our friends when tomorrow a bad news arrives…

nah, it’s not a very good time to talk about such things now. hmmh…

Cool! Blogger has these new functions called draft and change date/time. basically the former is to enable you to create posts without publishing the post in the blog yet. the latter is, well, to change the date/time setting of the post. so there’s no longer a need of ‘offline blog: dd mmmm yy hh:mm’. yay! another new function is the upload file function, to, well, upload files, such as images, into your server. i’m not very sure if it works with blogspot or not.

in memoriam: today is the second-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, 11 september 2001.