Friday, October 31, 2008

Love Languages



Love Language No. 4: Gifts

Can you remember any of the gifts that you have received in your lifetime which you have treasured?

It could be a seashell that you were given by someone as you were on a beach holiday. Or maybe a friend made you that CD all those years ago. Or even a flower someone bought for you or picked for you ten years ago.

If you remember the flowers, then your love language may be gifts. If you still have the flowers, then your love language is gifts. If you still have the flowers preserved in formaldehyde from the day you were given them, then your love language is definitely gifts, (and please don't hurt me).

Some people respond to gifts tremendously. You will see it in their faces - their eyes light up, the smile is sincere, they get really excited and most importantly, years later, they will suddenly bring up the fact that you bought them something a looong time ago.

If your partner's complaint is "You never buy me anything nice anymore!" that's a pretty big clue what their love language probably is.

The gifts do not need to be expensive. They need to be very expensive. Hahaha!

The most important thing is the thought that has gone on behind the gift.

You take notice of the person's favourite musician and buy them a CD from that artiste.
You bake 231 minicupcakes which they'll never get to try because you're in Sydney, and he's in Melbourne.
You buy someone's favourite cookie or biscuits while you're at the supermarket.
You buy someone an exciting Hello Kitty keychain for their boring car keys.
You give someone a book or DVD that they've been dying to read/watch but can't afford at the moment.
You cook someone a dish they've been dying to eat for a long time.
And then they actually die from eating your dish.

But seriously, it is the thoughtfulness that is important. A thoughtless gift may actually serve to offend the person whose love language is gifts.

Learning how to speak this language will also benefit you in your creativity in thinking up gifts for someone, and will also teach you to observe others and serve them in that way.

So, is this your primary love language?

Random Memories: It Is Better To Give

He thinks about it now, and wonders why he never saw it earlier. He was staying with a previous housemate, a really nice guy from Penang.

As all good housemates do, they had a falling out. Big time, and both parties were affected for a good long time.

But he remembers the happier days, especially during his birthdays, where he was given some of the best gifts ever. Two tickets to an awesome John Mayer concert. The guitar that sits in his bedroom with the sticker JOHN MAYER Musical Sound on it. All gifts which involved a lot of thoughtfulness.

And he never really gave in return.

He wonders if gifts are actually his primary love language, something he had assumed all along. Sure, he loved giving thoughtful gifts occasionally, but it required a whole lot of thinking before he recalls the gifts that he has been given in his lifetime.

And he wonders if things between him and his former housemate would have been different had he learnt to speak his housemate's love language earlier.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

J30 (The Preparation)

So you want to throw a party? Your brother's turning thirty?

Throwing a birthday party for someone is often a stressful and time consuming event, so remember to be prepared early.

The ingredients you will need are:

1) Someone to plan it with you. Often, your brother's girlfriend will be the best person to plan the party with you. She helped plan last year's birthday sabotage, after all.

This time last year. For someone who's just been saboed, he looks pretty happy.

2) A programme.

A party theme often works well. It gives people a chance to dress up, and also gives shape to the rest of your plans, including:

i) Music. Play music from the birthday boy's era. You will be surprised how the party turns into a spontaneuos karaoke session.

ii) Games. You can shape your games around the theme, and also, around the birthday boy. The more entertaining the games, the more people will forget that you didn't have much food at your party or alcohol.

iii) Decorations. You can decorate the house according to your theme. Decorations may require some laborious preparation, and a good idea is to actually use photos from the birthday boy's past. The more embarrassing the photos, the better. Ring Mum up and ask for nude kiddie photos. That always guarantees a laugh.



Be prepared for many sleepless nights, adrenaline rushing as you toss and turn in bed, coming up with ideas for the party. Prepare for last minute printing of said photographs and a mad scramble to get the main decoration ready, at your workplace.

3) Help for preparation on the day itself. Enlist the help of your brother's kindest/most creative friends in preparing your house. Your housemate, who is a genius with handiwork, will also be of great value.



4) The element of surprise. Get your brother's girlfriend to take him on a trip to the gym on Saturday morning, and pretend that when he returns, you will go out for yum cha. Have him dream about the plates of siew mai and har gao as he turns the key to the door. If you have done all the above well, it should look a little like this:



Enjoy!

J30 (The Party)

You should have seen the look on his face when he walked through the door.

One of the greatest blessings of my brother Joseph is his semi-blurness, which is always a blessing when you're trying to throw a surprise birthday party!

It turned out really well - there was a good amount of food (with killer chee cheong fun from Auntie Kim) and people enjoyed the music (thank you for the music, ABBA!)

The party started off a little awkward initially, as all parties do - not everybody knew everybody. There were friends from work, old friends and church friends there.

Everyone warmed up much more after the games - the underlying theme was a Hollywood one, because of my brother's interest in movie-making. Three teams were formed - team Dollywood, Jollywood (with Jo in it) and team Hollywood.

We played the Queen of Sheba game and my brother got to be the judge. Basically, I call out an adjective, and the teams send out a representative with the said adjective, although they do not know what the noun will be (ie. deepest... dimples or longest... breath). It was really funny towards the end when the groups had to send out the member with the sweetest... tongue, and they had to pay a compliment to my brother on his birthday!

The next game was Character lines, which is like Chinese whispers, but instead of speaking a message, the participants had to act it out down their row, and then the last person had to guess who the famous personality was. One of my brother's friends, Sean, did a really amazing Phantom of the Opera (that's him strutting his stuff in the top right corner).


The Character Lines game. That's my friend Jules in the middle bottom, acting out the Lion King (she's so going to kill me for putting up this picture!)

We then reconvened at home for the last set of games - Trivia! Basically, it was divided into two categories - movies, in keeping with the Hollywood theme, and Joseph trivia. It was really good 'cos people got to know facts about my brother which they otherwise wouldn't have known. (ie. Did you know that Joseph once got hit by a taxi on his was home from primary school in his excitement to try out the new Double Dragon game?)

(Oops. My Mum reads my blog. Er, this wasn't how I meant you to find out, Mum!)

Prizes were then handed out to the winning teams by my brother. The winning team, Jollywood, pipped everyone else by answering the last question (Who is handsomer, Joseph or his younger brother?) correctly. (Answer - Joseph, but only on his birthday.)


From the top, counter clockwise: Dollywood, the winning Jollywood team, and Hollywood.


Then it was time for the cake, which was an awesome sticky date pudding made by my brother's friend, Jeannie. (Remember that cake, Mum?) This was followed by the gift giving, and then a poignant time of sharing, which really blessed both my brother, and the people at the party.


That's a lotta candles. There were two remaining when my brother, in his old age, tried to blow them all out in one breath!

Fake gift (inset) and real gift (in ugly green box).

I got to give my gift towards the end of the party. On Thursday, when we went out for dinner - I gave him a set of Playstation games, only to find out that he was fasting from entertainment until the end of November. (*looks up into the skies* WHY??!!) But this was just a distracting gift from the actual one, which was in the green box.



To everyone who came for the party, thank you for honouring my brother with your presence, and also for being sporting enough to join in all the games. Here are some trivia goodies about the party:

J3O was meant to stand for Jo thirty. There is a similar logo on the envelope of the birthday card which I gave him on Thursday, which accompanied the two Playstation games. It's meant to be a premonition, but I'm not sure he picked up on it!

My brother really wanted yum cha that morning. He was (very) slightly disappointed that he got a surprise birthday party instead!

The colours blue, yellow and red were from the old TV3 logo back in Malaysia. What's the relationship between the two, you ask - three = thirty - Oh well, some relation! Hahaha! If you noticed, the napkins, and plates had the same colour theme.

All good things come to an end.

To Joseph, happy 30th birthday, dude. You are richly deserving of all the effort and planning that went into this party. I'm everything I am becaused I am loved by my family.

Now for the big Four-Oh?

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Hooked On You


So today at work, I had this thirteen year old kid come in with a fishing hook embedded in his left thumb. He was with his relatives fishing when it happened. He had been to other country hospitals, but there were no doctors there on a weekend and so his Mum had brought him to us.
I had to suppress my nausea when I saw it in his left thumb, as the thought itself was stomach churning. The fishing lure had three barbed hooks, one of which was sitting under his thumb. It looked like a thumb piercing gone wrong!
This brave little kid had been to several different hospitals and had been waiting for several hours in ours with the fishing lure in his thumb.
I brought him into the procedure room and then did the natural thing- started tugging at it a little. The kid flinched. He had been trying that himself all day (you idiot doctor), did he drag his bottom an hour away to our hospital so that I could do the same to him?
I put in a digital nerve block, which is just two small local anaesthetic needles to the side of his thumb to try and numb the thumb. I tried to pull a little harder. He flinched a little more. I can still feel it! he protested.
The problem with the hook was that it was barbed - which meant that it had an additional sharp needle sticking out of the hook in the other direction. Which meant that little fishies would get their mouths caught on the barb and would get more stuck the more they tried to wriggle free.
Which meant that the hook got more stuck the more I tried to wriggle it free. (Fishing hook manufacturers obviously have no children of their own).
After some gallant/blind attempts, I decided to ask a senior doctor to come and have a look. She manipulated the thumb with the hook in it, and it hurt the boy enough to start tearing. Mum was getting a bit restless, seeing her little one in pain. Make a cut along the pulp, the senior said, and then try and pull it out.
And so I tried it. The anesthetic was kicking in now, and I made a small centimetre long incision along his thumb tip and tried to pull out the hook. It didn't work.
Now what?
Hit by a sudden moment of inspiration, I pushed the hook through the thumb so that the barbed bit was sticking out. Yes, you heard right. I made another hole. By this time, the boy could not feel his thumb, so fascination had taken over his fear. While he was admiring my/his handiwork, I rushed upstairs to theatre to get a pair of wire cutters.
These wire cutters are not dainty little plier like appliances. They were wire cutters. You know, the type people use to snip fences to illegally cross national borders. Yes, those wire cutters.
I brought the wire cutters downstairs, excited as a child at Christmas, and then proceeded to carefully snip the barbed end. It was almost excruciating - I had to turn my face away, in case the barbed hook decided to behave like a stray toenail that flies into my eyes after snipping it.
Finally, after much grunting and straining, the hook came off with a satisfying snip.
Disappointingly, the barbed end did not shuriken itself into my face, but instead laid limply at the top of the wire cutter edge, defeated at last. With the barbed end gone, the rest of the hook surrendered to a simple tug without any resistance, and the relief in the room was palpable.
I stitched up the little cut that I had made and dressed the thumb. Mother and son walked away with grateful smiles, the rest of the offending lure stored in a tiny plastic jar to do whatever he pleased with it (ie. torture it, I suspect).
It felt really good figuring this one out and doing something to help. I could almost see the +100 XP (experience points - for those who don't speak geek) sign in red rising above my head like in a computer game. Now I'll be ready for the next person who comes in with a fish hook!
Random Memories: Eight Years Old
I remember being at a farm of one of his church elders in Malaysia. It was about an hours' drive from the city, and it had the works - lake, vegetable gardens, poultry scampering around.
The elder had invited over the church members for a fun day at the farm, even if only to give the city slickers a taste of the rural life.
I was eight at the time, my brother ten. My brother decided to go fishing with a group of the church members and I decided I wouldn't join them, but wander around the farm instead.
As I was happily walking around, there came a sudden loud scream followed by a litany of curse words coming from the stream.
One of the other church elders had inadvertently stuck a fish hook through my brothers' thumb, and the enraging shock and pain had caused my brother to swear at the church elder, telling him to go to that special place where Christians will not end up.
I was stuck between being embarrassed by this sudden show of passion from my brother and laughing out loud at the honesty that had come shining through! (And feeling sorry for him. Of course.)
Hahaha! (I bet my brother doesn't think it's funny).

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

A Day In The Life

To all my readers, who love doing just that - reading. Dedicated especially to my friends who are sure I sit home and Youtube all day (sometimes I do.) And here's why. :)



He works in one of the busiest Emergency Departments in Victoria.

He gets to work at 1.45 pm, fifteen minutes before he's actually meant to start. He goes to the laundry trolley and reaches for a white gown which he ties around his neck.

He scrolls through the computer screen and sighs. So many patients waiting to be seen, and not enough doctors around to be assigned to every one of them.

He is given three patients to see by his consultant, and he cannot find room to see them in. He sees the first one, a gentleman who had come in with abdominal pains a few days ago who was representing with the same pain. There were bugs in this patient's urine, but after discussion with his consultant, he is asked to order a CT scan to make sure there's no stones. He goes and talks to the radiologists, often not the friendliest of people especially when busy, and after a bit of growling at, he gets his CT request granted.

He picks up his next patient, a gentleman who was washing his concrete truck with some acid when some of it had gotten into his eye. He sits the gentleman down in the procedure room and proceeds to examine him with the slit lamp. He sees a small area of debris lying in front of the pupils, and reaches forward with a small needle to clean out the debris. The man is thankful to be rid of his pain and irritation and he is all smiles as he leaves. The doctor feels fulfilled by his immense gratefulness from having done so little for him.

The next patient is a lady in her late forties, who was coming in with a two week headache. There is no room in the department to see her, so he brings her around to the clinic areas, and makes do with seeing her in a treatment room. There are other doctors just sitting outside the waiting rooms seeing patients, so precious was the bedspace in the Emergency Department.

Something worries him about this lady - she has had an intermittent headache for two weeks and some dizziness. What concerns him is that she is normally a high functioning professional, and when he's examining her, she can't seem to get the place right, and the year as well. And there was almost a childlike detachment about her, giggling in an almost fascinated way as the doctor examines her neurological status. He orders a scan of her brain.

He sees the next patient in the triage area, an area with a nurse deciding how urgently a patient needed to be seen. There were two reclining chairs and a bed in that area.

It is a gentleman with a worsening large chronic ulcer of his legs, and the doctor is a little surprised that it hasn't smelt worst than he'd half expected it to. He knows this man needs a bed in the Emergency Department, but he can't get one yet. The doctor puts in a cannula and sends some bloods off.

It is time for handover, where the morning doctors would hand over their patients to the evening doctors, and they congregate in the dark handover room. The morning doctors speak about their patients and the consultants reassign the patients in the department to the evening doctors. They then disband out into the department again, and see the patients that they have been handed over, as well as the new ones.

He has been handed over a 19 year old with a headache, which could be a migraine. And given a new 1 year old with a crush injury to her 4th and 5th fingers.



when it hits the fan

His mind is now torn in five directions. The gentleman representing with the abdominal pain. The gentleman with the ulcerated leg. The lady with the headache. This new boy with the headache. And the one year old.

But the alarm suddenly goes off in the department. A lady in one of the monitored cubicles had crashed. There is no pulses that anyone could feel, and she is turning a dusky grey colour. There is a brown fluid that she is vomiting out. It looked faeculent.

A group of doctors and nurses descend upon the cubicle, suctioning her mouth, starting CPR, putting on the defibrillation paddles, giving her adrenaline. They rush her into one of the two resuscitation cubicles, CPR continuing the whole time.

"She's got a shockable rhythm," the doctor volunteers. The consultants look up and the nurses as well. Let's shock her, came the decision. Everyone stand clear. They deliver one shock, throwing her body about four inches from the bed. Her heart rhythm returns to normal.

They put a tube down her throat to help support her breathing and put in needles so that they can hook up the fluids and medications to save her life. The brown fluid is still coming, and they put another tube down into her tummy to try and drain it out so that it didn't go down her lungs.

The chaos settles down in the resuscitation cubicle as the patient is stabilised, for now. He asks if there's any other thing else he needs to do, and the consultant says, I think we'll be all right here.

now that you've saved her, for now/this is the sound of universes collapsing, again

Now back to his patients. Where was he?

He checks on the report of the gentleman with the abdominal pain. It shows diverticulitis, an inflammation of the large colon's little outpouchings. Causes diarrhea, fevers and painful bowel movements. He gets a bed for the gentleman in the department and starts some antibiotics and fluids. He then speaks to the surgical registrar, who is thankfully an old friend, making the referral easier.

He remembers too that he needed to check on the lady with the headache. He approaches the radiology registrar, whose face told him that the news wasn't good. She had a frontal brain tumour, and it was squashing the brain to the point of imminent death. The doctor starts getting a little rush of adrenaline again, as there were things that needed to be done for this lady now.

He talks to his consultant, who follows him into the radiology department to see the images himself. She needs to be transferred out into a tertiary hospital. He begins the long walk back to the patient and her husband to break them the bad news.

The doctor cannot believe it himself. This is his second brain tumour in his two and a half months of work here. How do you tell someone that they have a horrible tumour with only months to live? He does not cry this time. He cannot cry this time.

He sits her down and the husband as well, as he breaks the bad news. There are no tears coming from either of them.

She stares at him as the words roll out of his mouth in slow motion, but there is this invisible glass pane that has stopped her from understanding fully what he was saying to her. The tumour was also affecting her ability to take this all in and understand the true consequences of what she was being told.

The husband sits in silence, the news obviously will have to take time to sink in. The doctor rattles off a plan to give them structure in their time of grief. We need to give her steroids to help with the swelling. We need to give her medications to prevent her from fitting. We'll need to transfer her to another hospital. They nod in quiet acquiescence.

it's not just us

The doctor sets about arranging the transfer. He calls the tertiary hospitals. No beds at the moment, unfortunately, says one. Click. He speaks to another neurosurgical registrar. Why don't you call our bed manager and find out if we have beds? Click. I'm sorry, but we're on hospital bypass at the moment. No beds. Click. Finally he reaches one of the main tertiary hospitals, and the neurosurgical registrar accepts the patient. But they had no beds as well.

Call the Emergency Department and see if they'll take him, says his consultant. I know what they'll say. They'll say we have no beds. Then she'll have to stay here overnight. It's not ideal, you know, but. He shrugs.

He calls the admitting officer of the other Emergency Department, and, by the grace of the God who loves him, manages to secure a transfer to the other Emergency Department. He tells the patient about the transfer, and hurriedly orders an ambulance and puts together the films and the drug charts of the patient. He types a letter out to the doctors in the other Emergency Department.



only human

While all this is happening, patients keep turning up on trollies, being brought by Paramedics into the Emergency Department. He looks at them and sighs. Where are we going to put them? he thinks quietly. He sometimes wishes he could bring the Health minister and the whole health ministry into the Emergency Department to let out his frustrations. Look at this. We need more beds. We need more staff. We need another hospital.

He is not the only frustrated one. In the midst of his trying to resuscitate the other patient, and arranging the transfer, the parent of the one year old had gone off his head, unwilling to wait any longer. He was hurling abuse at the triage nurses, and had stormed off with his child.

The doctor refocuses, not wanting to dwell any longer on what he couldn't change. The gentleman with the leg ulcers. He spoke to the medical team, and overworked as they were, they tried to play down his problem and said that he was probably okay to go home with different antibiotics.

The doctor goes out into the waiting room to tell them the news. The daughter of the gentleman looked displeased, and wanted her father to come into hospital to sort his ulcers out. The doctor once again becomes the middle man, trapped between the desires of the families and the reluctance of the medical team to admit this gentleman into hospital. Another hour of careful negotiations had to happen before the decision was reached to admit the gentleman into hospital.

breathe. focus.

The consultants know that he's having a difficult day, and allow him to choose his next patient. He picks up another patient, a staff member with dizziness, but unfortunately, there is no room at all to see her in. He does what he can, asking for them to give her something for the dizziness in the triage area.

His mind is now in five directions. The man with the diverticulitis. Admitted under the Surgeons.
His mind is now in four directions. The man with the chronic leg ulcers. Seen by the Medics.
His mind is now in three directions. The lady with the brain tumour. The staff member with the dizziness. The young boy who was the hand over to him, with the headache.

He sees the young boy and discusses him with the consultants. They come to the conclusion that he needs to have his brain scanned. And then for a lumbar puncture, which is a needle into the spine to draw out some fluid around the spine.

He arranges the CT brain and waits for the results. He goes to grab some dinner, and has not sat down for five minutes before he gets called out again. The ambulance was here for the lady with the brain tumour. But her cannula had tissued. He needed to put another needle in.

He puts the needle in, and says his goodbyes to the unfortunate lady and her husband, wishing them all the best. He whispers a quiet prayer for them.

The staff member with the dizziness is asking to be seen. She wants a needle for her headache. He knows he should examine her fully first, but he lacked the time and the space, and going by clinical judgement and her story, the needle would be all she needed. He hopes. He asks for the needle to be given, and the nurses, who are Godsends, help him with it.

The CT brain on the young boy comes back normal. It was going to be time for the night handover soon, but the consultants tell him to just do the lumbar puncture, and she will hand over his patients to the night staff. He has had an eventful day, and she was being really understanding.



this is spinal tap

He sets up for the lumbar puncture, but the 19 year old is a little spooked. You would be too, I guess, if you were having a needle put into your spine, for goodness' sake, to have fluid taken out of it.

Before the doctor has finished setting up the lumbar puncture kit, a piercing alarm had gone off in the department. An old lady who had come in with a bleeding nose had gone unresponsive in the triage area. He is the only one of two doctors around as the rest were in at handover. He rushes to the lady, and they get her onto a bed and into the resuscitation cubicle. He puts in a needle and gets blood from the lady, and she comes to in a short while. A simple faint. He heaves a sigh of relief and returns to his lumbar puncture.

The staff member with the dizziness has improved, and is asking to go home. He should really fully examine her but he can't. He scuttles about organising for her medications and telling her to return if the dizziness persists.

He gowns and gloves up and proceeds to sterilise the back of the young boy with an alcohol solution. He then puts in local anaesthetic, and then guides the spinal needle into what he hoped was the spine. He was successful, thank God, and the fluid that comes from the spine was reassuringly crystal clear.

It is almost time to go home, and he ties up his loose ends, and hands over the rest of his patients to the night doctors personally. He is tired, but has had a fulfilling day. The white gown comes off easily as he disengages the knots that held it in place - and the whole chaos, the whole drama and all the frustrations fall from his shoulders with the gown.

If only for tonight.

He works in one of the busiest Emergency Departments in Victoria.

Koko Kaina

Tonight You Belong To Me (Please?) :)

Meet Koko Kaina. She is one of Malaysia's newest discovered talents after having one of her songs featured by Youtube. Rumour has it that Jack Johnson has signed her on to his label and she will be releasing an album soon.

She has this wonderfully distinctive voice, almost like Ella Fitzgerald or Norah Jones. If you close your eyes and just listen to her voice, you could almost envision yourself in some 1920s lounge bar, her mellow voice crooning to you from the stage, caressing you with every whispered note.

Moon River.

You should check out her Youtube page, as she is quite the songwriter as well. You should check up the upbeat "Just You and Me" and the pensive break up song "Someone You Used to Know".

Watch for the trademark smile and gentle wave "hello" (in some of her videos).

Sit back and exhale. Enjoy!

Monday, October 13, 2008

Tonight You Belong To Me

I stumbled upon this song (more about that later) while surfing through Youtube. The little ginger-haired girl is cuteness personified, and with such a cool sensitive older brother! This song was written in the 1920s, and there is that feel about it - cleverly written for a duet, and with cute lyrics!

Having scrolled through the other videos, I found this one from a scene from The Jerk, a quirky 1979 comedy by my favourite comedic actor of all time, Steve Martin and his real life lover of four years (oh, these Hollywood romances!) Bernadette Peters.

I watched the whole show again the other day, and I keep remembering why I regard Steve Martin so highly. Enjoy! More to come on this song soon!

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Natural Selection

In one of my random days off with my friends from work, we managed to catch up for a very nice lunch and then ice cream in the park. Okay, so it was a guy, but hey, why can't two guys enjoy an ice cream in the park all the same without being all Brokeback Mountain?
We had a really good discussion over the few hours, and as with all good guy friend conversations, it hovered around the topic of women and previous relationships.
He was someone who had been in about four or five long term relationships, and finally settled on his most recent partner, someone he had been together for four years.
They had met at a mutual friends' party, and soon got to talking and exchanging numbers. She called him out one day, and they went jogging together. He remembers being impressed by her determination and how she wasn't afraid of getting dirty and sweating, and pushing through all the way with him.
Here was a woman, he felt, who would stand up to the things that the world would throw at her, here was the woman who would be the mother of his children.
Without a doubt, there were other things as well, she was intelligent, warm and shared the same outdoor interests with him. But here was this other primitive instinct which played a part in choosing his partner.
And I thought how interesting it was that who we end up choosing sometimes stems from some primeval need to continue our line. Almost a selection of the fittest, if you will.
Take that, romance and Valentine's Day.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

A False Sense of Security

Oct 29, 1929.

19 "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:19-21 (New International Version)

When you finally finish whatever course it is you're doing, and the mortarboard and scroll have been tossed in celebration, a lot of new graduates will now find themselves in the working world. They begin to deal with a new, and somewhat gratifying side effect of working - earning money.

There are three ways of dealing with money - those who spend it as soon as they earn it, and those who invest it (in property, stock markets) and those who hoard it.

I am a hoarder.

I have always been a hoarder of things. You could have seen it in the way I played my computer games growing up. I would hold all the items in Diablo or collect all the gold coins in Sonic the Hedgehog and then find out at the end, that it was all worthless, because I didn't use it to good effect!

I think I take after my mother - often denying myself the unnecessary luxuries to save in the bank instead. The banks have always seemed a safe and sensible choice.

Yet, these are dark days for the global economy. The US markets is on its knees dragging along every other economy dependent on it, over 100,000 people in Iceland have lost their lifetime savings as banks have closed, and Pakistan is nearing bankruptcy (how do you bankrupt a nation?).

The Great Depression of 1929 will look like a stroll in the park in the face of what we are heading towards.

Nothing is safe or certain anymore. Not the banks and not the stocks anyway.

It is clearer now then ever what a fragile world we live in. And the rising fear of how one day, all that we have strived for, all the hours and toil put into work, would have been in vain.

And once more remind us that our certainties and hope should not lie in this world.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Spring (Has Sprung)

Beautifully done garden in a house in Williamstown.
The other sights of spring in Williamstown.

"Daffodils" (1804)
I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
By William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

I remember how as schoolkids growing up we were made to learn literature in school. My brother and I were fascinated with the English language, this passion fanned on by the host of good English Literature teachers that we had.

One of the more beautiful poems in memory were from William Wordsworth, a naturalist, who is covered in my latest reading: Alain de Botton's Art of Travel. William Wordsworth was ridiculed in his day for writing about unimportant things such as nature, but his works stood the test of time, and none more fondly remembered than 'Daffodils'.

I think there is much truth in the last stanza - that if we hide these images of these beautiful days in our heart or our minds' eye - then we can call upon them again, be it in a busy day at work, or bored at home, and have our hearts filled again with joy of a day well spent.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Love Languages

My name is Arnie. I will be your love butler. Yah.

Love Language No. 3: Acts of Service

This is a very big love language for some people, if my brother and his girlfriend's list is anything to go by!

Can you remember a time when you felt really loved because someone went out of their way to be nice to you or do you a service? It could be a time when you were sick, and someone brought you chicken soup for your cold. Or it could have been a time when they offered to do the dishes, even though it wasn't their 'turn' to.

Random Memories: Seven Years Old

It was a Sunday evening, and I was miserable in bed with a fever. My family had gone out to the local supermarket in OUG, and had McDonald's for dinner. Sick with a fever and no McDonald's. Could life be any more wretched for a seven year old?

I remember my brother coming home, and then sitting at the foot of the bed. He brought out the Filet-O-Fish in its blue paper wrapping and I chewed on perfect mixture of the soft bun, oozing mayonnaise and chive cream, and the crunchy golden fillet of fish. My brother played storyteller and started recounting this eerie story he had heard on Radio 4's Sunday evening radio drama.

An act of service - cleaning the house, making a nice dinner, mowing the lawn, helping a colleague who's swamped at work - these are a few ways of expressing love to the people whose primary love language is acts of service.

Sometimes you just can't win.

I think a lot of us place importance in this act of service simply because this was how our mother's expressed love to us - fetching us to and from school, preparing breakfast and dinners for us, cleaning the house - for a lot of us, this spelt L-O-V-E in capital letters for us.

Gary Chapman in his book warns against how this love language can be abused - Manipulation by guilt ('If you were a good husband/wife you would do this for me') or coercion by fear ('You will do this or you will be sorry') is definitely not the way to go about having your love language fulfilled.

If this is you/your partner's love language, a list may be quite helpful in defining what they/you can do in order to be loved ie. 'I feel most loved when you...' Sometimes we feel unloved when random things do not get done, but are unable to put it into words, so a list can be helpful.

So, is this your primary love language?