Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Quote from FB
It's funny how men extol the beauty of love, and then lambast the crude reality of it when they're sober.Ryan Midget
Give me wings
I've been looking around
There's a whole new world I see
And so many things that I can do
With your strength in me
Now I ask you to hear
As i sing of brighter days
For I need to have you very near
Come and find the way#
* Give me the wings
Of an eagle
I will soar into the sky
Give me strength
to hold a brother's hand
As he's passing by
Give me the eyes
Of tomorrow
Let me see what I can find
If you lead me
I will follow now*
Give me wings to fly@
You've been watching me grow
As you gently lead me on
It's your love and power that I know
Guides and keeps me strong
(repeat# to @)
High above the clouds
I can see the beauty down below
And I know you're holding me
I'll never fly alone
Alone
(repeat * to *)
Give me to reach the sky
Moving up I'm rising high
Give me wings to fly
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
TODAY: It ain't easy being foreign
An article from TODAY, by Phin Wong.
I HAD an Australian teacher in secondary school. Her name was Mrs Rose Harland. Gosh did everyone hate her.
She had arrived, fresh off the Boeing, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to teach the students of Ghim Moh Secondary School the glorious wonder that is the English language. Or at least the difference between "their" and "they're".
But these were kids who constructed sentences around colourful Hokkien phrases involving someone's mother. These were kids who said things like "I call my brother, then you know" - and had absolutely no intention of introducing you to an actual sibling over tea and scones. These were kids who got frisked.
In fact, I'm not even sure they were kids - some of them were there before I got in and were still there after I had graduated. Ever met a Sec 2 student with stubble? It looked like a father of two was sitting in to brush up on his algebra.
Mrs Harland didn't have a chance in hell.
It wasn't that she was a bad teacher. In fact, compared with our last English teacher - who corrected the only other English-speaking student's commendable use of the word "strumpet" to "crumpet", thereby changing his tale of a scorned harlot into a composition about tasty baked goods - Mrs Harland was pretty awesome.
It's just that she was so ... foreign.
For a start, she had never been to our little island, so she had no idea what to expect. The first time she walked into a funeral wake, she thought it was so lovely of her neighbours to have decorated the void deck of her HDB flat with pretty flowers. It didn't take long for her to realise it wasn't a garden party. The corpse was a dead giveaway.
It's hard to fit in when you don't look like everyone else. And Mrs Harland didn't fit - literally. At over six-feet-tall, she towered over just about everything except the Tembusu tree behind the canteen. And she was blonde. You could spot her from just about anywhere in the school, looming in the distance like a magnificent skyscraper, providing shade from the afternoon sun for flocks of migrating ah lians on their way to home economics class.
Then there was the accent. It's hard to teach effectively when your students don't understand a thing you're saying. Her audience was used to hearing Miss La La speak, and now they had Dame Edna telling them it's I before E except after C.
I didn't have a problem understanding her though. I'd already watched A Cry In The Dark three times by then. Such a great film.
Mrs Harland's biggest predicament with being a new transplant to Singapore, however, was her inability to grasp a foreign language. Which was exactly what our names were to her.
Xiao Ching? Shao Xiang? Jie Wen? Forget about it. She'd read your name right off the register and you wouldn't recognise it. "Oh, I'm sorry, were you talking to me? I thought you were having a seizure."
Because it took too much time to address a student by saying, "You, there - third Asian girl from the left, next to the 30-year-old kid with stubble", Mrs Harland took to calling us by our student numbers. It's hard to like someone who refers to you as 36.
It also made our English lessons sound like mathematical problem sums. If 12, 22 and 8 ganged up on 13 because 5 told 22 that 13 stole 10 bucks from 22, how many sweets would Jane have sold by Thursday?
We hated her for reducing us to anonymous digits. Years later, as a Singaporean transplant lost in translation in Melbourne, I understood a little better how difficult it can be for an out-of-towner and forgave Mrs Harland just a little.
My first week in school, an Aussie classmate asked warmly if I'd ever had "an Aussie barbie". I replied that I never even owned Malibu Barbie even though her beach house looked fabulous. I never got that invite for steaks.
When someone asked how my "arvo" was, I replied that it was a little sore from assembling all that Ikea furniture myself. (Someone explain how "arvo" could possibly be short for "afternoon"?)
Then there was the harrowing 30 seconds in a cab where the driver didn't understand my repeated instructions to make a U-turn. "Go back!" I sputtered, mere millimetres from the turning. "Turn right here - here - and go back the other way! U-turn! U-turn!!!"
"Oh, chuck a U-ey?" replied the cabbie. "Why didn't you say so?"
You may have heard they speak English in Australia. You would have heard wrong.
Just as I was convinced that any communication I'd have in Australia would be between me and the dust bunnies reproducing under my futon, a student stopped me on campus to ask if I had the time.
"Three-thirty," I mumbled.
"Wow, you speak really good English!" he said, surprised at this Asian kid's vast vocabulary of two words.
Yeah, I know my numbers really well. And it's all thanks to Mrs Harland.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Science vs Humanities
PART I
What would this world be without Edison? Will we live in darkness? Yet, with Einstein, we went through a period of darkness, where nuclear bomb annihilated two cities not too far from us. Science; is it a bliss, or a curse?
On a lighter note, Shakespeare taught us that all that glitters is not gold, and henceforth, we should, as adage so often warned us, that books should never be judged by its covers; the content is what matters. Yet, so many people, despite the advice told since days of yore, nonetheless succumbed into fallacy. Well, even Einstein, a Scientist, has not the obtuseness of a commoner, to say, "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
The society of today has much reached a consensus that a progress, relative to the past, which may not even be too distant, has indeed happened; anyone basing his conclusion on his prima facie observation of today's technology would probably attest to it. Yes, we may have progressed with respect to the technological arena, but have we done likewise as a basic human being? At the very least, even humanity does not stride in tandem with the Science, does it remain constant? Or, much to anyone's horror, has it regressed?
This, I am not so sure. Are you?
Friday, April 9, 2010
My response to someone's message on FB
Slow your pace of life, and slowly, and somewhat miraculously, your life will pace towards appreciation of the beauty of life so often ignored by the rushing of life. Are you living a life, or merely lving to live?
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
They've Never Heard of Jesus
The steeples rise up to the skies all across the land,
While lovely churches grace each town, it's hard to understand
Why Christ is still the Savior that so many never meet;
People halfway 'round the world, right across the street.
They've never heard of Jesus, they never call His name.
And without His great love and hope in their lives,
Their worlds will go on unchanged.
And they need Him so. We all need Him so.
They've never heard of Jesus , you and I must let them know.
Their eyes look out each morning on another day:
Their faces speak of heartache that their words might never say.
From busy city sidewalks to strange and distant shores.
How they need someone to tell them just what living's really for.
They've never heard of Jesus, they never call His name.
And without His great love and hope in their lives,
Their worlds will go on unchanged.
And they need Him so. We all need Him so.
They've never heard of Jesus , you and I must let them know.
Friday, April 2, 2010
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