Give Thanks

It is amazing that how God wants me to learn how to give thanks to Him in this particularly difficult week.

When I accepted Annie's Thanksgiving Challenge, I thought it would not be a hard thing to do. The next day I was hit by bouts of headache and fever. It was not too bad, but it wrecked my whole mood, and my whole ability to study, which is quite crucial now as I still couldn't get my Design Project simulation running.

Today the fever subsided but the natural phenomenon that happens once a month to ladies (before a certain age), deterred my ability to stand for long hours and made me very uncomfortable throughout today's career fair. Thankfully I more or less managed to note all the booths I wanted to see.

Yet I won't say this week is at rock-bottom stage because many, many nice things happened; and people were really understanding about my physical state and kept asking me to rest more. Jon did all he could to make me get better. Tirza has been urging me to sleep more (I slept A LOT yesterday + today!) The dinner Andrew cooked was beyond awesome too. And the 3 in 1 birthday celebration was worth staying up for :)

I know in the future there are most certainly worse days than this, but the more things turn downhill, the more we must learn to give thanks. Because if this is what God has mapped out, it can be nothing else but the best.

The extra push

This is Jon's favorite image on motivation:

How best to motivate oneself? To race after timelines closing in as the number of weeks increase, and the time to finish work decrease. It's very easy to get motivated if you set a nice (tight) timetable with closing deadlines to show how little time you have left. Push yourself further by comparing yourself against classmates who have done this or that on top of gazillion things, sent out a thousand resume's and is progressing leaps and bounds in a project that you're falling behind in.

It is very easy to get motivated to meet urgent needs; to work, to eat, to splurge. But sometimes it is not easy to get motivated to love others, to grow one's self spiritually, to serve; unless you love God enough. Indeed urgent timelines and sinful pleasures crowd out the Christian's capability to love God and others.

My teacher posted up an interesting status on her wall: Would you give up relationships for dreams? Those who are ambitious and have high spirits, said yes. Those who have people at heart, said no. Me? If giving up a relationship means to stop loving, stop contacting, and stop being concerned about people, my answer is no. Although sometimes it's a challenge, but my principles say no. But if it means giving up space in terms of distance - maybe yes. Depends on what dream you're chasing - is it God's dream?

A dream that may not prosper one materialistically, it might not even feed your ego. But any dream outside the will of God is futile. No one dreams of working in some unknown place for others who reject them, unless by the will and strength of God. No one dreams of battling cancer so that others may see how strong or weak they are inside, unless by the will of God. No parent dreams of bringing up a rebellious kid, to pierce their own hearts, even though just to watch him change one day. However, any dream held for one's own is futile. For men may well plan, but the best of plans may fail.

This is the point of time where I think much about my career, and whom I aspire to be at least in the next five years. As I plan, I need very much to remember whichever road I walk on, I want it to be one that I glorify God in. I don't want to live the next decades raking in $$ just to cover loans and expenses, take leave to go for trips, and then just let my youth fade worthlessly in some unknown workplace.

Let the next place where my career continues be a place where I can make a difference. And most importantly, let God be my biggest motivation.

Thought-Processing

I realize that I have fewer blog posts than before. That's because I have little blank spaces of time to write them down, and whatever pockets of time I have, I spend it processing my thoughts instead. Which means I have a blog post out and ready, but only in my mind. And once it's there, I think there's no need for it to be anywhere else.

This might be a good thing or bad thing. Which means only unprocessed, or half-processed thoughts come here (like this one). And it means that emotions here are not completely raw. Not that it has often been anyway. But many times my thoughts are random, and they just come.

There were things I wanted to write in detail about this week. Like the last handball match I watched. Like preparing for Career Fair. Struggling with project work, and The Review Paper. Like how I handled my emotions when they were too overwhelming. Like how I liked the content for last week's Bible study despite my doziness due to coffee withdrawal.

But they were all processed and kept in the store room. I guess it will be sometime, or some other stimulus that will cause me to draw them out again.

I want to go CNY shopping! Like I want a new (cheap) top or something that looks presentable for CNY instead of recycling all my clothes almost every time I go home. But then, that has to give way to other tasks of high priority. Sigh. Hopefully the bazaar in the central forum has some good deals these two weeks.

My last Week 2 in NUS

It has been a very busy week, and I'm anticipating more it to be worse next week due to multiple conflicting demands.

Design project planning and execution has been going on in full blast. None of the project mates I have now had I worked with before, though I know Anna and Jillian quite well from MSD. However, we are getting along quite well, and I hope we will be close by the time the project is over. I think I like all of them :)

The paper Mei and I have been working on for Prof Lee is hopefully going to be over soon. Thank God for Bevan being really considerate and understanding, saying that he'll forward our workload concerns to Prof. Lee. I like Bevan because he is not just someone who wants results, he cares about what we're doing at school and bothers to chat with us too. And Prof. Lee has been very understanding as well throughout the past year.

Other modules are kind of being side-lined at the moment, except for graded tutorial-preparation. Hope mid terms are not too cruel on us final years. I'm sort of arranging CNY songs on Sibelius for Andrew. It has been some time since I did song arranging, but it's fun! :) Other things to be busy about include preparing for Career Fair and the never-ending job-hunt. Hopefully I get to survive next week!

More Youtube songs!

I like how the composition method of this form! Not easy to write something for one guy to 'duet' with three girls leh. And if your name is Mable Lee, and you're reading this - you might or might not know, but that guy is the first runner up from that particular year of 超级星光大道! And his singing is actually quite good (towards the end). You might want to Youtube some of his songs too.

And this is one of the series of M-girls CNY songs I was talking about. I was more interested in the dresses they had than the singing though - they are pretty unique. And I like the way they do up their hair when they are wearing the traditional costumes! Quite different from the type they do on TV. Quite a nice watch. I have forgotten most of those CNY songs already - but I guess I will copy this for our CME CNY performance. Now the challenge is getting those parts written out!

Last First Week

This is the end of the last first week of school (no Friday classes). And I just found out that my Design project is 5 MC instead of 8 which I initially envisioned it to be. That means I'm only taking 15 MC worth of modules this semester. It does make me wish that I could take more. But then again, the remaining one module's time can go to job-hunting, doing more work for all my other modules, and doing stuff that I love.

Maybe I need more time to prepare myself for the road ahead too. I'm going to work hard for this semester's design project. To feel what it's like when you have a chemical engineering project in hand, and to be so near to being an engineer at least once in my life. :D

Modules are OK so far, stuffed with biology stuff, and chemical structures for once. Everything is fine for the first week. Life was pretty tranquil, apart from an email for Anna to give us the group's week one assignment for design project. And besides the fact that I still need to update my TB write-up and handle CNY songs for Andrew.

I attended this semester's first RHCME meeting. It was all random jamming and noise, but it was fun, apart from everything being quite messy. I always loved our practices. I may feel super reluctant to come down each time but every time I'm in the band room I don't feel like leaving. Now my biggest challenge is to find out what a Gu Zheng sounds like, find out what it's scores look like, and write Chinese songs for CNY for it. Been Googling CNY songs because of that, and I feel that M-girls really have potential, their acting is relatively natural compared to some other singers of their age. At least their producers have, they managed to synchronize all the movements, and dresses so that each time the girls look fresh. But still it's Malaysia - and so they are not really making it big here.

End with two versions of the song 雨天. I like both versions but Mable only likes the guy-version (which is not the original haha), because she doesn't like Stephanie Sun's pronunciation. I'm neutral regarding that though, but I agree that the non-original version does have a larger dose of emotions in it. Don't really like his facial expression though. But still, if it's really natural - it can't be helped.

The INTI Arrival

Today is Mable's first day in INTI. We reached there a little past 2.30 p.m. There was a whole crowd of people queuing to register/pay fees/get timetable etc. Not just the freshmen, but everyone else too! Hence we had to wait for around 100 people before we could get her fees paid.

After paying tuition fees, we went to get keys for her hostel and unload. Mable was (sort of) one hour late for orientation but still I don't think she missed much. The main agenda of the day was more or less ice-breaking. It was raining cats and dogs outside, and I didn't really regret our wearing shoes into her room, else if our shoes were left in the corridor they would be soaked. Daddy and I unpacked what we could and got her 'clothes line' up. Mopped the floor up before leaving the room, ridding the room of ugly black shoe prints, that might cause severe depression when in solitude.

Hope this is the beginning of new beginnings! On a very separate note, IVLE have been intimidating me today with the influx of new lecture notes and the design project description, which turned out to be at least as bad as I thought it would be. I am very thankful for not taking up an extra breadth module after all. Hello Semester 8. You might just be the toughest semester of all.

Thought Transfer

I just transferred my archives again for my blog at Windows Live Spaces. Reason being Windows Live Spaces is going to be converted to WordPress anyway and if I don't transfer I will lose all my archives. And whether you view this as being narcissistic or not, I treasure all my archives, and don't want to lose them. However, I lost my beloved green-tea theme that I have stuck with for years, AND the list of blog links I have compiled across the years. :( I haven't settled down with a new theme though.

Now I'm trying to get my review paper write-out out before holidays end. Thank God for EndNote. Why did EndNote not exist in my life years earlier?! It would have made citations a breeze. :( Well, better late then never. For the sake of myself, and those whose fate is tied with this review paper, I will get this out no matter what!

Mable is going off to INTI tomorrow. Makes me wish I could start Year One, or even Secondary One all over. It really feels weird to only have one more semester of school life left only! But then again, I'm not getting younger, so I'd better start working instead. Hope working life won't be too bad. As for tomorrow, it will spent loading and unloading, cleaning, hanging, and saying goodbye to all her toys.

First (short) post in 2011

Just attended a wedding of a sister in Christ in church. Apart from the bride and groom looking very sweet together - and some rather tear-jerking moments, I am really thankful for all the memories we have to share together in this church. It's like growing up in a mega-sized family, where we share many things together - growing up, growing old, celebrations, baptisms, marriages, births, and even deaths.

This is something I wish I could really feel for GLCC too - which to me seems much of an organization rather than a church, firstly because it is really much bigger; secondly because I don't know too many people there (mainly due to lack of initiative); and thirdly, because I didn't grow up there. But Campus has gone through a lot with me, much more than they think they know, and has walked me through an important phase of life too. I wish to create and preserve more memories with my home church still, and also in GLCC and with Campus group.

By the way yesterday I watched Despicable Me at home. Story-line was quite interesting, though not mind-blasting, but everything was a mixture of just-rightness, more or less like the feel Tangled gave. However, unlike Tangled, the theme of this story is more centered towards family warmth and over-whelming cute-ness, coming from two potent sources.

The first:

And what bowled Dawn over: