I discovered today a new abbreviation, and I'm not very sure if it's really common or the next big thing, because I have never ever seen it before prior to this. It goes "TL; DR", usually posted as a form of comment or reply to a post, and it stands for "Too Long; Didn't Read". And I'm instantly blown away by the wit and sarcasm and irony that went into this, hahaha this is precisely the kind of stuff that changes my life and have me staring in wonder! I'm amazed at how laconic and succint the abbreviation manages to convey. It's still in good grammar shape, and it's like one of those dismissive I-simply-can't-be-bothered things that you throw at annoying smugly people. And considering that I've never seen it before, my usage of such will get people asking what in the world was that, and the tables are instantly turned because it is then my turn to be smugly and I can recite out syllable for syllable just what I thought about their smugness! That's not to mention the semi-colon use, which makes it so upmarket and touché and dribbling with class. This kind of stuff is way above your usual LOL or IDKIDC or TYVM. It's a comeback with a kick-ass attitude; like a instant blame on you being too verbose and garrulous, and calls for people to get specific to the point and stop beating around the bush.

And as I am writing this, of couse I am aware that I fall into that category of taking out too many words to say something. Haha I've lost track of the amount of times people berate me for being naggy, or how I just have a tendency to put too many words in a sentence to explain something. Hahaha this post is like some confused self-reflexive piece. One moment I would totally relish using TL; DR on people, and the next moment I can totally imagine people commenting TL; DR to me. It is the great irony of it that makes me so highly amused at this heh! I love language and words, and I love the way how each word with its own meaning can be put together into sentences and paragraphs to form entire different meanings altogether. And to me the more words the better, because it is then you get all the space to express your emotions through your diction.

A lot of people don't care of course, and society just demands us to be concise and precise all the time because nobody has time to read a long SMS or email. Lest I sound sanctimonious, I fall into that trap myself too, because it is those emails that exceed five lines which sit in my inbox for a couple of days before I realise I need to sit down, get into wordy mode and type a reply. Everything must be instantaneous nowadays, if you can't say it in three lines then you won't get my attention.

I am very well aware that most of my blog posts will fit perfectly into the TL; DR category. Hahaha maybe that's why they have Twitter, it's 140 characters and nothing more. I think it's a fine balance. It's alright to be wordy at places, and unacceptable to be too short at others. Can you imagine if I submit a 140 character tweet as an essay assignment to my professor? Ah hahaha but one day if I really become a teacher, I'm going to write a fat TL; DR for all those who exceed word limits. And I will dot the dot and curl the comma accurately in that same penitential manner as required of that semi-colon.

Sleep patterns severely disrupted again, I only got to bed last night at 6am! And the start of this week looks to be another topsy-turvy week where I will not have a fixed sleeping pattern and everyone is going to comment that I look really tired and I lost weight. I think it's the long hair. Okay not really very long, but it's a mob on my head and the longer it grows the more wavy it becomes. My dad's hair is curly, but my mum's one is relatively straight, so I guess I got the in-between waves.

Anyway, I am really starting to like my guitar teaching assignments! This three ladies that I converse mostly to in Mandarin and I've been teaching them for a month odd or so now, I really like how their faith is so simple and straightforward. They are learning guitar because they want it to be like an avenue to praise God in their quiet time, and I am hugely impressed by the constant reminder to keep my life uncluttered. So many things threatening my attention everyday, and it's so difficult to not be bothered by everything that goes around me and to just focus. The other one is a French family, I'm teaching both the young daughter and her father. It put me in a huge fix because I was so afraid I will sound too old and rigid for the girl, and when it was her father's turn to learn, I had to work so hard to get rid of the "I'm-speaking-to-a-child" diction and tone, and a couple of times I caught myself belittling the dad! Gosh but all of them are an absolute delight, glad to know new people and to teach.

Okay. Sleep.

So it's ten minutes to 1am and I'm sitting here in front of my laptop tired and disappointed, all of me wanting to fire up at a lot of things and getting all irritated. A million thoughts about basic responsibilities and commitments and everything flashing through my mind, and I am blogging now because it keeps me from sending any unwanted emails or SMSes that will vent my displeasure. Hopefully by the end of this post I'm more calmed down and I will try and see from another perspective. 

I think that I've done my part to the best of my abilities already, and I have prayed more than sufficiently and I am more than ever willing to let go and jump into the deep end trusting that it will be alright. I worry all the time, and I keep trying to tell myself to just relax and let go and trust, but I think I'm always caught unprepared when my worries materialize in front of me. I really don't appreciate the way the circumstances is/was, and I really really am on the verge of just demanding an explanation and exhort some sort of answer. If not deemed satisfactory I want to say just choose the blue pill or the red pill, either take it or leave it, it ends here tonight or you continue on and don't abandon it again. 

But then again nobody really gets anything done by intruding into other people's lives and coercing stuff from them. Aiya I don't know what to do la, and all of me screams tired and despondent but I cannot, and I really just want another long break. 

Okay I shall backspace all the SMSes I typed but didn't send, leave it for tomorrow. 

This post is for the mentee that just flew to Shanghai! Haha it will probably go unread by her because last I checked she doesn't visit this virtual space much, unless I tell her imperatively to read and only will she grudgingly  do so, while skipping most of the verbosity found here. But yeah, two Saturdays ago we were planning a surprise party for Jolene at her place, and she was coming back from her own cell outing (of which they were in cahoots with us too) and she was very pleasantly surprised. And a few days later I conveniently overslept for her send-off at the airport, and oversleeping is an understatement because I woke up an hour after her plane took off! Considering the time to travel to Changi airport and the time for pre-flight check in and whatever, it's a massive lateness. And it wasn't the biggest mistake in the world in my opinion because she is only gonna be there for half a year or so, but it is the biggest mistake like at this point right now because I only found out the huge gap that she left behind.

Okay I'm probably only saying this because I am slightly irritated and facing a huge test of patience, but I think that a lot of times I take it for granted that she's just there doing the things that she does without really making a show of her doing the things that she does. And I'm always so flippantly habitual in telling the girls in my cell that if they have girly problems they can go find Jolene because I would never understand them. I can't exactly be there if they want a hug right? And then I always think people connect with their same gender a lot better than with the opposite, and I see how the girls share a bond with Jolene that I think I will never ever see with myself, cos it's just different! Which is kinda true haha I would totally imagine them telling the korkor one thing but telling the jiejie the same thing but with a lot more emotions and details and blah.

So while she is escaping from everything in Singapore and working in Shanghai, I feel like the sec one and two cells is now led by three guys who will just neglect all the girls and steam-roller over all their feelings hahaha. Okay nah maybe not, but I miss her perspectives on the way I do things, and I miss her helping out by just being there. And of course I miss the friendship la haha it's just not the same knowing that she might be at church Thurs Fri Sat Sun and consequently feeling as though I always take this routine with such banality. It feels like forever that I've known her, not as well as I should or I could but might be because she was my cell member and then co-cell leader, which makes it all the more easier to just look out for her and pray for her haha. And when I'm through thinking that she always seems to be this little girl, God will always surprise me by showing that she's just as equal in Christ as any other. 

"Four o'clock in the morning, my mind is filled with a thousand thoughts of you" hahaha gosh this becoming quite a hazardous thing to do, posting song lyrics as my blog post starters which relate aptly to the time. I assure you seriously that I did not plan to wait till the time just so I can include that in. But today was a day where I met a lot of friends after not seeing or hearing anything from them for a long time. Strangely it had to be all on today. So the list ran something like primary school friends, army friend, former church friends, friend that I did project with two years ago, and friend from some church. With the passage of time and everything that happens in each others' life, it's happy to know that somewhere out there people are finding life worthy for them to live as well as I do.

And after the brief catch-up, it takes me some frantic Facebooking to verify everything about what the other person is doing now, maybe leave a half-sincere message to go out for a meal sometime, great for the chance meet-up, blah blah. And it's almost a travesty when I discover that we aren't even Facebook friends. Which really gets me thinking sometimes about the fragility of human relationships? I remembered not too long ago that you were crying on my shoulders over something which seemed really tragic at that time, but looking back now and seeing where it took you, it hardly mattered at all. I remembered that time when we did that club notebook thing where we filled it with mazes and short stories which we will take turns to write, hardly seems all that mature now. I remembered the lunch where we sat for hours and poured out everything that we had concerning our ideas of faith and what it meant to us, and now it's just hello new set of problems, different
seasons.

I do wonder if the other party goes through an equally thoughtful reminiscence of the old times like I do. Or, if at all, this should be accepted as part and parcel of growing up and getting old. Who would have thought that at that gangly prepubescent age, you would turn out so well-built. Who would have thought that you two will eventually get married. Things change, and people go through so many different seasons too. I don't know if that friendship that mattered quite a lot to me a few years ago still holds the same weight now.

Okay, sleep I go. Long day tomorrow. 

Doing what I do with the sec one and twos sometimes gives me a certain insight into what grabs their attention and what they find amusing. Whenever I study about postmodernism in university, the lecturers just love to say that "you generation are literally born into the postmodern age". Which is kinda true, we were at the cusp of huge technology changes and Internet and iPods and iPhones; everything is configured to be visual and instantaneous. But sometimes I have to disagree with the lecturers, because the youths that I hang out with ten years my junior are even more crazy than I am about instantaneous visuals. If I'm borned into that age, then they ARE the postmodern age. But enough about postmodernity conditions, here are three Internet stuff that I've come across in my two or three years being a cell leader for that age group. Each one is as buffling and obscure and it's mystifying why they are crazy over it at their respective ages.

• Charlie the Unicorn

I distinctly remember being extremely new to the 13-14 year old age group and I'm trying to fit into their age and understand what rocks their boat. And it wasn't until Samantha and Celine found out OH MY GOSH YOU DUNNO CHARLIE THE UNICORN and then they happily and jumpily and crazily showed me this, that they really felt as though they successively inducted me into their lives. For the life of me I still don't know what this is about, and watching it again now I would point at it and say po-mo! But three years ago it seemed like the biggest thing on earth and I was Charlie the unbelieving unicorn to them, because I was a skeptic and old man and pragmatic and grumpy. And they kept threatening to bounce on me each time I refused to do their nefarious biddings, and I can't remember how I endured all the "Chaaaarrrlieeee" chants they did!

• Miss Swan

This one was a year later, and supposedly a year wiser when it comes to these things, but Andrea and Eunice demanded that they borrow my laptop this instant to watch this, because some teacher in their school showed them Miss Swan and they wanted to watch the rest of the series! There are many other Miss Swan misadventures, you can watch it if you like this kind of humour, but it proved as bad a idea as Charlie the unicorn because for about two months after that, they were speaking in Miss Swan's bumbling accent. Jolene and I will ask them questions to Bible study and they answered in Miss Swan speak, and when we get annoyed they'll mock sob and "where did the love go"! Gets me all irked up, but hard to stay annoyed for long because right after that they will laugh like crazy and it's impossible not to share their joy at Miss Swan. 

• Nyan Cat

This is the most recent, and arguably most annoying! Courtesy of Si Xuan, because I've heard of it but I don't know what is this cat thing so she showed me the website. It's just the Nyan Cat flying through space, and the music looped to infinity to irritate people! Okay the tune is catchy for the first ten seconds, and anything beyond that is agony. And if you go to the website you can apparently Nyan for many seconds and you can post that score on Twitter, but it's essentially just letting the browser sit there for hours and chalk up a respectable count while listening to the looped song! I have no idea how something as simple as this can be so annoying, and I have no idea why would the world all over love such things! Anyway Si Xuan says she wants to nyan at me tomorrow, I don't know how this will turn out. 

There-there-there-go! Miss Swan style.

Perhaps it will be good for me if I explain my absence from this blog and also absence from Singapore last weekend! Kuching did me great, being able to get out of Singapore and totally ignore all school/church work for a while. Of course that had its consequences, because now I'm struggling to play keep-up with all my module readings and books. But it was a good trip, the brass band was up there to support with various playing engagements, and I was up there as admin guy or photographer or worship leader (one which I had to readily volunteer to justify me being up there heh). Caught up with the old friends, most of whom are like the second or third time that I'm meeting them only, but they are so jubilant at my arrival in Kuching again and I'm just warmed by their hospitality. Made new friends too, next time I see them I've gotta get more stuff.

Elsewhere, I am absolutely dying in my school work. I have many many Victorian literature to read, the novels are brilliantly written, just that I am a slow reader and unfortunately I do not have time on my side to savor each book. And I regret to say that the tutorial for one of the lit modules was absolutely horrendous. It was a presentation on Wuthering Heights, the guy was speaking in English, his choice of words were a little upmarket but no problem I knew most of the meanings of his vocabulary, he had no foreign accents, he spoke quite fluently, just that for the life of me I couldn't understand head to tail what concept or theme or idea he was trying to bring forth. He went on and on about some abstractions which I totally do not see any link at all to the novel, and it got so bad that to hide my obvious jaw dropping what-is-this-nonsense, I had to pretend to refer to the novel here and there, scribble some notes. When he finished I half expected the professor to exclaim in bewilderment too. But nope, the whole class began to critique positively on his presentation, and they were similarly talking in English but I just couldn't understand what they are trying to debate about!! I mean, it can't be just me right? There was not a thing I understood and I sat there like an idiot grasping at things that were whizzing above my head but never catching it. I have no idea how on earth I am going to sit for the mid-term test next week.