chubes's Xanga

yet another mommy joke...

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 07:15:59 GMT

when i was six months pregnant with my third child, my three-year old came into the room as i was preparing to get into the shower. she said, "mommy, you are getting fat!" i replied, "yes honey, rmber mommy has a baby growing in her tummy." "i know," she replied, "but what's growing in your butt?"

kids.

Monday, November 06, 2006

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 03:34:26 GMT

The evil in our desire typically does not lie in what we want, but in that we want it too much.

-John Calvin-

The Need for Significance

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 05:44:16 GMT

Our needs as people are really quite simple. Beyond air, water, food and warmth, our only real primal need is to find validation for our existence...or significance. In fact, if a person feels their purpose is valid, they will give up their life for a cause. All our activities are then to gain significance, protect what significance we have, or to hide from others and ourselves our lack of significance.

No person has ever died from a lack of sex...in fact when a person has a higher purpose in their life, they live willingly celibate. Money, power, prestige are all expressions of apparent significance. To be in a loving relationship we gain in our significance to others and they to us. A more mature person comes to realize that our attempts to gain signific- ance from others is futile as we can only be as significant as we are to ourselves...the rest is illusion.

Yet if we do not have any existence beyond our short mortal life, what then validates our being? To be truly significant we need to surrender our significance to a greater calling, a greater being! Christianity teaches us that we do not have the significance within us to approach that being. Rather, God grants us that significance through His grace.

-- Dr. Wayne Coghlan

source: http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/9873.htm

concise and well put. but i have one question... how, in everyday life, do you apply that? how is that supposed to affect your work, your choices, your motivation?

hmph.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 18:06:04 GMT

convenience can be irritating. how do u make a protected post, protected to only certain non xangarian visitors? as such, ive had to make my most recent post private. im just gonna have to remind myself luxury is not a right.

Friday, September 29, 2006

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 07:03:17 GMT

life isnt fair. sometimes we are faced with choices that wouldnt have been there if life was fair. if life was fair, sometimes we'd even find that in some situations, we actually woulda had a choice.

choice. if anything, i now understand a little more of why God allowed us to sin, or choose to sin. sometimes u feel theres nothing worse than feeling robbed of the freedom to choose freely. to be able to choose freely, it is a right. it is a status, an identity, that you are an equal human being. to be created in the image of God also means we have been created with the equal ability to exercise choice.

yet, the context of the same choice can differ so much between two individuals. why should my choice be so difficult? why should my choice have been forcefully chosen for me before i was even faced with it? why should my choice now come with consquences that were not put there by me, no matter which one i choose now? why should i have been robbed of the freedom to choose for myself FREELY?

not being able to exercise your choice freely, is like being robbed. theres just something inherently wrong about it. feels like it just isnt fair. yet still, we are not without choice. how do you choose when u cannot choose freely? how do you choose when you feel unfairly burdened with the unusual consequences that come with the choice?

i made a choice. still felt all this while it wasnt fair. i had suspected that i would see this day, where i could choose yet i couldnt choose freely. many times when it comes back to me, the first thing i feel is that it wasnt fair, that i had to put up with this struggle even. even after making the choice, i had still been let down along the way.

a friend once commended me about the choice i made. never felt that my choice nor character identified with the good things attributed by this friend. but i happened to ponder a lil deeper today about this choice i once made.

there are some things that are absolutes, or facts. 'life isnt fair' is one of them. but in my reflection, i saw another one, which i will not state here. its easier to see the facts that work against us than the facts that dont.

why did i choose the way i did back then? i suppose that when u cant choose freely without having to worry about unusual consequences, you sometimes have to choose painfully. i chose what was seemingly academically correct, and still felt robbed and hurt. i chose to let go of certain promise for the sake of certain interest that is not mine.

but today, i see more. i saw the new fact, with which allowed me to see my choice in a different light. when you cant choose for yourself, you dont just choose painfully, you choose out of love. you choose, for the other person. you choose, the other person. you dont choose things anymore, or for just yourself, you choose people, for their sake.

when i chose, it was the 'correct' choice. i dare not claim any character credit for it, but i see now that the choice was not just 'correct', but right, and better.

perhaps the period of feeling hurt was necessary for me to understand all of this now...

1) the God-given power to choose, is a divine gift, a right even, considering that we are made in the image of God.

so why did God allow us to sin and not stop us from doing it? coz if he did, that would be like robbing us of our status, right, and identity of being created in God's image. we may not have liked it very much at all. it hurts. but more than that,

2) even when we cant choose 'freely', we are free to choose out of love.

we've heard it before that God didnt make us robots but humans so we can choose to love him. that is true, but that's not what i'm about. and i suppose its just about my choosing out of love being the only lesson here, but also that when we do choose out of love, even when it hurts us, we exercise to the very fullest potential this God-given gift of choice. it isnt just a correct choice anymore, its a right choice, a better choice, a higher choice, a choice more reflective of our God-given image.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Thu, 11 May 2006 09:08:38 GMT

THE MOMMY TEST

I was out walking with my 4 year old daughter. She picked up something off the ground and started to put it in her mouth. I took the item away from her and I asked her not to do that. "Why?" my daughter asked. "Because it's been laying outside, you don't know where it's been, it's dirty and probably has germs" I replied. At this point, my daughter looked at me with total admiration and asked, "Wow! How do you know all this stuff?" "Uh," ...I was thinking quickly, " All moms know this stuff. It's on the Mommy Test. You have to know it, or they don't let you be a Mommy." We walked along in silence for 2 or 3 minutes, but she was evidently pondering this new information. "OH...I get it!" she beamed, "So if you don't pass the test you have to be the daddy." "Exactly" I replied back with a big smile on my face and joy in my heart.

Happy Mother's Day!

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Thu, 04 May 2006 04:26:33 GMT

7 mins till lunchtime, and 10 hrs till departure for Lang Tengah with me CF mates. only the 10 hrs woulda turned out to be never if i never checked my email earlier today.

was informed some days back in an sms from Su En that the bus leaves at 11pm from Hentian Putra. i had the sms saved just so i dont forget that piece of information.

i candidly rmber on sunday discussing with Tien Ming... i told him i planned to take the LRT all the way to Gombak (the intended Hentian Putra) and meet him and the rest of the gang there. i dont know where the station is located anyway so i have no other option but to go by LRT.

well i just discovered that there is a difference between 'Hentian Putra' and 'Terminal Putra'. $%#$%$%#&&#*(&&$% one is indeed in Gombak, but had i be going there, i woulda missed the entire trip altogether.

Terminal Putra is the lousy LRT station which i thought was my destination. Hentian Putra on the other hand was the real destination, equally lousy, opposite PWTC, and for which i have to get off the PWTC LRT station. one is an LRT station, and the other is a bus station.

name two functionally-similar destinations and confusion is what you get. i wonder how many ppl, if any, have ever fallen prey to this sorta... naming farce? oh well, all is well now.

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 17:26:29 GMT

when ur on the highway, u just 'step on it' and ur just intent on 'getting there'. while it allows u to drive faster, the highway also actually makes u drive faster. and it doesnt really have to be a highway. it can pretty much be any well travelled long straight.

and so i was on this long straight, and am absorbed in the 'speed' of the road. and then as if from nowhere, to break the momentum, a bump. and then i go 'oh hey! there's scenery if u actually slow down!' then a short lil detour... and here i am. yes, i vaguely remember i have a blog.

ive heard of diarrhoea. just had my first brush with it. but never have i seen anyone so deprived of attention that he steps up to tell u that the glory is his. i get the diarrhoea, and he gets bragging rights. i had the diarrhoea, he made it happen.

i was so certain that when i was admitted close to 4am last sunday for food poisoning, that the culprit was the cant-even-call-it-RM4-spaghetti i had just the previous nite. in other words, saturday dinner. i mean, it doesnt usually (if ever) take up to a day for diarrhoea to kick in as a result of food poisoning rite? yeah, so i was dead certain for a week. the spaghetti it had to be.

then during 2nd service today, Ian walks over and the conversation was something like this...

Ian (the diarrhoea dealer): ey! dint know u got admitted wey!
me: (something...)
Ian: i also kena, my father also kena, Gerri also kena. i kena saturday nite, father kena sunday morning. its the cockles wey.
me: (thinking 'sure boh?') a bit late rite? the nasi lemak we had at your house was friday supper yknow... wat about Liang? did he kena? he had double.
Ian: i also had double. i kena, but he didnt. his stomach made of steel. (guffaws)
me: did u all have a fever? coz i did.
Ian: i had a fever, and dad had a headache...

now im not dead certain if it was the spaghetti or the cockles. but a friend who tries to identify with u in ur times of diarrhoea is rare, nvm claim the credit. for such a friend, im thankful. only i wish he hadnt actually really given me diarrhoea. but only God knows now. and if it turns out that it wasnt the nasi lemak session after all, then that woulda been the most costly spaghetti of my entire life.

oh but the assunta hospital experience sure rocks. they served food better than almost anything offered at Ming Tien, where i had my spaghetti. each meal never failed to top the previous one. the climax was the tuesday lunch before i was discharged. lamb with mint sauce with a side serving of mash potatoes. oh, and cream soup. if it wasnt for the stupid tube sticking outta my left hand all the time, i woulda mistakenly thought i was boarding in a hotel.

id like to say a thank you to all who visited, prayed and wished well.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 07:30:49 GMT

have i changed? i hardly ever seem to have the mood to blog anymore, although i cant say that NOTHING has happened since the last post.

well for one, yday i had my first time at a Japanese buffet. Shogun, at 1U to be exact. we did a user training for a client the whole day yday and we ended the affair by taking them out for dinner. on the company of course.

a friend asked me very recently what my fav cuisine was. altho i can never be sure where exactly Chinese ranks since i have it everyday and most definitely take it for granted, i replied without hesitating, 'pasta'. technically, it should be Italian, but yeah it answers the question alrite. 'red or white?' i was asked. wow. cool way of asking, i thought. 'red.' 'fav dish?' the traditional spaghetti bolognaise.

at Shogun, i told myself, 'now dont be greedy when u see something u think ull like. just take one piece.' i thought to myself that by limiting the amount of each item, id be able to try more of what Japanese had to offer.

i started with the sushi (only those with raw meat), then sampled a lil beef, a lil grilled oyster, a lil tempura, and finally a lil teppanyaki. i basically skipped whatever that's well, not-just-Japanese, e.g. roast duck, fried this, fried that, beef broth this and that and anything else that doesnt look exclusively Japanese.

for teppanyaki, i picked one piece of this mushroom, one piece of that mushroom, one piece of fish, one piece of squid (u get the idea), with the objective of again, trying as much as what i think i would like. silly me. the stuff i picked merely amounted to a handful so the chef dude just basically dumped everything and cooked them together. in the end, every piece i picked ended up tasting the same -- salty.

oh well, at least i tried. i concluded teppanyaki wasnt all that great. mom had always never thought anything special about it anyway. grandma could prolly whip up something tasting close haha.

time and again, with every round i took i found myself drawn back to the simplest that Japanese had to offer. the raw meat section. err, sashimi its called, i think. with soy sauce and wasabi at the side. i just think its... well, really nice. ironic, considering that its just raw meat. (gee, why do we ever bother cooking our food?)

so after surveying all that Japanese had to offer, i concluded that its generally nice but nothing great. to me, the only things that stand out within Japanese turned out after all to be, sushi, the very only thing Japanese ive ever pretty much tasted. and ive always mostly only ever had sushi from the supermarket cold section.

gee, i dint miss that much all this while did i?

red pasta still ranks tops for me.

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 16:05:30 GMT

Happy New Year, all! late, but well... well some ppl are still writing xx/1/2005 anyway, so...

2nd sunday of the year, and as can be imagined, YC was quite packed. coming out of the lift at L3 at 7plus in the morning, it looked like the first day of school or something. parents waiting with their kids, kids not knowing where to go, just standing around waiting for some clue...

i had one curiosity before we broke into our college CGs. 'how many new fellas for our CG?' walau, 17 in total. as it were, we were splitting into PJ1 and PJ2. but with that number of newbies, we could realistically form a PJ3 as well. but thats another matter.

Matt himself brought a newcomer too, in the form of his own lil sister. will be 11 this year. petrified sweet thing, haha. she made '1 friend' in Children's Church she says. =)

Yuen Wei!!! lousy!!! 1st CG sunday and ur not there! u went happy happy in Singapore! u better come back with souvenirs for PJ1, 2 & 3!!! sorry no cure!! and stop telling lies to your lil sister about me!

PS. gosh its 2006 already. *groan. i cant believe 'it' has happened... happy news, Ebbie my colleague gave birth to baby Noel on the 30th. joyness.