just minishorts.

Its not that I have grown wiser, its just that time has given me the realization that we select the adjectives we put to our statuses.

I am your true friend. I am your best friend. I am your loving friend. I am your busybody friend. I am your caring friend. I am your forgiving friend. I am your giving friend. I am your occasional friend. I am your greedy friend.

In the same way we could reverse the structures of the sentences and provide the definitions for another person.

You are a terrible friend. You are a best friend. You are a trustworthy friend. You are a sensitive friend. You are an unreliable friend. You are a tiring friend. You are a lousy friend.

We seem to get ourselves into knots each time we choose to reinforce into ourselves the kind of standards that we've been performing up to. It was only in these recent days that I realize that rather than allowing us to appreciate more the beauty and wonder of who our friends were, we were constantly placing impossible quantifiers and qualifiers to the kind of characters that we expected our loved ones to perform for us.

I can write it like this, because this is a constant struggle. I walk into an office and I say, this is the best job I've ever had. I look at my staff and I know how to say that person A is more reliable than person B, person C is the most efficient person I know. And each time I tell those things to myself, I further reinforce the belief that B is simply not reliable, and thus not allowing her the opportunity of ever raising the bar for herself.

These labels I've put to the people around in my life, they're such judgemental and impossible standards that I've placed upon them, all for the sake of satisfying my own judge-o-meter of who's best and who's worst.

So this is it. I am your friend. And you are my friend. And therefore, I will accept nothing more, and I will give nothing less. Whether you like it or not, I take the responsibility in fulfilling my duties, I will make this stand for you to be your friend, adjectives, qualifiers, standards not accepted. Because the moment I start living by anyone's definitions of good and bad, I start confusing myself and deviating myself from the ultimate role God has placed me in: to be A FRIEND.

…

And a friend will have to say what he has to say because he cares. You felt hurt because it was true, you felt I was insensitive because I was honest. And honesty always hurts.

…

I loved this Psalm long before I chose to accept my father's faith as my own. As a younger agnostic, searching teenager when I used to flip through Dad's bible, I used to hate the stories in it, in the times I chose to believe that God was evil because He allowed me to be born into a broken family. In recent weeks that I've considered the experiences that He has led me to encounter, I realized truly just how blessed I am to be be built just the way I am, and just how wonderfully and fearfully we have all be made in His image. That potential for growth to become just like Him just makes the whole concept of it logical. Of course carrying the cross is going to be difficult, you think being crucified easy meh?

(more…)

Okay lah, apparently I'm like this.

The ENTJ character gets translated into a few glamourous statements:

"ENTJs are natural born leaders. They live in a world of possibilities where they see all sorts challenges to be surmounted, and they want to be the ones responsible for surmounting them. They have a drive for leadership, which is well-served by their quickness to grasp complexities, their ability to absorb a large amount of impersonal information, and their quick and decisive judgments."
- Portrait of an ENTJ (The Personality Page)

"…have a strong natural urge to give structure and direction wherever they are — to harness people in the field and to direct them to achieve distant goals."
- The Portrait of the FieldMarshal Rational (Keirsey)

"leader, ambitious, hard working, dominant, prepared, hates to be bored, confident, opinionated, analytical…"
- Jung Type Descriptions (ENTJ) (similarminds.com)

""Unequivocating" expresses the resoluteness of the ENTJ's dominant function (Extraverted Thinking). Clarity of convictions endows these Thinkers with a knack for debate, or wanting knack, a penchant for argument. The light and heat generated by Thinking at the helm can be impressive; perhaps even overwhelming."
- ENTJ Profile (TypeLogic)

"At work, ENTJs contribute a wealth of energy directed toward the goals and those of the organization. Their sense of identity is closely tied to how they carry out their responsibilities. They are curious about new ideas and theories, evaluating them in terms of their goals. They are very efficient, competitive, strategic, and task focused."
- ENTJ - The Leader (Lifexplore)

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OK I Freak the hell out of myself can?

*This a post of sweeping statements. Be warned.*

I keep seeing this across-the-board message that screams through the lines of other people's rants about straying husbands, lying politicians, and monstrous mother-in-laws. Or lawless policemen, penny-sucking businessmen, and pretty young things with unbelievable lengths of legs. Its this sad, pathetic and unfortunate view of our earth and these group of people, they're all complaining about the same thing,

'The world sucks, my life sucks, you suck, he sucks, she sucks, the building sucks, the toilet sucks, coffee sucks, damn it the whole damn world sucks and here am I writing about it, and damn it you know its true because I can articulate the whole thing and you know it that everything I say is accurately true. Because I can write, therefore I'm right.'

It's sad because talent that can be used to deliberate on the brighter side of things, IMHO, is now used to repeatedly drum into oneself the hopelessness of being a citizen of earth, of being a part of life. Aish.

Now because I believe I'm one of you who also writes rather well (I a bit perasan, can or not?), I have to say this reflection of myself in the huge mirror called the Internet and the community called the Blogosphere freaks the shit out of me. What the hell are we doing, constantly brainwashing ourselves into a circling torture-room of hopelessness. The irony is this, while we acknowledge that we've got this talent to express our feelings and our thoughts in ways that other people want to say, we're stuck inside that comfort zone of expressiveness, and hardly move from there. We talk a lot and then we turn all these expressions of thoughts into circles of endless rantings, and then after a while, instead of doing something that is contributive, we turn into the old witch down the downtrodden road that's now sitting grumpily in her rundown shack, complaining about cobwebs, cockroaches and rotten wooden rocking chairs, and doing quite nothing to change the pathetic situation of things.

The results are obvious: Bush ends up thinking that the Apec summit is the Opec summit, and still remains the President, and we're looking at a generation of misfit leaders across the globe that are surely guiding our beloved Planet Earth to doom. Must this era be The Book of Revelation coming into the present? Come on lah, surely there's more to all of this than sitting behind our state-of-the-art computer pads and complaining the last breaths out of our fatigued brains?

There has to be more to life than all of this.

The last three words of the title above was deliberately put in for effect.

…

These things happened last week:

I nearly died in the middle of the sea last week. Because I can't quite remember the details of the events I'll be hanging around for a bit checking out from my fellow comrades on board the speedboat, and then maybe later I'll come back to see what had exactly happened.

…

Made it to last night's LP Rally to have my mouth locked into an awestruck gap. OMG LP110 you so rock man, I so so so so so love your moves! (wait a minute did I reveal anything there?)

…

We were talking about THE DRESS this morning and were wondering just how much it would cost if we chose not to go for studio shot, but instead decided to just get the dress and have our photos shot on the the big day itself. Research, research…

…

A little bit random. I've got photos to post, ah ha! But wait, lemme go sieve through my archives for a bit.

…

Oi damn, I'm so thoroughly broke, it's ridiculous.

The next time you take a trip out of KL during a public holiday, get out of the town as early as possible.

We left Taiping at 1.00 pm and reached KL at 11.30 pm last night, can?

…

Oh btw, if you ever ever take the turning off Lembah Beringin, that will take you across the SS Golf Course and through weird trunk roads all the way to Ladang Kerling and Pekan Kerling, play some spiritual music and sing really loudly, it helps to calm your shakey nerves!!

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I'm back in KL. To Perhentian the day after.