lil’ snow white

it all began on 19 Jun, Fri, when we were supposed to meet colleagues at the Asian Civilisation Museum after dinner to visit the galleries. entry was free that evening, n all museum-goers cld get a tic for a free Bacardi Mojito!

after a more-than-satisfyin dinner, we decided tt it was too late to visit the ACM then. decided to visit it the following wkend. we had a photography session by the river instead.. there were beautifully lit floats featuring the lives of the settlers in Singapore durin the early days.

while busy takin our photos, all of a sudden there was a “cling” sound tt sounded like one of e ropes hoistin e reverse bungee had given way! i looked towards tt direction n saw e capsule bein flung out 90 degs to e right n then to e left, like a pendulum. it was scary n i thot that an accident had happened! it was only e next day when fiona told me tt it’s their new ride!!  笨蛋!!

the followin day, we met F&N (Fiona & Nic) for some shoppin n dinner at orchard before adjournin to clarke quay for more action. they were havin a salsa party at the central sq canopy, but seriously it was jus a small mat set up with a few ppl dancin n din look the most interesting. we ended up at Arena instead. it was fun! cancan’s first real clubbin trip (minus those no-dance halloween parties) in 2 yrs!

the last time i dined at Indochine was at the wisma branch, when it was still there! gosh, that’s aeons ago! this one by the river seems even lovelier! check out that exotic decor wif e perfect play of mysterious colors! we had very nice whitebaits (oh yeah tt’s cancan’s fave finger food) n their house salad, and some deer meat.

seriously i thot the deer meat was a steak.. it turned out to be “deer meat ala tze char store”. hahaha! but nevertheless it was delicious n i paired it wif their fragrant white rice, which tuck tuck said (repeatedly) tasted really good. in e end he almost had more rice than salad i think. bo liao leh! kekeke!

after that it was back to the SG River Fest! another Cuban performance here. it was really cool.. i wished i was in e right attire to do some partyin!

some kind soul gave us tix to redeem e Mojito even tho we din manage to get into ACM. the queue to e ACM was a friggin 2-hr long!

the followin day, we came back for another dose of the river happenings. finally got into the ACM, but gave the Kangxi exhibition a miss cos the queue today was even longer!! kao eh.. that was actually wat i wanted to see most..

dinner was at the happenin Penny Black. we tried their popular fish fingers and it was GRRRREAT! suddenly got a cravin for that again… *slurps*

we’re 6,734 miles away frm London.

after dinner, it was a “musical by the river, under da stars”! A free local production, A River Romance brought us a lovely love story bw a Nonya girl n a poor coolie. cancan loves the nonya heritage, long before the Little Nonya was screened!

the musical, in my opinion, was pretty impressive, featurin an array of well-designed props and colorful traditional costumes. for a free production wif a make-shift stage, i think it was superb! the songs were nice and catchy too. wonder if they cut an album or sthg.. they incorporated some china acrobatics in the musical too, which was a bit extra, but nonetheless VERY impressive (i mean the stunts).

durin the SARS period, our holy almighty national leaders were administered a vaccine which us commoners had no access to. it seemed to indicate that their lives r worth more than ours. i found that fact hard to digest. but ok, perhaps it’s true if we assume that our country, n the general well-being of all in our society, cannot function w/o them.

and then i thot of a huge fund-raisin campaign gg on right now, for a little girl ill-stricken wif cancer. the target sum of the campaign is a hefty S$500k! of course, who am i to judge if someone else’s life is worth $500k or not?! if i’m a mother, my child’s life wld definitely be worth much more to me! wat wld stop me frm gg all out to raise money to save the life of my most precious one? as i read the blog, i cldnt help but drop a few tears.. one can definitely understand the reason behind this fund-raising campaign.

but as i read more, i cldnt help but to think of the other not-so-fortunate little ones out there in our society, who similary are struck wif illnesses frm a young age, but do not have recourse to such well-publicised fund-raisin campaigns.

Children’s Cancer Foundation is a charitable org which i donate to monthly. in e past it used to be Club Rainbow (n of course NKF), now i’m thinkin of startin donations to them again, on top of CCF. both CCF n Club Rainbow are charity organisations which help children with illnesses. i chose both of them cos i particularly sympathise wif young children wif illnesses.

n perhaps becos of this, sthg crossed my mind. tt wif the hundreds of thousands of dollars donated by the kind souls in this campaign, it cld either be used for a treatment for a single child (wif a recovery rate of 50%), or it cld be used to save e lives of 100 children wif a recovery rate of 70-90%.

for the friends n family of the child, the decision wld be understandably, unanimous. but for everyone else (i.e. includin me), i really dunno. it kept me pondering n thinkin abt life again… it makes me upset that unfortunate things liddat happen to kids so young, so innocent.

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i was so sure that tt huge silver Harrier had scratched the car since it was parked so friggin close.
i felt upset tt bad things always happen when i drive tuck tuck’s car!
i decided to take a picture of the suspect car, as well as to write him a note to contact me.

seriously, wat was i thinking then?
did i really think tt someone wld call n say
“ohhh sorry i bumped into ur car, i will pay for ur polishin cost!”?? duh!

i cldnt care less, jus din wanna suffer in silence.
jus as i placed e note on e car, the owner appeared!
i took e chance to ask if he bumped into my car..
he said no, n he said he was very sure he din. BLEAH!!

i had no choice but to drive off.
actually i wasnt havin much expectations frm the note n confrontation.
not like anyone was really gonna admit to his mistake, but i jus wanted to stand up for myself.

while drivin, i felt so bullied n almost wanted to cry. boohoo..
when i met tuck tuck, he inspected e scratch n said “no it’s been there (before this) alrdy”.

oh.
我是白痴.

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i was like wat e creep! i din even use the word keloid cos i din think anyone wld noe wat it means.. but she noes! impressed… so the facial was pretty good n my therapist used 2 ampoules on my face. apparently hwee hwee got 3 ampoules! COOL MAN!

i was told that we can use as many pdts durin e facial as we wan..
they provide an unlimited no. of complementary ampoules for all facials.
but it turns out tt e facial is pretty exp too.
even if we sign up for alot of sessions, the lowest they can go is abt $150 per session..
which seems pretty pricey for me as compared to my Bella package.

so i din sign up for any package n the consultant did not push any more either.
ah hwee wasnt so lucky n got a consultant who tried to hard sell her. keke.
before we left, we received our free LBD! it even comes in a very high-class lookin box n paper bag!

 
my big fat butt din look like it cld fit XS so i took S, but it was seriously HUGE!
needa bring it for alteration! yippee!!

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I would like to share this with everyone - an inspirational commencement speech by Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios. give it a read if u’re lookin for some inspiration on choosing your direction in life.

‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

June 12, 2005

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Thanks darling, for sendin this to me.
When i first read this, i was touched to tears.
I know wat’s holding me - n many others - back from doin wat we really want.
It is the fear of failure. our society, unfortunately, is not particularly forgivin when it comes to failure.
And i’m risk averse. I have never played a single game in e casino before, for fear of losing it.

But i think i am ready for a change now.
Or at least, i am preparing for a change now.

Give me ur blessing, Lord and people.

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