In Continuum.

I wish I can have the same view on things as Travers, how laid back he is for the most part and just allowing life to take the wheels for him. If he does well in school, he is happy for the day and life goes on; if he bombs a paper then there should be a reason for it, life still carries on. It is a virtue, something which should be known to many out there who cannot get over an academic-related failure. It is a barrier that I have yet to cross myself, as I sink in deeper into this pit of academia. I mean, as you get used to this life surrounded by quizzes and assignments, with tests and exams, you suddenly become so conscious about your grades, things that you have already convinced yourself to be trivial, to be of little consequences - even if they do, in reality. It's kind of like how someone must feel with his or her new found fame, perhaps a song posted on his myspace making it onto a local radio station, or an independent film gaining critical success at a film festival somewhere. All of a sudden you become aware of whether or not your shirt is tucked properly, if there are food stuck in between your teeth, if your hair is in a mess, or if the curtains in your home are drawn because you won't want the picture of your butt splattered all over the front page of tomorrow's newspaper.

It's the same, I suppose, the same kind of pressure after you have been immersed in the same life for too long. You sort of gain this sense of responsibility to yourself, this identity as a student in my case. To excel, to do well, to be on par, to not lose in competition. It is not half as bad if I lose to someone else than to lose out to myself, and that is where I am right now. It is a state of neutrality, if you want an abstract view of things. I don't suppose I am giving up, that's not in my style of doing things certainly. But it just seems that the odds are against me right now, and it is so tiring and hard to be the dark horse of a race. People are expecting you to do well in the race, and most of all you are expecting yourself to do well in the race. I don't do well with pressure, I certainly don't do well when grades are concerned. I seem to be back in those days when the sense of stupidity is coming over again. It's the way my past is coming back to slap me in the face, to laugh and  jeer at my brink of failure. Things are not irreversible, things are not hopeless yet. But I hate to run out of options, to be putting my money on the next race, on the next quiz, or exam, or whatever. I hope this is a fallacy of helplessness now, because I desperately need to be wrong this time around.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, and I like Tuesdays. Tuesdays is the day with history and psychology statistics. I'm not particularly excited about history, but psychology statistics almost always gives me a sense of achievement somehow. I suppose it is the fact that it is a very hands-on, very application based subject, which I seem to have a talent in. I'm not fantastic in the subject, but at least I have a tighter grip on things. I hate to memorize, I hate to regurgitate my knowledge on paper, or to pick the right answer from five other options. Give me a blank space, give me a mathematical sum, let me solve the problem with a whole series of equations, that's what I do best. Once again, I am questioning my options, and I am deathly afraid that I am going to let a lot of people down by the end of it all, all over again. I know this is the wrong time to feel lousy about myself, the time when I need that little boost of confidence. But it is hard to come by now, especially when I'm not sure which part of myself to push. It's frustrating, to be eating dust again. It really is. 

I fell off my chair, in between the last line and the one you are reading now. I leaned back, and the chair toppled and sent me crashing to the ground like an idiot in a bad comedy. It was painful, my head hit the side of my bed and knocked me out cold for a second or two, and all my sister could do at the door to my room was to tell me not to move so that she could take a picture. Something fell off the chair, probably a screw, I'd find it later under the table or something. But when that happened, I just sort of laid there on the ground for a while, wondered to myself what the hell just happened from the middle of the semester up until now. Things have been a downward spiral, up until the point when the center of gravity was tipped and I fell off the chair. I guess that was my rock bottom, a sign from wherever. I'm not superstitious, but somehow I do believe in such silly things. It's time to sit back on the chair again, and I hope this time, I make it happen. 

Why do I find this strangely familiar?

That's the real title by the way, and this album by the Propellerheads is also their only album, and sadly so. This is quite an old album, released in 1998 and made famous by the soundtrack of The Matrix. Spybreak! was such a big hit that it became one of those songs used over and over again in every possible medium, but nobody knew who made it. Though the highlight of the album is on Spybreak!, I must say that the rest of the album is equally good, if not better than it. It totally kicks Paul Oakenfold out of the windows here, which is even more confusing why they only released this one album. The whole album is like a really cool soundtrack to a really cool and slick heist movie, where you root for the bad guys and not the good ones. You can just picture in your head a group of smartly dressed men robbing a casino here, probably where the makers of Ocean's Eleven got their inspiration to make the film in the first place. This is the album you'd want to listen to while walking through a mall, everybody else becomes so small all of a sudden. 

Albums by the band:

1.Decksandrumsandrockandroll (1998)

A letter typed and printed out a month ago and made its way into my mailbox about the repainting of the entire estate. It has been quite some time since the last layer of fresh paint, and let's just say that it is about damn time that it is happening. If you have seen those old Hong Kong action movies with Jackie Chan running and jumping over buses and street signs, you would have noticed the state of the buildings there - old, cluttered, and rundown. My condominium is somewhat close to that description after years of disrepair, since the administration has been reluctant to do a complete makeover of the estate due to the MRT construction just an arm's reach away on the other side of the road. In fact, calling this a "condominium" hardly fits the bill, since it is more like a higher class HDB flat with security guards and a swimming pool, not to mention the third-rate gym and the nice little Thai restaurant downstairs. But it is big here, big and cozy, two words that don't usually come together in the same sentence while describing a certain place, but that's what I feel about my home in Singapore, my happy place.

Anyway, so, foreign workers have been running in and out of my estate due to the paint job happening on the perimeter of every block, some of them can be found sleeping at the lobby on lazy weekday afternoons while it is raining and they can't be paid to do anything. So the surrounding areas have been blocked up with warning signs, steel cages brought in and buckets of paint piled up to look like and outdoor mega mall selling home refurnishing equipments. The residences in the neighborhood have been given slips of paper to pick the colors that we'd like to see our blocks painted, and for some reason they all look rather horrendous to me. One suggestion was to keep the current color, which has already faded over the years into a pale shade of green. The second color is a awful shade of purple that looks like the guts of a jellyfish, made especially more so by the fancy designs by whosoever. The last option is a dull shade of brown, which makes the apartments look rather depressing but, at least it looks a little more normal than all the other options. So the colors have been chosen, the orders given, and the workers went to work.

A few afternoons ago, I was taking a nap in my room when the neighbors upstairs started drilling - again. Seriously, they are going to get themselves killed one day by my own hands, and I wonder if they are making a homemade bee hives for their secret underground honey mustard business. I woke me up abruptly, and I rolled about in bed and desperately wished for the old pair of ear plugs I had from my army days, which I so kindly gave to Lynette two years ago because she was having a hard time keeping the noise from the neighborhood renovations out. I started picturing myself murdering my neighbors again, and somehow such violent thoughts brought me some levels of peace as I slowly drifted back into sleep again. That was when I heard another sound on top of the drilling, and it sounded like water being sprayed on the walls outside my bedroom, or something along the lines of that. So I clicked my blankets off, walked to the window, and was just about to find out what the sound was when I saw a man staring back at me through my bedroom window. Now, keep in mind that I just woke up, and the sight of a man standing outside a nineteenth floor bedroom window can be quite a shock in times like this. 

So I jumped about ten steps back, cursed at the man and then gathered my nerves. It was one of those workers with the painting company, standing in one of those cages outside my bedroom spraying gibberish on my wall. I think they were marking out the dimensions, or the color, or something. My whole block looks like it has been vandalized by someone with very bad vandalizing skills. Anyway, that man on the outside stared at me for a while, and then closed my bedroom window for me so that it wouldn't be too noisy for me, I think. Nerves were collected, heart was calmed, and just as I was about to crawl back into bed for the second half of my nap, the man outside started singing in a language I couldn't understand. So, let's get the picture right: I had the neighbor drilling, the men outside spraying paint on my walls, and another singing on the top of his voice in a language I couldn't understand. It drove me crazy, and I had no choice but to wake up and blast even louder music through my speakers. 

I pictured these men to be spies from the government for some reason, marking out the units with blue colored spray paint so that pilots from above would be able to drop a bomb on us conveniently. Perhaps we are the invalid bunch, the group of population that proved to be resistant to the virus, and they are eradicating us from the face of the earth. Yes, I have strange and warped thoughts like that from time to time, which is also why my father gives me that look once in a while, as if to ask "What have I done?" So yes, the weather has been crazy and everybody is falling sick. It seems to be a global conspiracy thing, kind of like how TIME magazine is calling the promotion of bio-fuels to be some kind of money making scheme. Whatever it is, the weather is breaking me apart, and it's not like those creepy men outside my windows are making my life any easier for me. They have to stop staring at people's lives from the outside, it is strange and it is uncomfortable. It must be very tempting to look, and I suppose they get a kick out of it. Talk about a job bonus. 

Crazy eyes have you, are they gray or blue?
I wont make the move, you must make the move,
If you make the move, I will then approve,
If you do not move, we will surely lose

Don't second guess your feelings you were right form the start
And I noticed she's your lover, but she's nowhere near your heart
This city is for strangers, like the sky is for the stars

The moment I saw Michel Gondry's name tagged to this film in the trailer, I knew that I had to watch it one way or another. The genius in Michel Gondry is unbelievable, the way he can turn the most ordinary of things into cinematic gold. It has been reflected through his advertisements, his music videos, and not to mention the kind of life he injected into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless. The Science of Sleep, while not a masterpiece in conventional standards, was definitely a pleasant film to sit through, filled with numerous surprises and smiles. That's the thing about Michel Gondry that I love, the way you never know what to expect from him. His unpredictability is like putting your hands into a bag full of candies on Halloween. You don't really know what you are going to get, and you may not even like the candy you fish out of the bag either. But there's just this excitement in his films that is so endearing, so magical for some reason. I must admit, when it comes to being a film director, Michel Gondry definitely has a long way to go. He is flawed, very flawed, but you have to applaud him for his creativity. 

With that said, Be Kind Rewind feels like yet another drawing block for Michel Gondry to paint his imaginations. The film centers around a neighborhood video rental stall called Be Kind Rewind, owned by Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), which was about to be torn down because it failed to meet the safety requirements set by the district government. So Mr. Fletcher decided to go on a trip of sorts, to do researches on his rival video rental store that has the latest films all available in DVDs, instead of VHS like the ones in his store. He placed the shop under Mike's (Mos Def) care, with a warning written hastily on the glass window of the train carriage "Keep Jerry Out". Jerry (Jack Black) is a friend of Mike's, and he is a nuisance to everybody in the neighborhood due to his strange antics and habits. He claims that the power plant next to his house is trying to take over the world with microwave machines, and wanted Mike along with him in a mission to sabotage the transformers in the power plant. During the mission, however, Jerry accidentally got himself electrocuted and in turn, became magnetized. The next day, Jerry enters Mike's video store and accidentally erased all the contents in every tape, ruining the business and potentially destroying the trust Mr. Fletcher had on Mike. So Jerry came up with the brilliant idea of remaking the films in the store themselves, or "sweding" it according to Jerry, using little to no budget and on a prehistoric camcorder. 

In a way, Be Kind Rewind feels like a parody of all the films we grew up watching. Because Mike and Jerry had little to no budget at all, they had to come up with ingenious and creative ways to film their versions of the movies. The film spoofed a bunch of other films, everything from Ghostbusters, to Driving Miss Daisy, to 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Robocop, to Men in Black, to The Lion King... well, you get the point. It was very interesting to see how the duo pulled off various scenes from movies, how they made it almost feel like the kind if videos you'd find on YouTube. They were cheap, outrageous, and incredibly funny and creative at the same time. The length that they go to recreate the films was probably the best part of the whole movie, how they devised different ways to make the Marshmallow Man come alive from Ghostbusters, or how they shot people falling down into the streets for the 'sweded' version of Rush Hour 2. Seriously, I would have paid good money just to sit through the 'sweded' version of their films, anytime. 

Be Kind Rewind is not a perfect film, in fact it is quite a flawed one. With every hilarious scene, there were probably two others that didn't work as well as they should have. A lot of scenes had so much potential to be funny, but they were usually not executed properly or overwhelmed by Michel Gondry's urge to experiment with the material. Michel Gondry may seem to have been trying too hard to be weird and quirky at times, simply because of the reputation he has in the world of filmmaking. Certain aspects of the film gives the viewers a sense that he may have went over the top, especially the scene with the magnetized urine - seriously? However, with every dull moment of the film, I couldn't wait until Mike and Jerry move on to their next filming project, because it is a joy to see how they pull off those films, as I have mentioned. I suppose it is crucial for the viewers to have some sort of knowledge about the spoofed film prior to watching this film, because they are not going to be explained later on in the film. 

This film is targeted at the fans, not just the ones of Michel Gondry, but also at fans of movies as a whole. It was interesting to see and imagine how films must have been made in the past, or tried to be made anyway. The heart and soul poured into the films by Mike and Jerry was moving, especially the kind of dedication we saw. I don't suppose this film is going to gain a lot of critical acclaim, which is already proven on Rottentomatoes and the local critics. But still, it reminded me of why I loved watching movies in the first place, and I thought the film brought forth that point very well. This is how I see the film's structure through the pre-production process. Michel Gondry had an idea, and on top of that idea he laid the tracks for an actual story line. On top of that story line, he added his own style of quirkiness, his humor, along with a few of his trademark experiments. It may seem like a wonderful formula, but the end result is that of a hastily put together film with too much ambition at times. 

This film has a good story, a great story in fact, if you are willing to stretch the boundaries of your imaginations, and believe that it is possible for a man to be magnetized. The story is brilliant, but the execution by Michel Gondry was rough and almost amateur at times. The reason why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind worked was because it had Michel Gondry's style of film, carefully tamed by Charlie Kaufman's wild and yet restrained screenplay. Giving the full authority over the scripting as well as the filming, Michel Gondry clearly went overboard and drew out of the edge of his drawing block and onto the table. Certain aspects of the film seemed rough, a little unpolished, and perhaps under-developed as well. The characters are rather poor, you don't exactly feel a sense of attachment to them whatsoever. It is easy to laugh at their jokes, but then I thought a large portion of the film could have been devoted to character development to make the film more engaging. The film also needed more "sweding", because that is the main focus of the story after all. They film had a lot of those, but still too little. I wanted more, but we ended up watching the faces of the audience in the video store rather than what they filmed. 

The problem with Michel Gondry is that his ambitious usually exceeds his abilities. He is bigger than his skills in directing, and there are times whereby his story becomes a little under-developed, like a baby given birth to too early. Despite those however, it is not impossible to sit through Be Kind Rewind and be delighted at the film's humor and the heartwarming scenes. Some may argue that the end of the film was a little cliched, that it was a little too Hollywood. But I thought it was sweet, very heartwarming, and a fitful end to a story that went way out of line in the best of ways. 

The cast is nothing short of eclectic, which is something you would expect from a film by Michel Gondry. He knows his cast, and placing Jack Black next to Mos Def was probably the best move of all. Jack Black's electrifying performance is debatably funny, some may beg to differ. I am a closet fan of Jack Black though, and I am not afraid to tell the world about it right now. Mos Def has this strange ability to look into the camera without any expression, and make you like that guy. His laconic presence proved to be a stark contrast to Jack Black's, but it worked on screen and carried the film very well throughout. The supporting cast was decent enough, with guest appearances by Mia Farrow and Sigourney Weaver, and they were good enough in their parts as well - I thought Charlie Kaufman was the guy working in the video rental store, but I guess I was wrong. Melonie Diaz reminded me of Pao, for some reason, and she was rather cute in the film I must say. 

At the end of the film, one is going to say that the film was quite a mess. It was, it definitely was, with all the varying styles of filming. But it was not an uninteresting mess at that, and that is probably Michel's signature. The film placed aside its frequent misfires and awkwardness quickly and dives into the essence of the film. I thought it was incredibly enjoyable, and truly a film that defined itself from all the other films in the theaters showing now. Not exactly a recommendation for me, but people should give it a shot if they feel adventurous enough. 

7.5/10

McDonald's 24 hour delivery opened up new doors to the world of lazy people. In the past, lazy people had to walk to their cars to drive to the nearest joint. Now they can stay at home and wait for the food to be served, even if it is only going to be a cup of chocolate fudge. It changed the way we eat things, and I do consider it a gift of some sort. Another thing I loved about the service is probably the fact that we had to call them to place our orders in the past, though that is not the case now any longer. For a few weeks now, they have been promoting the online ordering website, which meant that we won't even need to pick up our phones now, every ounce of energy needed to order a meal rests upon the tip of your right index finger - isn't that amazing? At the same time, however, I feel that it took away that special touch of humanity when you give somebody a phone call, there is just something so special about phone calls, to hear somebody's voice through a plastic receiver shaped like a squarish banana. 

I was reading an article about technology taking over the world the other day, a far-fetched thought unless you believe in the whole Terminator franchise, thing. Laser discs came and replaced VHS cassettes, then VCDs came to take over that one, then came DVDs and then later HD-DVDs and Blue-ray, not to mention a few formats lost in between. The likes of the Hindenburg has been replaced by planes, cruise ships have taken over the likes of steam engines, and chunky old cellphones have been taken over by cellphones thinner than our fingers and some smaller than our palms. It is true that technology rapidly changed the world in the past century or so, but some things just cannot be taken away - ever. You cannot design a robot or a certain CD-ROM for the class and expect it to take over the job of a teacher, nor can you design robots to fight firing effectively in the future. Some things can only be done in proper, by humans. Picking up the phone, talking to somebody else, that's something only humans can do best, too.

This is something worthy of an entry on PostSecret.com, but there is always that little sense of excitement while calling a phone operator. It doesn't matter if I am calling in regarding some internet connection problems, cellphone issues, or some food delivery services. It's always nice to know that somebody is going to pick up the phone on the other end of the receiver to answer your questions, somehow. That was until Starhub decided to put the majority of their phone calls through to a monotonous pre-recorded voice, the voice of a woman that cannot sound less interested about your problems. You'd think that after pressing a million numbers on the dial, they'd transfer you to an actual human with a sweet voice, but I guess such things only happen in porn movies nowadays. Soon, McDonald's Delivery is going to be completely taken over by the website as well, and we will find ourselves rid of that human touch, which also means that I'd never be able to meet someone like Amelia anymore. 

There was a time, probably a year or two ago, when something in my cellphone decided to malfunction. No messages were getting in, and no messages were going on. Online, a bunch of my friends started complaining about how I was ignoring their messaged, and that was when I realized that there was a serious problem at hand that needed my attention. So I searched for a few phone numbers, dialed them up on my phone, and I was connected through to a phone operator working at Singtel. I remember the ruffling of the phone cord on the other end of the line before the person actually picked up the phone, and then the person introduced herself over the phone, simply as "Amelia". She had a sweet voice, at least for a phone operator, and she just sounded as if she was genuinely happy that you called. So I told her about my problem, and she told me about the various possibilities we were looking at. 

I forgot the various possibilities, but most of them didn't work very well. She sounded as if she was new on the job, because every remedy she came up with took about five minutes, as if she was looking through a user's manual while trying to entertain me over the phone. She kept apologizing while I waited, but I thought she was just being overly anxious about me waiting on this side of the line. I had all the time in the world, and it's not like I had the urge to hang up anytime soon either - everybody loves a lovely voice. It was rather amusing how she tried to start a conversation while she searched for a remedy, so I entertained her as well by going along with the act. Before we knew it, we were chatting on the phone instead of trying to solve the problem on my phone. I had the image of the floor manager or something peeking over the partition and catching her talking on the phone instead of serving other customers, which was why I asked if I was going to get her into any trouble. "Oh, no troubles!" I remember her saying. "This is a temporary thing anyway, don't really like this job." 

She then asked me to change the settings in my phone and try again, and I followed through the steps and finished her instructions. But I needed somebody to test the phone out, and Amelia was kind enough to give me her number to try if it was working. I sent some random gibberish to her, and she was nice enough to reply to that message - how weird. We talked a little bit more before hanging up, and I thought that was probably the best conversation I ever had with a stranger - ever. 

I was telling that story to Kerri last night, and she asked if we ever contacted each other again. She never did, and I never tried either. I think it'd seem weird somehow, like the perfect plot for a perfect horror movie, of some perverted serial killer looking for his next pray by calling up phone companies and asking for phone numbers. I didn't want to be seen as that kind of person, which was probably why I never attempted to call her back, and I am sure I never really left a deep impression on her either. I was just another customer, another statistic on her daily quota, perhaps. Still, I feel that these are the kind of things automated pre-recorded voices can never take over, these nice conversations with strangers over the phone, it's priceless really. I suppose, this is the best way to go about things, I am sure that if I actually tried to call Amelia in the days that followed and met her in real life, I would have been terribly disappointed somehow. Humans have the ability to romanticize everything, and things just do not turn out as we'd hope it to be - ever. So it is probably the best that it ended with the phone call, to have it preserved in a beautiful memory like that, like a floating iceberg inside my mind. 

I don't suppose it is likely but, if your name is Amelia and you worked for Singtel last year or the year before the last, my name is Will. Or I might have introduced myself as Weilien, or Mr. Chin, whatever. You don't remember me, but I remember you very well. If you are reading this, then you've found me. 

This, is a mosaic made by somebody online of George W. Bush and John McCain. It has always been a mind-boggling question as to how they actually made these mosaic pictures, the kind of patience and determination involved is simply amazing. As amazing as this picture is, it is important to look at what this picture is made up of. If you look closer at the little pictures, you are not going to recognize the faces, not even with a magnifying glass pressed up against the screen of the monitor. You are not alone though, because there are only a handful of people out there in the world who might recognize a face or two in this picture, simply because they are nameless soldiers who have died in Iraq ever since the war started five years ago. That is not to say that they are nameless in real life, they are nameless because nobody other than their family and friends know who they are. People like us, people all the way our side of the world are going to look at these men and women with blank eyes, not knowing any of them. This picture is made up of the 4000 faces that have died ever since the war began, and we don't know the names of any one of them. Not one. 

It has been five years now, five years since America decided to invade Iraq. Ever since that fateful morning in 2003, Operation Shock and Awe marked the beginning of an seamless end, a war that is still being fought until this day for a cause not a lot of us are very clear of any longer. The death toll in the U.S. military surpassed 4000 just yesterday, a few soldiers were killed by a bomb planted at the side of the road in a residential neighborhood in the middle of Baghdad. So they were blown into shreds, and nobody knows their name. In the month of February, television networks spent a grand total of 3% of the total air time talking about the war in Iraq, and the majority of that 3% was to talk about Prince Harry and his heroic return from the frontline. Nobody likes to hear about dead soldiers now, they happen on a daily basis. Nobody likes to hear that the country sent 4000 soldiers out to die in a foreign land and away from their loved ones. After all, if your own government is responsible for the deaths of 4000 people, do you really want to know? 

It is difficult to picture 4000 people, it is such an incomprehensible number. If I put all the people I have ever met in my life, the ones that I have had interactions with, I'm not sure if I can come up with 4000 faces, let alone 4000 names. It is difficult to picture 4000 people, but I guess a rough gauge would be a rock concert, that'd be a good reference I suppose. Just picture half of that crowd dying right in front of yours eyes, and the dead bodies piling on top of one another like dead pork at a wet market. That'd be how many soldiers the Americans have lost in Iraq ever since it all began. I forgot who they were, or which state they were from, but a few people came together ever since the beginning of the war and decided that they'd be responsible for filling up a grass field with white flags, with each flag representing a dead soldier. The end result was a field covered in little white flags, and they have already ran out of space after the 4000th soldier died yesterday night. It gave the other people a visual reference on how much people have passed away for a cause that not a lot of people are sure about. They talk about freeing the people of Iraq, liberating them from tyranny and such. But then the big bad guy has been captured from within a hole, more than 80000 Iraqis have been killed in the process, and we still have yet to find weapons of mass destruction. WMD my ass.

The war in Iraq cost $5000 every second, statistically speaking. After reading the last sentence, one American's annual salary might have been spent in Iraq, and another man's salary might have been wasted for a lost cause by the end of this sentence, maybe even two. More than money, human lives have been spent in Iraq for a reason the rest of the world are unsure of. But of course, none of us are protesting against the false tyranny that is the Bush administration, because nobody dares to stand up against the Big Brother, everybody is supposed to love him. George Orwell saw that coming, and he wrote the book 1984 that depicted the eventual fate of the world in the 21st century. It is true that the rest of the world are afraid, I think we really are. "Either you are with us, or against us." the president said more than five years ago, and now I am thinking if North Korea is really as bad as he has made it out to be. Seriously, if he is looking for a terrorist, he'd only need to look into a mirror. 

It is disturbing to know that the news of the 1000th soldier dying is still fresh in my mind, like a movie I saw last weekend in the cinema. It just doesn't feel that long ago when the death toll officially became a four digit number, when the troops that perished became just a part of a statistic, and nobody cared about them any longer. Those numbers became milestones, and we are just adding on more and more to that number because we are "short of an exit plan". It is said that killing one man will land you in a prison. Killing ten men will land you in an insane asylum. But if you kill 4000 men, people might look at you and say," Hey, not bad!" Even more disturbing, is probably the answer of the defense minister to this whole issue. Himself, along with his boss, orchestrated this daylight massacre and earned large wad of money and stuffed them into their secret overseas account. And all he could say about the situation was," So?"

If presented with this mosaic, I don't suppose George W. Bush is going to see those 4000 faces at all. He is going to see himself, and John, and maybe complain about how crooked his nose looks in the picture. He is going to overlook the pictures of the dead soldiers, kind of like how you'd ignore the green dots in an eye-test and concentrate on the orange dots forming a number or an alphabet in the middle of the picture. Ignorance is bliss, and that is what he has convinced himself to do, and what the rest of the world have as well. We have ignored what he did for way too long, so much so that we do not think that there is anything wrong with have 4000 fathers and sons, mothers and daughters dead in the middle of nowhere. To put things into perspective, America has been involved in this mindless war longer than they have been involved in the second world war. To put things into deeper perspective, the terrorists that orchestrated 9/11 killed 2000 odd people on that one morning. So yeah, do the math. 

It is a year of change, it really is. The oppositions are rising back up and defeating the old ways. We first saw the opposition party in Malaysia giving the ruling party a slap in the face, a wake up call. Then the opposition party in Taiwan thrashed the ruling party in their election by winning by a margin of more than two million votes. Very soon, the opposition party in America is going to reclaim what they had more than eight years ago and bring the country into a new direction - more importantly, to bring the troops home. I have been watching a lot of videos with Barack Obama, and let's just say that he is the only thing Rosemary and I can truly agree with. This is the man that can, well, change. Before that comes along, however, I wish for these soldiers to rest in peace, and may their names be remembered by people in the years to come. Even if it was for a lost cause, at least there was faith and passion involved in their deaths. Just pick a name off that list, and remember it. Just one name, at least one. I think that is the least that they deserve. 

The name that I have picked to remember for the rest of my life is: Albert Bitton. 

He died under hostile fires, on the 20th of February, in Baghdad. 

What about you? 

My mother's family has seven children, with my mother being the fifth child in the family. My grandmother was a friendly old woman who looked somewhat Japanese, but then my perception of her might have been influenced by the fact that she could speak fluent Japanese. My grandfather was a sort of tyrant in the family, a man who used to have considerable wealth until he gambled everything away. My mother spoke of cupboards stashed full of money in the past, and then everything went downhill from there when my grandfather became addicted to gambling. So the family became engaged in a knitting business that brought the whole family together. Everybody had a part to play, and living under the same roof caused much troubles and turmoil within the family, particularly between my third aunt and my second uncle, who used to throw fruit knives at each other because of a dispute over the television channel. 

My first aunt isn't very popular in the family, she's usually the person missing from family gatherings because of how 'busy' she claims herself to be at work. The last I heard, she was an insurance agent that sells any forms of insurance possible, and we all know how irritating insurance salespeople can be. The way they force insurance policies down your throat can be rather frustrating, and it's not like family members are spared in the great scheme of things. She never had enough time for anything, and the dislike towards her became even more elevated when my grandmother died, and she refused to take too much responsibilities regarding the funeral arrangements. I remember her husband being a cameraman or part of the backstage crew at a local television network in Taiwan, and he always look dead drunk somehow even if he was just smoking on a cigarette. They have three daughters I think, one of them born without a left arm - some birth defect, if I am not wrong. But they were all very beautiful looking girls, at least from the last time I saw them at all. I vaguely remember taking a picture with them when I was younger, but then it's lost somewhere in the photo albums now, and I just cannot be bothered.

I've never been a fan of my second uncle either, but he is very well respected in the family, being the eldest son and all. He has this uncanny resemblance to Donny Oswald, but with a pompous personality that I never admired that much. He has this one daughter, and she is everything to him to an extent that she has the ability to do anything in the world at the age of five. I remember that other time at my grandmother's birthday gathering when I brought a book there to read. It was an English-language book, and he has always prided himself in the fact that he's fluent in Mandarin, Japanese, English, amongst other languages. So he assumed that his daughter had the same mental capacities, and told me that his five year old daughter could finish the book in a faster time than myself. Still, some credit must be given to him for being the big brother, the guy that has the most responsibilities in the family on some level, a sort of leader of the pack I suppose. He's now in Canada, living with his daughter and wife. It has been a while since we've met, but I remember a phone call he gave to my family a dozen years ago when he was looking for my mother. So that's that, about him.

The second aunt changed her name by the time she was twenty-one because she hated her original one. Either way, she was the fashionable one of the family, the person who needed to be at the leading end of the family's fashion trend. There's always that somebody in your family who places a lot of importance in the way that they look, and she is certainly that individual. Warm, enthusiastic, and often a little too friendly, my second aunt is a person with a big heart. She owns a boutique in Taipei which I have visited rather often, and I remember the tank of fish underneath the counter that I used to play with all the time. My cousins, her sons, are a pair of hyperactive boys that had a passion for destroying things. Put the two in the same room for fifteen minutes and they are going to start a fight for the most trivial reasons, and for some reason both of them wanted me to be sided with them because I was supposed to be "cool". The big brother grew out of his teenage angst, spent the majority of his time doing sketches and drawings as part of his school work, while his brother remained the adolescent of the family. My second aunt also has a passion for dancing, and she does so with her husband on a weekly basis, her husband who is also a professional dance instructor who specializes in a variety of moves. 

My third aunt is the closest to my family, probably because of the fact that she doesn't have children of her own, and shared a house with my family while we still stayed in Taiwan. She is my second mother in a way, the woman that took care of me while my mother was away trying to set up a business with my father. She lived just across the hall with her husband up on the second floor, and they are both salespeople for the company called Amway. Basically every protect in her family, and my own, comes from that company. Everything from pots and pans, to toothbrushes, toothpastes, water filters, utensils, body foam, shampoo, hand soap, my mother's cosmetics, my mother's skin care set, detergents, dish sponges, vitamin pills, everything. She is still very much into the business, her husband isn't anymore. Her husband is one of the most respectable man I have ever met, the smartest person I have ever known in my life. It is hard to summarize him into a few sentences, but let's just say that he can swallow a Rubik's cube and then shit it out with all the six sides completed, if he wants to. They have a dog now, they treat him like their son for the most part. They are living happily in Taiwan, and we visit them often when we get back. 

My mother has a younger sister, my fourth aunt. She is the forgetful one of the family, with the uncanny ability to go to school without bringing her schoolbag. She looks somewhat like an indigenous singer famous in Taiwan, and she is probably the most western-influenced person of the family. She loves Hollywood movies, loves American TV-series (Great fan of Sex and the City and Nip/Tuck), and has a taste in music that is pretty well versed I must say. She is married to a workaholic lawyer husband, the kind of man you'd consider to be a nerd in Singapore. He has an explosive temper, which is the root of a lot of arguments within his household most of the time. He is an exam machine, he ace everything that he does and the kind of person you'd be jealous of academically. But his marriage has been on the edge for quite some time, and burying himself in his computer isn't helping anything at all. They have two children, a boy and a girl, with the former being in a state of permanent malnutrition. He is two years younger than me and he seems like he could be ten years younger. Short and skinny, with glasses too heavy for his nose and he used to have a mouth full of bad teeth. His sister is a little more normal I'd say, but the temper from the father is in her. 

The youngest member of the family is my second uncle, the somewhat rebellious one of the family who was interested in the arts. He refused to study very well in school last time, wanted so desperately to enter an arts institution to study ballet. He finally landed himself a role in Cats when the Broadway musical came to Taiwan for the very first time more than ten years ago, and I was there to see him perform with my family. He had a wife, a nice person whom I liked immensely, until they divorced each other and she took away a big part of his money. The last time I met him, he was working for a major healthcare agency in Taiwan, earning him the big bucks and enjoying his life to a certain degree without the restrains of a wife. I remember him doing the moonwalk for the rest of the family in the past, and I remember staring at him in awe. Really cool guy, really cool.

So that's a brief outline of my mother's side of the family, not that anybody cares really. I guess I just want to have it written down somewhere, or typed out rather. I guess I just wanted a reason, an excuse to remember who they are and what they mean to me in life, because I know that I am beginning to forget anybody else outside of my parents. It's a little sad, on my part, to learn that a big part of what an ordinary family enjoys has been taken away from me, ever since I moved overseas to Singapore. I mean, most of us have cousins they know well, nephews and nieces, grandparents to hear stories from and stuff like that. I've been away from all the other family members for too long to experience any of those. So for the little remaining memories that I have right now, perhaps this is a good reason to record them down somewhere, before everything vanishes with the sands of time, eventually, like everything else. 

The Kite Runner begins with the story of two young boys, Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) and Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada), in Afghanistan in the eve of the communist invasion. Amir is the son of a successful Afghan business man, Baba (Homayoun Ershadi). Hassan is the son of the faithful house servant, Ali, who has been Baba's servant for almost forty years. Aside from being best friends, Hassan is also Amir's partner in the annual kite flying competition that happens in Kabul, where the children of the city would compete for the best kite flyer. The tradition of the game involves the kite flyer to cut the string of the other kite, and it is basically a fight till the last kite flying. The last kite to be cut down would be the goal of most of the children in the city, because chasing it down would gain you the utmost respect and honor. Hassan is the best kite runner in the city, and on the day that Amir won the kite flying competition, Hassan ran ahead of the pack to catch the kite for him. That was also the same day when Hassan made a sacrifice for Amir so big, that Amir became afraid to face Hassan afterwards, and even grew to become resentful of Hassan.

Due to the invasion of the communists, Amir and his family were forced to become refugees, and they eventually ended up in America where they led a decent life. Baba became the owner of a store at the flea market, and occasionally earned some many from behind the counter at a gas station. Amir became a successful author and married the daughter of an Afghan general. Things were going fine, until an old friend called from Pakistan, telling Amir to pay him a visit. It turned out that Hassan had a son, named Sohrab, and rescuing him from Afghanistan would be Amir's only way to redeem himself from the past he dared not face until now. 

Being just two minutes over two hours, admittedly it was inevitable to give up a lot of materials from the book. However, the screenwriter David Benioff still managed to keep intact the three main arches of the film, and the pivotal scenes throughout the book. The three arches, the life in Afghanistan while Amir and Hassan were still young, the life in America and then the trip back to Afghanistan towards the third part of the film, still remained faithful to the book. However, the problem with this adaptation was probably how various scenes were diluted and perhaps filtered to make it suit a wider audience out there. While reading the book, it was almost impossible to imagine a faithful adaptation to be anywhere near a PG-13 rating, because it is quite a gory book to begin with. It was a concern of mine to be honest, and I guess my concerns came true as I watched the film and saw how many areas of the book were deliberately censored or edited to feel less provocative, or less disturbing. 

A particularly scene that was particularly toned down was the scene at the stadium where the woman was stoned to death for adultery, I believe. I remember that scene in the book being a lot more impacting than what I saw in the film, a lot more poignant. But the scene in the film ended a little too hastily, and seemed as if the director was too afraid to show a little bit more than droplets of blood on the floor. Of course, the power of a scene should not be judged by the amount of blood it had, but I thought more than the blood, the emotional attachment in that scene was greatly discounted. Other than that scene, my favorite scene from the book was also diluted in the film. It is the pivotal scene in the story, the one with Hassan in the dark alleyway that changed both their lives forever. I shall not give away spoilers here, but let's just say that part of the book blew me away like no other books did before. In the film, however, that scene became just a bunch of quick shots and messy editing, various sound effects amongst other techniques to diluted the disturbing imagery placed forward by the book. It was quite a disappointment, on my part. I mean, they didn't even mention the significance of the decapitated goat!

With that said, however, it is not to say that The Kite Runner was a failure at all. True to the theme of the book, the film addressed the issues of redemption, of sacrifice, or loyalty, of friendship to a great and detailed degree. It is easy to hate the character of Amir in the film, but at the same time it is not difficult to understand him either. Every character has a darker side to them one way or another, and it becomes very easy to relate to their flaws. The director certainly did a great job at not sugar-coating any aspects of these character flaws, and presented them in the most honest manner possible. The theme of friendship, especially, was particularly dealt with in between the young actors at the beginning of the film. You truly feel the love in between the two boys, the kind of mindless admiration Hassan had for Amir without doubts or questions. Some may argue that The Kite Runner may have manipulated the story too much, making it unrealistic and too coincidental in a way. Finding out the twist in the end of the film would make one believe in that statement easily, but I feel that those coincidences were definitely necessary for the development of the story as a whole.

In terms of the performances, I thought the actors did a decent job across the board, though a lot more could have been asked from the main actor, Khalid Abdalla, who played the older version of Amir. I thought for the most part of the film, he was little detached from his character. I remember feeling this excruciating pain and guilt for Amir as he read the letter from Hassan in the book, but the same cannot be said for the actor in the film. He was powerful in certain scenes but not the same in the others, a rather uneven performance there. In relative, however, the child actors were simply amazing. To think that they had zero backgrounds in acting would be amazing, because they delivered even better than their adult counterparts. Hassan and Amir were brilliant, truly credible for their efforts. I thought, also, that a better actor could have been found for the character of Sohrab. His subtle and laconic acting ruined the final scene for me, in a way. It could have been a whole lot better. Atossa Leoni was pleasant to look at, and I was too distracted to notice if her performance was good or not. She's just too cute.

Another noteworthy performance was probably from actor Homayoun Ershadi, who played as Amir's father. It was an interesting take on the character, a departure from the book's hard and stern character. Homayoun managed to inject a softer side to his character, and it was truly heartbreaking to see his performance onscreen, changing from a man with much wealth to a man behind the counter at a gas station. But the thing about his character was how he never lost his pride or his honor, and Homayoun truly brought forth this aspect of the character really well. I think, perhaps a little humor or wit would have made his character a little more interesting, but nonetheless he still did a fantastic job. 

The Kite Runner was a good adaptation, but not great. The condensed version in the film certainly gave justice only to certain aspects of the book, but not everything. Aspects of it felt empty, or hollow even, while others were sometimes rushed. A better editing and polishing of the film could have produced a better film, but I guess not a lot can be changed at this point. Still, despite the few complaints that I have for the film, I still must say that the critics in general have been too harsh on this film. This film set out and did what it wanted to do, and I feel that the themes of the story were brought forth in the best possible way. It certainly does not deserve the score on Rottentomatoes.com, and look to IMDB.com for a better and more accurate rating. And as for recommendation of this film to others, most definitely. This is a moving experience, albeit not as impacting as that of the book. Still, noteworthy and remarkable indeed.

8/10

This, is the Canadian flag. It is also known as the Maple Leaf flag, with maple leaf also being the national symbol of the country. The colors red and white are the national colors of the country as well, and they are the same colors used in the Union flag, or the national flag of the United Kingdom. Canada is one of the two countries that dominate the continent of North America, with better half of the country being covered in ice and snow. I remember looking upon the scattered northern lands of Canada on the laminated map that my father gave me when I was little. I pictured Canadians rowing kayaks in between those broken lands within in Arctic Circle, and they didn't have cars in the country at all. That was when I had a much smaller perspective of the world, the same kid that hadn't seen the Pacific Ocean. But I've always been fascinated with the snow-capped country, the country on the other side of the world. But I had little knowledge of that place, knew as much about Canada as an average African living in the forest of Congo. That was until I finally visited the country more than ten years go, when my family decided to pay a visit to our relatives living there.

I don't remember much about Canada, and I still don't know much about it either. I remember Vancouver being an awfully cold city to be living, but that was only because we visited the place in winter, and it was not common for temperatures in the night to plunge below the zero point. I wore four pairs of underwear, five pairs of pants, and countless layers of shirt to keep myself warm, and that wasn't even enough to keep myself from getting frost bites at the bottom of my feet. We were at this skiing resort, and the trip there in the morning was an excruciatingly long one. We passed a bridge made of iron that stretched over a frozen river, and it had metal lions melded into the frame of the bridge on either side. I remember the long stretch of road afterwards covered in dead maple leaves, then taking cable cars up onto the mountain and then rolling down the side of it because I couldn't ski to save my life - I still cannot ski to save my life. I remember the little playground in the neighborhood where I lived that had a swing and black sand, and the rotating tower where the family had dinner that night that made me nauseous and sick. As you can see, I don't remember much about Canada, and what I do remember certainly does not seem very encouraging either. 

I am convinced, however, that there is something magical about the country. It must be something to do with the latitude of the country, the fact that it is higher up and further away from the equator that sets it apart from every other country. For one, it has one of the best sounding national anthem I have ever heard, perhaps even more catchy than an average pop song we hear on the radio. It begins with "Oh, Canada. Our home and native land...", and then I don't recall much about the rest of the song any longer. I heard it over MTV once, not because there is a music video made with the national anthem, but because a teenage-bopping band from Canada was singing it on MTV, for some strange reason. It was the Moffatts, those little teenage boys who thought that they could make music just because they wrote a song or two while they were younger. My sister was a fan of this band, the band with the long silky hair that made it difficult for people like myself to tell their genders. Either way, Canada became the country with a lot of maple leaves, a lot of ice, and a lot of confused teenagers confused about their genders and forming boybands with electric guitars. 

But things have changed quite a bit over the years, Canada has become not just a country with boybands, but also a country with power-house singers. Shania Twain came out from Canada, and so did Celine Dion. Everybody hates Celine Dion for some reason, but you cannot deny that she can sing. Shania Twain has the highest selling female album of all time, as well as one of the top five selling albums of all time. Celine Dion, at the same time, has the honor of claiming the highest overplayed song of all time, and I don't suppose there is a need to elaborate on which song I am referring to. So, at that time, I started to wonder if there is something in the waters that the Canadians drink, if there is some secret in the type of food they eat that make them so much more different from the rest of the world musically. That is not to mention how another one of my favorite singers of time emerged out of nowhere and blew the rest of the world away. She came from a little island - in the context of Canada, it really is quite small - of Nova Scotia. This singer, is Sarah Mclachlan, and let's admit this: Angel is one of the best songs in the history of music, no matter how many times you decide to play it.

I was talking to a friend of mine last night, sharing our iTunes library over a program called Mojo, and discussing each others' playlist. Somehow, we started talking about the Canadian music scene, and that was when I realized that I do love a lot of Canadian music out there, without actually trying to like them at all. I love Broken Social Scene, New Buffalo, Feist, The Most Serene Republic and Do Make Say Think. I just discovered Stars from the same record label (Save for Do Make Say Think), and they are equally amazing as the rest of their Canadian counterparts. Obviously, it must be because of where they are living now, what they are eating, how they are eating, and everything that must have somehow contributed to their incredible talents. This is just a hypothetical assumption, merely an observation from a random fan of music from halfway around the world. But every assumption, every experiment, needs a control. Let's look at a country that is within the same latitude range, probably has the same diet, but a hundred times smaller than Canada - Iceland.

Iceland has a population of just a little over 300,000. Iceland, like the name of the country suggests, is really cold - like Canada. It is the youngest country in the world, growing in size every year due to their constant volcanic activities on the ocean floor. Despite the small population, this country has some of the most unique and distinct type of music I have ever heard. The thing about Icelandic bands I have heard so far is definitely the difficulty in classifying them into any conventional genres out there. There should be a musical genre called "Icelandic", because you can never put them in a box and mark it as "Alternative", or "Rock", or "World". Bands like Sigur Ros, Amiina, Mum, and even Bjork, they have some of the strangest - for the lack of a better word - music I have ever heard. But they are also beautiful music, something from out of this world entirely. If it isn't something that they eat and drink, I don't know what it is.

Now we consider countries closer to the zero point on the latitude, the equator. Singapore has very little musical talents to speak of, and that is a very sad thing indeed, considering the fact that I have been in this country for the better part of my life. It's not that Singapore doesn't have their musical talents, it does. It's just that the genres they tackle tend to be rather restricted, most of them are threading within the same boundaries and within the same cafes and bars. There isn't anything wrong with it surely, but then when was the last time we heard of a local band that actually made it somewhere, even regionally. Of course, some of us might argue that Singapore has done relatively well, regionally, in the Chinese music industry. But then these singers are Singaporeans, everybody else involved in their albums are not. Maybe it is the ridiculous amount of oily and spicy food we seem to love so much, or maybe the heat throughout the year baked the part of our brains with musical talents. The way I see it, music seems to thrive only in snow-capped countries in the Arctic, only in cold places where it can truly blossom and bloom. 

So, I am raising my glasses to the Canadians right now. More than their ridiculous amount of maple leaves and ice, not to mention the Niagara Falls, the Canadians have a thing for good music too. That is not to mention their little neighbors, the Icelandic people. Perhaps they should consider sharing their secret with the rest of the world, maybe a country like Singapore. I think it'd be cool for local music to be known around the world somehow, for someone else from another country to listen to the music and think about this small little country south of the South China Sea. We need to start eating fishes all the time, or grow maple leaves, or something, anything. At least we already have the color combination in the flag right, now we need to replace the crescent and the stars. We'd be alright, we'd be fine. 

This, is Chantal Sebire. She was a ordinary 52 year old French school teacher living in Dijon until she came down with a disease. Chantal discovered that she had cancer after she lost her sense of taste and smell in the early months of 2000, a rare form of cancer known as esthesioneuroblastoma, or ENB, with just two hundred similar cases reported in the last twenty years. ENB is a form of cancer in the nasal area, which may explain why her sense of smell slowly dissipated throughout the years. But in 2002, the cancer eventually developed into an uncommon malignant tumor in the nasal cavity which eventually caused the better part of her face to become serious deformed. In October of 2007, she eventually lost her sense of sight as well, and that was when her condition became known to the rest of the world - not because of the disease, but because of the fact that she pleaded for the government of France to "die with dignity", as she said in an interview last year. I refuse to post the picture of her with the dreadful disease, as I feel that it may disturb some readers out there. But if you are curious enough, typing her name in any search engine is going to bring up a few images of her condition, and let's just say that it is not meant for the faint hearted.

If you have watched the movie called Total Recall, the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger running about and killing bad guys on Mars, you'd know what I am talking about when I say that the scene at the end of the filmed disturbed me to no end. It's the scene when Arnold and Rachel Ticotin's character got shot out of the cave and onto the side of a Martian hill. They were out of oxygen and were being heavily exposed to radiation from the sun at that time, and that caused their faces to swell and disfigure, their eyes were bulging out of their sockets and their tongues sticking out of their mouths, crying in pain. If you remember that particular scene, you'd be able to picture how Chantal Sebire looked like after she discovered her disease. She looks exactly the same as Arnold on the surface of Mars, but without the makeup and all the predictable heroism in a typical Hollywood science fiction movie. She died yesterday in her own home, alone and her plea to the president utterly rejected. Without dignity, without anybody there in the time of death, Chantal Sebire left. 

The topic of euthanasia has been a rather controversial one in most countries, something which needs to be addressed but nobody ever found time to do so. A law to state that patients can be put to death if they so wish, with the help of doctors and medication to induce the process. So far, only certain countries like Switzerland and Netherlands allow euthanasia to be practiced, but that is not the case for most people around the world with similar wishes. In this case, it is difficult to say that who is right and who is wrong, because to aid in a patient's death would be against the oath all doctors took before they actually became doctors. It'd be a form of murder, and the word "murder" just makes everything so much more serious, so much more wrong. I remember those GP paper we wrote in Junior College, how we were introduced to the idea of euthanasia for the very first time. It was a hot topic of debate even in a typical school essay, but the same cannot be said in various countries around the world. Most of us don't talk about it, most of us think a perfect country such as Singapore wouldn't need such a law to accommodate people who want to kill themselves. But the truth is, however, there are a lot of people out there living with their deformities, their terminal diseases, and I can bet a lot of them want death to take their pain away. 

Suicide is illegal in Singapore, and we are talking about the conventional way of killing yourself. If you decide to jump down from your apartment, hang yourself from a ceiling fan, step in front of a moving truck, or throw yourself into a river with rocks in your pockets, they are all considered to be against the Singaporean law no matter what reasons you might provide in your suicide letter. The police actually handcuffs these dead bodies, no matter what state they are in - and by state we are talking about a bloated corpse or a smashed pulp. It may seem like a ridiculous thing to do, but that's what the police in Singapore does when you kill yourself. It is illegal to take your own life, and it is certainly not going to be encouraged when you want a doctor to aid you in your own death, to end your agony and your sufferings. And for the most part, the rest of the world agrees. France allows the doctors to "indirectly" cause a patient's death, only for those in extreme comatose conditions and under the supervision and the consent of the family members. They "pull the plug", so to speak, and the lack of life support causes the death of the patients - not the doctor. In that context, it is legal. 

But Chantal Sebire wasn't a patient bound to the hospital bed with tubes sticking out from her stomach and wrist. Other than her facial deformities, Chantal was a perfect human being, with the same ability to function properly in the society and have the same sets of emotions that we have. Under the law of France, she cannot receive any form of aid when she wanted the country to approve her own suicide, and no doctors wanted to risk their careers to do so either. So for six years, she has been "living with suffering", as she mentioned in an interview with TIME magazine, when her case was first brought to attention. It's a difficult question to answer, if you are a person running the government and receiving a letter from one of your citizens, wanting to die because of a certain disease. Being a Catholic country, the church disallows euthanasia to be a part of the laws in France, which meant that allowing her death would be to go against the church and a million other Catholic devotees. But to disallow her death would be to cause even more suffering on her part. It is a question that is difficult to answer, it really is. 

Somehow, I think, Chantal must have found certain medication from other countries and killed herself. Suicide, to me, was never a very wise choice in any context. That was until I read the book called The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides that changed my perspectives drastically. It is possible to kill oneself without hating life, but loving it to much. Chantal was probably one of such people, someone who loved her life so much that she couldn't tolerate herself suffering on a day to day basis. Just looking into a mirror, or any reflective surface would be a reminder of the loss of her better days, and I can somehow relate to that in a way. I remember getting my head shaved for the army in the later days of 2004, and I refused to look at myself in the mirror or any reflective surface. I was afraid of what I'd see to be honest, and that lasted for almost a week when I finally took up the courage to give myself a peek. It wasn't too bad in the end, but I still felt incredibly strange without the hair to cover my head, I felt incredibly naked, or vulnerable, but perhaps that is why the army still enforces this rule until this day.

Of course, my case is trivial as compared to Chantal's. I had my hair shaved off, she had her face disfigured, it is the worst analogy ever. But I guess I know what she must have went through, because I went through that dear of facing myself for a week in the past. Imagine knowing a deadly virus infested in your body, and there isn't anything you can do about it. This isn't the normal kind of cancer that attacks your internal organs from the inside. This is a cancer that takes away your dignity, takes away your pride, and it certainly is very hard to face yourself when you are in that physical state. So should all patients with terminal disease just wait for their heart to stop one day despite the excruciating pain, or are they free to choose their means of exit? If we can pick the song that they play on our funeral and the kind of food provided, shouldn't there also be a way for us to choose the way that we die when we are in similar medical conditions? Death, in the most conventional sense, is the end of life. But to Chantal, I feel, her life ended a long time ago. 

So, I don't know. I feel that countries should have more flexible laws when it comes to people with certain diseases, people with valid reasons to die rather than a debt that they cannot pay or a nasty break up. Suicide is an option, to me, rather than something that should be condemned by the public in general. It is your life and something that you have control over, unless you take into account other religious reasons. Some might argue that there are cases worse than Chantal's, people with worse physical disfigurement than hers. Take Juliana Whitmore for example, a little girl born without properly formed facial bone structure. Her face probably looks as if somebody poured acid on her, and it is absolutely horrendous to look at as much as I hate to admit. However, she is living a happy life right now with people that love her, and people are going to take her case to argue against euthanasia, and accuse the people seeking death to be those of little will to live, that they are weak. 

But we are all different individuals, aren't we? Not everybody grew up with a certain condition, not everybody can get used to it and live a life as normal as others. Not everybody takes suicide as a crime, some takes that as a solution. I think Chantal should have been allowed to take her own life, or at least with the aid of somebody else. But I guess, the solution to that problem, doesn't matter anymore. It breaks my heart to watch her interviews, to know that under that tumor is a perfectly normal human being, a good mother of three and she must have been a great teacher too. To know that even for somebody suffering from this dreadful disease, one cannot pick her own medication - even if it is death - just saddens me. It just makes someone even more helpless, even less hopeful, and much more resentful of themselves. "At least she is in a better place now", people always say to comfort somebody else. Well, she is in a better place, right now. 

You want the sunrise to go back to bed
I want to make you laugh

Mess up my bed with me
Kick off the covers, I'm waiting
Every word you say I think I should write down
I don't want to forget come daylight

Happy to lay here, just happy to be here
I'm happy to know you
Play me a song, your newest one
Please leave your taste on my tongue

Paperweight on my back
Cover me like a blanket

Mess up my bed with me
Kick off the covers, I'm waiting
Every word you say I think I should write down
I don't want to forget come daylight

And no need to worry, that's wasting time
And no need to wonder what's been on my mind
It's you.
It's you.

Every word you say i think I should write down
Don't want to forget come daylight
And I give up, I let you win
You win 'cause I'm not counting

You made it back to sleep again
Wonder what you're dreaming

There weren't a lot of things to laugh about yesterday, the 17th of March 2008. It has been a year since that day, the day which I shall not bring up again. Nonetheless, other than the nostalgic reasons, yesterday has just not been very kind to me. Rosemary straddled to the front of the class, explained to us that we were going to get our results back. A gob of spit was swallowed, the first sign of anxiety broke out within the hairline of my forehead. My palms were sweaty, knees were weak and my head felt suddenly heavy. It was the feeling of impending doom, sort of like driving a car over a cliff and then just waiting for the ground to meet the hood of your car, and you to meet death in due time. The grades were given out on white pieces of paper with our student numbers written on them, and the numerical grade right next to the numbers. A pathetic number, a disappointing score. It was the first blow to a lousy, lousy day to come. There aren't a lot of things that can bring me down to be honest, and the one thing that does it so well is something that is also so trivial at the very same time. I was dismayed, and demoralized, but at the same time motivated. It was a complicated outflow of emotions, but let's just say that I am a serial mugger right now - at least before I started blogging.

I had a talk with Rosemary alone, it was on her way to her lunch. It felt remotely comforting, but comforting nonetheless. It is always comforting to hear that the tiger is not going to eat you up, even if you have a broken leg and a sealed off cave. Somehow, I detected a condescending tone, words being spoken by her just to brush me off. But then truthful words weren't my priority right then, I just needed somebody to talk sense into me even if they didn't mean it at all. At times, humans can be that in need of things of such surface value, and I suppose as a beggar I didn't have much options to choose from. I took her words and treated it as gold, repeated it over and over in my head and told myself that there is still hope, that there is still a way to recover from his mess. I have done it before, I have done it last semester when I tripped on the rope hidden in the bushes by the Dark Enforcer, I can definitely do it again. That thought accompanied me through the lonely trip back home on the bus, with only my iPod as a personal comfort, thinking that the Black Monday was finally over.

Then my stop came, my black t-shirt sucked out the heat from the sun and baked me alive. It wasn't helped that my iPod suddenly died on me, the screen was stuck on Maserati's "Inventions". The two magical reboot buttons didn't work, and I tried every single possible combinations on the trackpad - those didn't work either. The funny thing about the whole situation was how the screen actually showed a sad iPod, and by that I am not being figurative here. There literally was a picture of an iPod with a sad face, and it looked like some kind of joke to me. As if the Monday wasn't bad enough already, my only source of comfort on the way home was replaced by the image of a dead cartoon iPod asking me to visit the website for troubleshooting issues. That didn't work out either, and I ended up searching through my entire bedroom for the old iPod-Mini just to get it traded in within the span of this week for a brand new one. Covered in dusty and finding things that should have remained buried under layers of old letters and textbooks, I sat in the middle of the floor that was already covered in memories of various forms. 

But there is always a balance to things, two sides of a coin. Doing badly at a paper only served as a motivation for me to work harder for the rest of the term, and having a busted iPod also meant the coming of a brand new one. And if those weren't convincing enough for me, the night suddenly turned for the better when a little blue box appeared at the bottom right hand side of my computer screen and caught me by surprise. It was a name that I haven't seen in eons, a name that I have been waiting for for the past, well, I lost count of the months. There at last, a reason to smile all over again, a reason to think that yesterday wasn't actually all that bad after all. It was my friend, my long lost friend, coming back into my life in the form of a little blue box. I was skeptical at first, not sure if it was her or just somebody sitting at her desk in the office again. But when she replied in capital letters and her familiar face appeared in the display picture, I knew. I knew, that she's back, I found her again.

It was great to find out that you are alright, to know that you are safe on your side of the world. I guess the effects of that e-mail were delayed for a little more than a month, but at least it got to you eventually. You don't know how excited I am, to know that my pillar of hope in the unholy hours of the night is back in my life all over again, the person I can depend on for - well, almost anything other than physical presence. It wasn't a very long conversation, but it was a very exciting one indeed. It must be fun working as a personal assistant, though the working hours do seem to be rather hectic and inhumane. Still, you sound like you are enjoying your work somehow, and you seem to have changed as well - at least from the entries that I have tried to catch up on on your blog, so far. It is nice to hear from you again, it really is. It really is. Be here, you have the rest of my life to catch up on. 

A reason to smile.