a story in progress

At 19, I do not think I have lived long enough to know the world and its content. Of the many people I have met and the friends that I have made along the way, though each are unique in their very own way, I am still searching for that one person to call my own. I may gone through 12 years of education so far but I can never quite confidently say I am prepared to face the world. Each day feels new to me in its own little way. Filled with opportunities to make it or break it.

At times, amidst all of these, it almost too easy to forget at 19, things are starting to look differently too. In fact, things are beginning to operate on a different level. No longer can ideals be achieved with determination and hard effort. As much as I like to believe that's the case, what I have learn through out this year and a half is that at times if not most of the time the utility of a dollar coupled with sheer/dumb/fated luck will reign supreme.

The former was and still is particularly important to me.I am now in this phase where there is a dollar and cent value attached to almost everything that revolves around me. I might not have noticed it back when I was 12 or even 17 but as of now, the dollar bill is quite visible I would say. I do not hope to jinx myself by saying this but I do see in years to come, the incentive of the dollar bill will only grow bigger and bigger.

I only hope by then I do not lose track of myself. Walking without a destination in sight is painful. To keep on walking down that path is even more painful. Thus, I am feeling very fortunate right now. To be able to reconcile my expectation of the ideals to what the reality entails me to do is something I count as a blessing each day. I have a destination in sight. A means to get there. Perhaps all that is left is having some sheer/dumb/fateful luck.

I would really like to keep to this. Whenever and wherever I am.

Dear Gong Gong,

We just cleared your paraphernalia yesterday. Although it has been awhile, we are only able to go through them in detail yesterday. I do suppose job of such nature requires a delicate balance between acceptance and brevity. I think you will be glad to know that everyone especially Po Po was in good spirit. Before we started the clearing we even celebrated her birthday. Needless to say it kept her in a jovial tone through out. She has recovered much since her minor stroke attack. I would even go as far as saying she is almost back to her former self.

Going back to the matter of clearing up your possessions, I would say that I have learn much about you during the process. I know we do not have the tightest relationship prior to this. May it be due to the family setting, language barrier or even the generation gap for that matter. But I will always recall you in fond memories. In life, I know you as a well educated Chinese tailor who spent most of his days in the town of Alor Star. But at this very moment, you are much more than that. Through your paraphernalia I seen a glimpse of your extensive traveling in your youth. It is through the plethora of postcards, souvenirs and well kept letters from your friends that offer me a better insight into you. Your meticulousness for details and sentimentality speaks of man of good principles that were upheld even to the very end. However, I hope you won't mind me keeping a few of those tokens as mementos of you for my own.

If there is a message I ever need to send across to you it would be that everything is well at our end. Know that we will always have you in our hearts and thoughts. Your gift to me in the form of my chinese name is also something I will carry on proudly for the rest of my life. As illiterate I am in chinese, knowing how to write those three characters and the meaning it hold will be my own little way to cherish you.

Thank you.

With Love,
加孟

I am seized by a sudden panic attack. Looking at the calendar tells me that I have about 2 more weeks to go before Term 2 commences. At this point, I am not sure I can accomplish half of the things I set out prior to my holidays. In a moment of weakness, I had these grand visions on how I will spend my holiday when I was asked what I will do during the term break. I was confident that  I will be meeting up with my old friends, doing some traveling, bonding with my family, sharpening my culinary skills and heck even get a head start in my upcoming Statistical Theory for next semester by going through the syllabus. At one point I even told myself I will be matter loading as much as possible in preparation for next year's debating season.

Boy was I naive.

Currently catching up with old friends seem to be the hardest to accomplish in my list to do. I have only met a handful of them. Trailing behind seems like a never ending list of old contacts whom I wish to be reacquainted once more but reality seems to be conspiring against it. Perhaps I am not trying hard enough, but coming to a sudden realization that one's friends no longer live within a mile radius from you (or heck even in the same time zone as one) and not being able to meet up with them as frequent as intended, is not a pleasant feeling at all. In addition to the tinge of guilt felt, I can't help but feeling resigned over the fact that, as time flies, everyone has to carry on with their own separate lives. With it the distance, unfamiliarity and awkwardness also follows. Arriving at such conclusion I can only count on nostalgia and Facebook to play their parts in order to offset the waning of such relationships.

Meanwhile, time for me to spend my remaining hours of my holiday more fruitfully. Hopefully.

BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds and publish.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ( )
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ( )
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible - ( )
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (x)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (x)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( )
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ( )
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ( )
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( )
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( )
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( )
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( )
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ( )
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( )
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams ( )
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ( )
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( )
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( )
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (x)
34 Emma - Jane Austen ( )
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ( )
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ( )
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ( )
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ( )
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ( )
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving ( )
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery ( )
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ( )
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ( )
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ( )
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ( )
52 Dune - Frank Herbert ( )
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen ( )
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( )
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens ( )
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ( )
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon ( )
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (x)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (x)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas ( )
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac ( )
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ( )
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett ( )
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce ( )
76 The Inferno - Dante ( )
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
80 Possession - AS Byatt ( )
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens ( )
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ( )
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( )
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White ( )
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (x)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( )
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery ( )
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ( )
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas ( )
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare ( )
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl ( )
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ( )

Postscript - Only included the ones I finished, But oh boy, 22/100! Looks like I have a long way to go. Sigh. But on a bright side, I proved BBC wrong. =P

Dear XX

I have never quite encounter anyone like you. Not in my 19 years of life time at least.

Being in the same room as you has this curious effect of making me more self conscious of my own awkwardness. Every flaw, superficiality borne on my part is magnified to a pulsating degree. There was a moment where I almost lost it. Back then, all I wanted to do was to spill my guts out to you. The consequences and what the others would think almost came secondary when it comes to gaining a nod from you. At the brink of such emotions, I would often think what you would have done if you are in my shoes. You would probably came out forthright anyway. Unlike me.

Listening to you for the first time has left a deep impact within me. I am smitten by your devil-may-care candidness. But beneath the awe, your petite silhouette is somewhat a source of inspiration to me as well. I want to emulate your qualities. The eloquence, the crassness, everything.

Writing this has made me realized. I want to be you as much as I want you to be by my side.

Sincerely,
Yours

Now and then I have these sudden strokes of epiphany. From learning how to operate a certain pesky electronic device to figuring out the proper directions to a desired destination, such momentary burst of intuitive perception never fails to uplift a person's spirit. Today, fresh from s straight 12 hours of hibernation I had a fuzzy burst of epiphany. Albeit the vividness I recall seeing a glimpse of the the future that awaits. Amid the random pieces, I see my own sense of belonging. Poised with confidence and determination, the thought of it is so warm and uplifting. I think I am falling for debating all over again.