fallen from grace.

so much has gone by since the last time i posted an entry. apologies for the lack of entries! haha. My birthday, scuba-diving, halloween… just to name a few. My birthday went by relatively quietly and nicely. I had a nice dinner with josiah and michelle and their family at this really good place at geylang street 37. Lobster tang hoon and stuff. really really good food. too bad for those of you who haven’t tried it before, cause the owner has already migrated to australia.. anyway, i just want to thank all those who remembered my birthday and wished me! really appreciate it!

next was scuba-diving on oct 24-26. it’s BEAUTIFUL!!! can’t stress it more.. the view is simply magnificent. It’s like viewing in an aquarium without the glass blocking you, and you really see everything!! fish, stingray, cuttlefish.. it’s a really different world underwater. those of you who are interested in scuba-diving, but are hesitating, or still trying to overcome the inertia to find out more. Don’t hesitate anymore! go go learn!! i took the open water diver course. It consists of a theory test, a pool session where they teach you and familiarise you with the equipment and teach you some practical skills. Then it’s off the malaysia, dayang for a 2 day 2 night diving trip!

24th Oct

I met john and rowell in the afternoon to buy some scuba stuff, like our mask, snorkel, booties and fins. Then we went back to grab our stuff before going down to hongkong street to get ready to go off to malaysia. At gill divers (the dive centre) we left our stuff tthere before going to central mall for a quick dinner. We ate at billy bombers, where they were having this special 1 for 1 for the obama burger. haha it’s really funny how they can even use food to rouse support. Then we loaded our stuff into two mini buses and off we went to woodlands checkpoint. It was jam-packed at the BKE all the way to woodlands. Traffic was reduced to a crawl. In the mini van, we were discussing ideas of how to elevate or reduce jams in the future. Some of the ideas which surfaced included grappling hooks to hook to the car in front and let the car in front drag our car, some crazy maglev idea to elevate the cars and push them through magnetic strips buried under the ground, or major conveyor belts which transported the cars in a sequence through the checkpoints. There were also alot of Singaporeans over at the johore side. Some were going camping, others for holidays. We saw another dive agency at woodlands checkpoint heading for mersing jetty too. After the checkpoint, it was down all the way to mersing. Nothing really interesting happened except for us to catch some sleep. We reached mersing jetty around 1am. The jetty was already packed full of divers. Imagine the whole jetty full at 1am in the morning!! full of divers and big duffel bags of dive gear and equipment. We reached dayang at about 3 and retired to our rooms to sleep for the rest of the night.

25th oct

We woke around 8 plus, and had breakfast. We had 3 dives that day. one after breakfast, after lunch and after tea break. Somehow, diving makes you fatigued. I’m not sure why too. but it just tires you out. The weather that day was sunny without much clouds, so it was a nice day to get a tan. when we first descended, i had some problems equalizing which i recovered soon after. Once underwater at the bottom, about 6m, we practiced some skills and then proceeded for a leisure swim around the reef. The reef is beautiful!! and the fish will swim around you without much fear.  the other two dives were equally as beautiful and deeper, with the deepest at about 12m. The view was really fantastic. We saw sea cucumbers, round round long black things like sausages which were really slimy and slick to touch. We also saw a stingray under a rock. It was a blue-spotted stingray. Quite harmless.

26th Oct

We awoke earlier to dive before breakfast. It was our certification dive, and we were revised on some essential skills which were needed to certify us as open water divers. The dive after breakfast was equally as deep, at around 18m, and there was more current. So it was a new experience. The water was constantly pushing us. So we had to swim head-on into the current. All in all, it was a good experience.

this week passed pretty quickly for me, probably because i was taken ill for two days. and i am totally going to blame it all on ops manning on saturday, when i got so busy i couldn’t even drink or eat! for the whole day. Well ops manning day was just one whole crazy day of calling, and scolding people.. and calling ns men back, and some of them were definitely unco-operative. After ops manning, i met up with damon and leqiao for dinner and went to the hospital to visit christie, who had a back operation. haha. well we ate at thai express and were doing our own eye-exercises.

then on wednesday, admist my mc, i went for this really cool event called mrt pub crawl. it’s really really cool! it starts at boon lay, and at certain mrt stops, we would all get off, hop to some kopitiam or a convenience store to get a drink (preferably alcoholic) and finish the drink. all in all, each stop was about half an hour. i went with phyllis, daniel (new acquaintance), and serene ( phyllis’ friend and new acquaintance too). it was a fun night. We were all wearing this orange tee with the words ” Hi my name is _________” and behind it wrote ” and i am a ________” well i’ll leave it to your imagination to guess what you can write. This event was either aimed at the caucasians, or wad we call ang-moh, or it was just a coincidence, but the main bulk of people who attended this event were caucasians and mainly they were all uni students. Serene has a really mature imagination. Firstly, she wrote ” sex addict, and i failed terribly at rehab.” for daniel, “stripper in training. Bring on the pole!” for phyllis, and “toyboy, and i love older ladies” for me. Promiscuous and Provocative indeed. haha. well it went on quite well. Oh i forgot to say, after all the mrt stops, the event would end at a club of choice. This time, it was thumper at goodwood park hotel. (well i hear the durian mooncakes at goodwood park hotel are really nice) all in all it was a fun activity.

(disclaimer: if you are not interested in religion or get bored or are averse to christianity, you may skip the next paragraph)

The next day, thursday, i attended the stephen tong gospel rally with a whole bunch of church youths. and subsequently on friday and tonight too. All in all, it was a really fruitful rally and it kind of re-awakened me. I am more re-affirmed in my faith and more dedicated. Not drifting as much as i was before. well he made a very important point. “don’t just anyhow believe in him just for the sake of believing in a god, and don’t just reject him anyhow cause he may just be the true one for you”. In a way, this is a really different gospel rally because the approach he has towards preaching and how he spreads the word is different. He is more concerned with you understanding the faith and the religion and letting you make your own choice, instead of just pushing you to just believe, and add to the numbers. He also made another interesting statement, ” i’d rather have a church of 20 people, who truly understand what they believe in, than a church of 1000 who go with the wrong beliefs.” i think that’s a very very good point for him. Many mega-churches now ( i’m not slamming any of them) have the wrong preaching points. they are very focused on instant gratification, on the here and the now, and fail to realise a very important point, that god has a time and place for everything, that he will reveal things in his time. well i learnt alot, still more points, but i guess that’ll be a separate passworded post.

and on saturday night, i watched nus Blast concert held at ucc.. jinglin was performing (as usual) haha. well she was good. especially for the first performance (that we missed because of a whole range of factors, cause the waiter at munchy monkey’s had tunnel vision and failed to spot our hands, cause we din ask for our desert early, cause we ate too slowly, cause we missed the first bus back to ucc, cause we all went to toilet before the concert) anyway the concert was a hip-hop concert. ucc theatre is EXTREMELY HOT. i suspect they forgot to turn on the air-con, or did not turn on all the units. the dancing in general was okayish. There were good dancers, and a variety of different hip-hop styles, and some more contemporary hip-hop. i particularly enjoyed the dance with the sofa. It reminded me of one of the episodes in sytycd where travis and (dunno-who) danced a contemp piece together. well it has been a long while since joel, stella, chien, jing and i met up. we promised we would try to meet up more often to catch up. haha.. hopefully this time it actually comes true.

i think i must be lagging, but how can someone make such a song so bad sound SO good. really does goes to show you dont have to be dancing beside a pole to look sexy. i’m in love.

it’s been a while. i have found myself a new game to play. it’s wow. i never really expected myself to actually start playing wow. really. when it came out 3-4 years ago, i decided that i wouldn’t play that game, but now i am quite caught up in it. people really change. as i reflect, i realise many of my ideals have changed, or i have changed in terms of personality. well fundamentally, character can’t be changed so easily, but the things you look out for, i think that has changed. like in the past, i would be totally averse and shun smoking as if it was a contagious disease. i would even consciously hold my breath whenever i walk into a cloud of smoke. now however, i have accepted smoking so much so that i have so many friends who smoke. but i know i’m still far from the path down smoking. i can say that singapore should be proud of its anti-smoking campaign. it has bored into my head how bad smoking is.

anyway, my cousin is back from canada! and cause of stupid $%@#$! i can’t fully spend time with her. but it’s alright. if only some stupid bugger would let me take leave on thurs and fri, i would get what i want. well life’s like that i guess. and oh! i was at nus arts bash ytd. my primary school classmate jonathan ma won the mens cat. i heard he cleansweeped all the prizes for men. lol. it’s funny how you see your primary school classmates all mature and all changed now when you meet up with them after so long. and how the friendship lines interwine and cross. and you can imagine how they were in primary school.

well i hope this week goes well!