Uncertainty

I got rejected by NTU. Not exactly a surprise.

One by one my friends are getting accepted into universities, the way good apples get picked off a tree. You know what I feel like? I feel like the small shriveled apple, hidden behind thick folliage, frowned upon, forgotten.

Finally, I get a taste of my own medicine. Who was the one who once said she wished she could just flop her exams and NOT CARE for once? Back then the consequences seemed far away, surreal. Now they loom overhead like dark clouds.

Anyhow, I am going back to study in a month, because I don’t see how lounging around for another half a year will help me. (Funny how time can distort your perception of things so radically.) But this time, I will be studying on family money. Hard-earned money.

I feel wobbly. I don’t know if I’m up to it. I have to be, but I don’t know if I can be. And the wheels of my mind go round and round, with Philippians 4:13 trailing along behind.

A Selfless Act

We’ve all pondered over moral dilemmas at one time or another, probably just for the sake of it. There’s a top 10 list here, if you’re interested.

I’ve never really been a fan of all this thinking and debating of hypothetical situations I don’t believe will ever happen to me. I don’t know, alright, whether I’ll save my mother or my husband if both of them are drowning and I can only save one. I don’t know! I’ll probably be immobilized by fear, too shocked to do anything. Or maybe I’ll jump in heroically and end up drowning together. So what’s the point of choosing.

But my world was rocked a little when I flipped through the Chinese papers and read about the rescue efforts in wake of the Sichuan quake. (By the way, The Star had Konsortium issues and some Iskandar Malaysia project I’ve never heard about on it’s front page. Surely the catastrophe in Sichuan deserves more attention?)  Read this Chinese article, if you will. This headmaster actually put the lives of his students above his wife of 20 years. What a difficult and courageous decision to make, to leave his wife in the rubble and rush to pull out the kids from the collapsed school.

There is story after story of the resilience of the human spirit in Nan Yang. I’m emotionally still quite numb these days, but this one, this one left me slightly shaken. I don’t know what to say.

The Snickers Snare

If you ever catch me buying Snickers bars again, please kindly remind me that I don’t like them, that I’ve never liked them, even if they’re the best selling candy bars of all time.

Somehow I keep forgetting that Snickers=peanut butter nougat and I often get fooled by the image of thick caramel oooozing out into thinking that it’s delicious. My hand will drift over and before I know it, I would have bought yet another Snickers bar, only to regret later.

I’m not a fan of peanut butter. When I was younger my nose would run whenever I had peanut butter sandwiches (and other oily stuff like roti canai). As I grew up and ate more unhealthy food, my body reacted less and less to junk. Well, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or so they say. But I’ve always associated peanut butter with unhealthy food since then. (The voice of my mum constantly nagging at dad to reduce consumption of peanut butter helped.) Whenever I eat it, I can almost feel the peanut butter clogging my oesophagus, which is not a pleasant experience at all. 

Alright, I think I’ve pretty much convinced myself to avoid Snickers for now. But I can see how a little bit of advertising can just easily sway me again.

It is, after all, an industry of well told lies.