Last week
>Sushi: THANK YOU! I have sent the Phelps book to you on Wednesday, should get to you by the end of the week...For the past couple of days -
Tk and Songyu were here. Brought them around Baltimore and Washington DC, and fed them better crabcakes (on two occasions) compared to those GCS had. And thanks to the car they don't have to walk around Baltimore and Washington DC - which was what I made GCS do.
It was fun. It is hard to not have fun when old friends are around. Songyu himself is already an entertainment channel with neverending programming. Though I think we got tk quite bored when we started talking about HCJC and biomedical stuff...
And as usual, felt good switching back to using that form of Chinese. One can actually talk about serious stuff using that kind of language - proven time and again - yet it is so much easier to mess it up and clown around using it. I am just too used to it I guess :P
Now that they have left, what is in front of me is a whole pile of work and exams for the next 19 days. For those of you who are going to be done with this term/semester soon, congratulations - for those of us who still have 14 - 19 days to go, err let's meet for a feast (drinks optional) at 6pm on 19 Dec.
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A friend sent me a message yesterday - I was telling her about my plans to do volunteering / social work when I am back and she showed her concern over recent events by postponing her reply to my topic and talked about something else completely.
I know about the massacre in Mumbai, the protests in Bangkok and also the loss of a young, cheerful and promising Singaporean in Mumbai. I also know that a lot of Singaporeans are struck by the loss - other than feeling for the family, we also began to realise that terrorism indeed affects every one of us, not just the ang moh walking in London or New York.
Based overseas, my immediate reaction was - what there is another one, and a new style?! All forms of terrorism, regardless of scale, impact and justification, ought to be condemned the most severely. However, it didn't affect me much - because, there is nothing we can do to prevent ourselves from being a victim, unless we stay at home all day and not go out.
What because of the risk of terrorist attacks I shouldn't go to New York? No way. I won't go to Columbia or Afghanistan but I will still go to Israel or India if there is a need for me to, not to go there for holiday maybe, but for work, yes.
We mourn for the loss of lives, we condemn the acts of violence, but we shouldn't be scared or depressed, neither should we lose hope and faith.
There are too many things in this world that are happening. Some of them will eventually affect us personally - the worst of the financial crisis is yet to come. But - is there anything we can do to prevent the worst from coming? I don't think so. But we can prevent the worst from happening to us, and according to our means help people to prevent the worst from happening to them.
We are already very blessed because - these crises hit us when we are relatively still burden-free. Which means - we can be relatively casual observers, participating yet not really participating in it while learning from other people's reactions what is the most prudent and appropriate. It is important because - there will definitely be more of such incidents coming in the future. 20 years later, we won't only need to be responsible for ourselves, but also our elderly parents, spouse and children. The previous major crisis (SARS) happened only 5 years ago.
Thus, while the world turns itself upside down, we should just live as normally as possible - and open our eyes to observe. We are not directly affected - so we are not, and we don't have to be. We ought to condemn terrorism, yes - and we should pray for the victims and their families and pray for our leaders so they can lead the world out of these crises peacefully. Other than that, go out and eat as usual, go shopping as usual, do homework as usual, love people as usual, praise the Lord as usual -
Don't doubt and lose hope now. That is what the terrorists want, and the world needs hope. Hope and faith will sustain us through anything - when something even worse comes upon us, it's only through hope and faith that we will know our directions.
Labels: Life
