My Love Affair with Criminal Minds

I started watching Criminal Minds several years back, during Season 5. It’s been 7 years now. And I’ve grown attached to some of the characters in particular Hotch and Reid. They are my favourites. I also enjoyed the playful banter between Morgan and Garcia. And with my other favourites shows axed/about to end (Castle, Bones, Rizzoli & Isles), Criminal Minds became my staple series.

That was until episode 6 that was broadcasted this week. I don’t really follow the news of the drama series so long as I know they have been extended for the next season. During the episode, it was revealed that Hotch had entered the Witness Protection Scheme with Jake. What? That sounds fishy… like he was being written out of the show.

Went to google and found out that he had been axed since August. Omigosh. How am I going to survive? First Morgan, and now Hotch? I really like Prentiss too and loved the idea of her returning, but I want the old team!

Sounds like Season 12 might just be the final season for Criminal Minds. Sigh.

The Pokemon GO Effect

This widely popular augmented reality game was finally launched in Singapore last weekend, rather quietly, I would say, after much anticipation. Like many others, I waited with bated breath while coming across article after article of accidents occurring all over the world due to the game, or rather the gamers getting distracted by it. One camp of people have decided against trying the game at all even before it landed on our shores.

I belong to the other camp. Let’s just say my curiosity got the better of me. And it really takes a lot to rouse my curiosity for a game, because I am no gamer. After 5 days of playing it, I am ready to declare that it is fun! I enjoy the collecting, but I have not gone to battles at any of the gyms. That part of the game, I don’t particularly enjoy.

A cursory scroll through my FB feed tells me that many of my peers are put off by the strange phenomenon brought about by the game. People gather around poke-stops in masses, and the public parks have never been this crowded. They think it is retarded, herd instinct. They are entitled to their own opinion.

And I am entitled to mine. I won’t comment for the others, but this game has brought about some positive changes to my household. H has noticed that I am much more willing to go out with him just so that I drive and he can catch some pokemon on both our behalf. And for the past 2 nights, Belle has gone on very long walks with us, so much so that I predict she will very soon hesitate to go on walks with us. Considering how sedentary my lifestyle is, this is indeed a very good change. For how long, we won’t know but for now, it’s good.

H and I have noticed that it can actually be very safe to play this game. I don’t know how people can walk onto the roads, or fall into rivers just to catch a pokemon. Once one is captured on your screen, you can move to a safer place to capture it. This is tried and tested. I always move to the side of the paths in the park or up the curb to capture the cute little monsters when I spot them because 1) I don’t to be in the way and 2) I don’t want oblivious pokemon catchers to bump into me (that really happened).

This game has done what nobody has been able to achieve in Singapore – to encourage us to lead a more active lifestyle. Never mind that it won’t last forever; for as long as it lasts, we are all reaping the benefits. I wish the naysayers will get down off their high horses and view this more objectively. But well… like I’ve said, everyone is entitled to their opinion.

风起时

几星期前，约了一位不常见面的好友。就在我们最爱的餐厅吃点心时，她开口了。就这样，我听说了《琅琊榜》。

这位好友说，之所以介绍我看《琅琊榜》，是因为我俩对《太阳的后裔》有相同的看法。令我们感动之处也一致。太多女观众观看《太阳的后裔》后，是被主角们的恋情给深深吸引了。我觉得相当可惜，因为《太阳》是韩国一部难得的作品。它何止是一部有关爱情的剧集。更深深吸引我的是… the moral dilemma. Big Boss 常常陷于道德困境，陷入两难。他屡次在困境中的取舍确实是我被这部剧集深深吸引的最大原因。而不是那平庸的爱情。

XX 与我有同感，所以力介《琅琊榜》，说是部难得的剧集。我有自己的偏见，所以不长看中国剧集。之前看过的，也只是《兰陵王》。这还是台湾朋友介绍的呢。《兰陵王》前面还不错，后面却一直围绕在三角爱情之中，我看了很烦。最近听老公说《医女明飞转》口碑很好，就开始看了看。看不到5集就停了。真的不爱刘诗诗。觉得她很烦。索性不看了。

《琅琊榜》几乎是把爱情排到最后， 注重的是情义和正义。看完54集，相当感动。之后又找了这网络小说来阅读。毕竟，剧集和小说是有出路的。小说在某些部分，是交代的比较清楚。聚集呢，把一些不核心的角色给斩掉了。各有千秋啦。

华文现在真的不行了。

I’ve been watching and rewatching this ‘Fire in Nirvana’.  Even H has been using it as his lullaby. I really like it for its depth. And since I feel so strongly for it, I thought I should dedicate a post to it so that years later, I can be reminded of this phase in my life.

Guess I’m Back

I really miss writing. Not necessarily in the form of blogging, but frankly this is about the closest to writing I’ve ever done in the past decade, apart from pushing paper submissions at work.

I tried leaving blogging because for a while it didn’t mean much anymore, since I lost touch with a particular group of blogger friends. It didn’t take long for me to feel unbalanced because I’ve lost my platform to ventilate. I confided in the hubby and he agreed with me, that I should continue blogging. Secretly, I think he reads my posts to find out what I’m thinking (and trust me, I think a lot – in fact, I often think I overthink) but he lost the tool when I stopped.

So, for my sanity, I think I will restart my blogging exercise.

오랫동안

It’s been a very long while since I last updated on 1 Jun 2014. Many things have transpired in the past 3 months, yet one could also say nothing has happened.

To begin with, I’m now kind of working my dream job – as a travel planner muahaha. And yes, the cliche cannot be more true, that it is indeed more fun planning your own trip than someone else’s. Especially when you absolutely cannot comprehend the style in which your clients prefer to travel.

If there is anything my short stint (thus far) as a travel planner has taught me, it is that the way H and I travel… is considered budget. 😆

My fur babies are doing real fine. Since I work from home and have not travelled in the past 9 months, they have been seeing a lot of me. So much so that they developed separation anxiety when I had evening engagements for 3 days in a row just last month or so. And Paris has been sleeping an insanely long number of hours per day. It’s so funny seeing how she happily trots to the bedroom every single night when I call her to go to bed. Age is definitely catching up where she is concerned. So much so that she has always become more tardy with her self-nominated house-guarding duties: she doesn’t bark in a timely manner at times, when someone approaches our door. Conversely, Belle seems to have put it on herself to take over her jie-jie’s duties. These two clowns… just amuse me senseless.

I’m still going strong with my Korean Language lessons. Now on 11th of 21 levels in total. Love attending the weekly lessons but visibly, they are becoming harder. And I also feel the enthusiasm waning in some of my classmates, 3 of whom have been with me on this journey right from the start, 2.5 years ago. I am loathed to lose them but well… you can’t keep people with you just because you can’t bear to part with them.

The thought of spending a semester at Sogang University again did cross my mind, only that this time it will be a 10-week proper semester rather than the summer immersion programme. I changed my mind shortly after because I’m not looking to quicken the pace of completing all 5 levels of Sogang’s textbooks but a semester will mean I will cover 1 whole level in 10 weeks. What am I going to do when I finished all 5 levels?  So I’m just going to stick with weekly lessons for the time being.

Deeper

It’s been a while. In between we celebrated 2 furkids’ birthdays (including that of one who has departed for a couple of years now), visited numerous interesting and blog-worthy eateries and restaurants, and met interesting people. Plentiful topics to write about yet there was simply a complete lack of motivation. Closing down the blog for good has crossed my mind but I just never got down to doing it. After all, I’ve been blogging for 9 years now… I wouldn’t have come this far if the motivation was sustained simply on novelty.

And so here I am back again. Currently many things are consuming my mind. So many that I don’t even know how I should mull over them all at the same time. I haven’t felt this confused and low in quite a while. It just felt like nothing seems to be going right for me at all. No, nothing is going right at this point in time. I look at my elderly parents bogged down by so many medical issues that ail most elderly and wonder why they are still able to embrace each new day with so much enthusiasm. They must wonder how they managed to raise a daughter who is so pessimistic when it comes to life and being alive.

We have a trip planned for October yet nothing has been decided because the itinerary I planned has not been approved. My business idea was just in its infancy stage but it seems like it will be crushed before it bears fruit. I lost a lot of very precious data in a 3TB external hard disk because the USB port became dislodged. He is denying me the chance of ever being a mother with a sweeping statement that I will not be a good one. And both parents have been needing my company to go for medical appointments and procedures every week for the past month. It may appear to be very trivial issues to an onlooker but the physical and mental stress of it all are adding up and I find myself losing my sanity. And falling deeper into an abyss of darkness.

Changes

I know what the general consensus about a new year and new resolutions are: that nobody seems to be able to keep the resolutions, and come next year, the exact same resolutions will be made again. All true, yet I don’t let this repeated process perturb me. In this sense, I’m surprisinging forward looking: I look forward to making new resolutions at the beginning of every year, like how I like to start a brand new diary.

One of the major decisions I made at the beginning of the year was to ensure that I took back control of my life. My health in particular. It helped that I finally found the way to keep my asthma in check. Last November I travelled to Osaka on my own while nursing a nasty infection. After finishing the meds from the doc’s, I religiously puffed the preventive inhaler every single morning and every night because Osaka was cold and I couldn’t afford not to be able to breathe while being on my own. To my immense surprise, it worked. And since it did and I enjoyed not having to be breathless and feeling constricted in my chest, I continued the daily habit.

For 2 whole months I could breathe properly without any sign of an impending asthma attack. Finally I had to visit the doc’s for more of the preventive inhaler. To say he was extremely surprised that I didn’t have an attack during the 2 months when Singapore is at its coolest was a gross understatement. And of course he had to add a ‘I told you so’ because he had been trying to get me to use the preventive inhaler for years. Years. But I refused because I had a warped logic about not wanting to rely on it permanently. He went on to explain how his other asthmatic patients cut down their reliance on the preventive inhaler over the years but told me to keep to my daily morning and night puffs first since it was working so well for me.

Honestly, I like having to breathe well. And I’m thankful I finally found the method to do so.

The other slight change I took was to introduce probiotics into my system. Or perhaps I should say, re-introduce. This particular brand of probiotics, I once took it for a month a couple of years back and found that it worked to keep my irritable bowels in check. Then I stopped because it was not exactly convenient to purchase it in Singapore. However my IBS has gone from bad to worse over the years; rarely am I able to sit through a meal without needing to rush to the washroom immediately. And most of the time, I had diarrhea. H can attest to that because I frequently run to the toilet at home in the middle of meals due to tummy aches. After re-introducing the probiotics into my system, this scenario has been cut down substantially and I find myself having diarrhea much less often.

I still need to lose a lot of weight, amongst other issues but I’m grateful two of more inconvenient and life-impeding problems have been addressed.

Penmanship

I recently bought some interesting pencil sharpeners from Japan for two friends’ daughters who just embarked on their formal education a couple of days back. Sharpeners are just sharpeners, aren’t they? What could be so interesting? Well… I don’t have them in my possession now but from what I recall, it was a sharpener that allows 4 adjustments to the degree of sharpness, if you get what I mean. I chanced upon this unique design of a sharpener while looking for post-its (to tag my travel guide) at a stationery store in Den-Den Town and I couldn’t put it down; I so wanted to buy but have absolutely no use for it. That was when I thought of the two girls.

So this friend was thanking me for the sharpener this afternoon and our conversation drifted to how some primary schools do not allow the students from the lower levels to use mechanical pencils. I thought it might possibly have to do with grip or penmanship – not good for new writers to develop bad grip leading to poor penmanship. Which led me to my traumatizing childhood memories of writing with a fountain pen.

My primary school has quite a queer tradition – when we progressed to writing with pens towards the end of Primary 3 (a couple of months earlier for those with better handwriting), we had to write with fountain pens. And with that began our (and our mothers’) nightmares. Back in those days, fountain pen ink cartridges were not available, so in all our heavy schoolbags, we additionally had to bring an ink bottle to pump ink into our fountain pens when necessary. If you follow what I’m talking about, now try visualising 9-year olds trying to pump ink in school amidst friends and play. Ink blots on our uniforms and ink smudges on our hands were more than a common sight. Sometimes worse accidents happened like ink spillage in our school bags or an ink bottle falling off the table.

I hated writing with a fountain pen in cursive and being allowed only to use ink erasers for corrections (all compulsory, by the way) because I’m quite the messy writer. Back then I never understood why the school made us do this because I know my cousins’ schools didn’t make them do it but my dad was surprisingly very supportive of the school’s policy. He even invested in a Pilot fountain pen (considered rather expensive back then) for me when the rest of my classmates just used the Hero fountain pens they purchased in the bookshop.

It was only in Primary 6 when we were finally allowed to switch to ballpoint pens – I guess it was to prepare us for the PSLE. That was a huge relief to me because I really don’t write well with fountain pens. And still never understood why the school made us do it. It’s only a few years later that I appreciate what the school has done for us. I’ve always been known to be a person with neat handwriting throughout my life (and belatedly, I thought of my sister too! We went to the same primary school) and I think the years of writing with a fountain pen has really helped me very much with my penmanship.

Back to the topic of sharpeners: I hope the two young girls find them useful.

-2 and Taking Stock

We’re down to 2 more days of 2013 before welcoming the new year. High time I take stock of this year after having been missing from the blogging scene for almost a month.

2013 is definitely going down as a year of many ‘Firsts’ for me – I finally decided to embark on a language immersion programme, and I took a week-long trip to Japan all by myself. This is also the year where I decided to remove some ‘toxins’ in my life. Sure I do think about them once in a while, but considering the hurt I will surely feel if I continue being friends with them, I think I’m better off without. They are not my family and not the closest friends I want to keep forever, so suffering due to them is not an option.

Looking back on the things I’ve done, I can only conclude that one of my biggest fortune in life is having been born to great parents, followed by choosing the right life partner. Because of them, I have been leading a good life without needs. I’m really not so much into astrology and the likes, but I’ve always thought that I am the exact epitome of a Cancerian. Recently I read an article on Weibo about how perverse a Cancerian can be (it gives an interesting insight to this horoscope sign apart from the usual). And horror of all horror, I find myself agreeing with almost all the points mentioned. I AM like that!

巨蟹是一个很冷漠与很理智的星座.

可以这么说一句话… 巨蟹冷漠起来不是人…

相当的狠… 而且绝不回头. 不管是对友情还是爱情… 亲情里除了他最直接的亲人, 其他的人对他来说其实无关紧要.

巨蟹的温柔其实很多的时候是因为他不好意思拒绝… 巨蟹不喜欢看到别人失望的眼神. 不管这个人和他是否熟稔. 不管这个人是否在他心里有位置… 他不拒绝你的要求… 只是因为他不好意思…

巨蟹对你温柔,对你温情只能说明你和他的距离还很远… 根本走不进他的心. 而如果相反, 你发现巨蟹会和你阴阳怪气, 会和你耍脾气的时候… 那么起码证明你已经进入到一定的范围中… 而在这个范围里你又会发现空间很大…

会觉得好像巨蟹对你不是那么在意… 那么你错了… 因为巨蟹是一个超级自卑但是又很自恋的人. 他总是觉得 既然这个人来了, 就不会走了就是他的了. 这也就是为什么很多和巨蟹修成正果的人都是那种耐性超强, 忍耐力超好的人…

你发现巨蟹的空, 只是因为闯入这个范围的人很少. 巨蟹很喜欢和很多人保持一种不明所以的关系.

和巨蟹一起… 第一前提就是不要说谎… 相信我. 巨蟹的敏感和细腻不是一般人可以想像得到的. 如果他在意你… 那么巨蟹会第一感觉就会感觉你的不对劲… 那么就会根据任何分析… 得出最后的结论你是否在说谎.

巨蟹的话语表达都很隐晦… 很少人能明白巨蟹真正想要表达的意思. 会觉得巨蟹很难猜. 其实巨蟹隐晦的说话方式… 是不想把所有话都挑明了来说… 这样会很伤不管是伤人还是伤己都是巨蟹不想看到的. 隐晦的说… 只是想给彼此一个机会坦白.

I cannot say ‘No’ even to people I don’t care very much for, and when I have decided to harden my heart, there is no turning back. More importantly, I have a temper and I only flare up in front of my loved ones. I don’t know why the article is so spot on about so many things I never quite understood about myself. Well it’s never too late to find out.

巨蟹座总是脸上微笑着、无所谓着、强势着，但是心里却一直流着泪；巨蟹座总是对陌生人冷冷的，但是熟悉了就嘻嘻哈哈；巨蟹座总是表现得很坚强，其实很软弱；巨蟹座总是说自己不孤单，其实很寂寞；巨蟹座总是被人误解，却又不愿解释。巨蟹座，很累的…

This probably best summarises what I am all about. Taking the easier route is just not the way I live.

I have been thinking about New Year resolutions. Going to make some that are different from previous years’.

– 31

We are officially into the final month of 2013. For more than a week since returning from Osaka, I had been wanting to post something so that there is one more post to add on to the 3-4 posts I had for November – it’s probably the ‘driest’ month on this blog. But I never found the inspiration to write. Strangely enough, now that November is over, the urge to write never felt stronger. The irony…

Logged into my account and found out I am 6 years with WordPress today! Actually I’m quite sure it’s longer than 6 years (because I definitely starting using WP in 2005 or early 2006), but it was probably with another account that I have erased. Never looked back since.

So, how has your 2013 pan out so far? It’s just another 31 days before we wrap up the year so I guess it’s a good time to start looking back.