chocolate wrapper

During Valentine’s Day last year, my Korean friend Lee gave me a tiny chocolate with a pink wrapper. Inside the wrapper was a quote that I really like:

 

“Go where your heart takes you”

 

Looking back, my heart has taken me to places that I never imagine I will step foot on and to people that I will never otherwise meet, people who have then taken important places in my life. I guess I have always followed my heart.

 

 

But how far can your heart takes you? Does it has your best interests in mind?   

There will be a time when you have to listen to the logic inside your brain rather than to the thumping sound of your heartbeat.

Yesterday night, I dreamt of a clinic in Japan with my name on it. It was a vet clinic. Maybe the doctor there had the same name as me. Still, seeing my name there made me happy. So, I asked my sister (who was in my dreams) to take a picture of it so that I can take it back to Malaysia. I have successfully fulfill my childhood dreams of becoming a veterinarian, even though it was just a dream.

Remember how we have always imagined how our lives are going to be like in the future? Sometimes, that image excites us. Sometimes it scares us. The image that I saw when I was 7 is vastly different from the image that I saw when I was 21.

But what I know is, my life at 23 now is very different from what I imagined it to be like 16 years ago or even 2 years ago. Life really is unpredictable.

So even if my future looks scary to me now, I can rest assured that it will be totally different from my imagination.

I wonder where will my heart takes me next.

For my dear friend, Dwight

“Every decisions could be our last decision in our life, knowing that any moment could be our last moment in this world.”

How true is that.

I’ve never imagined that I would have to witness the truth of this statement before my very own eyes.

He was his usual self that night. Hanging around us while we were making lemon sorbet. He used to joke about how good both of us would look together. I would just rolled my eyes quietly. How can a 6 foot tall man and a less than 5 foot tall girl look good together? He called me cutie on my first day of work and was one of my first few friends.

He always asked me to hang out with him after work, but I never did.

That night, he said he wanted to find Par, one of the Thailand girls, after work.

“I’ll knock on your door after this alright?”

Then he patted my head and said, “This girl never came out of her room”.

It was the first time he touched my head. It felt nice.

After we were done with the sorbet, he helped us carry trays from the back of the kitchen to the appetizer station, where we always worked.

Maybe he wanted to impress the Thailand girls, I thought. But without his help, it would be a difficult task for us 4 girls.

Soon, the dining room started to fill up and orders started to come in. We went back to work, us at the appetizer section, him at the dish-washing machine.

 

I never saw him after that.

 

May and I were asked to prepare the amuse-bouche, which was a small plate of one glob of cheese atop a slice of tomato (I never knew what is that), while Par and Joof were left to manage the orders at the appetizer station.

Usually, the guys would be handling the entree station because the trays there would be a lot heavier. But, at that moment, Ben and Ronnie were nowhere to be seen.

An order had been finished and it could not wait. The main chef then asked me to carry the entree to the main dining room. I went out of the kitchen with the tray, handed it to the server and headed back. It was all but 5 minutes. I was not prepared at all for the things I would see when I came back.

For some strange reasons, the sliding glass door to the kitchen was closed. I looked through the door into the kitchen, wondering which joker closed the door.

I could see some of the dish washers avoiding something, I thought it was some kind of insects or monsters. Ronnie came running out as fast as he could to the nearest exit. I’ve never seen him like that.

Then I heard it.

Bang!    Bang!      Bang!     Bang!

 

~*~

My friend was killed that night. The garbage man had hid a gun inside his jacket and opened fire inside the kitchen, killing my friend and the chief dish-washer. Another target, who was younger than me, had avoided the bullet by a few inches. The police came, people wrapped themselves in towels to keep from the cold, and the whole scenario looked like something from a movie.

I only manage to cry when Chea Chea, my roommate who came with me from Malaysia, ran into the dining room looking for me. She was working as a banquet server downstairs.

It was a Saturday night. And it was our second last week in Hot Springs, before we officially end our work contract. The sound from the police helicopter hovering above us accompanied us to sleep that night.

~*~

I could never really say what that incident taught me. I’ve learned though, that when a Jamaican dies, on the days leading to his funeral, his Jamaican friends would pump up the music, dance and party every night until he had been laid to rest. It was their way of leading him onto the correct path to heaven, I guess.

And the funeral would be an event filled with music and singing.

My friend never kept his promise that night. He didn’t get to visit Par after work. His “after this” never came.

He never had a clue that that night would be his very last night here.

 

I was browsing some of the topics on LYN when a post caught my eyes. It was the same post where I got the quotations at the beginning of this article from. The forumer ended his post with this:

“ Think for a moment, if you are playing a Mario game and you have only one life left, what would you do? And imagine if you have 99 lives, what would you do then?”

Scars on me

About a week ago, I fell down while I was walking my dog, Tommy. It was  my fault, really, because I was a bit distracted that time. After some tail-yanking, growling and pain, I got up and continued the walk with bloody knees. Then I got home and put on some Hansaplast on top of the bruises. 

They are still on my knees now, those plasters, only that they have morphed into no-brand ones, not so miraculously. I still felt pain now and then, especially when I woke up in the morning*ahem* afternoon. I try hard not to let water get into them when I bath.

The wounds have changed into ugly “shell –like” things. I was convinced that there will be scars on my knees from now on. Big,ugly, brownish ones.

But then, the scars started to come off when I poked at them. Big, ugly, brownish scars came off, revealing perfectly fine, untainted skin underneath.

                                                                ~*~

Does it sound familiar to you? It is a bit like life, isn’t it…you fell down hard, complete with bruises, pain and scars. You thought that you will never recover, that you will be scarred for life.

But then, after some time, nature took off the scars you had, revealing beautiful skin underneath, even more beautiful than the one you had previously, only if you care to “poke” at them. If you never make an effort, you will never find out that those scars are actually shells that are there to protect your wounds, so that they will be able to recover in due time.

You have become a more beautiful person because of all the scars you once had.

That’s what I thought when I look at my scars just now.

 

p/s If you didn’t notice, I’ve changed the look of my blog!

       Do you like it?

The funny thing about us

“(Human beings’ funniest characteristic is) our contradictoriness. We are in such a hurry to grow up, and then we long for our lost childhood. We make ourselves ill earning money, and then spend all our money on getting well again. We think so much about the future that we neglect the present, and thus experience neither the present nor the future. We live as if we are never going to die, and die as if we never lived.”

An excerpt from Paulo Coelho’s Like the Flowing River.

Just wanna share this with everyone because it’s worth thinking about.

Life Lessons No#4132

I have been trying hard for the last few hours to update my Nokia 6120 classic with a software called Nokia Software Updater. Why? Because I got nothing better to do.

I followed all the instructions carefully. Nothing left out.

They asked me to back up my phone contents first, so I did.

Download update files – finished. Then the update process started. The progress bar was moving and below that it says “estimated time left – 15 minutes”. So, I sit back in my chair happily and continue watching Nodame Cantabile Special Episode.  

2 hours passed. Estimated time left – 15 minutes.

3 hours of Nodame Cantabile later (i had to wait for the thing to load!), Estimated time left – 15 minutes.

Was tempted to pull off the USB cable and start all over again but a sentence caught my eye.

DO NOT DISCONNECT YOUR PHONE DURING UPDATE PROCESS. DOING SO WILL CAUSE SEVERE DAMAGE TO YOUR PHONE AND IT MAY NOT WORK FOREVER AGAIN. YOU MAY NEED TO BEG YOUR DAD FOR A NEW PHONE.

Below that is another sentence:

DO NOT USE YOUR PHONE DURING THE UPDATING PROCESS (EVEN DURING EMERGENCIES). DOING SO WILL HAVE THE SAME EFFECT AS ABOVE.

Well, any English-literate person who love their phone enough will follow the instructions on the screen. So I waited obediently for a few hours more. And in the process, ignored someone’s sms and terminated a phone call from a friend I haven’t heard from in a vr long time. Sorry Ah Bu~

It’s almost 12am now. And I am still waiting. Even though my phone is seemingly working like normal, the fear that plugging the cables will reduce it to a useless phone is too big.

Searching the internet for any possible solutions, I found these. Stories upon horror stories of how interrupting the update process have ruined other people’s Nokia phones and their lives.

No good.

So I plan on waiting till my bedtime.

Half a day of unnecessary kan-cheongness and waiting, gone just like tat. Life is too short for this.

Moral of my story? DO NOT UPDATE your phone software if your phone is from Nokia. Save yourself some peace of mind. There are better things to do.