Silly_pug's Xanga

Seven bloody pounds

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:11:13 GMT

A while ago, someone mentioned that Seven Pounds is a great film. Recently I watched it in order to appreciate how great this film was but it appeared to me a total nonsense. It was about a man, out of negligence involved in a traffic accident which killed seven people (including his beloved wife). Then, he was living in guilt and tried to do something to compensate this irreversible fault. So this film was all about his ‘over-compensation’, and the most ridiculous part at the end, he killed himself in order to spare his heart to somebody. To me, this is merely transferring his guilt to somebody else. If I were the receiver of the organ, I would probably unable to live with myself if I knew that someone committed suicide to have his heart recycled, for my sake!!

A lot of time, people showing some ‘nice’ gestures to other people are not solely out of kindness. They are more or less doing it for themselves. What they did will make themselves feel good, or at least better, but not really for the sake of other people, or genuinely care about them. There are all kinds of selfish act in this world, but I guess being kind to be selfish is the easiest way to camouflage your own shortcoming. For example, you beg for forgiveness not because you thought you have hurt someone. You probably want to get rid of the guilt which is bothering you, or at some point, you still want the relationship to continue. Sometimes I wonder if I am getting less and less appreciative to people’s kindness. But deep inside me, I just cannot convinced myself that what they did are really so selfless! I don’t find things as ‘touching’ as they appeared to be, like tears do not necessary represent sadness or how deep one’s feeling. It represents a moment of emotional turmoil. The more I see, the more distant I feel my connection to this world of humans, and the things they did! To me, it is nothing wrong to be selfish and self-centred, as long as it does not affect other people, or they have to bear any adverse consequences to make your life complete.

Eclipse

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:04:31 GMT

We can see the eclipse today in Hong Kong! Colleagues got a sun filter so we take our turn to watch the eclipse and it was amazing! I called my friend at once so he could see it from his end but he said he has not got a sun filter. On the news they said we can use an x’ray negative as a filter but I mean it is ugly to hold out our lungs’ x’ray and probably what we thought as an eclipse could be the spot on our lung!

Just to share with you, this is a tiny picture of what happened. If you enlarge the picture to 200%, you can actually see it quite clearly. It is the middle spot I am talking about, which is in the shape of a half moon but it is in fact the remaining part of the sun. The rest of the sun is being shadowed by the moon. In Shanghai, they can see the full eclipse which means about 6 minutes of day time has turned into the night.

In India, eclipse meant bad luck and a lot of people have to wash out their bad luck in the river. As it turned out, two people were squash to death. Bad luck, I think most of the time, we induce it into ourselves!

How to be environmental friendly

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:57:28 GMT

All the stores and supermarkets in Hong Kong have stopped giving plastic bags, and a waste disposal tax has to be charged if you asked for one.

In fact, I realized that I got far too many environmental friendly bags at home. When I purchased a pair of shoes, they put them inside an environmental protection bag. When I purchased a dress, they put it in a trendy environmental reusable bag. Something perhaps one will not chuck out but will never take it out to reuse again. They don’t really go with carrots and onions. Then I found my cupboard is now full of bags which I never reuse, but I am still asking for plastic bags to hold my grocery shopping, even they aren’t free. The fact it, it isn’t really wasted. I used them to dispose my garbage or as bin liners. It works the same way.

Perhaps I should try to remember taking a bag with me when I am going out, just like checking on my keys before I shut the door (remembering the consequences if I don’t) but I am not used to the idea yet. Or perhaps the supermarket till should give out a siren when one is paying for a plastic bag, telling people that this alien here is contaminating the earth, then I shall probably bear that in mind the next time.

What next if I am now finding too guilty to ask for a bag? I juggle with the items instead. The other day, I was juggling with a carton of milk, two cups of yogurt and a bag of French beans. And I saw my flat mate coming home holding a lemon on top of the Marigold. In fact, outside the supermarket, it is not unusual to see people balancing 5 kg of rice with a packet of 12 eggs, or struggling with a big water melon, walking like a heavily pregnant woman. With constant training, I guess we can all work in the circus but the end of the year.

Conditional and unconditional

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:13:04 GMT

I spent my entire life searching for love, and most of the time I was disappointed and hurt. From the time I was only a kid to my adulthood, and into my mid-life, I felt I was going round in a circle and had learned nothing about love at all. Until I have my dog Champagne three years ago, (in fact I longed for a dog since I was a kid), I learned all about love from a dog, and that kind of love is unconditional. There and then I know that for us human, when we talk about love, we are fooling ourselves and other people. How much do we actually know about love?

To me, the most immature kind of love is the love between men and women. A lot of time, we want to be loved more than we want to love, or at least we expect everything to be reciprocated. If it did not happen that way, we felt hurt, disappointed and being cheated. When I came to think about this, love to most people is just a deal, a bargain. I love you subject to this and that. There are always some conditions attached.

I am just one of these people not until I have kept a puppy three years ago. I love him, just as simple as that. He makes me happy and even he annoys me, I love him all the same. I just want the best for him. And if someone loves him more, I won’t feel jealous but only grateful, and want him to share more of their love. It was only then that I realized when you really love somebody, your love can be unconditional and not possessive. You won’t throw your tantrum, or return the same bitter ‘favour’ simply because he/she does not fulfill your expectation. I mean when you still feel that way, perhaps you have to rethink. Your love to someone may not as deep as you claim/thought. Since then, I would only appreciate an unconditional love, either to others or others unto me. And only you can give your love unconditionally can you feel it the same way from other people, i.e. he may not say a lot on how much you meant to him, but you know he does through his act, and not merely words. This is the deepest kind of love.

Valentine’s Day on Saturday

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:18:47 GMT

Unlike some post I read in Xanga, I do not detest Valentine’s Day as much those bloggers. I just think it is an occasion for a laugh, and quite entertaining indeed. Imagine you eat heart shape chocolates, heart shape steak and heart shape dessert, I wonder your poo will come in heart shape too!

The fact that it falls on a Saturday this year brings a lot of disappointment to the florists. Certainly less people will order flowers because it is on a Saturday. The office is closed and hence no chance for the girls to show off their bouquet. They don’t really want their bouquet to be sent to their home. There’s no point to show them to their parents or siblings. They want to show them to their colleagues, you see.

For some show-off addicts, they simply want flowers to be delivered to their office on Friday, a day before Valentine’s Day, just to satisfy their show off desire. And I love to identify those people too. I just found the whole scenario amusing more than anything else. You got that bunch of flowers so everybody can see it, and it will be left in the office for the weekend, and by the time you come back on Monday, it is about time to bin it! But under our current financial crisis, we do need these lousy people to boost the economy.

The dog and the clock

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 08:00:59 GMT

Over ten years ago I bought a clock from Ikea. It is a fashionable clock with a pendulum, a combination of modern and ancient and I loved it. Since then, we have moved several times and at one time, I thought the clock was lost but later recovered from one of our boxes. I wasn’t ready to part with it just yet and I was glad to find it. Then at a later stage the clock started to go slow and I thought perhaps it has run its course. No, one new battery made it all alive again.

Years gone and I thought it was about time to change a new look on the wall. I got another clock but the ticking noise was far too loud for me to bear. It was like living with a time bomb 24/7. I took it down and put the old Ikea clock back on the wall.

Since then, I have almost forgotten the idea of a new clock when yesterday I passed by a street seller and he got something which I loved at first sight. It was a clock with the picture of two plush bears sitting together, very cute and loving. I bought it with no second thought.

When I got home, I placed it on the wall, replaced the old clock (with some nostalgic feelings of parting but still!) and it was great. The colour of the clock matched our wall paint and the pair of cute little bears warmed our sitting room. I went into my bedroom happily and that’s when the trouble began.

My dog went back into the sitting room, barking non stop at the clock. Apparently he thought those two bears were enemies! I went out to fetch him, took him back into my room but within half a minute, he was out in the sitting room, barking at the clock again. I could not stop him! So I took a chair, carrying him and stepping on the high chair with him to face the two bears, and said, ‘hello, see these two bears, they are friends, they don’t bark at you, do they?’ He seemed o.k. then and got quiet, so I took him down and we went back into our bedroom. No luck, the next minute, he was back to the sitting room, barking at the bears again!

By then I was getting impatient, I took the clock down to show him that they were unreal, they weren’t alive, and they weren’t even real bears! They were toy bears! But he behaved as if he seen a ghost! When the clock was getting near him, he ran from kitchen to bedroom, as though there was an earthquake. So at the end, I have to give in! I picked up the old clock, which was just about to go to the bin, and put it back on the wall. There it was ticking its way as if it was laughing at me saying, ‘hey, you can never get rid of me, this is my territory, even you dog knew that, you silly old fool!’

Yes, I think my dog wants the old clock back, what can I do? Now when I get some new furniture, do I have to get permission from this dog?

Do your plastic surgery through internet

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:40:15 GMT

It has been a while since our company monitors our usage on the internet, and which sites we went into. I tried to refrain myself from using the internet at work, but I simply cannot forfeit using the stock market brokerage through the internet which is part of my livelihood, you see! Well this is not about me, at least not just yet because I don’t get onto the stock market all day, but this colleague who looks exactly like Garfield with half closed eyes gets into the internet chatroom over 1,500 times in a week, according to our IT report. Garfield does not speak to anybody at work. What she does every day is to stock up enough snack from our free snack bar, and goes back to her internet chatroom. That’s how she spends her day.

Various warnings from her supervisor have no effect on the issue, not until when she was told that her net connection could be severed. When she heard this, she broke down and cried! It’s like our company is going to disconnect her life-support machine! It’s only the bloody internet!

But this leads me to think that nowadays why so many people addicted to the internet world. Perhaps inside this internet world, they can be a totally different person. For some, they created an entirely different image for themselves, an ideal image which in reality they can never fulfilled, e.g. pretty, witty, learned and capable, just everything missing in them. They tell lots of lies which are far from the truth, e.g. the most common lie is how capable they are at work but as a matter of fact, they usually are the kind of people other colleagues have neglected their existence. Some never show their photos (that’s me) so as to open to imagination how nice looking they are! (that’s not me, I like to describe myself as an old hag).

I mean there is no harm that every now and again, we do something to boost our ego. But the internet saga is more serious than that. Instead of helping us to accept who we really are, it provides a temporary shelter for us to escape from our shortcoming, like performing a plastic surgery inside this system, coming out with a perfect nose, and lots of fans, and then the nose sank or the breast implants burst after a while, bringing people back to reality in despair.

This may be perfectly o.k. for some. But to me, I cannot help to think that the world’s scenario has changed from bad to worse. No one would make an effort to improve themselves or communication with one other in their actual life. They simply resort to this mirror mirror on the wall, who is the smartest among all, and see themselves as the smartest through the internet illusion. How pathetic can you get!

An old man's tale

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 03:06:29 GMT

Yesterday, my dog and I went to an elderly home for his Dr Dog’s duty. It was around the New Year and so we had a special performance. From the community centre, ten kids joined us too, and each was assigned with a dog. And we taught the kids to do some tricks with our dogs and then showed them to the elderly. It was great fun to watch them.

After the performance, an old man was talking to me. He said he does not like Pekingese in particular. It’s far too clingy. In fact, he had a Pekingese before, the dog cling on to him too much, had to lie on his arm before it could get to sleep. Then after a few years, the dog got an incurable illness, and he had to watch him being put to sleep. Tears were flooded from his eyes when he was holding its dead body. He was so sad that he could not eat for days and days, and only got himself drunk. That was far too painful for him. So his advice for people is, never keep any dog. I said to him that he had his happy days with the dog but he thought the pain of loss was unbearable. Even up to the very moment when he spoke to me, he still got tears in his eyes.

I know some people who do not fall in love because they do not want to experience the loss when a relationship does not last. Some people don’t keep pets because they know those pets will definitely die before them.

But I guess that’s the fair deal in life. When you love someone/something that much, the pain, if not more, will definitely be as much as the happiness one gave you when you were together. Some people will choose never to experience any. While I would, in no uncertainty, choose to experience them all. Infact, I would want to see to my dog until it dies, as I don’t think he can make some important decisions himself. I would want to see him through his life first, and probably in return, he would check if the coast is clear to Heaven, and show me how to sneak through the side entrance if I were not allowed an immediate entry!

Goodbye 2008

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:45:55 GMT

I am not sure about the others, but all the Eves e.g. Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve like today used to make me feel nostalgic. You recalled the events happened in the past one year, how dramatic they seemed, how unexpected they had been. Unfulfilled promises, broken dreams, gain some friendship and lose some, and life is passing us by.

But apart of all that, let's be thankful that we are still alive. Let's tell people we care, and we are grateful for their kindness. I really want to do that, before 2008's stage curtain is being closed, and before I tell myself let bygones be bygones.

A Mrs Scrooge in the Christmas Carol

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 01:25:39 GMT

I know love is not only applicable over Christmas, and should be all year round. But this special time is a good reminder of love. However, let me tell you a little incident which was the very opposite to me.

On the night of the 23^rd, our company was having an annual Christmas Dinner. In the recent years, I do not even attend because I am a bit tired of this kind of show time. I bumped into my colleague the next day, which was Christmas Eve and saw that he was still wearing yesterday's outfit for the Christmas dinner. Did he enjoy himself so much that he has forgotten to change his clothes for work the next day? Or if people got a dirty mind, they would have thought that he did not go home that night, ending in someone else’s bed.

But as always, what we saw or what we thought is always far from the truth. That’s what made gossip so interesting! It would be boring if we do not apply our own imagination of facts into the truth to fuck it all up, you see!

He told me that it was slightly over an hour after the party started, around seven o’clock in the evening, that he got this very scary phone call. When he answered it, it was his daughter’s image on the screen, crying badly and unable to speak. Then he heard a strange voice next to the child, saying ‘you tell him, you tell him!’ The child just kept crying and could not/did not want to say anything. He started to panic, left the party at once, and called the police to go into the apartment with him. He rather worried that it could be kidnapped, murdered or just anything tragic had happened to his wife and daughter at home.

But when he got home, he bumped into his wife and daughter who were just about to go out for dinner. So what’s wrong there? Apparently, his wife was upset that my colleague was having such a good time himself, leaving them at home, so tormented the child into tears, and forced her to call her dad to make him come home. The strange voice on the phone before was in fact his wife!

I did not ask him what happen next. They must be having such a big row afterwards that my colleague did not get the chance to use the bedroom to get change for work the next day.

I feel sorry for my colleague, having such a wife. Perhaps he may not be the perfect husband, but that’s not the point. The point is, I don’t believe one should use all possible means (even horrible means) to keep someone with you. If you cannot keep someone’s heart, I rather set him free! Or if you really love someone, why wouldn’t you want him to have a good time, even he was not with you? Perhaps people are always confused between love and possession. Love means possessing that someone physically at the same time. No, it isn’t true. Love is in union with someone’s soul, which is beyond every boundary, even across the miles.