Living at the moment

I am writing a piece not because it is work related even though it is office hour but because I am moved to write at the moment. I know it is probably unethical but sometimes I just want to rebel a little bit by doing something that I want to do rather than doing something I have to do. 

“ When you are busy doing something you have to do, eventually you will forget what you want to do”

I am watching Scent of a Woman played by kim Su Nah. I adored her in City Hall and in My Name Is Kim Sam Soon. Both dramas had been proven to raise her up as an excellent actress. However, in my opinion she didn’t do much in this new drama. She was middling at best. I wasn’t sympathetic towards her and I found her character unappealing. I hated her over the top acting. Moving away from her,  thankfully Seo hyorim played her part well as an arrogant heir. I even fell in love with her elegant style and her carefully curled front part of hair. I am now in episode 8 and I am positive from here onwards nothing much would change.

How do you feel about saving money while living frugally or poorly?

When it comes to long term goal of saving money for retirement and other big purchase in the future I think it is given that saving money is a must. How if your days are numbered? You would have forgotten about long term goal and focus on what will make you happy now. Isn’t? That was the essence of the story in Scent of A Woman which I think is a very interesting question we all can ask ourselves.

Lee Yeon Jae in the story made her  bucket of list of what she wanted to do before she died. She only had 6 months more to live due to gallbladder cancer. It was spreading very fast and she didn’t expect herself to live long. Therefore, she wrote all the things she wanted to accomplish within the period she might still alive.

This story reminds me of another story I read. Veronica was a character I found most intriguing in Veronica Decides To Die written by Paulo Coelho. She was a young woman in her 20s but already decided to end her life by taking overdose of sleeping pill. Her reason was she couldn’t live a predictable routine life. She survived the attempt but admitted to a mental hospital. However in this story the doctor in charge tricked her into believing that she would eventually died because of heart failure due to the side effect of the sleeping pill she took. The doctor gave her the kind of medicine that stops her heart for a while. Veronica indeed got a deeper outlook of her life that she decided to live to the fullest. She even managed to influence those people around her to live fully. In the end the doctor proved his theory that man would incessantly try to live to the fullest when they realize they are really going to die soon. Thus, cure the problem of suicidal thought.

Lee Yeon Jae and Veronica perhaps faced the same problem albeit for a different reason.  Both tried to live fully only after knowing their predicament.  My question is; If you live at the moment, do you neglect being frugal and spontaneously spend all your money to your heart desire?

It is true that we are probably not a cancer patient but we too do not know when our final day would be. Our days are numbered too. Our final day can be today or it can be tomorrow. Who knows?

Having that in mind what would you want to do if you know exactly the time you are going to die? Will you prepare your bucket’s list? Will you start eating what you want to eat, buy what you want to buy without hesitation, learn the thing you always wanted, love more, smile more, forgive more and live more?

I wanted a lot of things. But I could never do all of it if I am a full time employee. I can’t have time to have a home in a vast land to cultivate and plant vegetables, fruits and flowers I wanted. I can’t have time to wake up early in the morning to watch the sunrise and play with the pets at home. I can’t go to places I thought of visiting. I can’t embark on other areas I found interesting. I can’t rest and give my full energy on the things I wish to indulge at the moment. Those are the things I long for if only there is no constraint.

Human basically have very simple needs. They just want to do what they want to do and not what people expect them to do or what they have to do to survive. I am as simple as that or maybe I am more complicated than simple since I have a hard time to differentiate between what I need and what I want. Aren’t we all like that? Are you?

I had a beautiful dream. Once upon a time I had great friends...

I had a beautiful dream. I was singing.

Setiap kali bersendirian kurenung kembali

Sebuah mimpi menghiasi hati

Kenangan satu pengalaman tidak kulupakan

Walaupun usia ditelan zaman

Kau sering membayangi kehidupan ini

Walau kemana arah langkah pergi

Bersyukur serta kukagumi keesaan Tuhan

Kerana menemukan kau dan aku

Chorus;

Aku sedar segalanya sementara

Tiada apa yang kekal di dunia

Seandainya nanti ditakdirkan kita berpisah

Kau tetap manis di dalam ingatan.

That was my song.

In my dream I was in form 4F. I sat at the back. It seemed I was late for class but regardless, my friends; all of my close friends in real life were sitting in front of me. It seemed to that we had an exam and I once again as if it happened before in that place, scored high despite maybe ranked at second this time. Maybe.

In a different scene the school or the teacher in my classroom was organizing a singing performance and it happened that she picked people randomly. I was anxious but I was unusually, unafraid. But I couldn’t really find the tune for the song that I wish to sing. Therefore, I went back to my dorm, grabbed my exercise book not caring if people might saw my random writing inside it if I were to bring it out during my singing performance. I then started to write the song out. As I sung, a memory started flooding in.  This time the memory was a real experience I had when I was in form two. It was a performance during a motivational camp. I sang with my two closest mates. It was amazingly a recollection of an accurate memory of what had really happened. It wasn’t just the two of us singing it. It was the three of us. In the last few years, I had mistakenly remembered it as performed by only the two of us. I and H. Now, that was something Isn’t ?

Again in a different scene, the friend I just had recalled back came to my room. It was a room in my house. It was the old house. This friend was sweating from cleaning up my room.

“Weren’t your turn already passed” I asked her.

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter. “ She said.

What a wonderful friend she was. She sweated for me. How can I not acknowledge that?

This dream comes as a comfort. There were two monumental moments there. One was; it reminds me the loneliness I felt after I transferred to a different school when I was in form 4. My dream righted the wrong by providing me a scenario of what could have been if only I stayed back. I could have ended my two years triumphantly with good, real friends whom I shared the same values. It can’t be helped that perhaps despite scoring high, there will be a better opponent who would dash my score. 

Secondly; it reminds me of my friendship with two persons whom I have taken for granted. It’s rather not surprising that these two were the only people who remembered my birth day and sent a greeting on that day.

I could never replace what have taken place in the past but I also could not take for granted those who have rooted for me in the past. Now that I am living as if in a seclusion perhaps I shouldn’t try so much to avoid my wonderful friends. No man is an island.

If you were to watch a Japanese drama series Hanazakari No Kimitachi E you would be brought back to your high school memories. The story was perhaps a little out of the norm because it featured a girl named Ayashi Mizuki who disguised as a boy to enroll in all boy school. The reason was she wanted to make Sano Izumi a boy who was a national high jump champion to jump again after tragically injured while trying to help her. However the nice part of the story wasn’t just about her goal and later their realization of love for each other. It was more than a love story. It was about a friendship story whereby all the people in the school matters and that friendship was the best memory you can bring with you for the rest of your life until you turn old and gray.

That drama gave me that fuzzy, innocent feeling of a high school student. Perhaps, it invoked so much of feelings that I started to remember a lot of things in my high school years. I had amazing friends. And then now, how could I know that things could turn out differently when we are older. We become more selfish trying each day to accomplish our own goal and little by little lost the pure connection we once had. I ask of you; Do you still have someone in the past that you communicate regularly because you are still close with them?

People change. I changed a lot. I can’t keep up with the now and what more of yesterday. But then again, maybe I am just lost.

I don't Know how She Does It

I have watched a movie entitled “I don’t know how she does it” played by SJP (Sarah Jessica Parker). For some reason this movie gave me an idea about a working woman. SJP as Kate in this movie was someone who had a loving family and a high flying career. She was struggling to keep up with her demanding roles as a career woman, a wife and a mother. Nonetheless, she managed to be in an almost balanced state. Along the way she was tempted and seduced by her co-worker, almost lost the trust of her young daughter and had less and less quality time with her beloved husband. Even so, she tried hard enough to acknowledge her needs for self-recognition in having a fulfilling career and a loving family. She didn’t let an affair to ruin her life and opted to sacrifice a little time to be with her children. She stated that no matter how demanding her job was, she simply couldn’t quit a job she loved. 

How does it feel like to not having to choose between a family and a career? Is it really possible to scale the mountain and still have your family by your side? 

I once dreamed and I mean it is an ultimate dream that one day when I have my own family I will be a homemaker. I would like to participate in my children’s life especially in the first five years of their life. I want to sacrifice my day and night having to totally nurse them myself. I want to give them the affection I once missed as a child, and I want to expose them to the values I highly regarded in my own life. I want to build a balanced child who can give lights to the world because of his or her upbringing. There is no way I want to have a child and have someone else give them the values I don’t concede. I too want to be a wife who is totally into her husband wellbeing. That was my “dream”.

And then reality sinks in and I am caught between having to focus on something I wish for and something I already have and possibly could work on more for the future. A longing stirs my soul to be someone perhaps like SJP, working on a career I am truly capable of and raising a family I love. Is that something possible?

A memory in childhood came back. It was late in the afternoon when I squatted at the side of the road waiting for my ever hardworking mother to come home. I waited for so long when my father came by riding a bicycle and crushed my hopeful heart by telling me that mother wasn’t coming back that day. He took me back home. That memory stays like a neon light to remind me never ever to let my own child waits for me to come home.

Still in my selfish desire I wish to spend my youth breaking my bone doing something for my own pleasure. Is it wrong to think that way? Of wanting a little bit more of life outside home? Of becoming more than just a homemaker? Will I then eventually becomes the woman who once left her child and never get back her affection when she hopes to have it in her later life? What a pitiful woman I would become then…

Happy New Year 2012

Its been one heck of a wonderful year here in my land of blessing.  How was yours? I have been in and out of this blog for the last one year and wasn't sure if my inconsistent blogging had an impact to people on the net. Nevertheless, I am glad to be back this year. I hope it will bring me to a new height in every area of my life.

I have listed down my goals this year. I am following the norms of setting a goal at each wake of a new year. I didn't normally celebrate the end of the year but of course I am very much involve internally and spiritually.

There are so much of things that I am thankful for including a healthy self, a loving family and a husband who has been a continual support in my quest to be a  good impact to the people around me.

My hope for this blog is; that I continue to produce readable articles and hopefully those that will create an awareness towards something important or for pure entertainment reason, I could supply review of those dramas and movies which I happen to watch in my leisure time.  I wish too that I could make a regular review on books that I found interesting and I thought would be of some help to you as much as it has helped me.

I must say in books reading, last year has been a new breakthrough for me. I have gone to another level of appreciating fiction books and chanced upon several authors who stole my heart, namely Paulo Coelho, Anchee Min, Lisa See and Sophie Kinsella. I hope in this new year I would be honored to get to know several more authors by reading their masterpiece.

With that note, lets cheer on for a new chapter in 2012.

Love you all