BLOGGER



Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.


MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.


OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.


CHAT





Monday, December 18, 2006
Christmas, like the proms in Adrian's recent blog post, has a way of making the minority feel small. It's funny, because unlike proms, Christmas did not come about as a means to fan the ass of the elites, but still, it has that uncanny ability of isolating the already-isolated. Or to misquote the bible, it's sort of like how Jesus said "Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him". Or to use an Adrianic metaphor, Christmas can sometimes feel like being alone and standing ragged out in the cold looking through a window while inside a house, a nice functional family tucks its way into a scrumptious middle-class dinner and say grace together.

Why am I feeling so blue this Christmas? I don't know. Maybe it's because I haven't got any real parties to go to, but Christmas parties worth going to are few and far between anyway. Not on Christmas night. All the meaningful ones happen in the weekends leading up to it, thrown by churchmembers who serve you great food before praying and worshipping and singing Jesus-carols into the night. No, those are for the leadup. And even these nice families want to spend private time on Christmas night. Which leaves me with Christmas parties where people... what? Shag and drink and smoke and cuss and dance around like New Year's eve came early. No, no matter how blue I'll feel on Christmas, that's not for me.

The year the tsunami happened, that was my saddest Christmas. I was serving in the media ministry - and as ministries like media go, you're always first in and last out. I remember locking up the camera in the cabinet, returning all the keys to the church office and then thinking: "ok, church was great, lots of people got saved, i got some goodies, now where is everybody? I've missed all the lunch groups and I'm not in the mood to invite myself into any of them now that they're all already at their restaurants". Eventually, I found a group of disparate churchgoers whom I roughly knew and we ended up in Strudels. I can't say I had a great time. I felt distinctly lonely and as much as I would have liked to embrace the make-new-friends ethos, I felt extra sad for myself that I was lunching with people I barely knew for the sake of not being alone.

You see, Christmas is still a family thing, and no matter how close you are to your mates, the understanding is that when Christmas dinner kicks in, everybody wants to spend some family time together. Which is perfectly fair. I've got a biological family, but spending Christmas with them can sometimes feel about as spiritually relevant as a Muslim spending Hari Raya with a Mormon family. To this end, Christmas just doesn't really make sense if you can't openly talk about Christ.

So then, what happens to those who don't have a family to spend Christmas with? Aren't we well-networked enough to know who are the yuletide orphans among us? Shouldn't our Friendsteric interconnections help us identify who are the potentially lonesome so that our mutual isolation can nullify each other? Well, unless you have a database of young Christians without a Christian family who still want to spend Christian Christmasses for me to spend Christmas with, I have no clue who to go to this year.

Well, what are my options? I could sit at home and edit my movie. (Cue laugh track.) I could go to the mall and wrestle with all the unbelievers for a seat at the cinemas. That would be fun (not the unbelievers, the seat at the cinemas). I could go and become a one-man charity evangelist, knocking on doors of poor houses and giving them gifts while telling them all about the gospel and the true meaning of Christmas. Yeah, I could do that. Or I could sit around at home and write depressing blogposts about how depressing Christmas is when you're alone and wait for comments to flood in saying comforting things like "don't be so cham, we love you" but the comments don't flood in until Tuesday afternoon because everyone was with their families until late at night and not being miserable in front of their computers posting comments on other peoples' blogs.

Sure, I'm feeling blue - blue as hell. And maybe between now and Monday, I'll feel better about this whole thing and stop being so bloody miserable. But right now, in the spirit of my post on burnout, I just want Christmas to be over. I want to be in 2007 already, armed with the knowledge that no matter how lonesome it was, I survived Christmas 06. Cos from this side of the 25th, I really dread the surviving part. And as for being merry... huh... I just want to be accompanied.

Accompanied Christmas everybody.

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Genusfrog [ 6:01 pm ]

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