= FAVOURITE WORD =
Proverbs 3:5-6
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways acknowledge Him,
and He will make your paths straight.
[NIV]
New phase. More changes.
What would the future bring?
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Can I Do It? x\
Heh. My brother just sent a message via SMS saying that he's failed his driving test - by 14 points. He could have passed, but he committed a major error that rendered an immediate failure - mounting the kerb. x
Oh well. I think he should be able to pass once he takes his second test in July.
And I haven't even registered for my first test date yet! I haven't had the time to continue with my driving.
ERHM... Actually, I do. I'm just too lazy to go all the way down to register it. Sigh. Okay okay. I must really get to work. -_-
Since examinations are like just next week, I think I should be able to fork out 4-6 hours per week for driving. Oh, plus travelling time, that'll be another 4-6 hours. All in all, 8-12 hours for driving per week.
Can I do it? x\
jOyZ blogged at 11:03 AM
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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Painful Crap Is Retribution
Have you felt pain that is so deep that it cuts right into - and beyond - the recesses of your heart? Not only that. It doesn't stop. The pain just keeps stabbing you again and again - at the same spot - for a very long time until your tears run dry and your heart feels numb. Then when you think you are not capable of feeling any more pain, yet another knife drives further into the same spot - again - until you feel that you are no longer human but just an abandoned tool, used and abused repeatedly at your very own expense.
And then you look around you to see what is left.
What is left?
Nothing, honestly. Not even precious pride, which had been so callously and manipulatively robbed away from you. Not even the slightest bit of it. Compassion was so deliberately withheld from you that you feel worse than wretchedness itself.
Retribution? Definitely.
What goes around comes around.
So, be careful. Be very, very careful.
Watch what you do. Watch what you say. Watch how you think. Because if you don't learn from the experience, you will be tested again and again. Either you will get hurt or others will get hurt. Retribution.
Life is really that serious unfortunately.
Yes, you want to have fun, to laugh and be happy - who doesn't? But in your quest for these, show compassion and consideration to others by watching your words and your actions. "Crapping" is definitely not the way to do it.
Today's people (especially the younger generations) like to "crap" too much. Come on, take it easy. Destress. Life's stressful enough, so why make it any harder by being so serious?
Unless you can "crap" with tact and compassion, don't "crap" at all. It's detrimental to all forms of human relation. Why? Because some people are just so dense as to not know where to draw the line. They go overboard and hurt other people's feelings - purposely or otherwise. If you can't stop yourself from "crapping" no matter how hard you try, then learn to say "sorry" WITH SINCERITY and STOP "CRAPPING". For too many "sorry"s will become pointless after a while.
What can I say?
It's finally over.
jOyZ blogged at 12:32 AM
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Sunday, April 23, 2006
Tired Again
I think I'm getting better. My nose isn't stuck as much and the phlegm is clearing up, though I'm still coughing a bit.
I woke up late - it's becoming a habit for me to wake up at around noon on Sundays. ;P I received Cheryl's message about her going to Paragon with Pei Chin to do work after lunch. I'm not sure if I'll be joining them. For one, the sky looks like it will pour in the afternoon. Plus, going town to work on a Sunday is just so painful.
Yesterday wasn't a good day. I woke up at 1030am thinking it would be just nice to leave the house with my parents after getting ready within fifteen minutes. We were supposed to head down to our new place to make measurements and decide where to place our furniture in our respective rooms. My dad had also made an appointment with a PUB personnel to turn on our power supply at 11am. By the time we left our home, it was 11.10am. -rolls eyes-
[Okay, here's a bit of digression. I was half-right. It's pouring like crazy now! =D Hoo!]
Anyway, we had to fetch my brother who was at Ikea, where he went right after his driving lesson to take a look at his loft bed. There was a slight traffic congestion outside The Chinese High due to some inter-school function. We didn't reach our new place until around 11.30am. We took measurements and discussed where to place the furniture. By the way, I just realised my room faces the back of an all-girls' school. ;\ Okay, I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.
We left the apartment at around 12plus. My dad was complaining that we were running late. None of us knew what we were late for. Apparently, he had arranged to meet with the interior designer to discuss about the wardrobes in our rooms. We saw some display sets and talked until a little after 2pm before finally leaving to grab lunch, after which we went to Courts to take a look at furniture.
By the time we got home, I was exhausted. I slept but woke up at around 5plus to meet Jocelyn for dinner at Mad Jack. We had fish and chips. It was raining by the time we finished dinner. We had to wait at the bus stop for a while before finally getting a cab to take us to church for service. We were late of course, but at least worship hadn't ended yet.
After service, we walked back to Mad Jack and just chilled there, eating our desserts and catching up. It was good meeting up and talking.
I'm feeling rather drowsy now - feeling tired after a long day out yesterday.
jOyZ blogged at 12:42 PM
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Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Sickening Flu
I feel terrible. My nose is totally blocked, so I can only breathe through my mouth. But when I breathe in, my throat gets irritated and I cough non-stop. ARGH! This is such a torture.
My fever came and went the whole day yesterday. It was quite bad in the afternoon - I was feverish every two hours or so. I'd wake up feeling better but in a short while the fever would return. My head was hurting the whole time too. It still hurts.
Oh, and I actually puked out my dinner last night. -_- Hopefully, by the time I recover, I would have lost some weight. BLEAH.
I think I shall just have some vegetable soup for lunch later.
Oh, shoot. I can't. My dad just told me he's cut up some ingredients for me to cook for lunch. Oh well.
At least I'm happy about one thing: I'll be following my dad down to our new home in the late afternoon. I can probably start thinking what I want to put in my bedroom and how I want it to be like. I just hope my parents will not interfere and start dumping their things in my room. Believe it or not, one-third of the items in my present room don't belong to me.
jOyZ blogged at 10:39 AM
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Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Really On MC
I just woke up. I went to see the doctor this morning and came back feverish, so I slept. The doctor gave me 2 days of medical leave. My classes must be really happy to miss English lessons. After all, lessons usually revolve around writing or comprehension.
If I were them, I'd be really bored. Well, I'm very sure they are. It can't be helped. I wish there were other ways to make it more interesting for them. Perhaps after the mid-year examination, I'll give them a project to do.
I think I'm going back to sleep. My head is hurting again. =(
jOyZ blogged at 1:59 PM
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Monday, April 17, 2006
Early Monday... Tuesday MC?
For once, I'm home early on Monday. It's been so-so at work today. You know, just doing my job. :|
It's raining now and I'm feeling a little drowsy. I just had my lunch. There's no need for me to take my dinner later, I guess, since lunch was so late. Not much of a big deal anyway. I've kinda lost interest in food. Hoho... that should help me lose some weight. I'm becoming such a slob. x_x
I'm falling ill too. I can feel a sorethroat coming at the back of my throat - can't seem to stop coughing. =(
I wonder if I'll have to go on MC tomorrow. Today's MC list was horrifying.
jOyZ blogged at 4:41 PM
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Sunday, April 16, 2006
真的很累...
我觉得我这个老师当的好辛苦。有时候，心里有话也不能一五一十说出来。怕的就是会影响学生的成长与思考。真有点受不了这种压力... 但又有谁能了解？
或许，老师的责任没有天下父母的来得还要重。我不知道。我只知道我好累，好累。累得无法做我自己喜欢做的事。应该这么说吧：连我自己喜欢的是什么，也不知道。既然做人这么失败，又有何资格当老师呢？
真的很累...
jOyZ blogged at 9:15 PM
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Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Dreadful Snuffling
I just finished marking the 4A girls' essays but there is no sign of the 4A boys. I'm wondering if they've gone home. I feel rather sick to wait for them any longer. I kept snuffling the whole time while marking the girls' essays outside the staffroom and practically used up all of Wan Jun's tissues. -_- I think I did. I don't know.
I think I will wait for another ten minutes before I leave. And then I'm going home to my beloved bed. -_-
jOyZ blogged at 4:26 PM
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Cold
I've been sneezing quite a bit at work this morning. I think I've caught the cold again. I'm not sure if I want to join Pei Chin and Cheryl for marking. Sigh. I'm way behind schedule. ARGH.
I guess I'm going to try to mark in school while waiting for pupils to see me for their personal consultation on their essays. I doubt I'll complete much though. x_x
Honestly, I can't wait for 2006 to be over.
jOyZ blogged at 1:20 PM
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Ridiculous
I find the following ridiculous. ;\ And by the way, Da Vinci Code is blasphemous. Must everything - from frivolous reality TV shows to sensitive, serious issues - be sensationalized? Bah.
Sealed With a Kiss
A long-lost early Christian text says Jesus asked Judas to betray him.
By David Gates
Newsweek
April 17, 2006 issue - Even Jesus recognized that there was something paradoxical about his betrayal by Judas Iscariot — in three of the four canonical Gospels, with a kiss. "And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined," he says in Luke 22, "but woe unto that man by whom he is betrayed!" In other words, Judas is damned for helping bring about the salvation of humankind. This is doctrinally explicable: in the working out of God's plan, some people get damned. But in human terms, it's as puzzling as that kiss — which either is gratuitously cruel (he could have just pointed) or suggests that the self-divided Judas is already having the seller's remorse that leads, in Matthew, to suicide. And Jesus knows all along who will sell him out. In John's account of the Last Supper, he tells Judas: "That thou doest, do quickly" — and Judas "went immediately out." In shame and terror, we assume. But it sounds almost as if he were obeying an order that both of them understood.
We've always known that there was a Gospel of Judas, which might clear some of this up. In the year 180, Irenaeus, a church father in Lyon who specialized in rooting out heresy, denounced it as "fictional." The Gospel was in vogue for a few hundred years, then disappeared from history — until last week. The National Geographic Society has just published a translation of the long-lost work, with a companion volume explaining its provenance and exploring its meaning. Actually, it's a translation of a translation: the scribe wrote in Coptic, circa 300, from a Greek original, surely lost forever. This Gospel tells us that Judas was Jesus' only true disciple, to whom he imparted secret mystic knowledge, and whom he asked to turn him in to the Romans, in order to free his spirit from its fleshly prison.
The story of the manuscript resembles an Indiana Jones movie — or, more to the point, a Dan Brown novel. (An unseen hand must have arranged for the Gospel of Judas to be published while the "Da Vinci Code" craze still had life in it.) The crumbling papyrus — 13 sheets, in more than 1,000 fragments, written on both sides — was found in a cave in the Egyptian desert in the 1970s, passed from one antiquities dealer to another, and ended up in a safe-deposit box in Hicksville, N.Y. In 1983, scholar James M. Robinson, who created the team that restored the Nag Hammadi manuscripts — source of the similarly contrarian Gnostic Gospels — was told that the Gospel of Judas was up for sale in Geneva. He couldn't come up with the $3 million. In 2000, it was offered to Yale, which begged off; an Ohio dealer briefly stored it in a freezer. At last, its price reportedly down to $1 million, the manuscript ended up with the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, which started restoration, translation and authentication.
Don't be expecting this fragmented manuscript to read like the King James. Small sample: " '[Truly] I say to you, [ ... ] angel [ ... ] power will be able to see that [ ... ] these to whom [ ... ] holy generations [ ... ]' After Jesus said this, he departed." And not a minute too soon. The secret wisdom Jesus confides — when he's not laying out a hierarchy of angels, gods and more gods that makes Hinduism sound minimalist — is a lot like that of the Gnostic Gospels, which posit a strict enmity between flesh and spirit. Judas' betrayal of Jesus has sparked considerable anti-Semitism over the centuries, and the new Gospel may help Christians see beyond ancient — and historically unfounded — stereotypes. Or it may simply add to our sense of how inchoate and multifarious early Christianity was, before such church fathers as Irenaeus codified it.
Robinson, who tried to acquire the manuscript again in 1993, says the Gospel is a sensation — but only to scholars, not the public. His own book, "The Secrets of Judas", hardly oversells the translation. "It tells us nothing about the historical Jesus, nothing about the historical Judas," he told NEWSWEEK. "It only tells what, 100 years later, Gnostics were doing with the story they found in the canonical Gospels. I think purchasers are going to throw the book down in disgust." But right now, people are loving the idea that Jesus and Judas were dear friends who were in it together — it's such a downer to think the guy sinned and felt bad — and the hoopla machine is grinding away. The book. The book about the book. The National Geographic TV show about the book and the book about the book. The audiobook. (Can't wait to hear the passage above.) Last week, the public unveiling of the manuscript. Next year, the illustrated critical edition. Can the lipstick tie-in be far behind?
With Jac Chebatoris
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
jOyZ blogged at 7:22 AM
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Sunday, April 09, 2006
Work-less Weekend
I refused to work this weekend. The past week had been tough mostly because I was feeling not good. It was not so much of feeling ill. I just felt really down. Furthermore, I knocked off later than usual on Thursday and Friday - especially Friday because of the meet-the-parents session in the evening. I was in school until around 9.30pm to talk to some of my pupils' parents. Most of them were very concerned about their children's English grades.
I was at Pikie's place for a short while on Saturday to lend her my laptop, after which I came home and finished watching another HK drama serial on VCD - Net Deception - which I borrowed from Selwyn through Pikie. Hurhur... I am becoming a VCD freak. I still have two more serials to complete.
I didn't watch any today though. Instead, I met Xiaorong for lunch and then we went for KTV at Lucky Chinatown with her colleagues. So I watched a lot of MTVs really. Hoo!
It is work again tomorrow. Sigh. I really hate Mondays - especially this year.
jOyZ blogged at 8:06 PM
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Sunday, April 02, 2006
Cranky Gadget
I'm wondering if my iPod mini is dying. I think it is. The battery has been giving me some kinda problem.
Oh well, at least it seems to be working fine at the moment. Unfortunately, I think this may not last through the night. I seem to be charging it everyday now.
I'm not sure if I should get another iPod gadget once this one dies. Hm...
jOyZ blogged at 6:32 PM
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