Always begin with the end in mind. If she knows she doesn’t want kids, it’s never going to work out so it’s wiser not to get involved.

It feels nice to show up on my friends’ blog. For reasons good and otherwise.

A Preview of the birthday card that they got me. I cant wait to see it!

Quote of the Hour. HAHA!

I love Danson’s shades. Rock rOck roCk my socks!

When you become the topic of 3 consecutive entries, you know you are… hot stuff.

I totally didn’t expect this, although I maintained my “poker face” when the cake arrived. (being on the back of 3 hours sleep helped)

Surprise

This was a pleasant surprise. When the cake arrived I had a fleeting thought: I turned 23 yesterday. So fast turning 24 already?

Then I kinda woke up and smiled to myself. The girls are diabetically sweet to me.

The Ethicists

Been nothing short of a great term at SMU. We’re different.

dad, i wonder how you’re doing up in heaven… i know u always make the best out of every situation, so i’m not that worried about you. besides, heaven is supposed to be the best place a man can possibly reside in, right? so i really shouldn’t have to worry about u.

but i think about u all the time. i miss u so much.

it suddenly dawned on me that u weren’t such a bad father after all. true, u weren’t a man of many words, at least not to me. (i used to wish he made the effort to talk to me) but you know what? fuck that, your actions taught (and is still teaching) me so much more about life. and u weren’t that good with your words anyway.

i was just lying on my bed (thanks for getting me a queen-sized, the extra space rocks) and i thought about what u said before. “look, i’ve been observing u, and u haven’t proven anything to me, so there’s no way i can give u this.” (i asked for permission to accept the university’s offer and go to uk to read medicine)

it took me 2 years to finally understand, but i’m glad i now do. sometimes, i am simply not as good as i think/proclaim to be. it takes a third party who cares enough about me to watch my back. it takes even more to have the courage to tell me off when i’m wrong, especially since it broke your heart.

i’m surprised that even though u weren’t always around (i hated u for that), u knew everything about me. you also knew you weren’t good with words, but you wanted to help me become a better man so u did the next best thing; you made sure u always chose the right time to holler at me. and timing is everything.

thanks for teaching me that i suck at promises. i promised more than i delivered, and it disappointed you. i hope u can see (from heaven) that i’ve improved, and it is now my personal mantra to under-promise and over-deliver.

thank you also for demonstrating the value in being prudent with money. this lesson in managing finances is probably one of the most impt u’ve ever taught me.

i used to think u were an idiot for being a cheapskate to yourself. i always wondered why u took the bus and train to get to the airport when there are cabs. why go through all that trouble and tire yourself when u have a flight to pilot? people’s lives were in your hands. (he always had things under control, so don’t worry SIA is a safe airline)
sigh… dad, i knew u worked hard for our family because you love us. i just wish u took better care of yourself and lived longer so you could continue bothering me with your bullshit.

i wish u were still around so i could learn more from u.

i get the feeling that mum blamed herself for not being able to convince u to quit smoking. i convinced her that it wasn’t her fault; after all, it was your choice of lifestyle, your escape; the sole indulgence you allowed yourself even though you knew it was harmful to your body. i told her we should respect your choice to smoke (and kill yourself) because you are an adult and adults are capable of making informed decisions.

mum misses u so much. but don’t worry, we are taking good care of her and she’s alot better now.

fuck, it would have been nice to be able to spend one more birthday with you.

I don’t mind where you come from,
As long as you come to me
And I don’t like illusions I can’t see
Them clearly
I don’t care no I wouldn’t dare to fix the twist in you
You showed me eventually
What you’ll do

I don’t mind
I don’t care
As long as you’re here

Go ahead tell me you’ll leave again,
You’ll just come back running
Holding your scarred heart in hand
It’s all the same
And I’ll take you for who you are
If you take me for everything
And do it all over again
It’s all the same

Hours slide and days go by
Till you decide to come
And in between it always seems to long
All of a sudden

And I have the skill
Yeah, I have the will
To breath you in while I can
However long you stay is all that I am

Wrong or right
Black or white
If I close my eyes
It’s all the same

In my life
The compromise
I close my eyes
It’s all the same

Go ahead say it, your leaving
You’ll just come back running
Holding your scarred heart in hand
It’s all the same
And I’ll take you for who you are
If you take me for everything
And do it all over again
It’s all the same

Lawrence Chan (chungyin.2006@economics.smu.edu.sg) is going on exchange next term and he wants to trade his MacBook Air for a used MacBook Pro to bring overseas.
If you are interested, or might know anyone who would be, do spread the word.

Contact Lawrence directly if interested!

He’s offering:
Macbook Air
13.3 Inc LCD
1.6 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo Merom, With 800 Mhz FSB
2GB PC2-5300 DDR 2 SDram
Integrated Airport Extreme Supports 802.11/a/b/g/n
Built in ISight

Condition: 9.5/10 (1 hairline scratch, not too major. very slight and in the corner)
Purchase date: March (AppleCare expires next march, renewable on your own)

Bonuses: Macbook air SuperDrive (purchased for 150++)
Macbook air Ethernet Port dongle (purchase for 10-30 bucks can’t rem)

In return for:
Macbook Pro 2.2-2.4 Ghz, Minimum of a nvidia 8 series graphics card.
If you have a higher spec model, or the newest 2.4Ghz model, he can top up a certain amount and is willing to negotiate. (He will make it a sweet deal <—$$$)
Lawrence has also mentioned, “I am also willing to trade for a high end Lap Gaming laptops. Minimum usual is a Nvidia 8 series graphics card.”

Contact Lawrence directly if interested!!

This is an extract of the NTU Convocation Ceremony speech this year. Delivered by Adrian Tan, a litigation lawyer at one of Singapore’s top law firms. I read this on a fren’s blog and i liked it alot, so i though i should share it here.

Life and How to Survive It

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that ‘Learning is a lifelong process’ and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term ‘Karoshi’, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are ‘making a living’. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan ‘Arbeit macht frei’ was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say ‘be loved’. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

You’re going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there’s no life expectancy.

She saw this while exploring the city, then decided to take a picture and show it to me. how cool! i have my own street! thank u*

the closest i get to this in singapore is jervois road in tanglin area, which u could probably argue is my name in french. imagine my mails if i lived there:

To: Jervis Chia

6 Jervois Road

Singapore 24899.

HAHA!

One of dad’s parting words were, “…you got to be true to yourself. don’t let what people think of you restrict what you want to do in life, because at the end of the day, what really matters is whether you followed your heart and were true to yourself.”

well, i’m guess he was true to himself and i’m glad for him. it’s not an easy thing to accomplish.

it’s been awhile, and i haven’t really figured out what being true to myself really means. does it mean i don’t do things just because everyone else is doing it? cos i don’t. i never did. i know exactly what i want and that’s it. who cares what the rest of the world thinks?

when i was in primary sch, i remember buying a Camel long sleeve tshirt from OG Departmental Store that said “One life. Live it.” Some time later, that turned out to be M1’s slogan. (haha!) we never know for sure how long we’re gonna live, but i believe most ppl assume that they’re gonna make it past graduation, past their wedding ceremony, have a couple of kids or a small family at least, past mid life crisis and retirement… and that’s the problem with most of us. we assume that our lives will not be short. if i were to tell u right now that you have 6 months left to live, how different would you be living your life?

6 months. that’s it.

think about it, cos about a year ago that’s exactly what my father was told and that was all he had.

One life. Live it.

The story I wanna share today is called The John & Mary Example.

John was a single guy, and because he was single he could afford to save $1000 every year. Mary on the other hand, was cash-strapped because she didn’t have a boyfriend, and she had to pay for all her meals and movie tickets and stuff. (HAHA!) Therefore Mary couldn’t save a single cent when she was younger.

This went on for 5 years, John managed to save $1000 a year and Mary saving nothing.

Then one beautiful summer afternoon, John met Mary and they started dating. They were 25 years old. John was a gentleman, and he paid for all their dates. Subsequently, John couldn’t save a single cent, and Mary managed to save 1000 bucks a year.

10 years later, John proposed to Mary and they got married. They took a peek into their accounts to see what they could afford for their honeymoon.

Remember: John saved a total of $5000. Mary put in a total of $9000. Assume they managed to achieve 10% returns on their money every year.

Guess who had more money?

Link: Cashflow Working

Amazing isn’t it?

John was richer than Mary despite putting aside far less money. This is the beauty of compound interest. It’s simple math that reminds us of the power that compound interest has on our money.

All we need is savings and time. The more we save, and the earlier we start doing so, the bigger our money will grow.