(: just thinking...

my whole home is in complete darkness, save for the light from the screen of this laptop. just a few minutes ago, i stood at my parents' window with my dad and marveled at the Creation of God. only that my dad knows no God. it's the 15th of the lunar calendar, so the moon is shining like a coy beauty. beneath her was a sprinkle of stars resting on stratus clouds, fighting the city lights to twinkle. and he asked me "can you imagine how fast the moon is moving? it moves around the entire earth in a single day. but when we look at it, it doesn't look like it's moving at all." and then i asked him "how come the sun doesn't move?" and right then i realized just how marvelous gravity is! it is how God holds us still while he swiftly arranges the sky for us - with His magnetic fingers, He holds the sun still and hurries the moon on; unfurling the clouds like a blow paint artist or a sand artist! isn't He the most talented ever?

i couldn't keep it in my heart anymore and the words were so loud in my ears and choking my throat that i had to say it. i asked my father "how do you think all these came about? why do you not believe in a Creator?" hmm we went on to discuss it a little bit. he believes in the 'a few atoms came together' theory and i told him that if that was the case, these atoms must be really intelligent because all of nature and your brain and mine came out of that. and i asked him how did these atoms even come about? he had no conclusion. the thing is that no physically entity can ever explain itself (a ravi zacharias argument) and thus the answer to the beginning of physical entities has to come outside of the physical realm. anw he was really tired so we just left it at that. it was such a lovely night with the cool breeze and all. hopefully, the thoughts will run in my dad's head again and God will probe him until he comes to the Truth. Nobody knows my father better than my Father! hurhur.

haha goodnight everybody ~

eating monster

HELP! I CANNOT STOP EATING!
i'm eating at 15min intervals. this is crazy.
and it's so distracting my mind regularly slips to images of a sukiyaki steamboat or a juicy beef burger or a plate of breko's pancakes or a bowl of ichiban's special.

what's wrong man......


i'm gonna cook some tomyam maggi mee now! (:

amnesia

today, elfie (a fellow toa payoh folk) was lamenting the rise of two condominiums in front of his home and how the demographics of the place, and with that the atmosphere, shops, and so on, are going to become hip, young, and modernized. he told me the he liked the place a lot because of its old charm and the kind of breezy laid back-ness that comes with older residents. i've never ever thought of this town as charming. but when he said that, i looked out of the bus at flats from the 1970s and their mildly worn down cream coloured exterior and thought hmm oh yea!

coincidentally, i'm reading about social amnesia right now. this thing about memory and forgetting. and to quote this writer Connerton, he wrote that "a major source of forgetting is associated with the processes that separate social life from locality and from human dimensions; superhuman speed, megacities that are so enormous as to be unmemorable, consumerism disconnected from the labour process, the short lifespan of modern architecture, the disappearance of walkable cities. what is forgotten in modernity is profound, the human-scale-ness of life, the experience of living and working in a world of relations that are known."
and i thought... oh dear.. this is true! pragmatism and efficiency - our country's two favouritest words in the universe. why the hurry to run fast into the future?

with this in mind, i think i've figured out the thing about toa payoh central that i haven't really been able to put my finger on. the central area is very unlike the charming toa payoh 'suburbs' where elfie stays in. it is caught right in the middle of the processes of remembering and forgetting. it is very telling from the array of shops, the things they sell, the kind of fashion on display, the music they play, etc. there are a lot of old school elements that can be found (probably to appeal to the older residents around) but they're promoted as modernized versions of what used to be. it's like you can't survive if you don't flow with the new age trend. the central area is definitely changing with more and more franchises coming in, and upgrading will always be in progress as coffee shops shed their years to look like a mimicry of Food Junction. yea to think of it, this whole place is undergoing botox. And when i'm surrounded by elderly residents who embody the memories of another time and life, the place is a misfit. that is why my neighbourhood is hardly charming and is a jarring mix of the new and the old that doesn't really settle well.

why not age gracefully?