End Summer Feels

(20/08/15 930 AM)

Two things. I'm sitting at the KL airport now waiting for transit, and I'm trying to arrange my thoughts into a systematic chronological fashion. Rather tired haha, considering that I stayed up overnight for my 640am flight which was only an hour long. My life has been moving at an extremely fast pace these days.. I'm so glad I finally found this window to gather my feelings by myself.

So let me run you through the events in sequence, shall I? For you and for the sake of my future 110yr old dementia self hahaha. 

Internship 

Remember a few posts ago, I mentioned that I'm working for a startup that has got to do with losing weight?

Okay. Lai liao, I am ready to talk about my work. The way I put it the other time was too misleading. I have this friend who asked me "erm.. so they hire you to be the "before" model is it?" HAHA. My sister isn't any better. She went "eh, does your client know about your weight?" in the genuinely concerned tone. LOL. I just weighed myself at the luggage weighing machine and I got the shock of my life. Jialat. Dear God, if your plan is for me to be fat, at least let me look cute like Doraemon T_T Hahahaha. Okay, so my company is actually a new initiative that focuses on raising awareness of preventive healthcare in Singapore. My boss founded the company when she's 26 right after she left SPRING Singapore, as she is very certain about her vision. She has this very strong desire to help the society because of her family background and also her volunteering experience with the elderly, so much so that she almost majored in Social Work. 

I was very motivated when I first joined the company because I found meaning in its cause. My job position is "Care Coordinator". LOL sound a bit too gentle for me but it's a fact ;) Basically, what I do is to design care experience for our clients according to their needs. Weight management is just one of the tracks they can choose to take. So far, I have helped to plan and arrange group fitness and diet sessions where clients of similar conditions gather to learn more about exercises and healthy eating. Of course, my job scope was way beyond that. People are right about startups ahaha. You really get to stretch yourself. If you are are doing programs, you also gotta do logistics, marketing, admin, public relations and more. Hahahaha. So other than activity planning, I'm a 'nanny', a poster designer, an admin temp staff and a content writer. But I'm not complaining :-) It was really a good exposure for me, as it's my first industry experience! First time, nobody from my past followed me into this aspect of my future. Hence, I comfortably introduced myself as...*chiang chiang chiang* Charine. LOL. 

*Insert namecard*

The only problem my company faces is the practicality and sustainability of its business model, I guess. Would you pay $790 for a 6 months program that aims to induce lifestyle modifications for healthy living? Maybe..maybe not. Humans are reactive. We tend to only take actions only when problems surface. This includes taking care of our health. I certainly hope my boss could work things out :-) 

Though I did have my fair share of unhappiness at work, I'm glad it still ended on a good note. Haha. My boss went to my party, albeit alone! I learnt a lot from her too. Important work ethics such as timeliness, focus.. consistency and kindness. I hope I can bring these values forward with me everywhere I go! 

<Continued @ Airbnb apartment in London> 

Kodaline Concert 

Kody!!!!!! So glad Hyung and I decided to go for it *v* BECAUSE THEY ARE REALLY SO GOOD LIVE. It's like all those youtube videos coming into life, holy! Good music is essential to my soul T_T 

Happened to buy my first Canon D on the same day with an ultra zoom lens 55-250mm! Lucky me hohoho!

Cried when I sang along with this song. It's so emotional. And the night felt ethereal :')

Songs really feel and sound different live. There's an added character to it. Could be the atmosphere, the crowd..and simply the band reaching out to you in their presence. 

People complained that SCAPE sucks but I felt that it's a positive move towards creating a music fest culture in Singapore. An open free standing space where people congregate in front of the stage and do singalong~ So I was really turned off by how self-entitled some Singaporeans are. I was standing at the steps which gave me quite a marvellous view. I stood upright when Sheppard started jamming to their songs. However, the people behind me chose to sit down on the steps. Well, that would be alright, if they didn't start tsk-ing at me and my friends for blocking their view. Hello...free standing for a reason right? Not free seating leh. Lame poks. If they have asked nicely, I might have considered to step aside. (Actually, if they are pretty la, I'm superficial like that LOL.) Nobody sits down at a concert anyway?!? Also not musical, play or orchestra.. concerts are supposed to be HYPED UP! Those little girls indie wannabes had better learnt. Grow up la. Hahahahaha.

These aside, I still had a wonderful night heh. Thank you Kodaline for those amazing songs :') 

21st Birthday Party 

Hosting a party has really opened my eyes to who really care for me in this world. I'm glad that it has pushed me even closer to my family now :') Really. I'm so touched by whatever they have done for me selflessly and unconditionally, that I had a pretty bad meltdown at the party...LOLOLOL. 

Invited my long lost childhood best friend to my party with just a week notice, and he came anyway tho he's alone! I introduced him as my secret boyfriend HAHAHAHA and some people jaw-dropped-to-the-ground. I'm really touched by people who came to my party by themselves without company, because it's really for me that they are plucking the courage to be awkward and to feel so alone in those few hours of their lives.

I will recount my birthday party story some other day heh, maybe when closer to my actual birthday or when I'm missing home. Ok the latter seems really really hard. LOL.

I tried to upload more photos but my startup disk is full and my mac is starting to show attitude to me..*bitch face* Hahaha. So I will edit this post again next time~ when I'm...less busy with LONDON!


"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
— Samuel Johnson


Stay tuned for my updates on London! ;) 

Life, lie?

So a very dear friend of mine challenged me to explain life by last Friday 2359. Looking at the timestamp of this post, I obviously failed. Hahaha.

To be honest, I would need to be intoxicated with caffeine to even begin touching on this topic. Or be high on shrooms so that I'll be lucid dreaming on what is life all about in a bubble above my head. But I'm not. So by now you should know this post is going nowhere near brilliant..

Nonetheless, her challenge is indeed very timely as recently, I was just talking to another friend about life purposes. He told me about this quote: "Why worry about life? It is not like you gonna get out of it alive anyway." I came across this saying before and when he mentioned it, it just struck me how relatable that is to other people. 

So if life is supposed to end, then what does forever even mean? "Forever is composed of nows." I'm sure many of you have been seeing this other quote around recently because of John Green's Paper Town. It is true that we have finite time on earth because of the fragility of our life. So the "forever" we promise our loved ones is the sheer present, the depth of love you have for them in the now. It does not extend to the future, to the afterlife, because we are never in control of the unknown. But, 'forever' seems definite to some at the moment because those bubbly feelings of loving and being loved easily triumph over their logical senses. 

Who are we exactly?

Scientifically, we are made up of atoms. So if atoms never die, we never die. We are merely disintegrated into particles that have made us up in the first place and then assembled into something else. 

But this is just our physical shell. What about our soul? Personally, I believe in souls. Our hormones help to trigger actions and chemicals like endorphin induce happiness, but they do not make up our personalities. They are merely supplements that feed our spirits. In early 20th century, a physician named Duncan MacDougall attempted to prove the existence of souls by measuring the mass change of six patients at the moment of death. It was measured to be 21 grams. While the experiment was flawed, it certainly accentuated the notion of 'soul'. I see our soul as an energy that never dies, and is simply transferred or converted to another form.

So if forever is the now, why do we strive so hard in life? Is it because our soul is gonna be graded and only the high scorers get to be teleported to the next level? Is the next level gonna be heaven or hell based on our merits in this life we have? Maybe. But so far, everything sounds a little too self-centric. We are never living only for ourselves, are we? Hence, it doesn't matter if we are being assessed or not, because we do whatever we intend to do anyway for our loved ones.

There are too many unanswered questions about life. Especially its biggest component named 'love'. Does one true love exist? Or is it just something that people make up to remain committed to their partner? What is the difference between the love you feel for your first love and your final love? I'm talking above the love here, not feelings of thrill you find in the former and security you find in the latter. So if you can love more than one person in your life that intensely, does soulmate still exist? How can love for someone just fade away in the passage of time? Is it because our body replaces itself with a whole set of cells every 7 years? Can we have pure love for someone where compatibility does not matter? Why do we feel jealous and possessive?

Why are we happy when we feel special to someone? This question has been ringing in my head for quite sometime. I feel that the answer has to do with the meaning of one's existence. We want to feel needed. We want to feel indispensable. This is why we can't tolerate polygamy (at least in most cultures). If your partner can love someone else other than you, then what is the purpose of you?

Aren't we all similar then, in a way? 

My thoughts are seriously all over the place and I have yet to debate on whether the universe is finite or infinite and whether time is linear or circular. Believe me or not, they are intricately linked to our lives. They determine if time travel is possible and doppelganger from another time and space exists. Hahahaha. But I guess I shall save these topics for another time..

So don't take life too seriously. And it will be easier to live.

多少人走着却困在原地
多少人活着却如同死去
多少人爱着却好似分离
多少人笑着却满含泪滴

谁知道我们该去向何处
谁明白生命已变为何物
是否找个借口继续苟活
或是展翅高飞保持愤怒
谁知道我们该梦归何处
谁明白尊严已沦为何物
是否找个理由随波逐流
或是勇敢前行挣脱牢笼
我该如何存在

Great song. The lyrics are so on point. How do I exist..MMMM. The first verse especially shows how life is full of contradictions.