not quite the mona lisa, but…

Oh and I’ve realised that it’s been practically weeks since I’ve posted any new photographs here. Not that I’ve even taken any new ones; I’ve had better things to do with my time lately, I think.

Anyhow… my friend Ivy – very awesome salsa partner and erstwhile queer-eye to my straight guy – got hold of uh, one of my pictures and dolled it up (very professionally, i think) just for fun and, here’s the unsettling result. Behold – for your viewing (dis)pleasure, The Jo-elle, in all its unshaven, violet mascara-ed glory.

Aiight… I’m off to bed. One more test-less week before the pre-reading-week onslaught of PSY/ECO/MGT! There goes the last weekend of peace for the next fortnight…

PS. Oh, 恭喜发财， 万事如意， 年年有余，and whatever else… mah’ fellow yellow people. Hahaha. Ha. Happy Chinese New Year…

ahh yes… one lunar year ago, i wrote in this entry:

merry xin nian

happy chinese new year, mah fellow yellow people.

is it just me, or is it just not the same this year? my cousin daniel has one feeling about chinese new year this year – he felt “sleepy”. which i smugly scoffed at until i fell asleep in one of my uncles’ rooms after new year’s lunch at my grandma’s. and found daniel standing at the door laughing at me… prick.

sigh. somehow, the mood isnt at all right this year. this year, i turn twenty. everything just becomes less special now, doesnt it? everything gets old and boring and tired; what’s tradition but glorified cliche?

everything gets old and stale, doesn’t it?

— thursday, feb 10, 2005

stuff does get “older”, don’t it…?

not necessarily in a bad way, though; last chinese new year i think i very much still was a kid, immature and wayy too idealistic for my own good.

now i know i was blind then, but at the very least i was asking (myself) the right questions, feeling for the first time the bars of my prison, the slick, steep walls of the deep, deep wall i was toading around in. (what a horrendously mixed metaphor hah but what do i care?)

not that im really mature now. its just… startling how very much i still was a kid just a year back, so headstrong and curious about stuff, so overly trusting in the good in people.

i think i very much was still trying to figure myself out… i know this sounds lame and contrived but it really, really is amazing how writing stuff down – or in this case typing it in here – can help with hindsight and figuring out what the heck you were up to in life, instead of just careening through life like a hungover bat out of hell.

how very embarrassing. haha.

Hmmph. Somehow, though have quite a couple of things want to write about, I just feel apathetic (lazy) right now.

Perhaps I’ll do them later tomorrow – I mean later today; it’s already hella late and I think I’m just gonna get some sleep so I don’t mess up my sleep-schedule too bad. Busy week ahead. =)

Yeah, that’s decided. Tomorrow shall (hopefully) have a proper post which does justice to stuff.

Oh yeah. One thing.

I got a call from my dad just now in the afternoon while I was studying in my room at about three-ish… my dad was fumbling around for his gloves at the lake near Port Credit and he dropped his car keys into the water, stranding himself and the camry (which he was locked out of) a forty minute’s walk from our house, necessitating me to make the journey down lakeshore to bring him back.

Not wanting to walk the disgusting distance on foot, I hopped onto my brother’s ancient bicycle, thinking that cycling down lakeshore boulevard would be easy. I think-ed wrong.

The back tire, I realized after riding out of my lane, was desperately flat and the gear-shifting mechanism was totally, totally screwed, which made the rolling gradient of the road an absolute biatch to cycle on.

Thank goodness it was nice and warm… this big leather clad guy zoomed past me noisily in his huge Harley and, well, that was the low, low point of the afternoon.

I need… a car. Or a motorbike. To bail my dad out of silly situations, at least.

COME ON, SANTA!!!

Today, Mister Joel went to ball a bit – nothing crazy, just shooting the ball around – and he’s realized that his handles are pretty, pretty gone. His shot is, too. But given some time I don’t think getting them back would be a problem at all. I can still dribble and shoot SOME… I’m just hella rusty. No biggie. Just need practice…

… which, unfortunately, I don’t think I’m gonna get… after shooting around for a bit I realized that my OTHER knee was starting to ache. Not good. So I quit shooting around and went to do some cardio, which is a lot less impact-ey on my knees than jump shooting. Apparently the doctors were right… I think that the four or so months I’ve spent favouring my right leg when walking since I got hurt back in August have putten quite a lot of stress on my “good” knee.

In other words, I think Mister Joel’s going to be laying off his grand basketball plans for a while. Oh well. No biggie. Time to get better first… ball can wait. It better wait til I get both knees back to 100 percent.

And I forgot to mention this but my physiotherapist said I’ll be ready to actually play ball in six weeks. Think will work my way into it – slowly.

Slowly.

oh, and had vg egg tarts today on baldwin street which is just south of campus.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, Kobe Bryant scored eighty one points in a game against the Raptors. Eighty one points, fellas. On the Raps, who, despite their pedestrian record, are playing tremendous team basketball as of late.

Now, Kobe has been the target of a LOT of hate throughout his entire career; some of it well-deserved, some of it unfounded. The alleged rape scandal, the beef with (my idol) Karl Malone, Phil Jackson branding him “the most uncoachable player ever”, the incessantly bitchy Kobe-vs-Shaq-infighting that has plagued sports news headlines for longer than anyone can remember – Kobe’s reputation has taken a severe beating on every single of the aforementioned occasions.

However, team success usually shuts the (playa) haters up, right?

Like in the case of Allen Iverson’s overnight 180 degree transformation in the eyes of the world, where he went from “selfish” and “a thug” to having more “heart” than any other player in the NBA. Real ball fanatics, we know. Iverson didn’t change, it’s just that putting together that amazingly inspirational season back in 2001 which culminated in a tenaciously determined run to the NBA Finals showed the “mainstream” basketball audience what we real fans knew: we loved Iverson, his “selfish” tags, gritty tats notwithstanding, because he made us believe that if you tried hard enough, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, there isn’t anything in the world that can hold you back.

That we knew. We saw the crossover on MJ. The thousands of times he recklessly throws his body into the gauntlet of seven footers’ knees and elbows. Saw him stepping over Tyronne Lue after torching him in Game 1 of that 2001 NBA Finals, watched him carry a Sixer team perenially lacking in depth into the playoffs every damn year. We saw, we knew – and we loved.

How does this have anything to do with Kobe, might you ask?

Because Kobe has proven his greatness already. Iverson hasn’t won a title yet, and neither does T-mac or KG. Kob’ has three. The thing is, everyone knows how good Kobe is… they know there isn’t anyone on earth right now who can guard him one-on-one, hell, three-on-one, even. The success? It’s been there for years, and still – still, the hate continues.

Ironically, unlike most other basketball superstars, Kobe has been an annoyingly private person. He tells us – even today, in his latest interview(s) – to stop comparing him to MJ. Can we help but? From day one, it always seemed like was trying to emulate MJ, on and off the court, from the gorgeous fadeaways to his mannerisms.

While the basketball world has always seemed overly eager to slap on the title of “Next Jordan” on every promising youngster who has emerged in the NBA since The Great One (first) retired, from Grant Hill more than a decade ago to Lebron in the present, no one player has seemed so eager to assume that mantle, literally, as Kobe has, like the bratty ‘keener in the front row of your math class who raises his hand at every damn question.

Moreover, sadly enough, the more Kob’ tried to better his image by hiding his inner emotions from the media, the more the quietly proud superstar tried to keep his peace, the more his reputation plummeted in the eyes of the public. He always seemed too proud to “hang” with everyone else, a fact seemed even more evident in contrast to Shaq’s over-the-top, yet ultimately, genuinely nice demeanour.

Will this 81 – I say again, EIGHTY ONE POINTS – shut the haters up? Deep inside, I honestly hope so… because I was once a Kobe hater myself too.

For every great player out there, there will be haters. Sometimes, however, the odd moment occurs when the hater sees through the bias and dislike. When the hate just disappears, so suddenly, you could swear it never existed in the first place.

That moment for me came in Game 4 of the 2000 Finals, when the Lakers faced off against a veteran Pacer team stacked with depth, firepower and dogged determination. If you can remember, Shaq fouled out in OT against the red-hot Pacers, and Kobe turned to the bench and motioned for the Lakers to “cool down”, then went on to singlehandedly take over the game in one of the greatest clutch performances ever.

With time dwindling down and the game on the line, Kobe pulled up and hit a jumper with a hand in his face at the top of the key. The next possesion, he audaciously did the same move on virtually the same spot – with the same results: net. Sensing danger, the Pacers then denied him the ball on the ensuing possession, but Kobe eluded his defender and hustled inside for the offensive rebound, slashing inside to acrobatically tip the ball in from behind the basket. Lakers win.

That game broke the Pacers, whose hopes of seizing control of the series evaporated with that heart-wrenching loss to the Shaq-less Lakers. From that day on, I’ve been a Kobe diehard fan.

To conclude, I have no idea how this revolutionary performance will affect Kobe’s rep. Hate him or love him, you just cannot knock on someone who’s scored 81 points in a basketball game.

PS. For the record, Mr. Joel’s career high was 24 points in a U-14 South Zone match. Haha.

make that ZERO sleep as well… ive been tossing and turning and looking at the clock every 10 minutes or so since i tried to sleep at 3am except for a half-hour stretch from maybe 630am til 700 am where i knew i was asleep because for a fleeting moment i was dribbling a basketball in RI and blocking out my tall useless teammate.

~o-hhh what a way to sta-art the day ahead~

indeed.

sonovabitch.

Sunday’s schedule:

1100hrs – wake up, wash up, have brunch

1300
– 1500hrs – accounting readings

1500
– 1800hrs – psychology readings

1800
– 2000hrs – dinner + watching band of brothers which made self feel v garang for while

2000
– 2200hrs – math practice

2200
– 0115hrs – more accounting readings + tutorial prep

ZERO experience points earnt, ZERO tanks blown up, ZERO rounds fired, ZERO monsters killed, ZERO levels gained… (read: no games played at all)

keep holy the sabbath, they said… no work supposed to be done on the sabbath, they said…

pfah.

somehow that sick little pimply ri boy inside me is feeling better than if he’d spent the day sleeping, watching soccer, watching some julia roberts / tom hanks / etc. romantic comedy over the afternoon… etc.

still, whatever. accrued homework beats… being way behind like last term, right?

uh… whatever. i dont even know when chinese new year officially happens.

(lame recounting of nightmare ahead)

I had another one of those very vivid dreams on Monday night. I dreamt I was walking in this huge Vegas-ey casino-ish skyscraper building packed with thousands of people having fun and shopping.

Somehow, my dream-consciousness-self then had a vision of myself standing dozens of storeys up in the charred, molten skeletal ruins of that very same building, which kinda looked like what buildings look like when they’re under construction, only just that this time, someone had reversed the process – and what remained of the building was its frayed, metallic hollowed out cadaverish exoskeleton.

From my vantage point high up in the wreck, I could see huge smouldering crater-like holes in the skyscraper and… I could see all the way down to the ground storey, because one of the holes seemed to have been bore-d vertically right through the entire building, which shook when the wind blew.

The dream-joel then returned to my (his) self, where I was back in the undamaged thriving skyscraper, with a mortifying cold feeling in my body borne of the knowledge that something really, really wrong was going to happen soon.

I remember to run around shouting, trying to warn people, trying to get them out of the building because I knew shit was going to happen, but they thought I was crazy and didn’t listen to me. I tried to hit the fire alarm but then these security guards grabbed me and threw me out before I could. Like Cassandra of Troy, my warnings went unheeded and the last thing I remember in the dream is of me hopelessly leopard crawling on my hands and knees away from the skyscraper as it came crashing down behind me…