indeed, let’s try this again.

all right. i’ve been here, half-written a whole bunch of posts on a couple of pretty important issues, but somehow lost steam due to circumstance (and possible due to rust), so they were never published here. maybe i’ve been trying too hard, biting off more than i can chew with those posts. and in the process of my wishy-washy half-heartedness, haven’t posted anything here for a bit.

well, moving on, i think i’ll try and breathe life into this thing by just bringing this blog back to its roots - as a conversation between me, myself and i. i’ll post pictures and whatever nifty things here i’d like to remember or remind myself of in time. and i will write about important issues when the inspiration arises. but for the most part, i think i’ll go back to “keeping it real”.

regarding my NBA playoff predictions, i couldn’t have been more wrong. but i was just as wrong as pretty much everyone else. you have to be a serious homer or die hard fan to have predicted a laker/celtic nba final. i thought the pistons and the spurs had a good chance of making it, but the pistons imploded again, much to my disappointment, and the spurs just weren’t lucky this time. this year’s champions are the real deal, though. i’m really impressed and happy for them, especially for paul pierce whom i’ve been quietly following and supporting for the last decade or so.

finally, i’ve been running every other day on average, for about 4-5kilometres each time, since the summer began. i haven’t lost as much weight as i would’ve liked, but my stamina has amazingly improved. i started out barely being able to run 2k without having a panting fit, but now i can finish the 5km route with no problem whatsoever. i think tomorrow i’ll take it up a notch and run farther than i have before.

the best part about this - no knee aches. none at all. maybe my knee is really whole again, i’d really love it to be so. i’m not going back to playing basketball any time soon, but i’ll be really glad and thankful if i could keep running like this without pain. i’m going to keep at this for the rest of the summer… and get back in as good shape as i can so this stupid knee doesn’t haunt me anymore.

that was a fine start, if i may say so myself. more to come in the days to come.

Before it all begins, here are my playoff forecasts; I’m predicting who will come up tops in the East and the West.

Eastern Conference Champs: DETROIT PISTONS
They’ve been the most “slept on” team this year; they’ve convincingly beaten just about everyone before, and when determined they’ve got the teamwork and spirit to win it all… if motivated. This year, after embarrassing themselves due to their overconfidence against the Cavs last May, the Bad Boys have definitely got a bone to pick. Detroit’s pissed off, they’re playing tremendously well, and have been spurred on by their deep, young and very talented bench.

As for the Celtics? The Pistons have broken the traditional mould (that predicts that superstars win games) with their special formula. They beat a Laker team with 4 Hall-Of-Famers to win the title, so I wouldn’t put it beyond them to beat a Celtic team with 3 HOFers to come up tops in the East. The only team that can beat the Pistons is… themselves, and I think they’ve got the mindset to win it all this year.

Western Conference Champs: SAN ANTONIO SPURS
Everyone seems to hate them for being “boring”. My NBA Live research, however, has proven otherwise. They are the perfect NBA Live team - Duncan the monster being unstoppable down low and grabbing every rebound that comes his way, Manu and TP each bringing their own brand of unstoppable-ness, a whole slew of solid jump shooters, cheap shot defensive players in Bowen and Horry, and 2 rock-solid big guys in Oberto and Thomas as “garbage dudes”. They have no flaws. They can kill you on the break with their deceptive speed, execute you to death in the half court, and dump it in to Duncan for the high-percentage shot every damn time.

These Spurs are a basketball purist’s (i.e. me) dream, and their sheer professionalism is gonna win it for the again. This is the year they repeat. The Lakers are nigh-unstoppable when they have their freak on, but a lot of this is contingent on their twin towers coming back and not losing a step - which may be a lot to hope for; for the sake of Bynum’s future, I really wouldn’t rush him back into shape. The Mavs are write-offs. N’awlins, good as they are, can not survive a 7-game series against the Spurs. The Suns have moved away from their “key success factor” and traded their future away for the now; they better enjoy the “now” while he lasts, because in a season and a half the “now” is gonna be older, phatter and grumpier - and is gonna start blaming everyone in the Suns organization for not doing enough to win a title. G-State’s live-for-the-moment thing isn’t really convincing anyone; they may win it all or not even make the playoffs, and it wouldn’t matter to those maniacs who’re in for it purely for the love of the game. Finally, Utah, solid as they are, was systematically taken apart last year by the Spurs… neither team has changed much, so do the math.

NBA Champs: The Spurs
They get the job done, no matter what that entails… including kung fu flying kicks and hip-checking you into the stands til your nose gets half-torn off.

They hit big shots. TP, Duncan and Manu are each able to take over a game and drop 30 on you… and once 2 of them get hot it’s pretty damn hard to stop the Spurs. So once more, I’m picking the Spurs to win it all. This might seem like a low-risk “value” pick, but the Spurs have not repeated so far, so it’s not as safe as one might think. Nonetheless, I’m not betting against these MFs, not until Duncan is finally deactivated and Popovich goes back to his old job of stealing Christmas.

The sun lies low in the sky, and my Company is crowded around a few dilapidated buildings which lie amidst a great expanse of jungle. Of key importance is the one building I’m currently standing in - an old, discreet-looking medium-sized warehouse with a single entrance, a tall and wide portal with its rolling steel door half-open - because the basement of this warehouse leads deep into the ground, ultimately leading to a single, locked, steel door which gives access to a network of tunnels that contain something of grave importance, something the likes of which me or my lowly Company would never have to know about. We are here to defend that door, those tunnels, with our lives.

I sit behind the cover of a large box that stands by the mouth of the warehouse, waiting for the sun to set…. and the inevitable attack by the enemy, which lurked deep in the palms and fronds of the jungle that encircled us. Every night the enemy came without fail, in increasing numbers, to open fire at us from the farthest range of their weapons, never once coming closer than a hundred or two meters. Besieged, we fired back, not knowing who they were or where they came from. We held them off for a week already, but after our nightly firefights were over, none of their bodies were to be found - just gore-splattered trees and undergrowth. Every day, while the sun was up, our scouting teams combed the jungle in various vectors, but invariably came back none the wiser: we hadn’t the slightest idea who it was we were up against.

The sun falls deeper into the horizon, and the darkening sky mirrors the mood of the Company. Preparations for the impending assault are done, and the men take cover behind crates and sandbags that litter the mouth of the warehouse. I load and cock my rifle, and tap at the extra magazines hidden in my combat webbing in anticipation. I look around and see, in the dim light of the warehouse, the dark silhouettes of my comrades, prone or crouching, grasping their rifles tightly and looking intently into the darkness.

Then it begins - shots are fired, and deep in the shadows I see vague silhouettes illuminated by tracer rounds and muzzle flashes. Pressing myself hard against the crate, I take aim and pull the trigger again and again. This night, the enemy comes in larger numbers; and, instead of hanging back in the shadows of the undergrowth, they creep closer in a line formation, hellfire spewing forth from their rifles as they run and crawl at us.

Under the cover of my crate, I pull the trigger again and again, in two-round bursts, and assailant after assailant falls to my hand. A bullet impacts the crate, inches from my face, and I get desperate; I fear that I’ll never see the sun rise again, that the tunnel network has already been infiltrated and the enemy will emerge from the massive door behind us and cut us down from both directions. As more and more of the enemy get closer, the firefight gets increasingly dire and bloody. Putting a fresh magazine in the rifle, I scream a war cry and let loose more fire at the lurking terror in the darkness, as they claw closer and closer and closer.

I wake up much later than usual. It’s Good Friday and - cliche alert! - that was all just a dream. A vivid one, however… I look at my face in the mirror and am surprised to see the absence of camouflage cream. Shaken, but intent to write it all down before wakefulness distorts the memory of dream, I sit down at the computer and start typing.

Hello everyone. Despite spending much of the weekend madly writing notes and doing readings that have accumulated over the past three weeks (already?) of school, I’ve finally had the first chance since the year began to breathe. Things have been terribly busy - as usual - and I’ve learnt a lot in these few weeks, in school and out of it.

A lot has been going through my mind, worries and thoughts of the future. About the direction my life should be taking, professionally and otherwise. This very evening, something reminded me of a… sentiment that went through my head over the New Year.

Usually, on particularly poignant days (birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, etc) I make a special prayer asking for protection and peace for my family and friends. This year, more than ever, I felt the need to extend that prayer to include the entire world.

I haven’t lived long, but yet I feel that our future has never felt so uncertain as it does today. I’m not saying it’s bleak - rather, I believe that the next decade or so will be a pivotal point for the world, for better or for worse, to take a new direction.

And so, I hope and pray that we have the strength and courage to meet the challenges of the future, and see past our differences and overcome our racial shortsightedness that has been the hallmark of every mistake we have ever made. I have full faith that humanity can do what we need to do; at the same time, I know fully well how capable we are of majestically screwing everything up.

So, for what it is worth, I pray that everyone out there has a successful and safe year; that we all find it in ourselves to value and cherish our loved ones, and protect them and be there for them; that we see past the propagandist vomit that’s woven into the media and never forget that we’re all brothers and sisters; that we never forget what Jesus or Buddha or Mohammad (or otherwise) has taught us, and live our lives in their example; and finally, that we stay true to ourselves.

Amen.

“2008 is 2 weeks old, and my recent busy-ness (today is the first time I was in school not wearing business formal / casual) has ironically got me all introspective…”

…was what I was typing before I chanced upon this clip, courtesy of my brother.

It’s ABSOLUTELY brilliant. The guy who plays Solid Snake does a really good job mimicking Snake’s actions; he moves exactly like Snake would. Brought a tear to my eye.

Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I am a rabid Metal Gear fanatic. I could rant on for hour after hour about how perfect every single Metal Gear game is; but beyond all that, the underlying message behind every Metal Gear game truly touches you deep inside, in the same way the Matrix movies do. The Matrix movies and Metal Gear, pioneers of bullet-time special effects and the stealth video game genre, respectively, are too often only remembered as such; look deeper and you’ll find deep, mind-shattering messages that slap you in the face hard and make you rethink the very meaning of life itself.

It is for that reason why Metal Gear II, arguably the worst game of the series, has probably the most special emotional connection with me, because of one special line, uttered by Otacon dealing with tragedy: “You can’t wait to be loved. You have to go out and find it… You can’t just wish for a happy family - you have to go out and make it happen.”

I played this game when I was in my early days of serving National Service, at a lonely and rather desolate point in my life. That quote gave me strength, and allowed me to find my place and grow as a soldier and a friend to those around me.

Until someone goes out to make a Metal Gear movie, however, the non-gaming world won’t get a chance to appreciate the unbelievable story and the great educational message that Metal Gear has for its fans, which is a huge pity. I read that a movie is in the works, but if they massacre the movie the way they did to Hitman, it would be a tragic waste.

The new year is six days old, and school starts anew tomorrow. My iBook G4 laptop has been out of commission since early December, which has made things tremendously troublesome, but I had since gotten kinda used to working on a plain, old-fashioned, but significantly faster PC. Comatose iBook and exams partially explain my MIA status from this blog, but my affliction with inertia, recent propensity to write ridiculously long posts (which end up half-written and unedited), among other things, have kept me from it.

Thanks to much help from The Dad, I was able to dismantle my once immaculately white, now greying with age iBook G4 (warranty’s over anyway) and take a look inside. Not easy. Lots of screws and even taking it apart requires some degree of dexterity which I obviously lack. At least that’s done, and my iBook screen hasn’t gone out of commission yet for the past half hour since we fiddled with the inverter cables n stuff.

Anyway, I went to Montreal with my girlfriend over the December holidays. It was awesome. Montreal is a really pretty city, and having been to Paris when I was younger, I was reminded a lot of it, particularly in the architecture of the place. The Montreal subway system is excellent, and in my opinion rivals the best subway systems in Asia - trains move fast, there were few delays, and even when there was a 15-minute delay during the weekday rush hour in downtown Montreal, everyone in the large crowd was somehow able to get onto the rather narrow train carriage. C’est magnifique, says Joel.

There’s this really cool thing called the Biodome in Montreal which is kind of like an indoor domed zoo thing, it doesn’t have a HUGE variety of animals, but the various flora and fauna in there seem to be extremely well taken care of. The Biodome recreated a number of environments, from a tropical jungle to a huge underwater mini-ocean… pictures should follow if time permits.

All right. I’ve got quite a few things to do before school starts, and I want to get them done so I can have a good (final?) rest tonight before the grind begins anew.

To whoever reads this, have a safe and enriching year ahead.

It’s been a week since my parents and I moved to our new place, a nice townhouse southwest of High Park, Toronto. Moving took a while, and I’ve been absolutely drained by the experience. The sheer amount of… stuff that we had to shift over in boxes is staggering. At least now school is a lot closer than it was before; I now live less than 10km from the University, where before I was nearly 30km away to the west. (In Singapore, if we also take into account the horrendous traffic that is a regular on the GTA highways, that’s like living in a hut in Lim Chu Kang and going to school in Changi…)

As usual, life is never without bumps and these past few months have been no exception. It’s not been easy, but there’s never a… “free lunch”, but that’s just how things are, I guess.

Okay. I’m too tired for any more of this. Apologies for relative uninspired-ness. To bed I go.

Hmmph. Just one thing - a random thought just crept into my mind, of incidents of about three years ago. Never, EVER trust a man who, instead of giving you facts or a strong opinion on anything, heavily relies on the use of the horrendously vague “you know what I mean”, “that kind of thing”, “something like that”. Only sorrow… can follow.

I apologize for the lack of recent posts; anyway, my summer final exam is coming up in a few weeks, and I’ll be busy til then. I’m moving house within the next month too, which is a TREMENDOUS headache in every way.

So, to anyone who reads this, until next time, be safe and happy - and take care.