Sunday, August 31, 2008

The Yellow Ribbon Project.



The Yellow Ribbon Project seeks to engage the community in giving ex-offenders a second chance at life. It hopes to inspire a ripple effect of concerted community action to support ex-offenders and their families.

The vision of the Community Action for the Rehabilitation of Ex-Offenders (CARE) Network is to offer hope, confidence and opportunities for reforming offenders.


  • YELLOW RIBBON CONCERT 2008
    Saturday, 6 Sep 2008, 7.30pm
    The Max Pavilion,
    Singapore Expo
    Free Admission (*Tickets have been fully redeemed.)
  • OUR CROSSROADS”,
    YELLOW RIBBON JOURNEY EXHIBITION
    Friday - Sunday, 12 - 14 Sep 2008
    Marina Square, Central Atrium, 11am – 9pm

    Free Admission
    An experiential exhibition showcasing the experiences of inmates, ex-offenders and their family members for the community to gain greater insights into their lives as well as the roles that the community can play to support their successful reintegration.
  • RE-CONNECTION, THE YELLOW RIBBON COMMUNITY ART EXHIBITION
    Thursday - Sunday, 20 – 23 Nov 2008
    Singapore Botanic Gardens, 10am – 6pm

    Free Admission
    The Yellow Ribbon Community Art Exhibition revolves around the theme of 'Re-connection', which illustrates the offender's rehabilitation journey to reconnect with him or herself, with family, employment, faith and the community at large. Art pieces can be purchased at the charity sale on-site.
The wearing of the Yellow Ribbon is an active display of the community willingness to "Help Unlock the Second Prison" and a show of support for ex-offenders and their families. Each ribbon is handmade by an inmate, and symbolizes his/her hope for acceptance. Join thousands of others in an act of acceptance by wearing a Yellow Ribbon in the month of September.

Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree
Tony Orlando (1966)

I'm coming home, I've done my time
Now I've got to know what is and isn't mine
If you received my letter telling you I'd soon be free
Then you'll know just what to do
If you still want me
If you still want me

Whoa, tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak tree
It's been three long years
Do you still want me?
If I don't see a ribbon round the old oak tree
I'll stay on the bus
Forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree

Bus driver, please look for me
Coz I couldn't bear to see what I might see
I'm really still in prison
And my love, she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon's what I need to set me free
I wrote and told her please

Whoa, tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree
It's been three long years
Do you still want me?
If I don't see a ribbon round the old oak tree
I'll stay on the bus
Forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree

Now the whole damned bus is cheering
And I can't believe I see
A hundred yellow ribbons round the old oak tree

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Saturday, August 30, 2008

Make Me Whole.



Again.

Remember.

Me.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Can Such Things Be?

Immense dissertation arose from the daunting cycle that teetered suspiciously and lurked in dark corners, launching ballistic wharves in blistering scrutiny.

Pulsating sporadic flashes rifted sunshine and shadow.

In the distance, a glimmer cheered. It was, by far, strangely pleasing.

Hollowed steps hastily thimbled the parched pavement, each perforating that which impelled.

Far as the eye could reach were tall, green trees whose drooping boughs made graceful arches. Scarcely did she notice how Time had deposited gently upon the soft, ochre moss. No other vegetation than what lay in sight was in evidence.

Gently, then gently, trimmings of lichen made way.

By way of ornament to the slumbering repose, a gleam darted aslant above her shoulders.

The object, rendered into simple reason, was one of hushed mirth and her furtive glances settled on its uniform condition of dust and grit.

And in it, thus, through the Reflection that it might have been, she arrived at the conviction that it could never be.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Ohm.....


An old farmer once had an ungodly relative visit him.

After the farmer had bowed his head and thanked God for the food they were about to eat, the relative rudely said, "What did you do that for? There's no God. We live in an age of enlightenment."

The old farmer smiled and said, "There is one on the farm who doesn't thank God before he eats."

The relative sat up and said, "Who is this enlightened one?"

To which the farmer quietly replied, "My pig."

[ Living Waters ]

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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Afflicted.



My latest governing element, an orifice not to be diluted with extraneous matter. A lovely perch, if I may add. =)
Isn't it weird?
Isn't it strange?
Even though we're just two strangers on this runaway train
We're both trying to find a place in the sun
We've lived in the shadows, but doesn't everyone?
Isn't it strange how we all feel a little bit weird sometimes?

Isn't it hard, standing in the rain?
You're on the verge of going crazy and your heart's in pain
No one can hear, but you're screaming so loud
You feel like you're all alone in a faceless crowd
Isn't it strange how we all get a little bit weird sometimes

Sitting on the side, waiting for a sign,
Hoping that my luck will change
Reaching for a hand that'll understand,
Someone who feels the same
When you live in a cookie cutter world,
Being different is a sin
So you don't stand out, but you don't fit in
Weird

Sitting on the side, waiting for a sign,
Hoping that my luck will change
Reaching for a hand that'll understand,
Someone who feels the same
When you live in a cookie cutter world,
If you're different you can't win
So you don't stand out and you don't fit in

Isn't it strange?
How we all feel a little bit weird
Strange, how we all get a little bit
Strange, how we all feel a little bit weird, sometimes.
Just a little bit weird sometimes.
-- [ Hanson - Weird ]

Thursday, August 07, 2008

These Days....







Mich has been really Happy.

=)

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Randy Pausch

If you have yet to read my post in Facebook a few days ago,

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008) was included in TIME Magazine's 2008 list of the world's 100 most influential people.

He gave his last lecture, a moving presentation, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," at the university on Sept. 18, 2007 before a packed McConomy Auditorium. It has become a phenomenon since then.

He passed away last weekend after battling with pancreatic cancer. The Last Lecture is his definitive legacy.

Although the length of this lecture is over an hour, I promise that you will be fully engaged and emerge with respect for the man who dared to be different.

Life And How To Survive It by Adrian Tan

Adrian Tan is a litigation lawyer at one of Singapore's leading law firms. Outside the courtroom, he is known for a variety of funny things, including The Teenage Textbook, which he wrote in the late 1980s. The book became a cult classic among students of that generation and was adapted into a film 10 years later.Adrian was the guest-of-honour at an NTU convocation ceremony last week, and this is Adrian's speech to the graduating class of 2008:
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.
Source: Mr Wang Says So