Stranger on the Road

Imagine this.


An attractive stranger of the opposite sex walks up to you and says:


"Hey, I've been noticing you around lately and I find you quite attractive. I was wondering, would you go on a date with me?"




That was part of a psychological study conducted in Florida. 55% of girls said yes to the hot guy, while 50% of guys said yes to the hot girl. So not much gender difference there. Interesting. I'm leaving out the rest of the study to touch on something more important to me.




I'd like to ask a question that the study did not address. Lets say a random decent looking stranger of the opposite sex comes up to you, and says s/he finds you very attractive, but does not ask for anything in return- number, name or date. S/he just comes up to you, compliments you, and leaves.


How would you feel?

Lost

I think that's all I can say.

I did something today that

.

blank.

I don't mean my mind's blank.

My heart is blank.




It's not empty it's blank.



I did something today that would have been something that I would have wanted to do for a while. It was impulsive. It was quick. It was the spur of the moment. My heart beat fast. and faster still. And still even more as adrenaline flooded my veins.

We don't often get the opportunity to do something that someone else will remember for the rest of their lives. When the chance comes, it's simple.


Take the shot, or walk on.


But it's never that simple. This one shot requires you to go against society. This one shot requires you do do something different, something salient, something almost or even absolutely outrageous. If you really want to be remembered, if you want to change someone's life, you have to step out of your comfort zone.

This one shot demands no less than all of you.


Today.

I took that shot.


And i smiled for the next hour.


But the euphoria is over. The rush of emotions, the extreme rush of emotions, are over.

It's not something to feel or I feel guilty about. Don't worry. It's pure.

But I'm left empty.



Maybe it's just that I've wanted for so long a chance to love purely and sincerely. And in this one instance I did.

And now i'm empty.

Poured out.

Nothing.


left


That's all

Déjà vu

Déjà vu (pronounced /ˈdeɪʒɑː ˈvuː/ ( listen); French: [deʒa vy]  ( listen), "already seen"; also called paramnesia, from Greek παρα "para," "near, against, contrary to" + μνήμη "mnēmē," "memory") or promnesia, is the experience of feeling sure that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously (an individual feels as though an event has already happened or has happened in the recent past), although the exact circumstances of the previous encounter are uncertain.


The experience of déjà vu is usually accompanied by a compelling sense of familiarity, and also a sense of "eeriness", "strangeness", or "weirdness". The "previous" experience is most frequently attributed to a dream, although in some cases there is a firm sense that the experience "genuinely happened" in the past.


Today I was at VivoCity making a stamp of my Chinese name when I had a Déjà vu moment.


Technically, it wasn't Déjà vu, but something even more uncanny.


You see I had already been there before, I had already passed this stall before, so that makes for nothing unusual as to recalling being here before.


But the last time I walked past this shop I remember I had a moment of Déjà vu. I felt as if I had been to this shop before, but I had not. It was a new shop after all.


So today as I was standing at the shop waiting for them to carve my name in stone, I was hit by the sense that I had seen this scene before- me standing at this exact location looking at the row of stone stamps.


It was the scene that appeared to me the first time I walked past this stall, the Déjà vu moment.


How could I have seen a vision of my second visit to the stall, the first time I passed it?


Was it really possible that I had a memory of the future?

On hold

To all of you eagerly waiting the next installment of my Attraction articles, sorry.

I'm putting that essay on hole as my term assignments come in.

First up, my gender essay.

I'm going to write on women's breast sizes.

Any input? No pictures please.

Ladies on the Train

Girl on the train
Woman sitting next to her

Girl falling asleep
Leaning towards woman's shoulder
Girl waking up

Girl falling asleep
Girl leaning over
Girl waking up

Girl falling asleep
Girl leaning over
Girl waking up

Girl getting up
Girl leaves the train
Old lady takes her seat.

Old lady falling asleep
Leaning towards woman's shoulder
Old lady waking up

Old lady falling asleep...

Based on a true story

No two snowflakes are the same

Every single one you avoid looking at is forever lost.

Tears Fall on the 2nd Day

You've been warned. Careful if you still decide to click on this link.
(Double click for a full screen and a torn heart.)





At the end of my life, I don't want to say:

I was meant to live for so much more.


So as my life begins, I realise I know my destiny.

It's always been clear. But I have never dared to embrace it.

I was meant to live with so much less.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

I didn't really get the ending of the movie. But never mind.

One scene moved me beyond any other scene in this movie.

*Spoiler alert.*

In the final scene, the man who has immortality, who has seen over a thousand years pass, who has the ability to guide people's imagination, and let them experience their greatest dreams, the great Doctor Parnassus...

kneels by the side of the walkway,

hands and head on the floor,

and begs people for a few coins.

Matt 16:26

Engagement

Today at the steamboat dinner with my extended family, Mom told me that a marriage proposal and getting engaged are not the same.


I fervently disagreed. To me the whole process is simple.

1) Guy pulls out a ring.
2) Guy asks "will you marry me"
3) Girl says "yes"
4) Girl puts on ring.
5) Guy and Girl change facebook status from In a relationship to Engaged.


Apparently... I was wrong. Either that, or my extended family is awfully deviant. I realised that as I started asking the 3 older couples present there how their proposal/engagement/marriage took place.


When dad asked mom to marry her, he didn't have a ring, so it was not called a proposal. They had an elaborate ceremony (pastor included) in which mom had the ring (which she had chosen with dad) placed on her finger, and this was called the Engagement.

When I asked my uncle how his worked, he said his wife proposed. When I asked his wife the same question, she said they just got married; no engagement.


Don't you need to ask for the other party's permission before you begin planning a wedding?


Never mind, this older generation is confused. Our generation has watched enough TV to know how that a guy should ask a girl to marry him and the decision is sealed with a ring from which point they are engaged. So when we saw a ring on the 4th finger of our cousin's girlfriend, my sister asked him,

"So... Are you engaged?"

And he replied...


"Can lah."


Seriously... What is going on here?

The Week in Passing

Watched 2 sunsets from the library rooftop alone.

Brought 2 people to supper in school.

Brought 2 girls to watch a movie.

Brought 1 person to do an act of kindness.

Told 1 girl that I think she's beautiful.

Sent 1 girl a valentines' message.

More than half of these were done on friday.

Football

What do men do when there's a football match on Valentines' Day?

What do men do when they have to choose between their girl and football?

They choose football.

But that doesn't mean they don't have a heart.

Attraction #2

The Second Aspect of the First Impression

For a long time the idea of the first impression being entirely composed by the big 3 (sharp jaw-line, big eyes and long hair) stood. That was until Justin was introduced to a girl in a rather unusual way.

Justin's friend was staying in hall and one day, brought Justin to meet one of his female neighbors in the next block. The friend was already at the girl's door talking to her before Justin even reached the corridor outside. This was when the discovery was made. Before Justin had even seen the girl, her voice alone had made him come to the conclusion that she was attractive.

As we look into Justin's past experiences we find that this was really nothing new, but much like the law of gravity, it existed long before it was conceptualized. Further study into his former experiences brought evidence forward that the attractiveness of the girl's voice could very quickly overwrite the physical attraction Justin had for the girl. 


Back in secondary school, he used to travel on the bus with a girl who he thought looked the most pretty in the whole school. He travelled to school almost every day with her without hearing her voice, and everyday found her beauty very attractive. But the day he first heard her voice, which was in a more high pitched and harsh tone than he expected, he stopped feeling any attraction towards her. Thus it was clear that the voice was actually of a higher priority than looks in the attraction scale to Justin.

To be continued...

The Onset of Depression

I am weak
I am sick

My gums are hurting in the morning
My tongue is painful in the night
All day long my teeth are grinding
All night long my jaw is tight

Lack of sleep.
Lack of focus.

Everything be g i n s to
                                    fall
                                        ap
                                           a
                                            r
                                            t
                                            .

Attraction #1

Physical Attraction

What kind of girl attracts me on a physical basis, what kind of girl catches my eye?

Since I can't put up pictures of the actual girls I've liked here (for that won't be a very nice thing to do) I shall use examples from film-stars for the sake of simplicity. Here are the women who have caught my eye even before I could figure out why.

Liv Tyler, who I think is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Vivian Hsu, the poster girl for Hang Ten, always caught my eye as I walked past the store. Not that there was anything outstanding about their clothing line.

So these two were more or less the exemplars of beauty even before I started getting interested in the concept of beauty.

As I stared as these posters, I soon began to ask myself, what is it that catches my eye? What is it that a woman has that would grab my attention. The starting point I could worked from, was the hair. I love long hair. It's the one thing I cannot have. Thus I relate keeping long hair with the ultimate woman because that is the one major difference between men and women in my country.

(From this point I shall write from the 3rd person, which was the objective way in which I seeked to study myself- from the outside.)

Judging from case studies of Justin walking from one train to another in an MRT interchange, it was found that that the women who caught his eye mostly had long hair.

, originally uploaded by sara fields..

The first thing Justin notices in a crowd of women that are walking in the same direction as him is their hair, for obvious reasons of that being all he can see. Justin would the tend to speed up to catch up with a girl with long and nicely kept to take a look at her face.

Going beyond the hair though, it was difficult to tell which specific facial features Justin found to be attractive. But he knew there were definite features that he liked for he could tell if a girl looked attractive to him within the first glance, even if his friends did not agree with him. Thus there must be a distinction here.

*Note though that the physical attractiveness of a girl to Justin is by no means the ideal standard of society. It is a mere subjective standard, much like a person's favorite colour.

Breakthrough in this research came one day when Justin was standing behind a girl with long hair. As she turned her head slightly to show only the side outline of her face, Justin realised that he could tell if she was attractive to him by merely looking at the side of her face, which showed only her jaw-line, and her eyes. Which thus lead us to conclude that Justin is most attracted to girls with bigger eyes and sharper jaw-lines.

The view Justin saw of the girl showed even less than this side profile of Vivian, who had the big eyes and sharp Jaw-line that Justin was drawn to.

Thus I conclude this very first section on physical attraction with a note: while many of the traits or aspects of what Justin found attractive In a girl have changed over the years, the type of facial feature he was and is drawn to has remained so consistent one might even conclude that it was biologically based. Yet this is not to say that the physical attraction is the most important, or even one of the more important aspects. It was placed first simply because it was the first thing Justin notices. And till this day, Justin has only been successful in approaching a handful of girls he finds attractive and becoming friends with them.

Spotlight Effect

Today I felt pain like never before.

I got my eyebrows threaded once again, but this time it hurt so bad. The lady who did it for me didn't seem very experienced and kept breaking the thread... like 10 times. She said it was due to my eyebrows being thick, which is true, but that is still a lot. The pain was a burning sensation that I almost could not take (thank God the string kept breaking so I had some respite).

Come to think of it, maybe the string did burn up.

Anyway, after it was done, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw my eyebrows were of different length and thickness. So I asked her to continue and I could not find the cure for the pain.

In the end, I have eyebrows of even length but different thickness. But I did not want her to adjust them because they were already too thin. Gah.

I stepped into school absolutely self conscious about my gay eyebrows and pinkish raw skin above my eyes and went for my Social Psychology tutorial. We discussed 2 experiments. The first was on regret.

"Think of something you regret this week." the tutor said.

Easy for me. But i was too shy to draw more attention to my brows than there already was.

The second experiment was on the Spotlight Effect. In these psychological experiments, they got a participant to wear a weird shirt and enter a room of people doing a survey. After coming out of the room, the participant was asked how many people he/she thought noticed the shirt.

On average they thought twice as many people noticed their shirt than the real number.

Which means... We think more people are noticing us then there really are.

So at the end of the lesson, I turned around and asked my friends how many of them actually noticed my eyebrows.

And it turns out...

None did.

Prostitution

Girl: What's your study?

Me: Prostitution.

It's actually gender studies, but for this week we're focusing on prostitution in south-east Asia. We have about a hundred pages to read in a week.

I soon realised it's not possible for me to do an in depth study of prostitution without facing my demons again.

Cats and Dogs

Your sex is not your gender.

Let me explain.

After a long discussion between Andrew, me, Dawn, Angeline M and Amanda, we came to the conclusion that men find it dumb to keep dogs because you need to cuddle them while women find it dumb to keep cats because you can't cuddle them.

Andrew and I like cats.
The 3 girls like dogs.

Let's say Cats and Dogs are like your sex, instead of male or female. So if you're a man then you'd like cats and be a dog. If you're a woman then you'd like dogs and be more like a cat.

But wait, aren't there male and female cats and dogs?

If your sex is if you're a dog or a cat, then your gender is if the dog or cat is male or female!

So straight forward.

Last Week in Passing

4 random acts of kindness.

3 nights sleeping on the floor.

2 nights going to bed holding my wooden kitana.

1 sunset viewed from high ground.


Quote of the week:

''You should get a girlfriend."

(I had told my friend I was going to watch the sunset alone. I replied saying that's not the point.)

Lost and Found

If you lost something at the NUS Library, check out the Lost and Found section. I was so grateful to find that they had my EZ Link card that I had absentmindedly left behind.

But I would say... I found some strange things in the Lost and Found...

Somehow I really want to meet the person who brought these to the library.

Attraction #0

Abstract

One of the greatest mysteries of the 21st century can be summed up in one question: "What kind of girl attracts me?" This was the starting point of this essay, for after 21 years of life, I realised that of all the closer female friends I had, the number of them which I did not feel attracted to at some point in time could well be counted with one hand. Given such a huge sample size to work with, I embarked on a research project like no other. I was about to study myself, and understand what it was I was looking for in a girl.

*For the purpose of this study, I will be subscribing to the Psychological concept of Self-Perception, which begins by saying that we don't know who we are, but by observing our own behavior we can infer our attributes and dispositions.

Introduction

When I started planning how I'd write this post, I had a very different idea of what it was going to turn out looking like from what I have now. I had an idea of how I would start writing but had no clue how I'd end it. In the course of thinking, planning and researching though, I came to a much better understanding of the topic. Thus this post will be much more academic than most that I post, and it will (unfortunately) be long. It's an important article though, for me more than anyone, because it is about me, a subject that I need to understand, and the kind of girls I like, or have liked, over the years.

(After typing out the first two sections though, I realised I had already passed the 1000 word mark. Being kind to my readers, I have thus split this essay into several parts that I shall upload in time to come. The importance of this is to remember that what you read in section 1 may not be my complete stand on the matter, but instead a mere stage in my development and not the final product.)

But before we get over our heads, let's start where I originally wanted to start...

To be continued...

I climbed a mountain today

I climbed a mountain today to watch the sunset.

But I did not see the sun set.

Yet the sky got dark.

The Boy in the Library

Sorry people.

I may sound bipolar with my sudden change in emotions between blogpost.

Post 101 won't be as happy as 100.

I won't get to meet the girl at the benches this week because her lectures changed.

Will have to wait another 3 weeks.

Love is patient, love is kind.

Girl on the Bench

Yesterday.

I could have passed the benches as I always did.

To check once again if she was there.

But I didn't.

Because this weekend, she dropped me an sms.

And so... I have a date this Friday morning.

Happy 100th post!

Womens' Soccer

Anyone who wants to see empowered women should watch womens' soccer. It's aggressive, it's competitive, it's not for the faint-hearted. That's why it's not called girls' soccer, because this stuff is only for real women.

So there I was today sitting by the field doing my origami as the NUS female soccer team took on the guest team.

After the match, I went up to player number 6 and commended her on how well she played. Since I was the only supporter from NUS, all the home team's supporters unanimously agreed that she was our team's MVP.

And it hit me. Women are becoming empowered. I had just seen a most amazing display of masculinity from these women. And elsewhere in society, women are advancing in careers and taking their place next to or even above men. At the rate we are going, if cloning ever comes to past, all men would be made obsolete soon enough. (Women could clone women and give birth to themselves without a man's help.)

So I wondered... what is the purpose man? Are we soon to be absolutely unnecessary?

And then, Number 9 let out a piercing scream and with terror in her eyes jumped away. A tiny lizard had crawled under her bag and I calmly approached it.

Such a relief. Looks like We're still needed.