hello.

a second passes; a minute, an hour or 2, and then a day.

a twinkle of the eye, and it's been more than half a year since I wrote down my thoughts.

Spain, Morocco, London- the trip has ended.

And then a new chapter begins: New people, new routine, new challenges.

So i like to imagine myself on this line scale which I usually have in my head when i deal with negative & positive numbers

i stand on the dot (not the empty one, but the full one) in the middle of that line and i look back. and then i look forth.

Time to fly, to run, to march and to walk- in order to return back to Spain, Morocco and London, there's no choice.

hmm.i miss doing this.

Stockholm, oh! i miss you so.

its not that i do not have anything to blog about.

i have tons, but they, i.e. thoughts and time, disappear when I click on the login button.

anyway, i'm currently feeling very sad.

oh well.

it is not always that it falls on a saturday. how will it be this year? will it be the most unique?

u see? they disappear again. all of them.

hmm.. happy birthday, chong.

today, joanne and I led the kids in a time of praise and worship.

I stand firm in my opinion that there's nothing more angelic, more magical than hearing children singing God's praises.

There's nothing more beautiful than watching children closing their eyes, with their hands lifted up, singing their hearts out to God.

child like faith- thats what they call it. child like faith to believe God does miracles. child like faith to know God is behind it all. child like faith to understand that His love surrounds me. child like faith to know that He planned my life, and He knows what I have, am and will be going through. child like faith to know that He's holding my hand and bringing me through it all.

we need to go back to those days when we were a child.

Kim seah sent me a link half an hour ago. Be encouraged, be loved.

madrid, here i come. =)

glad there are some countries that we didn't totally cover finish during exchange.. haha.. "got to leave some for honeymoon"

oh well. life's been quite amazing recently. finally met up with my rain. :) i didn't know how much i missed her these 7 years till we finally met. she's still the same.. her voice, her demeanour, her actions, her diet. haha i miss sec 2 days while we sit next to each other, both answering Pang's questions at the same time because we never knew if he was calling for the wind or the rain. :)

i strongly believe that having such friends like her as well as all my good close friends are truly gifts from God. There's no way I'll get through life without them. I stand firm on His promise that there my life is in His timetable... that is why He sent these angels to my life.. to show and guide me on which direction and how many steps I should take.

In retrospect, i really think i picked the right theme for my 21st, 2 years back. :)

God is good.

"I'm not ashamed of the gospel of the Lord."

Acting fascinates me- I love to watch as well as to act in a play. From an audience point of view, acting may seem effortless; however, there are plenty of considerations with regards to portaying a character within a play. Acting allows one to be of a different character, Overall, it is the art of balancing the imagination of an interesting ficticious story and the reality of current pertinent issues that really engages me. Of all types of acting, I have an immense interest in the entertainment sport, Wrestling. It is not the violence that draws me to this sport, but the careful scripting of the story line- in my opinion- is an admirable form of the union between the arts and sports.

My 25.

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you. (either that or i think you're capable of writing something that is worth reading)

1. my biggest achievement in life was to put on a 3 hour play and well, having the guts to strip on stage. (well, not totally.)

2. I love to act- I love to be someone else just for that period of time, to be someone whom I don't dare to be. Perhaps that explains my sensitivity to how people feel: I understand the meaning of "put yourself in other's shoes" perfectly

3. I never believe much in the 'selecting which chinese characters your kid's chinese name should have because you want them to be like that' till my dad admitted to me that he named me after famous actress Lin Qing Xia. (but he said, because she was pretty. HMMM..)

4. I thought I was damn talented in acting and drafted my thank you speech for the Star Awards ceremony when I was 12.

5. I did not give it much thought after I took NUS Module TS1101E. I realised that there were even more drama mamas than I ever imagined. how immature... well, at least I grew up.

6. "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages."- W.Shakespeare

But it still did not stop me to think of myself as an actress... we all are.

7. Taking a more religious view of acting, I remember reading about some quote that describes the view of life as a stage, and we are but actors for the pleasure of the gods to watch and to be entertained. can't find it while googling *shrugs

8. every Sunday during worship, I always wish that we could just worship God till eternity; that we did not have to stop worship to go home from church, to go to school (then)/ work (now), to eat, to bathe, to sleep.

Because I love to be in His presence- the peace, the love, the atmosphere- I can't describe it in words.

9. People question me about my faith in life and I get very irritated when they can't see my point of view. I find it so difficult to tell them how real God is to me; it is so hard to translate the joy and the peace I have to them in words.

10. But i learnt, about 2 or 3 years ago, that one really has to experience that life changing moment before understanding what I have been trying to tell them.

11. So I pray everyday- I pray that God will give them that moment to finally understand what it totally means to have the joy and peace I have.

12. All these points have been in my head swimming for eons, and I've wanted to write it down for a loooong time.

13. The reason as to why i've not been writing my thoughts down much these few months is because I usually forget what I really want to write about when I stare at the blank box in blogger.com.

And I get very frustrated then because I know i had a good one.

14. And this frustrations come back to me again when I have a thought in my head and I need to write it down but i'm without my lappie.

Do you understand how sick that feels?? urgh.

15. So right now, i have many things on my mind- so i'm writing them down now.

16. I haven't been writing or reading much in the last few months since i graduated, and i am darn sure my standard of english has dropped by quite a bit. and I am really quite pissed with myself over that. need to read and write more.

17. i hope Troy has recovered fully from her food poisoning yesterday. so that the 5 of us can finally meet soon. i'm looking forward to this reunion. :) i love you girls to bits. :) and i enjoyed my time with Celest yday! :) finaly a meeting without time restrictions. hahaha

18. back on that point of getting frustrated with not being able to write my thoughts down then and there, i need some digital gadget that allows me to do so. or maybe i should just take pen and paper lah. cheaper. -.-

19. I am currently annoyed with yong yong for watching slumdog without me.

20. i hope the company that i just applied for, will call me back. but even if they don't, I know there really is a better job waiting for me (better than pasting receipts too). All in His time :)

21. i'm currently thinking of adrian and xj- wonder if adrian made the snowman family of the 3 of us in London (which i doubt) and how many days xj has left in army.

22. i'm thinking of when my JC jie meis will finally have a reunion.. wonder when our miss diana chan aka the most busiest among all of us, is free. haha

23. I'm thinking how fast my uni days have passed-I'm thinking of my biz mates and my exchange pals. Business School was enjoyable because of you. I hope we'll all find good jobs and be great biz men and women in time to come. :)

24. I'm thinking about all the hall events that I took part in; i'm thinking about Siew wen, Winnie, Lian and Joyce as we run to each other's rooms and whine and whine and whine (haha); Sean and his resort, Guowei- my astro boy, haojie that he didn't send that email to invite me to supper but i still went anyway, and ronald sitting by the road with his beanie and gloves talking to Suzy the Sheep (i think about that all the time. HAHAHAHAHA).

25. I'm thinking of yong yong's valentine note, and that tear that slowly rolled down my cheeks as I watched him sleep.

Last night, i met my beloved exchange pals (except aya & bf who weren't ard :( ), we reminisced our Europe trip and spoke about several important matters that concerns our future.

how time flies.

Mok Ying Ren and Dinah Chan suffer scrutiny for second straight day in mainstream media

Feb. 2

By Les Tan/Red Sports

Mok Ying Ren

Mok Ying Ren in action during last year’s Singapore International Triathlon. (Photo © Vanessa Lim/Red Sports file photo)

National triathletes Mok Ying Ren and Dinah Chan, featured in the Prime section of the Sunday Times yesterday, have finally found themselves back in the sports pages, but it still has little to do with the sport of triathlon (Triathletes ban stirs debate; Monday, February 2, 2009).

This is the second day in a row that the Straits Times are covering the story. In yesterday’s Sunday Times, the triathletes were featured on the front page and Prime section because they were banned for breaking an unwritten rule of conduct at the Asian Beach Games. (see story: Mainstream media’s obsession with the personal lives of national athletes continues)

The athletes breached an unwritten rule that says teammates of opposite genders cannot be in the same room with the door closed.

The title of the Straits Times article -Triathletes ban stirs debate - is highly ironic, considering that it is the paper itself that stirred the pot a day earlier to generate the debate.

“I was really disappointed with the article today in Straits Times,” said Ying Ren in an email to Red Sports. “We were not in the room to have fun. People are getting the wrong idea. If you realised, it was more of a safety issue.”

The Singapore contingent arrived a day after Indonesian courts had ruled that theBali Bombers would hang for their crimes. The Singapore contingent was issued a terrorist warning but Dinah Chan was put up in a block where there were no other guests. Frightened and unable to sleep, she sought the company of her teammate Ying Ren two blocks away and took one of the two single beds available in Ying Ren’s room.

Ying Ren, however, has no issue with the fact that he was banned for an undisclosed period which has since expired.

“I am happy with the inquiry which took into account the situation at the resort. But it was not supposed to be in the press in the first place. If me and Dinah kept our mouth shut and didn’t tell anyone, either SSC or TAS deliberately released it to the media or someone else leaked it out. Either way, it was detrimental to us and the sport.”

The news was probably leaked to the Today newspaper which broke the story and subsequently ran a second story. This triggered the two Straits Times stories over the last two days.

Lacking a picture of Dinah Chan, the Straits Times also used Dinah Chan’s facebook profile picture without her permission for the second straight day, raisingquestions about copyright infringement. A picture in the public domain does not automatically give a newspaper the right of use without the photographer’s permission. According to Ying Ren, the photograph used by the Straits Times was taken by himself and Dinah, nor had their permission been sought for its use.

The Straits Times has the biggest sports desk in Singapore, and is owned by the Singapore Press Holdings Ltd, a $1.3 billion revenue company with a net revenue of $437 million in their last financial year. It is notable that it doesn’t have in their database a picture of a national triathlete who has competed in national events in Singapore over the years.

Devathas Satianathan, 20, who has known Ying Ren since their Army days and trains with him and Dinah Chan three times a week, felt a sense of injustice over the series of articles in the mainstream media.

“I disagree not just with the publishing of the article, for I thought it was ill-advised and generally distasteful, (but also) the means by which the information and even the facebook picture was procured, for that smacks of underhanded and ill-conceived journalism.”

Another reader going by the alias triathlete commented on Red Sports: “It has already been tough for them and there are details which are not supposed to be revealed to the media to protect the personnel involved, including the organisations and the triathlete themselves.

Details of what happened shouldn’t even have been made known to the media and yet, the triathletes were betrayed. They were told by both TAS and SSC to keep mum about it and yet, news of this covered half the page of the prime sections.

They do not deserve this. Ying Ren is a medical student and Dinah is in NIE. What is going to happen to Dinah when she goes out teaching? The media has definitely not spared them despite the harsh punishment. My heart goes out to them.”

This matter should always have remained an internal matter. Putting two young national athletes in the national spotlight with a story with a touch of sexual innuendo is unnecessary and unkind.

On an island with so much sports going on, surely there were more newsworthy stories? © Red Sports

Dawn"How the information came in their (ST and Today’s) hands in the first place. Was the inquiry intended as closed-door? If so, someone leaked, and I hope the authorities will investigate and take to task whoever was responsible. The privacy of two young and promising national athletes was unfairly compromised and they have every reason to be upset."


----------------

i am utterly disappointed in Singapore's media. totally disgusted.

i wonder if this can be considered as slander of some sort. i'm sure it is...

dinah dear, jiayou and be strong, cos you know you are not alone.

i wanted to start on a positive note for my blog this 2009, but i am too too busy to do so.

its a whole new chapter; with a new perspective: i've finally ended school, and i've stepped into the working world.

well, so far so good. life in JP is quite exciting- i'm not talking about my job, but rather the energy you gather in the dealing room. I feed on their energy when they scream their deals, "Crude $5 KT Feb-March", "DONE!", "Good job, guys!", etc. and i tell you, my fingers can operate the photocopier, fax, scanner, printer at record timings especially during their trading hour.

i think i'm one of the lucky few who can experience how real investment banking works- too bad i don't do their stuff.

then again, no matter how interesting their job is, i doubt i'll ever have the drive to do it. Take the book Ron helped me borrowed a month ago, Jim Rogers is really an awesome guy- but maybe not as awesome for me to get THAT interested in. ahahaha.. maybe its just not my line.

oh btw, ron, i heard the traders talking about sth Jim Rogers called to tell them sth. Wasn't hearing about what he told, but rather, the fact that Jim Rogers called. HAHA

oh well, whats been on my mind lately? that first class we had in OB when we talk about Nature vs Nurture. Not so much about how mr hong chang crapped to gain participation marks, but rather how it applied in my life.

can i ever be an investment banker?

thats what i've been thinking for the past 3 weeks.

oh well, have been knocking off at 8 30pm+ every night, damn tired..

--------------

lian, if you read this, siew wen called me today. its time we meet for dinner- my treat! :)