I'm not sure if anyone still reads this, but if you do, wow.

With so many platforms to stay in touch and share viz. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, the use of a blog has come into question.

I have been rethinking the social media strategy, and in the process of thinking, I moved. Here.

Wordpress allows me to do alot more, and the nifty iPhone app is a + point. I have not done much there, so call this a soft launch, if you want. Maybe one day, these will all come under the umbrella of my own domain - that day will come when i have spare cash to indulge and after I have taught myself CSS.

www.beckythinkofprettythings.blogspot.com will be preserved - the value of memories of some best 5 years of my life.

It was fun while it lasted.

Hasta Luego Amigo.

It is the first blush of dawn as I step into this long-tailed boat after haggling with the boatman for a suitable price. His jolly countenance and leathery skin tell a story all their own. His toothless grin is a cartoonist’s dream, and a comb has not visited his sparse scalp for ages. If one has to wake up this early, the sight of him beats the face of a clock any day.

He has agreed to take me on a journey along the famed River of Kings. We wend our way through back canals that teem with life, dotted by the corrugated iron rooftops along shores that house a large part of this mega-city.

A sense of nostalgia surfaces within me as the slumbering multitude begins to stir among the backdrop of temples and pagodas spiralling toward the sky. It is as if the calendar collides here, the past, present, and future all speaking in unison. The morning air is fragrant with aromas ranging from lemongrass to fish sauce, all being prepared for the day’s consumption. Yes, the food here wins the palate of virtually every traveller. This is a city I have visited often and its people are among the most winsome in the world. The smiles, the graces, and the charms exude as in no other land I know. A carefree attitude toward life is writ large in the cultural ethos, and strangers make you feel very welcome, even when one may have just cheated you into buying a fake name-brand watch or a pirated copy of the latest movie.

I am very much at home on this continent, for it reminds me so much of the land of my birth. But there is a reality here that compels me to ask some hard questions about life. Within this culture, the most reverent of expressions mix with the most unashamed abandon for the sensual. I see a monk walking in the distance, a bowl for begging in his hand, but I also see a man who spends most of his day waylaying tourists and seducing them with pictures to come and visit a nearby brothel. He does that from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. It is quite a juxtaposition: the monk, austere and in pursuit of nirvana; the man, with a roguish smile, promising a different kind of bliss.

Here a cultural immersion would be impossible without visiting a host of temples – the Emerald Buddha, the Reclining Buddha, and a long list of others. But here, too, the newspapers sound a somber tone. The income from prostitution, they declare, exceeds the entire national budget. Here, drugs and AIDS have ravaged the population, and sincere politicians are trying desperately to deal with it. But this very city is exploited by money-hungry opportunists who bring in planeloads of men, promising them orgies to fulfil every imaginable craving.

And so I sit in this sputtering boat, smothered in a misty spray, I feel nearly drowned in a sea of emotions. How does one talk about the eternal when both religion and riotous living argue that nothing is permanent? An odd mix of the glory and the shame of humanity within this microcosm ignites a series of difficult questions.

Prologue to "The Lotus and the Cross", by Ravi Zacharias

The good things I have done for the year 2009.

I quit my first job.

Bought a LX 3

Bought a Mac Book Pro

Became a BodyShop Member

Spent a lot more time with my grandparents

Became bolder on the piano and guitar

Stopped hating.


The things I want to accomplish in 2010.

Have all the love in the world in me (is that possible?)

Love You like I never knew I could.

Obey You because I always said I would, but I have not.

Listen.

Ride a motorbike (like a pro); if not in Singapore, at least in Nam Kem.

Not be bound to anything.

Live.

Next year I turn 25. It will go uphill from here.

"We are not ants. We are not so faithful, or so disciplined. We cannot continue with our work without some assurance of how it fits with other, larger things. Humans need a resonance. This can be an affirmation, or it can be a reasoned debate. But silence, the stonewall of stock replies in smug tones of "we know best", kills the human will to action. I realize this. Yet I am powerless to defy its gravity."

- This is not a reflection of how I'm currently feeling, but, a para that I extracted from Simon Tay's "City of Small Blessings". I've came across many sections in this book where he has been able to encapsulate many emotions I felt like I've experienced before.