Thank god for this new chance. I cannot begin to describe my sense of relief. I almost shed tears of joy in receiving that email. Thank you so much. I will cherish this second chance. No matter how tough it will be, I promise I will. Each time I feel like giving up, I will remember this afternoon. The helplessness. I cannot give enough thanks nor express my relief and gratefulness. Thank you.

This is probably the last post for the year or is it the last post forever. I don't know. THIS BLOG HAS A STALKER WHO STAYED FOR 11HOURS AND 42MINUTES. I am secretly glad that I decided to remove my archives link sometime back. The year is coming to an end. Many thoughts and stuff.

I don't have a habit of making new year resolutions because I think no one bothers making them come true anyway. At least I don't. This year might have been hard. I hate that feeling of inadequacy that has been haunting me for the past few months but I guess I will live with it. Sometimes I wonder who am I trying to convince. I told the whole world it is okay. I will keep on trying but seriously I have no idea how much courage I have left. The feeling just kinda sucks I guess?

Let's not talk about that. This year I am grateful for the friends who have been there. Thank you for just being there. Without them I don't know how I would have been able to survive the year. The feeling after hk trip, the feeling after midterms and stuff. I feel loved. ((:

I guess I have pretty much changed over the past year. To someone that I barely recognise. Aiwen asked me the other day why am I so quiet with my OG mates because it is so rare to see me quiet. I don't know how to answer. With old friends, I guess I am still pretty much the same huixian. With new people, I am kinda withdrawn. Time flew past, people change, I changed too...

As 2009 approaches, I am kind of apprehensive of what is there in wait for me. I wonder what new experiences awaits, whether I will change again. This is life. 有所不为，有所必为。

Sometimes I do wonder whether I will come back to this blog and blog. About my life or whatsoever. This blog holds many memories. Memories that I hold dear to me. It has been around for a long time, sometimes I read back on my entries and marvelled at how uninteresting my life is at times. I marvelled at how I went through the dark periods and cherish the happy moments that are captured here. Usually I blog when I am really sad, when I have a lot of thoughts on my mind and I just want to pen them all down. I remember my euthanasia post, my post about "My Sister's Keeper". Things that I feel strongly about, things that happened in my life. This explains my reluctance to tell many people about my blog because it is somewhere for me to compose my thoughts. There were long lapses in my blogging span simply because I lost the heart to or because there were simply too many things happening that I don't feel like writing everything down. Sometimes it is because I feel that too many people are here and I stopped updating so that people will give up coming to this space where I can safely called my own.

I was reluctant to move to blogspot because this blog here just holds too many memories. Of sec sch and of college. As I scrolled my entries just now, a wave of nolstagia came over me. I lost the ease in which I write. This blog deserved a tribute because I stuck by it for so long. It is about time that I get round to archiving all my entries because I think I will cry if I lose it one day.

For the past week which I had been really sick, I spent a lot of time by myself. Not replying to sms-es and whatsoever. A time in which I relaxed and gave myself deserving rest. I think back about the choices I have made over the past year. How I choose to continue working up till the very last day of my long break. How the HK trip changed me. How I came to realise who are the people who matters to me. How I caught up with friends that I have not seen for the 2years I was in college. The past year have its ups and downs. You can say it is like every other year but yet it is unique in its own way. This year I grew up quite a bit and I kind of changed also. I became a lot quieter. I remember how Mdm Toh used to say that when I grow up, I will be a quiet and unassuming person. I never believed her because I was easily the noisest kid in her class.

Again I think back about the relationships I have formed with people, be it old friends or new people that I have met in NUS. Many a time during semester, I was thinking that I don't know who I can trust in NUS because the people there don't seem that real that sincere. I have met many different kinds of people, I can't say that I like all of them but I guess I can live with them. Sometimes I think I am really biased. There are some people whom I simply can't be bothered with yet there are some people whom I care about. It is fate or is it not? Usually I trust my instinct about people. As I entered NUS, I start to think otherwise. University life is definitely different from that of college or sec sch.

I am grateful for people who have made a mark in my life. I am thankful that this year has passed. It is a year that I first stepped into corporate world and witnessed how it is like. I gained one or two confidante and I have lost some too. During different periods of our lives, different people matter to us. We tell each other friends forever or whatsoever, yet when we lead our own individual lives we kind of grew apart. Because in our own lives, we learn and we grow but sometimes in different directions. The once familiar bond seems not so familiar. I have seen people change, I wonder what changes do people see in me.

Different people that I have met always tell me around the same thing. That is given my determination and attitude, I will go places. I have no idea how much I believed in that line or the rest of the things that they tell me. I didn't exactly have a good semester. It wasn't all that bad. Maybe I did cry a few times. Maybe I have pondered about giving up. Maybe... As much as I worry come 23rd, I will dissolve in tears again. I shall take one step at a time. Sometimes, some things just have to be faced headon. No matter how much it hurts presently, it will go away. As the year comes to an end, I would say that I had a good year. I had my unhappy moments, I learned from them. I had my happy moments and I cherish them. It time to put them all behind me and get ready for the year ahead. I will get there no matter how treacherous the path can be.

You can do a lot of things in nineteen mintues. Yet in nineteen minutes you can bring the world into a screeching halt. You could exact revenge in nineteen minutes? How would you spend nineteen minutes of your life?

Just read Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult and it left me quiet for quite some time. I marvelled at how her books can make us stop for a moment and reflect upon our lives, upon our choices. Nineteen minutes is about Peter Houghton who has been bullied through his schooling life and he decided to put to a stop to it one day by going to school armed with 4 guns. He killed 10 students and wounded 19 students. He had with him 198 bullets. He went from place to place in school, places where he had been bullied by other students. You can say he is a cold blooded murderer so you can say all he wanted was for all of it to stop. Take your pick.

If you are the kin of the students who died you might have hated Peter. Simply because it freaking well hurts when someone that close died. Someone at that tender age, its no age to die. You start to blame Peter. In fact, you only have to be present at school that day to be affected by it. I believe in here there is no one to be blamed. Adolescence bullying. Part and parcel of growing up? Yes we cannot deny that many kids have bore the brunt of bullying but they never go around shooting people. Does that make it acceptable or does that make Peter's intolerable? Attempts by Peter to put a stop to all these bullying had failed and like everyone, when pushed to a corner all he could do was to turn back and retaliate. Most of us grow up and laugh all these memories off yet there are people who are like Peter who don't.

Peter's act was more intolerable as compared to those bullies simply because he killed and in society's perception, nothing can be more wrong than that. No one can deny that he was wrong in killing but I feel that he deserve empathy if not sympathy. What make all those years of bullying tolerable? Why is it that school bullying is too evident up till date? Is it because society viewed it as part and parcel of growing up? Maybe like what one of the characters, who was in the popular crowd, said "if there are no them, there would be no us." Meaning that if there isn't all those 'losers' around then there would be no popular crowd. What has society taught us? Its a dog eat dog world? I don't know whether this just shows the ugly side of human nature.

Personally I have never really bore the brunt of bullying. In fact, I have never been the target before. Maybe I have but it has never struck me as something malicious perhaps. Why is it that these shooting incidents only occur in the states and not in singapore? Because in Singapore guns are not allowed?

When I read this book, what struck me hard is when Peter's mother said "I wish I can tell them that they are not the only one who lost a son/daughter. I lost my son too, long before they did." What is it in this system that disallows us to be close to our parents? What actually goes on in the mind of Peter, no one really knew. All he was able to explain is that he just wants everything to stop. He just wasn't able to fit in. Jodi Picoult put it very aptly, "Adolescence is about fitting in and not standing out". Popularity is something that you cannot admit to wanting to have. It is something that should come naturally.

I have never really seen the need to fit in anyone. When I entered TJ I never expected to fit in because I feel that I don't. And truth be told, I didn't want to either but I still fit in nevertheless. In RV, I fit in though I never cared much about it. In fact I don't really care whether I have a friend walking with me or not. Maybe I have taken for granted that I will always have friends around me. Reading this book makes me think about what is it about me that fitted in. I see nothing striking about me.

This book is not as touching as that of My Sister's Keeper but it has its own beauty. The reality of the scenes that it enacted. The raw feelings that is protrayed. The feelings of Peter and that of his mother. No matter what a parent did, what they say or do, does it make a difference to how we each become? Nature v Nurture? Each time we say something or do something, it might be a moment of impulse but it would have left a mark on some other people. Parents are the same but the impact they have on their kids is far larger than they can imagine. Imagine your brother dying and your parents wishing that the kid you died was you and you knew it. Thats what Peter felt because he was a less worthy child. It must have hurt very badly for him. What really triggered him to commit such an act? No one can pinpoint it to any particular incident. All we can say that its built up over the years, acts by poeple whom he cared about or people who used him as a means to divert attention from themselves.

This is not going to change much. The bullying in school isn't going to stop just because there is a good discipline master. It must come from the kids themselves. Parents have the burden of teaching them tolerance. Yet like what the book said. Many kids are not what their parents imagined them to be. That's reality. How to change that? I don't know. Its a sad book in its own way. When Peter decided to end his own life in his cell, when he is convicted on 8 counts of first degree murder, 2 counts of 2nd degree murder. He didn't get 10counts of first degree murder because the jury recognises the fact that he was provoked in some ways too. Its kind of sad how a person life just ended like that. It was through no fault of his own that he stood out from the rest. He wasn't a shining star and it kind of decided his fate. If only he could live it through, things would have gotten better. I would never be able to understand how he felt because I have never bore the brunt of bullying and teasing. I am lucky in my own way too.

Nineteen minutes. That's all you need. Not only to bring the whole world to a screeching halt. That's all it takes to ruin your entire life too. In this incident, it wasn't just the students who died that are the victims. Peter is a victim too. But what's different is that he has been a victim for far too long that people stop realising that he is victimised. No one said he is right but one can't entirely fault his actions simply because he was doing it the only way he see fits. There might be errors in his judgement and his actions. But when you can't fault a kid for bullying others, why is it that you can fault Peter for his wrong actions? He is a kid too. The bullies are no less wrong than him, just that their actions created far less devastation and society chose to not face the problem. Has the judicial system been impartial in their verdict? Was the verdict to appease the entire town or...?

been eons since i last posted here. things have been weird, it has been tough. i survived semester 1. next semester will be tougher but i will pull through. :) no matter how hard it is, i will survive it because i say i will.