Saturday, August 6th 2005, 22:25
The air pollution is starting to have ridiculous effects on me. I get 8 hours of sleep and I still get tired easily. If this continues I really have to say good-bye to Hong Kong for good. I am literally getting slowly intoxicated over the f***ing years!!!! Who the f*** decided that Gwangzhou, one of the wealthiest provinces of China, should be focusing on heavy industrial manufacturing anyway?
Thursday, July 28th 2005, 22:00
You told me we'll always be friends, but you lie. All these years you say things that you know will hurt me, but you do it anyway. You pretend to care about me, but seeing me suffer makes you happy nonetheless. You are not insensitive - quite the opposite. In fact...
...one of the easiest ways for long-time friendships to break is not from outside influances, but your mind's own doing. Your friends aren't talking to you? Maybe they're busy, and that they really are thinking about you. Saying bad things about you? Not if your friend trusts you... and you trust your friend that he trusts you. I am having a lot of these thought towards some of my friends right now, a deep sense of suspicion. Then I realised that they probably aren't true - or if my thoughts are true, then you're not important enough for me to be upset about anyway.
Wednesday, June 29th 2005, 16:45
I'll be working Mon-Fri, plus Saturday mornings, from next week onwards, until I go back to Champaign. So I'll only be able to go out during weekends pretty much.
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Once is a mistake, twice is being insensitive, thrice is being personal. Hence, I have decided to treat you... accordingly; you've been warned!
Saturday, June 4th 2005, 16:02
Sunday, May 29th 2005, 22:25
Does anyone miss the days when we played Magic in high-school? Can't find the time and (more importantly) money to do so? Want to play online with friends from far away?
Friday, May 27th 2005, 18:49
A lot of people say they believe in a religion because they think it's true. In actual fact, it's because they want it to be true and hence live their lives as if it were true, like a sort of self-brainwashing. At first, I thought they were just being stupid, or that they are psychologically trapped within whatever they believe will happen if they don't. However, I've slowly come to understand that humans need both reason and faith in their lives. What I do find interesting is that a lot of people that don't actively practice religion or claim themselves to be non-religious, do in fact have their own spiritual beliefs.
I guess the most established religions today were once polytheistic religions, the most diverse form being spirit worship. Everyone has their own ideas of the unknown, and most people have their own views of abstract things such as ideas and values. As I said before, one of the many reasons why people have spiritual beliefs is the need for security, and one sure way of feeling secure in your own beliefs is if many others also share that belief. What I do not like about established religions is that this psychological security dominates all other reasons for having spiritual beliefs. Then, if the ideas of the individual and the religion conflict, the person will trust the religious ideas, and begin to not trust his own reason or mind. Being religious simply means I conform or truly believe in this set of ideas, and I'll do these things. Being spiritual, on the other hand, means you constantly thinking about your life in relation to the world around you, and how the forces around reflect on your life. You can be religious, spiritual, neither or both. Some people are very religious and are totally devoid of spirituality.
Human understanding is ultimately dependent on their reasoning and sensory limits. None of us live our lives totally dependent on logic, we do far more everyday than reason alone can tell us. In other words, everyone is spiritual to some degree. Using myself as an example, I am atheist because the word "supernatural" simply means "that which humans cannot explain yet", and that everything does in fact have a reason and a cause, even if the understanding of it could be forever beyond us. But atheists don't have problems in believing that there are forces out there that are far more powerful than ourselves, and I guess those beings are what religious people call gods (although the atheist wins by rule of default, you can't prove a universal negative!). One can believe in powerful beings and not belong to any religious group or sect, and still be very spiritual, if that person can link such ideas to how he acts in his own life. For agnostics, they can even believe in all sorts of gods, but remain non-religious, because mainstream religious beliefs about such powerful beings goes directly against their spirituality; moral values, ideas of virtue, and purpose of life.
Just because you have a spiritual need doesn't mean you have to find a ready-made religion to fill in that gap. Only you know what is spiritual to yourself. Trying to fit into a religion and throwing away all sort of common sense in the process will only make you less spiritual.
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Why, oh why, haven't I discovered the simply fact that a lot of functions in Windows can, in fact, be DISABLED? Trying to play PC games with only 196MB of RAM is hard enough, but having 160MB of it used in the background just makes it worse. Playing with only 36MB of RAM is not fun. So I went in, disabled everything, and now I have 96MB to use.
I so should've done that long ago.
Friday, May 13th 2005, 09:59
Finished my finals on Wednesday. Didn't have time to update before hand, but I did make a lot of comment on other people's diaries, so at least you know I am still alive.
My past week and a half was characterised by pink eyes, persistent coughing at night and fevers. I've almost recovered now. Funny how Friday the thirteenth is the day that I recover. I just don't know how on Earth am I going to pack up everything in my room yet. By tomorrow. Hope I can keep all those extremely important loose bits of paper together.
I'm definitely returning to Hong Kong on June 14th, somewhere around ten at night. I'm still banking on a job, don't know. Wouldn't mind not having it anymore, since I do have things I could do. It seems that I am a person destined to get no rest in life. So much for being born in a Chinese middle class family. Technocrats do all the work, pay all the taxes, and the lower and upper class takes all your money.
I have to change my lifestyle. It's not sustainable.