pre-menstrual diatribe

i receive a goodie pack in the post with christmas stickers, gift tags, calendar, and personalized address stickers, in addition to a heart-rending request to my first name for a donation.

this is like another envelope marked, statement enclosed, thereby ensuring i open it. it contains a thanksgiving statement(!!*#) as well as the bleed-'em-dry plea.

sometimes nickels accessorize the entreaties, because only a cad would keep the nickel and not give more in return. i am an embittered cad who callously removes the coins and discards the paper.

all this organized, unashamed soliciting gets my goat. who are they to presume upon my charity, or my gullibility, or my guilty conscience, or even my amiability? or, in truth, upon my laziness, my ineptitude, and my loose change?

my message to the sponsors: fuhget it. when i give, i make my own considered choice and give directly. when i want gift tags, or address stickers, i get my own and pay for them. and if i like your stuff, i will keep it and use it, and i won't feel bad.

wedding hongbao

there is a newspaper article today about wedding financing, the singaporean chinese way. briefly, there is a going rate for the cash gift you bring to the dinner reception, and woe betide the couple who do not receive sufficient lucre to cover the cost of their reception. also, woe betide the hapless guest who gives a gift instead of cash.

having a going rate for giftings is offensive. it's almost a contract for payment. a donation. not a wedding gift.

what society considers wedding extravaganzas to be de rigeur? what parents insist on palatial banquets? what breed of young men and women commit to expenditures they need to be bailed out of? what kind of misguided idiots actually string profit and wedding together in a sentence?

good grief.

christmas cantata

church is very ambitious this year. a cantata! so:

1. J1 and J2, hanging out with the youth worship band, are drafted to sing tenor and sop, respectively. there is an unbelieving twinkle in their eyes as they practise. indeed the predominant expression on the faces of the youth draftees is disbelief or dazedness.

2. i, a life-long alto, am promoted to sop, on account of there being sufficient altos. they need sopranos who can read notes. i can read. the tricky bit is singing what i read.

3. HOM now spends his sundays after service avoiding the choir, to preempt conscription.

all i say is, it takes courage, faith and a certain guilelessness to dare put up a cantata with such a disparate gaggle as us.

the book of psalms - a (gentle) rant

a beautiful rendering of deeply lived experiences, yes. descriptive of many a spiritual struggle and triumph, yes. a natural response of a grateful or suffering people, yes. the confident song of a man beloved of his God, yes.

i wonder why we have psalms for responsive reading though. it's as random as taking it from the book of job, or paul's letters to timothy, in the sense that these are all individual accounts of privations and defeats and victories and revelations. i would read them to know my God better, but psalms are not any more or less extrapolatable than paul's epistles or the gospels or the prophets.

in fact, the sensible book to read publicly and regularly is the book of proverbs, because the proverbs were written to guide the living we presumably do after church. or we could read all the books of the bible, so that we knew what was in it. just not exclusively the psalms, because i don't get the logic.

a boat in the storm

moving every couple of years takes its toll. what have we gained, i wonder, from such vagrancy?

- much solitariness

- no hometown stability

- memories of many goodbyes, &

- pain of starting over.

there are perks...

- friends in unexpected corners

- many churches we can call home

- enjoyment, and endurance, beyond the usual, &

- no moment of boredom.

it's been a lovely ride. i have been allowed to be wife and mom to a degree of luxury, and known richness of heart and spirit i could not have imagined when i joined my fortunes with HOM's well on twenty years ago now.

but for now, just a bit of me, the cowardly bit, would ask for just a little stability, until the J's have done with school here, if God be willing.

i will say of the LORD, he is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom i trust. -ps 91:2

a tribute to the acer

HOM lives from project to project. the current one, agonizingly dragged out over the past several months, is an attempt to nurse the old laptop back to health.

we have ever briefer periods of temporary remission and now a comatose state out of which he beguiles moments of lucidity. how long, he asks, would you cpr a man? as long as there is hope of resuscitation, i murmur.

and so the heroic measures continue. he deletes, and re-installs, re-boots, and hopes, and repeats the cycle. if you ask me, it's agonal.

history of communication exhibit

it occurs to me that HOM and i belong to the last generation that can personally relate to the history on display.

we used to switch channels by turning a stiff noisy knob. there was one house in the neighbourhood whose black telephone we all used. we have seen the thick cably innards of the 286. we printed on dotmatrix. transistors used to be state of our art. once there was no internet.

to our children these are antediluvian, who were raised on the remote control and mouse and who learnt to power point as they learnt to wield the pencil, who cannot contemplate a pre-networked world.

today HOM and i look and remember and marvel. tomorrow, perhaps, the J's will look and be amused and relieved.

mars & venus, or perhaps just me & him

finally we manage an offspring free museum visit, which immediately frees us to see whatever, eat whenever, speak uninhibitedly, and actually enter a museum without facing vociferous objection.

i am fascinated by: the skeletons the gems the crystals and the hope diamond

HOM is fascinated by: the computers the airplanes and the rockets

actually i am a little disappointed in the enormous gems. perhaps it's contempt from surfeit. the stones are so behemoth that they lose their chief attraction for me, which has always been their elusive twinkly quality. a star twinkles. a luminous elephant gives indigestion.

a middle-aged date

pack the kids to school

look up metro

look up free parking

look up cheap parking

look up food

program gps

and off we go!

vindication

well i never! having paid much good money to mr ali at the driving school, i am greatly relieved that he has indeed worked a minor miracle on J2. this is as close as you can get to inserting raw stuff into a machine and collecting the nicely finished product at the other end.

a couple more try-outs with her, i think, and i will be able to let her loose on HOM. HOM does not handle nascent drivers very tactfully and much grief is sometimes generated.

point of reflection: how do you recognize an embryonic driver?

answer: when the car does not pass pedestrians.