Category: AHAS

The feeling you get when something hits you as very meaningful.
The moment when you connect the dots and derived at some,
unexpected conclusion.
The moment you go, “Aha… now why didn’t I think about that?”

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New Year’s Eve Shopping

Originally written on the 31st of December 2006, at Raffles City.

At shopping with Hwei Min on New Year’s Eve. At Raffles City now. Spent the first half an hour looking at bedlinen, cutlery, even baby items at Robinson’s to plan how to spend her voucher she won during her company’s dinner and dance. I enjoyed myself marginally for that, but well … I am bored already.

Now I am standing outside G2000 waiting for her. I would much rather watch people than look at clothes. We’ve been in G2000 so many times already! I don’t want to buy anything! She doesn’t want to buy anything either!

Once again, this is an example of the fundamental difference between Hwei Min and myself, and judging from experiences recounted by all our friends, most men and women as well.

First of all, I think the common misconception that men hate shopping is wholly untrue. It’s just that men and women have a different definition of the word “shopping”.

When men shop, we look for something at the shop, find it, buy it. Men ENJOY the satisfaction of getting what we want tremendously. We want to go home immediately to use the new device or gadget (usually) that we have bought.

When women shop, they mean walking around, looking around at things that catch their eye, buy something that catches their eye. And the words ‘SALE’ or ‘OFFER’ or ‘… % OFF!’ really catches their eyes. Usually, the words are in red, but they don’t always have to be. Never ask a woman if they need something, or what they want to achieve from the shopping trip. They don’t know most of the time.

Now I don’t know about other men, though I suspect it to be the same for them. I do not enjoy women’s way of shopping. In fact, it causes real pain to my back. Mysteriously, my lower back aches faster than it normally does when I am just walking around, waiting for Hwei Min to shop.

I found that my back aches are alleviated 50% almost as soon as I stepped out of the shop. The pain is then alleviated a further 25% if I am looking at electronic devices, music CDs, games or DVDs. If I were to sit down somewhere where I can play at a LAN shop, or if I were to go to some new historical site and I can take my pictures, the pain will be 100% gone!

If what I read from ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ is true, then this is very easy to explain. Men are motivated by a goal. Women are motivated by senses.

So to a man, shopping without a goal is, literally, a pain. Our testosterone levels drop tremendously, and thus I feel the backache.

Women however, need the shopping to raise their oxytocin levels. They need the flood to their senses. In fact, women actually enjoy talking, and asking for opinions on what to buy. They enjoy the feeling of togetherness.

So a proposal for couples…

– State how much time you spend shopping together at the start (SENSORY), so that men can aim to complete that time (GOAL).

– Then the men can go wander off and do something else that has a purpose, like maybe play a game, or even get a drink, (a GOAL) while the ladies can continue their shopping (SENSORY)

– Then, meet together again at a stated time and place. (a GOAL).

– Then the men can help the ladies make a choice on what to buy, of all those things that she has found. (SENSORY).

Wonderful? Hope that this works for you. Now to convince Hwei Min that we should follow this.

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New Year Resolutions

It’s 2007 in 3 days time. How about some resolutions to launch the year with?

1. Update the blog, blockhead!
Hai…. Yes… I know. Number 1 resolution should be updating blogs. What can I say… I am busy. How do people do this everyday?? Limited time is spent on either living life, or writing about living life. You need 2 hours of the experience of living life in order to write about that 2 hours of living life. You probably need another 1 hour to write about that 2 hours of life. So there is some cheem formula here…

Live life… No time to write.
Write…. No time to live life.

Ok… I am being too extreme… but you get my point.

So the best time for me to write, draw and write songs is when I am feeling sad, depressed and unable to live life fully. So

happy TWeaK = no-updates TWeaK

Back to the resolutions.

2. Get back in shape

I feel bloated now. I feel fat and lazy. My digestive system had been giving me problems since just before the Cameron Highlands trip. Not going to the toilet often enough.

Too many wedding dinners, family dinners at Cameron Highlands and other miscellaneous celebrations combined with too little exercise got me to where I am now.

I have been giving myself the excuse of having a bad back problem for too long. Now I am recovered. Have to start getting my act together!!!

Started on the rebounder, since it had been raining this whole period. Starting to feel good again. Cutting on carbohydrates intake, upping my greens.

3. Using spare time wisely

Someone once said or written that businesses are made after working hours. What we do with the times we are off working for money makes all the difference whether we work for money for the rest of our lives.

Ashamedly, I have not been following this advice. I have been watching too much Boston Legal, and not spending time learning Internet Marketing or the Stock Market.

Again… no excuse. It’s time to restart my engine again.

4. Stop talking, take action.

’nuff said. Action.

Now ar? No lah… Of course sleep first lah… Its late.

(Here we go again.)

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ICT Day Three/Four : Training – Appreciation

Past two days were spent doing basic engineering tasks. Not too bad, mainly refreshers, we forgot most of the procedures but our past knowledge kicked in shortly after ‘hands on’.

As usual, though, lots of time spent waiting. The standard SAF motto, “Rush to wait, wait to rush” applies all the time. It seems no matter how much planning you put into arranging your tasks, so as to speed things up, SAF just seems to break everything back down and slow you down. It’s very interesting, you know?

Once you put on the uniform, you suddenly become a little more stupid, and time seems to flow slower.

However, someone put things into a very positive perspective yesterday.

We were in a training shed, and it just happened to be breezy. That guy (i can’t remember who) said that he treated ICTs like a retreat, a time to reflect. It’s true… The training shed we were in was in the middle of a field, and when I heard that observation, the trees, the grass, the breeze quite suddenly become quite surreal.

After being introduced to it by Kok Boon, I watched a movie called “The Secret” not too long ago. (www.thesecret.tv) It describes the secret to success. I shall not reveal too much, you can take a look at the video at youtube, but having watched the movie, I found that ICT served another purpose.

The Secret

ICT takes away things I take for granted. Things like freedom of time, ability to keep clean, having a nicely cooked meal and all the other comforts of modern life, but much more importantly, time with family.

It is a part of human nature that we take things for granted after having it for a while. From what I recall from studying psychology, that’s how our brain functions. Our thoughts and sensations being ‘electrical signals’ in the brain… after many times of repetitive ‘signals’ of the same kind, our brain builds a huge trunking line between the parts of the brain that are involved in that signal. This is so to make our brain process this information faster, and allow more of the adaptive parts of our brain to take in new information.

In short, we are wired to just accept certain sensations as the norm, after repeating it too many times.

The problem with that is that we tend to forget what we already have, and we tend to focus on things that we do not want. We then complain about things that are now not going on too well in our lives.

The more we focus on the things we DO NOT want, the unhappier we become, and the more the things we do not want become a reality.

To me, we need to constantly remind ourselves of the things we already have, the things that are going on well, and have been going on well. We are thus, training our minds to become in-tuned with the things that we DO want.

Sounds cheem? I think not. Think about it and I think you can find dozen examples of people who are unhappier and unhappier, and are thus becoming unhappier and unhappier still. Nothing mystical about that!