Life, Laughter and Everything Else

I am someone who don't really have many wants, partly because I don't really know what I want. This posed a problem for my coming birthday. You see, I have a habit of telling my parents and my sisters what I want for my birthday. This saves the trouble of being given things that I would not end up using and not being given things that I needed using. For my coming birthday, all I needed was a watch as my old one was badly scratched from my frequent tumbling during a skating clinic. That I assigned to my parents. And then my sisters asked me what I wanted, to which I had no answer. I racked my brains but there was nothing that I needed at that point in time that would fall within their budget. And chances were that if I did not tell them anything, they would get me a shirt, and chances are that shirt would just disappear in the pile of shirts overflowing from my cupboard. And then I had an answer. I wanted a plant. It was a weird request. Even I did not see it coming. But ...

I happened to have this conversation with a close friend which went Him: Dude, you remember the time I told you that I went to drink with my exchange friends in the beginning of the sem. Me: Yea. Why? Him: There was this fucking hot British chick there. She literally looked like she could be supermodel. Me: Wah really?! Then what happened? Him: I talked to her. A bit. And he ended the conversation with a smile, a smile reminiscent of that of a fully satisfied man who had just conquered the world. You see, there are things in a guy's life money can't buy. If there is anything, it is that sense of satisfaction of having talked to that girl who was way above his league. Even if it was just a bit.

I am human. As such I have never ceased in my pursuit of the easy way out. That was one of the reasons why I stopped reading motivational books and started meditating. Motivational books promised success, but it came at a cost. I had to plan out my life for the next 10 years and then dedicate myself to that plan with an unflinching attitude, which I found quite ridiculous given that usually I had more than enough trouble keeping to my plan for the day. Meditation on the other hand seemed to propose a one size fit all solution. Meditate for 10 minutes a day and it promised everything. A calm and composed mind, a disciplined lifestyle, a positive attitude, the opposite of which were the root of all problems in my daily life. However, just to sit there and to focus on my breathing was harder than I thought and soon I gave it up, though I never gave up on the hope that one day I would return to it again. When the semester started, so did the stress and all the usual problems. So when a...

If you were to ask me if I am a conservative or if I am a liberal, I would probably answer, "I am a conservative liberal". That would be as good as saying that "I am a idiot", though that would just be the message that you want to assume and that I don't want you to assume. In my terms, it just means that I when it comes to certain opinions or mindsets, I am a mix of conservative, liberal and everything else in the middle, someone who believes that people my age should stand up and acknowledge elders when they enter the room, but it is not necessary to listen to them if they start lecturing me on how I should behave. The reason that I am writing this though is that lately I had the opportunity to witness certain instances of clashes between the old conservative and the modern liberal generations. And from where I am standing, when the old preaches the young to work hard, to sleep and wake up early, to eat healthy and most importantly to lead a life with a mo...

During my trip to Vietnam, my team stayed over at the house of one of my friend's relatives house for s short while. Our neighbour, who happened to be my friend's uncle, had a boy, about 12 years old, who would come over for a kick-about with the soccer ball once in a while. Everyday, I would see him play the game with my friends. The game was elementary. Pass the ball to the person playing with you and the person passes it back and the game goes on like that. In short, a simple passing game. After a while, I thought, this has gone on for too long. It was time to take the game to the next level, maybe teach the kid to play one on one, perhaps dribble the ball a bit. Otherwise, all the kid would learn was to just pass the ball. So one night, I told my friend who was playing with him to go take a rest and I took over her. The boy sadly knew little or no English, so I thought the best way to tell him what to do was to well, do it myself. So I took the ball to him, then dribble...