Which inappropriately coloured animal are you?

You are Green Cheetah, who looks sharp and fearless.
Your unhesitating manner leaves strong impression on people.
You tend to be little short tempered.
Your moves are fast, and you can make decisions so fast that you do not give other person a chance to take a breath.
Concerning your personal relationship, you calculate the merits and demerits of having a relationship from the start.
You tend to have relationships that do not inflict loss on yourself.
You are very straight forward person.
Therefore, your friends and enemies are clear.
You will put in great effort in catching someone who would become useful to you.
Like your looks, you are very smart and intelligent.
You have great many talents.
You are always finding new things to challenge, and is a person with strong desire to reform.
You are quick on changes that occur in the society, and are very interested in politics.
You are workaholic.
You love what you do.
Your career comes before your personal life.
You are weak on making long term plans, and tend to be too optimistic.
You will be successful if there is someone who is precise to assist you.

Find out which part of the brain doesn’t work!

Your Brain Usage Profile:

Auditory : 53%
Visual : 46%
Left : 55%
Right : 44%

Peter, you are mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing. This overall combination seems to indicate a well-working blend of logic and judgment and organization, with sufficient intuition, perception and creativity to balance that dominance.

You will at times experience conflict between how you feel and what you think which will generally be resolved in favor of what you think. You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in.

By and large, you will orient yourself toward intellectual activities and structure. Though not rigid, you will schedule yourself, plan, and focus on routine and continuity of operations, rather than on changes and disruptions

When changes or disruptions occur, you are likely to consider first how to ensure that such disruptions do The same balance is reflected in your sensory preference. You will tend to be reflective and measured in your interaction style. For the most part, you will be considered objective without being cold and goal-oriented while retaining the capacity to listen to others.

Preferentially you learn by listening and maintaining significant internal dialogues with yourself. Nevertheless, you have sufficient visualization capabilities to benefit from using graphs, charts, doodles, or even body movement to enhance your comprehension and memory.

To the extent that you are even implicitly aware of your hemispheric dominance and sensory style, you will feel most comfortable in those arenas which emphasize verbal skills and logic. Teaching, law, and science are those that stand out among the professions, along with technical sales and management.

This evening I attended a talk by Megan McKenna at the CHOICE Retreat House in Jurong West. Megan is reknown for being a theologian and a master storyteller, though her actual credentials seem rather elusive. Her talk this evening was regarding “Discipleship” and in the midst of her session, between two stories, she shot question after question at us, her audience.

The first, though general, was a precedent for the others.

1. Who are you, really?

This already set several thoughts flying through my mind. Essentially, I discovered that I didn’t want to (or perhaps I simply couldn’t) put my identity into words. Two years of blog posts such as these are what define me, not a handful of words. Or perhaps I was simply too afraid to really admit who I was, really.

The second was a little more personal.

2. Who is Jesus, to you?

This is personal, because of my keen awareness that, just as I find it hard to live up to the hopes of my parents, my identity of Jesus does not correlate to the way I live my life. As Megan pointed out, if Jesus is “King”, do I truly subject myself to His laws and only His authority in all aspects of my life? Or if Jesus was a “Role Model”, then should we not strive to be more like Him?

She then quoted Mark 8:27-38 from the New International Version Bible:

Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Peter answered, “You are the Christ.”
Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.

Jesus Predicts His Death

He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”
Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

And then she asked:

3. Are you a disciple of Christ?

Can I “deny [myself] and take up [my] cross and follow [Jesus]”? And if I can’t give a concrete answer to that… am I even a disciple?

Some days, you just get challenged in ways you never expected.

Ah, to resign myself to a fate worse than death.

To deny myself the possibilities of a normal life. To risk incurring the looks of horror and pity from those around me. To insist, against all odds, that I have been set apart from the rigidity of this world. To do what few would do to gain myself a seemingly perpetual freedom. To sacrifice everything that I’ve lived and hoped for sp as to live and hope for something so much better.

Well, you would be forgiven if you thought I was finally planning to enter the seminary. But the truth is, the desire to rejoin a community I’d long forsaken has been reawakened within me.

I plan to take the first steps to becoming a full-fledged Trekkie.

I had no idea what I was expecting when I got my parents to drive me down to the CSC Tennesohn Clubhouse off Lavender Street on Sunday afternoon. All I knew was that WWW had organised another Star Trek CCG tournament, and this time we were getting players outside of our usual gang of 6. But things really threw me off when, just when I was getting out of the car, a Starfleet captain walks out of the Clubhouse (fully dressed in Officer Duty Uniform) leading about 4 to 5 kids to presumably the nearest eating place.

Holy Shit. I was entering a local Trekkie gathering.

Things weren’t so bad at first. Aloysius caught sight of me as I was passing the Club’s bowling alley and I met up with WWW and kakita. All well and good. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was just imagining the Captain. Maybe my mind has finally snapped and my delusions have never looked more realistic.

Ah, if only that were true.

When we actually started making our way towards the inside of the Clubhouse, I began to notice all the posters blu-tacked to the walls. “CSC Hobbies Day - Star Trek Exhibition Level 2″ they read. Yeesh. I was entering a Trekkie zone. I believed I had experienced some of these people on the MINDEF forums years ago, those who only watched Voyager and Enterprise religiously and believed that was all it needed to classify themselves as Trekkies. Those who thought Janeway was the best Starfleet captain ever and that Seven of Nine and T’Pol are the sexiest female characters in Starfleet history.

Well, the last point is true, anyway.

And for a while, it really seemed so. We had people all dressed up as Starfleet captains (as indicated by the number of pips they had) - thus crossing the first rule in my book: Never powerplay. All but one had the stature and the look of someone who could presumably command a starship. Even worse, they hardly acted appropriately for what they were dressed as. “Captain James”, the next time you want to dance around the room, get a Dabo girl costume.

And yet, it was the enthusiasm of one guy, Jonathan aka “Garak”, that made me feel proud to be a Trekkie. It was seeing the same enthusiasm in him that I had, so many years ago, still so fresh and so apparent. It was hard not to feel a fan-connection with him.

So coming back to the title… does this indicate an end to my dying social life? I should think so. But who knows, yeah?

This looks like an interesting read.

Do I think too much? Yes, that’s kinda obvious. Everyone who is anyone to me should know that by now. But damn, I hate it when my fear and my insecurities end up getting the better of me.

I thought we had an agreement. Three out of six days, both of us had to be in school around the same time. I would wait for her at Paya Lebar MRT and we were to keep each other company on the long ride to school. Seemed simple enough. Except when she messaged me yesterday at 8a.m. to say she was going to NUS first to check in on her trinket stall at the Science faculty, so she couldn’t meet me. Seemed alright, I guess. After all, I was going to meet her today, right?

Wrong. My message at 6.30am goes unanswered. Hardly a problem. For all I know she’s either still asleep or furiously busy waking up. At 7.05am I reach Paya Lebar. As expected, she’s nowhere to be found. 7.15am comes and goes, but still no sign of her. My calls to her handphone remain unanswered. At 7.30am I decide not to wait any longer and get in the train. Arriving 7 minutes late for my Life Sciences lecture, I am glad A/P Shawn Lum is still preparing for a DVD presentation on the discovery of DNA. I scan the LT. She isn’t around, which actually gives me some respite. Perhaps she overslept, or something.

I call her immediately after the lecture. Still no answer. I give up. I see her friends around, but according to her they’re not really close, so I don’t bother asking them about her. Essentially, I’ve given up.

Why am I frustrated? Because I always let this get to me. Even though I’m concious of what I do and I try to avoid it, I know that the second I see her again, the second I hear her voice, the second I receive an SMS from her, things will be alright. I’ll forget all that I went through. I’ll forget all that I’ve thought and done. It’ll be as if nothing has happened.

I can’t live like this. I can’t go on being insecure about every person I encounter. If I am to get anywhere from here, I’ve got to accept and move on - and not dwell on the fact that history’s repeating itself all over again.

http://www.kiteretsu.jp/on/grow3/index.html

It took me a while, but I solved it in the end. Now it’s your turn.

You watch the trailer for Stepford Wives. The premise seems interesting and you appreciate the horde of talent to be found among the main cast. You think it’ll be the perfect movie outing for the two of you. Then you read online reviews. You read the scathing comments in Life!. You get worried because, for once, the critics agree with the users at Yahoo! Movies.

And all because you’ve already asked her out for it.

What if you don’t like it? Worse… what if SHE doesn’t like it?

Oh the horror.