I should stop reading the local FHM.

Not that I read it regularly, but it scares me everytime I see someone I’ve met in real life featured in the pages. And I’m talking regular people, not even major celebrities. People like Lavinia Tan, formerly of ACJC’s 2SC2, who appeared in FHM’s Firecracker section slightly over a year ago, before her travel host stint. People like Cherry Jessup, also from ACJC, who appears as one of a hundred “Girls Next Door” in this year’s competition - interestingly enough, as the only model who appears topless. And then there’s Izzy.

But let me digress first, and speak about a teen movie from 2004, “The Girl Next Door”. Starring Emile Hirsch of “Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys” fame and Elisha Cuthbert (aka “24″’s Kim Bauer), the movie’s about a graduating high school kid who meets the girl of his dreams, but who later turns out to be a former porn star. He goes on a crazy adventure to convince her that she’s right for him, getting into scrapes that could only happened in a teen movie. Not one of the better movies I’ve watched… critic Roger Ebert claims

“A good movie could presumably be made from this premise — a good movie can be made from anything, in the right hands and way — but this is a dishonest, quease-inducing “comedy” that had me feeling uneasy and then unclean. Who in the world read this script and thought it was acceptable?”

But I should be getting back to my point.

Apparently, Izzy hosts an “Aunt Aggy” type column for FHM, except that, naturally, she gets sex-related questions. I’d bring out the February issue that I picked up earlier this week, but well, my family might wonder. And you know, the last thing I wanna do is point to Izzy (who seems to be channelling Grace Quek aka Annabel Chong in said photo) and say, “She’s my groupmate… and she’s the coolest person I’ve ever encountered.”

The irony, of course, is that before seeing them in FHM, I’ve never seen all three women in that light. Well, Cherry was definitely one of the better looking girls back in ACJC, but even then, I didn’t think of her beneath that uniform, you know what I mean? And Izzy’s mind is so captivating, you spend ten times the amount of time contemplating her blog posts as you do reading them. But seeing her in the magazine kinda makes you forget that sometimes.

I don’t really know what I’m saying. But yeah… I should stop reading FHM.

I have just finished reading a book.

If there’s a “So what?” lingering on the edge of your lips, remember that I have since forgotten how to enjoy fiction. I did mention once before that I preferred the medium of the motion picture over the written word. I now realise that it was a most unfounded statement to make, as, at the point of mentioning the above phrase, I had simply not completed reading as many books as I had watched movies.

Note the qualification: Despite having done two literature modules in the past year, I had not completed reading any of the prescibed texts. To this day, I doubt I can describe how the Creature learnt to speak in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or quote from The Time Machine by HG Wells, or how goes the ending of Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfeld Hall. If not for watching the BBC production of The Moonstone, I might not have bothered to read Wilke Collins’ novel further in depth, yet I have not completed reading the book from cover to cover.

This semester, however, one of the prescribed readings is Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. After purchasing the book yesterday, I voraciously delved into it and like remembering a special encounter from a distant past, found the desire to see it through till the end. It has now been little over an hour since I read the book, including the Appendix.

What an enormous sensation! Such absolute joy! It has, as is apparent to all, driven me to type this very post so soon after my previous one despite having averaged only one blogpost per week in the past two months or so. No recent movie has ever done that for me, and between The Chronicles of Narnia and Wallace and Gromit, I like to think that I have watched a slew of inspiring and impressive movies over the holiday period.

But for a book, one single work of fiction, to move me so! It just proves beyond a shadow of doubt how much I miss the joy of reading.

As an afterthought: I visited the rather chic Italian cafe in Raffles City today, the Menotti. Brilliant ambience and an affordable Set Lunch at $19.90 that can really keep you filled for the rest of the day! What topped off a most underrated linguine for me, was their selection of deserts - from which I selected the Catalina, which was the best introduction to Creme Brulée that I could have ever asked for. Mmmmm! Heck, even their Earl Grey tasted divine. So drop by the Menotti for lunch if you can. It’s on the outside of Raffles City, at the junction facing CHIJMES and Raffles Hotel.

http://www.missizzy.org/2006/01/21/all-your-value-systems-are-subjective/trackback/

Izzy’s been documenting her (dare I say it) trouble with the whole concept of a value system. Her point of view, as I understand it, is that value systems, or at least the Asian one, is antiquated and has no basis for its existence in the present. And even if I’m possibly quoting her out of context, she pronounces “Chastity” and “Altruism” (noting here that she refers to “undiscerning altruism at the expense of one-self”) as “rubbish ‘virtues’”.

Where do I stand on a series of statements like the ones I mentioned? As the “Catholic War Machine”, the ‘value system’ is my bread and butter. There are things that I may take for granted, but never truly ditch. AÂ value like chastity, while I like to believe I can understand where Izzy’s anti-”value system” tirade coming from, is still generally important to me. Sure, I may be guilty as the next guy of watching porn, but ultimately, the furthest this lame nerd has gone is purely online… when it comes down to the real world, chastity still means that I am respectful to the women I meet, honouring their dignity and (still trying VERY hard at this) not treating them like chunks of flesh with tits and ass. In a way, you could say that my practice of chastity is shallow to say the least, and hypocritical to be more accurate. Yet, how many are truly chaste in this world?

I admit to enjoying the run-of-the-mill teen movie. I admit to enjoying the way Sash tells of her exploits. I admit to appreciating the guilty pleasure of a Sidney Sheldon book. There’s just something about good fiction (fact, I hope, in the case of Sash), comedy, drama and plain well-scripted sex (well, that definition could use a little work when it comes to teen movies).

Does that make me less chaste? Perhaps. Less Catholic? Oh definitely. But I guess the reality will only hit home if it affects my offline sex life. And I’ll only have that, thanks to my value system, after marriage.

So it’s all finally complete. The whole week of crazy events, one happening after another…

In the past several days, I oversaw the Catholic Awareness Week (CAW) in NTU. It was a three-day exhibition that gave us in the Catholic Students’ Apostolate the opportunity to do a little PR campaign for our faith and our activities. We essentially had a Catholic FAQ with straightforward questions such as “Who is Jesus Christ?” and “Do Catholics worship Mary?”, to slightly more controversially phrased ones like “Do Catholics really consume flesh and blood every week?” and “Are angels for real?”. At the end of the week, I’d like to think that, despite our small-scale activity, we did drum up a relatively high amount of interest in the faith and the activities that the CSA gets involved in.

The CAW also encompassed a series of programmes that were unfortunately not too well attended. On Thursday, we invited Brother Michael Broughton, Vice-Principal of St. Joseph’s Institution to speak about the “Universality of the Catholic Church”, while on Friday, Kelvin Chia, co-founder of the apologetic group ACT, came down to speak about the Da Vinci Code. The sad thing is that our attendance was low because several CSA members chose to watch the University Pageant instead. No idea who won though. Heh.

And of course, there was the musical on Saturday, which, in a nutshell went much better than any of us expected. My thanks to all those who sent well-wishes via SMS. Your support is much, much appreciated.

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http://www.missizzy.org/2006/01/16/stairs-and-elevators/trackback/

Now, normally, I don’t agree with much of what MissIzzy says, but I think in her latest blog post, she makes some rather valid points. Like how parents can sometimes have inappropriate priorities by choosing church over child.

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Proving that I’m a sucker for memes… here’s one kakita started that I joined soon after direcow. Basically, our MSN nicks look as such: Â

Kakita: If you were gay, it’d be ok
direcow *if you were queer, I’d still be here*
Petey - I would feel free to say I was gay (but I’m not gay).

The phrases are from the Avenue Q song “If You Were Gay” (lyrics can be found here). Apparently even Viv is in on the act, but there’s not many quotable lyrics left… except for - “If you were gay, I’d shout hooray!” which unfortunately doesn’t quite have the same connotation as the others.

e·piph·a·ny
1. A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something.
2. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization

Somehow my brain associates this word with Heidi, Adrian Mole and Mr. Bean.

Not necessarily in that order.

Welcome to the first blogpost of 2006. It has been a crazy holiday and now that school has started, it seems like everything’s just going to fall into place. Which is a crazy thought, seeing how there is suddenly a huge difference in stress levels and my body was just getting used to my insanity.

Just to give you an idea of how wound-up my life was before today, I had two dreams last night. Two epic flights of fantasy that somehow felt more like deja vu. The sad thing is, I had so much on my mind upon waking up that I failed to take note of the finer details of my dreams and now cannot remember anything about them. What’s my point? I forgot.

Seriously though, welcome to Epiphany. The feast that marks the end of the Christmas season but heralds the truth of the Good News - that Jesus Christ and salvation are for all peoples.

I spent Epiphany seriously contemplating that fact - on Saturday amidst Colin and Audra’s wedding, where love was truly present; amidst David and Grace’s wedding, where despite the couple being Catholic, more than half the guests present weren’t; and the Catechetical Ministry AGM and Commissioning Mass, where I discovered that the ’sheep’ was way too ironic a logo; amidst the wedding dinner at Marina Mandarin, where memories came alive.

Yes, if what I’ve experienced is just a sliver of God’s immense mercy and grace, then I am content knowing that there are bigger things in store for all of us.

Afterthought: I just found out that for now, at least, Miss Izzy (aka SarongPartyGirl) is one of my lecture-mates for HL807 - Childrens’ Adventure Tales. What an epiphany.