Fragrant Sounds

It’s been a while since I have been able to, thanks to academics and various other commitments. Time flies when you’re having fun, but apparently also when you don’t have a watch. It seems that this year has just zoomed past me, carrying many problems away as well as bringing me several more. The problems always look larger, different, more dramatic than the problems I have already solved, yet when I look back even further, all my problems seem to blend into one blurry mess leading to one origin.

Reminiscing is a great way to procrastinate, you let your mind wander off into the goods and bads of your past (well, mostly goods), ignoring the present and the future. In fact, things in the past always seem so much better than they actually are. As a child, I adored this Malaysian sweet gelatinous multicoloured layered dessert that I would be given every day after school. Recently, walking past an Asian store, I saw the same dessert on sale and bought it without hesitation. I made sure I placed it in a separate bag, carried it with both hands and brought it home with so much care that it looked like I was carrying a precious diamond. I couldn’t even eat it right away! I stared at it on the kitchen counter, memorising all the glistening angles and colours. Finally, when I got hungry and desperate enough to try it, I slowly cut a piece and placed it on my tongue. To my dismay, it was not as sweet as I remembered, not as smooth as I remembered, not the right chewy texture that I remembered, just simply not the dessert that my childhood self had tasted.

Since then, I tried other shops, thinking that it was probably just the way it was made that was different. I even bought multiples from the same shops to check for quality assurance. Of course, these were all in vain, for my childhood self tasted that wonderful dessert that my current or even future self will never be able to register.

- fragrantsounds

I’d like to dedicate this post to a very much loved friend of mine.

We have been friends ever since we were 14. I know without a doubt that she will be my friend for the rest of my life, not because we are terribly compatible with each other, but because we both treasure each other equally. Truth be told, she’s an amazing person; she never once gave up on me, not even in the times when I decided to join a different crowd and distanced myself from her. Her unwavering trust in me and endless forgiveness makes me wonder if I am worthy of her friendship.

Recently, this beloved friend of mine has been in an emotional rut. Understandably, it is something that inevitably happens to everyone during a romantic relationship. However, being on the other side of the globe means that there is nothing I can do but offer an ear to listen to her problems. This feeling of helplessness reminds me of a Chinese proverb saying that the water from afar cannot fight the nearby fire.

So here is my message to you, my dear friend:

I love you very much, and although I say this to you on a regular basis, it will never be enough to express how grateful I am for God to have given us the opportunity to be friends. No matter what happens, don’t spend too long agonising over a guy. I’m not sure if you remember saying this to me, but I’m going to repeat it back to you. A man who makes you cry is not worth it, and the man who’s worth crying for would never do so. Of course, it’s easily said but hard to accomplish. I understand the feeling of wanting to find excuses for everyone’s behaviour, including mine, because that’s who you are. You’ve always treasured and actively maintained friendships and relationships between people because you cannot bear anger and conflict with people you love. You always place other people before you, sacrificing your well-being and desires for other people, and though it is partially why I respect you so much, there are times that I wish you would think of yourself first. Let him be the one to want to give you surprises. Make him respect you as his partner, you shouldn’t suffer the brunt of his bad moods, especially so early in the relationship.

I know you will be able to get past these problems, and you know I will be praying for you.

Loving you from a land far far away,

-fragrantsounds

After my previous post, I noticed a pretty little announcement on the top of my dashboard informing me of something that would assist with writer’s block. This site would release a prompt every day, sort of like a topic or question, to enable writers to overcome the whole ‘I want to write something but I’m too brain-dead to think of anything to write about’ situation. It sounded very much like something on LiveJournal.com (aptly named “Writer’s Block”), though the name of the site is rather interesting.

Plinky.com.

Prior to clicking on the link, I was certain that this would be a website filled with pink colours and links that would sparkle pink my mouse ran over them. Or perhaps, if I had my speakers on, it would make ‘plink-plink’ sounds when I clicked on anything.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Plinky.com is merely a normal website that allows you to write answers to their questions and share it amongst various servers, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress and other blogging sites. Regardless, it looks rather promising, and is a fairly good method of expanding the topics that are usually written in a blog.

- fragrantsounds

Semester break is officially over. My desk is already filled with notes and ‘extra reading’ I should be completing, as well as a extremely tempting canvas bag filled with anticipation of my two-day trip to Sydney. Tomorrow will be the day I fly down to Sydney to watch a Ne-yo concert, hopefully watch Inception at the IMAX, and go to the Taronga Zoo.

But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. It has been a while since my previous entry, and there is much to record for future memories purposes.

The first trip of the holiday was to Fraser Island, which was a beautiful place to go to. It is a national treasure and conservation area, where crocodiles, dingoes and multiple species of birds were seen regularly. The entire island was made out of sand, and to this day, no one really understands how this island was created. Of course, considering we had went during the winter season (as it was cheaper), we missed out on much of the sunbathing and swimming activities one would expect to do on an island made of sand.

We also went to the Lamington National Park soon after we returned home for a short day trip, which again was a conservation site. The view and abundance of plants was astounding, and to know that this place was only a two-hour drive away from my home added to its beauty.

Other than these two places, we also spent a day down at the Gold Coast for a barbeque and lazed around on the beach. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, after almost three years of living in Australia, I am still surprised every winter when it is still warm enough to lie on the beach in a bikini to sunbathe.

In between these trips during the holiday, all I really did was sleep and watch TV, which, to be quite honest, was a wondrous change after a semester’s worth of studying.

Today was the second official day of lectures, and though I am fully in my study mode, I have a strong suspicion that it is due to the fact that I’ll be skipping classes for the next two days. To my chagrin, I am hardly feeling any form of guilt or worry, excitement and anticipation trumps all. Sadly, the parents do not share the same sentiment, and it is becoming increasingly tense between us as my departure time approaches. Hopefully when I return, we can pretend that nothing has happened besides the fact that I wasn’t home for one night.

Anyhow, it’s time to get back to the grind (and hopefully receive a phone call).

- fragrantsounds

Call and Response is a movie that was shown in our church tonight, painting a vivid picture of the reality of child slavery, and what role we can play to stop it. It was heartwrenching to hear what these young boys and girls endured every day, being held against their will doing things that they should be protected against. Instead, they are looked upon as commodities, worth nothing but a mere few hundred dollars, more if they were new to the system, resold if the trafficker needed more cash to buy another slave.

As a female, when I hear the words ‘child slavery’, I think of the child sex trade. It is no doubt that it is the fastest growing criminal trade in the world. A particularly heartbreaking moment was when a girl was interviewed, and she said that she had been there for 6 years, and she counted up to 1000 men that she serviced in one year. She then told the reporters to do the math, because she didn’t know how to calculate how many men that equaled to over 6 years. Another story was from the journalist himself. He said that a good journalist needed to be able to watch from the sidelines and not get involved within the actual event, but he made an exception when he decided to buy two young girls from the brothel. The price was USD$150 and $203 for complete ownership. He then escorted them back to their villages, and a beautiful tearful reunion was witnessed, for the girls’ families had believed their daughters to be dead. Yet when the journalist returned a few days later, he was told that one of the girls had ran away and returned to the brothel. The social stigma of feeling ‘dirty’ and the dependence these girls had on the drugs that they were given to create an insatiable addiction meant that they had nowhere to go but these brothels, where they could service up to 20 men a day.

However, we must remember that it is not simply the problem of a child performing sexual acts, but that they are held against their will and threatened with violence if they did not submit to the cruelty. In the documentary, we could see that some of the girls were caged with no form of escape, some even chained to the bed. It was said that a brothel had burned down once, and two girls who were chained to their beds died in the fire.

Of course, the child sex trade is not the only form of human trafficking. Children who are abducted and brainwashed to be terrorists, dying for a seemingly unknown cause; adults and children who are tricked into leaving their hometown in search for a better job, only to find themselves slaving away on a farm or factory with no end in sight; these are all happening around us, and they are happening now. A family spent four generations as slaves on a cotton picking farm in the United States all because their great-grandfather had borrowed $5 from the landowner. Because the landowner/slave-owner kept dishing out excuses about providing housing for the family and interest rates, the following generations have had been slaving at the farm to pay off that $5 debt.

These are stories that many of us, if not all of us, will have heard of in the past. Perhaps we have been so desensitised by statistics and the mere vastness of the problem that we simply accept it. Perhaps we are so privileged that these problems are not our problems, it seems that these bad things only happen to other people, not to us. Lest we forget, when there is no demand, there can be no supply; traffickers are treating humans as commodities for one reason – the trafficking trade is a profitable trade. Lest we forget, this is not a cultural problem, it is a criminal act. Lest we forget, it is sustained anger and rage that an entire community needs to feel in order for a revolution to occur.

I planned to post websites and projects that are available for everyone to participate in, but that was before I knew of how much one could achieve by simply typing ‘end child slavery’ into any search engine. So I end on this note, and I hope that anyone who stumbles upon this post will take what I have written to heart, and together, we can make a difference.

Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy. - Proverbs 31:8-9

Being on holiday is like a sea breeze on a sunny day. Refreshing.

The lovely coincidence that the end-of-financial-year sales are on during my holidays makes the days pass so much quicker.

Here is what I bought the other day:

My first ever Country Road bag! I had wanted to purchase the Chocolate Twill styled bag, alas, the shop did not have it in store, and I wouldn’t be caught dead walking out of the mall without a single purchase after the long trip to get there.

After buying this bag, my sister and I decided to venture around to see if we could take advantage of all the discounted items. During this time, we found a “new-concept store” that had opened recently, called Typo. Beautiful mugs and stationery are sold there, and things that caught our eyes were the pencil holders shaped like a hand and their pencil clips carved in the shapes of animals and people. It reminded me of the Muji shop in HK, a mixture between delicate simplicity and pure ingenuity. Alas, I refrained from buying anything except for a weekly planner with headings like “Shit to do”, I was entertained by my sister running around and shoving as many things as possible into her arms.

From now onwards, I know what else I can celebrate on a regular basis. Not only is Sunday a day of prayer and worship, it is also the day that I was born on. God bless us all.

-fragrantsounds

Hoorah, it’s holidays!

Not only have I completed exams for this semester, I am now officially half-way through my course, and it feels like I can finally begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The past two and a half years has been amazing, I have learnt so many things, not only academically, but also about myself, and I know that my future journeys will be filled with fascination and intrigue.

-fragrantsounds

Taking a breather from reality, something which I’ve been doing increasingly more often as my exam approaches. Quite counterproductive, if you think about it. There is increased stress resulting from the lack of progress made, which leads to self-discouragement allowing me to bring my mouse to that lovely icon sending me to the beautiful world called The Internet. I’ve noticed that I can spend quite some time on the internet, though at the end of my ‘little break’, I can hardly recall anything that could be classified productive done in that period. Which ultimately leads to another bout of stress due to being behind the study schedule.

Vicious cycle, I tell you.

Future me, it would be quite profitable to discover some way to curb procrastination. However, keep in mind to horde that information for oneself and selected few so you’ll always be one of the more efficient people in the workforce.

As quoted from Psalm 4:5, “Offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord”, I shall remove myself from the temptation of The Internet, and trust in the Lord that I shall fare reasonably well for my exam.

At least, that’s what I think the psalm’s trying to tell me.

-fragrantsounds

Writing a blog entry is never an easy task for me, save for the incoherent rants and meme’s that are copied-and-pasted from other sites.

Starting a completely new blog entry, however, cuts the cake. The mere thought of what the first post symbolises frightens me. This is the beginning. The beginning is where one returns to after a long day, wondering what it was all about, thinking how a series of events followed that one special moment.

Perhaps I will be the only one in this world that will ever read this blog, perhaps the ones who stumble across this page will roll their eyes and say: “what a silly child, it is simply the first entry to a blog, what’s the fuss?”

In my -admittedly limited- years, I feel that people value the end as opposed to the beginning. The sighs of relief when that love story is complete with “And they lived happily ever after. The End”, the cries of joy at a graduation ceremony, the finishing of that 100m sprint are what everyone can remember. Yet, the beginning of a new school, new job, new relationship are more often than not tainted with feelings of fear, anxiety and apprehension.

Today is no different. I agonised over the decision to open yet another blog, and once that decision was made, the dilemma of choosing a unique username was thrown at me.

But these processes are important to me. The indecisions that come with the beginning is sort of like a test to ensure what one is doing is truly what one desires, and the inevitable end that follows will not be one of regret, but one filled with smiles and memories.

In my previous blogs, I had always actively gave my address to my friends, as a form of communication between them and I. Slowly, I realised that instead of being able to communicate with all my friends, I had begun to withhold information so as to retain privacy. Hence, this blog shall be my sanctuary, and I pray that no one who knows me in the real world will ever find me here.

-fragrantsounds