The minor fall, the major lift

This song has been recorded by many artists from simple solo guitar composition to a grandeur orchestra, solo singer or choir. A singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist, one of the most celebrated artists of all time, Leonard Cohen was the one who composed this beautiful tune - there's a song-lyrics version of this.

I remember, me, walking across Purdue campus over a Christmas eve in effin cold Indiana winter tuning in to Chris Botti's Live in Boston playlist. It was the first time I heard Hallelujah. It is peaceful, mellow, simple, and very intimate for me, at least, personally.

Merry Christmas.

If

Have you ever felt that things are moving quickly relative to time when everything goes as planned? Have you ever felt that when you have no plan you're twisting and turning in an empty field that could be such a relaxing and chilling moments if that is what you're looking for (it's planned right?) also a moment of lost?

Today, I woke up around 5:30 and stared up to the sky as my bed is positioned facing three paned windows next to each on a curvy edge. I thought I was on a moment of lost. It could be in a recovery mode, emotionally. And the goal is total recovery - to come out better than I was before.

I got to the gym around 6:30. Got into the locker room, placed my stuff in the locker and started to warm up on the treadmill. 1 hour 30 minutes later, I found myself in a total stupidity (or blaming my mental sickness) on not bringing along my work clothes and shoes, after taking a shower. Putting back my boxer and running shoes, I drove back home to get the clothes. I NEVER forget such things before. May be this is what recovery mode doing to my routine.

Medically or psychologically speaking, some patients heal quickly and feel immediate relief. For others the healing happens gradually, and it's not until months or even years later that they realize they don't hurt anymore. So the challenge after any treatments is to be patient. But if you can make it through the first weeks and months, if you believe that healing is possible, then you can get your life back. But that's a big if.

I wish I had a river

This is officially my Christmas and New Year's tune this year. You know that I like it so much. When I found it, I straight away send the link to your inbox. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

It's coming on christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

But it don't snow here
You know, It stays pretty green
I'm going to make a lot of money
Then I'm going to quit this crazy scene
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

I wish I had a river so long
I'd teach my feet to fly
Cause' I made my baby cry
I made her say goodbye

She tried hard to help me
You know, she put me at ease
And she loved me all naughty
Made me weak in the knees
Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

I'm so hard to handle
I'm selfish and I'm sad
Now I've gone and lost the best baby
That I've ever had
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
Cause' I made my baby cry
I made her say goodbye
I made her say goodbye

It hurts

Because of you, in gardens of blossoming
Flowers I ache from the perfumes of spring.
I have forgotten your face, I no longer
Remember your hands; how did your lips
Feel on mine?

Because of you, I love the white statues
Drowsing in the parks, the white statues that
Have neither voice nor sight.

I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice;
I have forgotten your eyes.

Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound to
My vague memory of you. I live with pain
That is like a wound; if you touch me, you will
Make to me an irreperable harm.

Your caresses enfold me, like climbing
Vines on melancholy walls.

I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to
Glimpse you in every window.

Because of you, the heady perfumes of
Summer pain me; because of you, I again
Seek out the signs that precipitate desires:
Shooting stars, falling objects.

Cold Turkey

Since I started watching the show almost 2 years ago, Brothers and Sisters never disappoints me at all. The latest episode was THE best episode ever, I have ever seen.

With this holiday season mood, in which I found myself feeling too much excitement - more than Hari Raya, the cast comes out with a total shenanigan episode. It was highly entertaining - as Justin was high in the dream sequence snorting powdered sugar (yes, seriously?). Kevin and Kitty have pulled out the beast freak-out reactions and siblings moments in the show's history - in the funniest, witty and over-the-top way!

All the twists and turns are coming out in funny ways except the discovery on how Saul got infected with HIV and his soothing rendition of a Hebrew prayer in the last scene.

Team it up!

They train risk modelers slowly. They watch us practice on simple-text-book data on Excel and then small projects on SPSS Modeler. They grill us relentlessly. They raise us like children and eventually they take a cold hard boot and kick us out of the next.

I have two interns came in yesterday - two Jeffs to be specific. One of them is working under me. It definitely reminds me of those early episodes of Grey's Anatomy.

Bailey goes;

I have five rules. Memorize them. Rule number one, don't bother sucking up. I already hate you, that's not gonna change. Trauma protocol, phone list, pagers, nurses will page you. You will answer every page at a run. A run! That's rule number two. Your first shift starts now and lasts 48 hours. You're interns, grunts, nobodies, bottom of the surgical food chain. You run labs, run orders, work every second night until you drop, and don't complain. On-call rooms. Attendings hog them. Sleep when you can where you can, which brings me to rule number three. If I'm sleeping, don't wake me unless your patient is dying. Rule number four: the dying patient better not be dead when I get there. Not only will you have killed someone, you would have woke me for no good reason. We clear?

I am fairly new to this field and the company. So much to learn. I was really ambitious. Taking notes over first few days, paying attentions to every slides over presentations, and asking every single questions popping out in my mind. All because i want to grow up in this profession and eventually in life. But, I never aware of the reality that lies behind it. Things i might lose, people I might abandon, important dates I might forget along the way.

We all want to grow up. We're desperate to get there. Grab all the opportunities we can to live. We're so busy trying to get out of that mess, we don't think about the fact that it's going to be cold out there. Really freaking cold. Because growing up sometimes means leaving people behind. And by the time we stand on our own two feet, we're standing there alone.

I am making plans

Evan was my soulmate. When he died, you do this thing where you stop making plans because you had plans and there was an accident and your plans dissapear. I just try to get from sun up to sun down. That's as far into the future as I can handle and I've been fine with that, I have, but right now, looking at you, damn, I have all kinds of plans.

Not impressed

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. (That's amazing!)

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of The Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I added my own version - Italic and Bold: Have read and re-reading now!

I am a vegetarian

I still remember reading this to him one summer in Wyoming in an open tent. Me lying on my belly with Tagore's The Gardener in my hands on the piece number 49 and him sitting on a log carving a soon-to-be a horse miniature. He stopped and listened to me.

I hold her hands and press her to my breast.
I try to fill my arms with her loveliness,
to plunder her sweet smile with kisses,
to drink her dark glances with my eyes.
Ah, but, where is it?
Who can strain the blue from the sky?
I try to grasp the beauty, it eludes me,
leaving only the body in my hands.
Baffled and weary I come back.
How can the body touch the flower
which only the spirit may touch?

And he said "Change dark glances to alluring glimpse. And the whole piece will be from me to you"

Now, after two years of his death, I, recently, have read the same piece to somebody. I thought I would not read it to anybody anymore. The person now means something to me. And I keep on telling myself that I will not give up - not a pushy way =p

Love is what counts the most

It was 2 years ago when Evan and I went to Lincoln Park, Chicago getting some climbing gears at Chicago's Recreational Equipment Inc (REI) that we stumbled upon a group of kids, age ranged between 8 to 10, cheerfully playing basketball at a court next to the outlet.

We decided to stop by the court and join them - which thereafter we realized we both suck at basketball when we thought we were good with 'balls' ;-) There were two ladies sitting on a bench on the edge of the court reading newspaper and glancing at us several times when we were with the kids. They were the kids sitters.

A kid, Tommy, was a hyper boy. He would run all over the court chasing the ball without even realizing which side he was playing for. At one point, he was jumping really high that he fell down scratching his knee and bleeding out excessively. I didn't see this such a big deal. Yeah, kids playing, hurting, bleeding, crying, etc. We all have gone through that. One of those memorable experiences. But, the ladies on the bench ran frantically towards us and tell us to stay away from Tommy and do not touch Tommy as Evan was trying to stop the bleeding using his shirt and applying some pressure to the wound. One lady, Emma, took the kid away to a building next to the court while the other, Christine, told the other kids to follow Emma from behind.

Tommy has AIDS. Most of the kids are HIV positive. We were astounded.

Today, in the gym, a usual morning visitor like I am, Heng, was telling me about a funeral he was arranging - he works in funeral business. At one funeral, a sister of the dead, came to him and thank him for conducting a smooth process for her sister. Heng was surprised and eventually humbled for the fact that the sister was referring the dead as her sister rather than brother because she was a transgender.

Evan and I had a very good time with the kids. Smiling and laughing. Emerging into their innocent and fun world. We love the kids. So much to learn from them about love as I could see a sister loving her dead sister.

It boils down to Love. Evan and I do not really care about those kids having AIDS/HIV. With a child eyes, you were more than you see. You're seeing true space. And for the sister, she saw a true space between her and her sister regardless the dead being a transgender. Love is what counts the most.

Happy AIDS day.

Herewith is the link to a site with a great cause regarding AIDS awareness.

Keep A Child Alive

Not Organized

For some reason out of these lives transitions (between College career and Real career), I could not remember the password to my previous blog! The missives

From now on, come and see what I can offer here.