Behind the Scenes

I am not sure how many readers there are of this blog. For those of you who read this, thank you very much for sharing my stories... But it is hard to maintain two blogs. From now on, I intend to focus on just one. So I am migrating to www.luxevanity.blogspot.com.
It will be my fashion/feminine/shopping blog...


Toodles! Mwah <3

I have decided to stop using Singlish for a while. Ever since I got to Singapore, I felt that my English has been constantly deteriorating. My usage of English words, phrases, and idioms has significantly weakened as can be seen in my writings. I have also been stuttering as I speak lines and lines of straight English and have been using the wrong words frequently. I know what they say, that when in Rome, do as the Romans do, but I don’t think I should continue doing it here. My English and my communication skills in general are suffering. I need to put a stop to this.

The first step to curbing my current Singlish addiction is to re-watch Audrey Hepburn’s My Fair Lady. In that movie, Audrey Hepburn plays the role of Eliza Doolittle, a lowly flower girl who is taught proper phonetics and is transformed to a dignified lady. Hopefully, after watching this, my pronunciation can be corrected and I can once again be influenced to start speaking proper English.

The second step is to use proper English in speaking to my Singaporean counterparts. In the past, I have always resolved to using Singlish when talking to them as I feel it helps us communicate better. Luckily, I am able to control what accent I use in speaking to different groups of people. However, I feel that I am slowly losing control, hence, I need to stop and go back to my original accent before it is too late.

Lastly, I need to read more books to brush up on my English writing. I used to be able to write good articles, worthy of being published in newsletters. With my current state of writing, I can’t get my writing anywhere other than my personal blog and diary.

Singlish, I shall bid you goodbye today.

I had a productive shopping spree yesterday at Powerplant Mall @ Rockwell yesterday with my brother and my mom. To put a wonderful end to a great shopping spree, we went to Chelsea Market Cafe at The Fort to eat dinner. (http://chelseamarketcafe.com/menus.html)

I got to taste two very interesting dishes. The first one is risotto balls. It is made up of sticky rice used to make risotto, rolled into a ball coated with breadcrumbs, fried to a crisp, and filled with cheese inside. It was heavenly.

The second one was chocolate dipped crispy bacon waffles. The bacon was fried (or baked, I’m not really sure) to perfection, making it really crispy, after which the top half was dipped in rich chocolate. The combination of sweet and salty was perfect for the palate.

Okay, enough about the food, since that is not the purpose of this blog entry.

While having dinner, I could not help but overhear the conversation of the couple over at the next table. (The tables were very close to one another and not because I was being a busybody!) I am not really sure how the conversation started, but somehow, they ended up talking about how people make choices. The guy made a very good point. He said, “Often times, we don’t know what we want, we only know what we don’t want.”

It made perfect sense. This is so true, especially for us fresh graduates trying to look for a job, or high school students applying to university. We are given so many choices and we try to pick those that we should apply for, and almost always end up applying to a multitude of unrelated positions. Whichever one we get is irrelevant, as long as we get something.

We begin to settle. We no longer want to think about what we really want to do. We are ready to do whatever job it is that we don’t mind doing. We all have a mental list of things that we really don’t want to do, such as be a construction worker, a clerk, a cleaner, and all those dead-end low paying jobs. We will accept everything else.

I guess it is true when my friend told me, “ I really respect you. What you are doing is hard, but at least you know what you want to do. Most of us don’t even know what we want.”

I have said countless times that my mom has been neglected by the times. She has long been surpassed by her peers in terms of economic stability and success in life. In high school and university, she was the type to be voted “Most Likely To Succeed, “ but look at her now.

A lot of her friends have now become citizens of the world, well-read, well-traveled, financially independent, with assets to their names, whereas my mom is still tied up in this little dilapidated hellhole.

I have been thinking…. And something struck me. Is it fair for me to make claims that I just made? Is she really less successful?

It all boils back down to how I define success to begin with. Is success characterized by the house you live in, the car you drive, the places you visit, the people you interact with, or the size of your bank account?

In the past, I would have readily said yes. Even until today, a part of me would say yes. But after much thought, it dawned on me that us children could have caused her to be how she is now. Her friends might seemingly lead better lives, but who among them has 4 children? A lot of them are single, only needing to fend for themselves.

Raising all four of us siblings is an achievement enough. She not only raised us but ensured that we all end up capable, responsible, and ready for the world. She is trying hard to teach us to be self-sufficient. During gatherings, we may not show up in the best car, nor are we proud of where we live, nor have fantastic tales of our visits to the renowned cities of the world, but when you see us, you know that this is a family that is able to make it big. That alone is a point of envy that cannot be easily emulated.

Had she not had to provide for four spoiled children, she will have a lot more resources available for her and my dad to enjoy more luxuries in life. I am sure she is not going to fall behind her peers. But she chose to have a family, and successfully raised a family.

Not a lot of assets to her name (most of them are tied up with my grandfather), she has 4 priceless possessions that will forever have her mark. All four of us siblings who inherited her brains and her vocal chords….. our net present value added up is definitely higher than that of any of her friends at this point in time. :P This may be a fairer way of judging the accomplishments of a person. I guess she is still very well in the running of being “Most Likely to Succeed.”

The next time I complain about my mom’s “failures”, I better bite my tongue because I am probably one of the principle reasons for those.

DRAMA

I don’t know if it is because of the very boring life I lead or because of the gazillion shows that I watch, but until now, drama is my best friend. Don’t get me wrong. But unlike those in the tragic lives of people less fortunate than us, all the drama in my life is imaginary. (at least I now think so.)

Whenever I get lonely or have nothing going on in my head, I try to fill it with all kinds of ridiculous thoughts, most of which are centered around self-pity and the unfairness of the world. My most recent heart-to-heart with my friend was about the unfair advantage that others are bestowed in life, and why I was never given those advantages. At that point in time, I felt like I was making sense. I even ranted for hours to my friend over YM. Thinking about it now, my friend must think I was insane, because I was talking rubbish the whole time. My arguments were more than flawed and I was using my speed typing skills to trump the conversation than with reason. (To my dear friend, I’m sorry you had to go through that. I can imagine your agony at the other end of the line… The next time I do it, feel free to go offline!)

I have been contemplating my life and my behaviour… the things I do, and why I am so unsuccessful in social situations and there it hit me. Who wants to be with a drama queen? Nobody is looking down on me or is discriminating against me or whatever. It’s all in my head. As far as others are concerned, I am equally, if not far more fortunate than majority of the human population. I just don’t know how to take advantage of it. I decided to think the worst of people, and believe more in the evils of the world. I created my own hell, and made my own life a living hell.

To the people who suffered from my drama, please accept my sincerest apologies. I am a nice and bubbly person in real life. It’s just when I am faced with people I do not know well, I assume that the person refuses to talk to me and that I am not worth anybody’s time. I always assume that people are after something and I don’t have that something. I promise to change…

I entered a new phase in my life and it is time for a fresh start. The first thing in order: Drama extinguisher.

This year marks my 21st year of existence. Contrary to the past 20 years, I have actually decided to commemorate this momentous event with a celebration. By now, the event would have passed for a week, but as I was going through the guestbook, the events of that night all came back to me…..

Yes, I am a vain person and I have always wanted a quinceanera (sweet 16), or the debutante ball (turning 18), but I never got it. Nobody was going to do it for me, so I thought, what the heck, I’d better do it for myself. Hence, this year, I decided to throw myself a masquerade party. For a night, we were all princes and princesses, all dressed up, albeit not as formally if it were held in a hotel ballroom, but pretty formal nevertheless.


It felt great. Of course, there are the usual frustrations of being reminded that I had to create my own celebration, otherwise, nobody would have celebrated. Getting teary-eyed as I blew up the balloons one by one, fretting over how to decorate my place, which décor to buy and all that, but the night proved to be very memorable. I have no regrets.

Although most of them did not show it, I realized that a lot of my friends are really very sweet, and I was deeply touched by the little nothings that they did for me.

Preparing a guestbook, baking a two-tiered cake, dressing up, going out of the way to buy masks, the thoughtful presents, and of course the photos that serve as remembrance that I will cherish forever – each one made me really feel like a princess for the night. And I felt blessed.



I was glad I had the party. It was a good way to round up my wishes and prepare to aspire for more, dream even bigger dreams, and ultimately, to grow up. No more princess dreams. No more waiting for the knight in shining armour. No more damsel in distress. No more Cinderella stories.

I am 21, and officially a grown up, legal to drink and gamble in most places I know. No more excuses. I had to stand up and take responsibility. I had to stop blaming fate or destiny. I had to take charge. Because from now on, I will be held fully accountable for my actions. I have officially entered the real world…..

I just finished watching a re-run of an episode of Oprah on young multi-millionaires. In that episode, she interviewed the twins Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen and two other moguls. Their messages were all the same- You have to do something because you want it, and not for the money. You must get others to pay you for something that you enjoy doing. Follow your passion and money comes after.

This is something that has been said over and over again. All the CEOs who came to give talks in my school have said the same thing. They all ended up finding something that they loved. We all know this, but we don’t necessarily believe it. I also wonder if they all started doing what they loved or do they learn to love what they are doing.

Following your passion requires bravery and confidence, two things that I lack. There is just insufficient support for this kind of idealistic thinking from society. I personally wish I could do that, to only apply for jobs in industries that I am really passionate about and to be headstrong. Sadly, translated into the words of other people, what I am doing is just being plain stubborn.

I am trying to follow my passion, but over these months, I have found it to be extremely difficult to combine it with a real job. That is until today.

This evening, I attended a recruitment talk by LuxAsia which is a distributor for luxury cosmetics, fragrances, and hair products. The CEO himself came down to talk to us, together with the heads of the different businesses. From the talk, I felt that the company is being run like a family and I can feel the warmth between the employees. (so much better than my grandpa’s so-called family business) From the description of the job scope, the industry, the culture, it all feels like I chanced upon a gold mine. Have I really found something that I can really be happy with and actually have a chance at it? I hope this is it!

But having said that, I have applied to a lot of jobs so far, not all of which I am entirely passionate about. At the end of the day, practicality still reigns supreme. You need to find something to help you survive. We can’t always keep focusing on the self-actualization needs. While we venture out and gamble meet our passion, we also need to prepare Plan B’s as a safety net in case everything just turns out wrong. As sad as it may sound, that is the real world for me. I am risk averse, and I’d love to have something to fall back on, just in case.