Isn't it wonderful how recalling old memories can give rise to new ideas?

Let's see... 3rd day of writing and I'm already getting tired, haha. I think it's because Colin kept talking to me for 2+ hours and he kept whining all the time. Literally, whining because he adopted that way of speaking on purpose, while pestering me for information.

On an unrelated note, I realise that some of us Christians may have a lot of head-knowledge when it comes to faith, because we can name this or that situation in the Bible, and we know why there was so and so action taken during so and so time and the meaning of a ton of Greek words. But not all of us have that relationship with God. I am meaning the almost passionate love that one can have for Him. Complete with the whole fireworks thingy. We sometimes get so caught up in learning about God that we forget to love Him. And then, by the time we realise it, we usually don't know how we can get that feeling. Well, maybe you might find it useful to know that when I meet with such a problem, I find that the best way is to sing a hymn. I feel it the most when I'm in the shower and I'm looking out the window (alright, the toilet wasn't constructed very well and I have to keep it to a slit most of the time in order not to be arrested for indecent exposure :p) at the bright beautiful world and then I just want to break into song. (11 years of being a choir member now). I can always get the tune but oftentimes I can't really remember the lyrics. So when I sing with the church choir, I take note of the songs that I particularly like, and then google the lyrics. There's some that I've never been able to find though, like the one that the choir at CTK (Church of Christ the King) sang, "For God so loved the world".

Chorus:

For God so loved the world,

that He gave His only Son,

That whoever believes in Him,

Shall never die, but have eternal life

God did not send His Son into the world

To condemn the world

But that the world might be saved through Him!

I only remember the chorus and the verse. It's the favorite song of Joyce and I when I was attending catechism there and we used to attend Mass together (we can't now because her mom forbade her from attending SFX (St Francis Xavier) because of the foreign worker's dormitory here. Yeah that might be a little overreacting but all mothers have their episodes, just have to live with them, they are our mothers after all). I tried to look it up but there were so many other different songs that I suspect only the choir at CTK sings it. A pity.

Speaking of CTK, while I was still in catechism I saw a poster asking for organists for the choir. I looked for the choir after Mass that time, and was told that they would contact me if they had a slot. I wanted to become one because I knew that I would receive training, and this training would help me advance creatively in my improvisation (I found myself doing the same things over and over again) not to mention that with the constant pressure on organists to play every week, improvisation will soon become second nature, at least I hoped. But the great news is that I am probably going to become an organist at SFX. Then I can hone my improvisation skills.

Oh, for those who are starting to feel weird about all the church hopping, well in the Catholic church every church is the same. You can go to any Catholic church in the world and you will receive the same thing. The order is always the same, and the words. The language may be different, but the words are the same. I particularly love, though, to be able to see the words of the Mass in another language. I've seen it in Chinese so far, as well as sign language. With more languages, you start to get the real meaning of it all. Because some words can take on a certain connotation in a language, or you may think that a word isn't literal because you thought it had taken a connotation when in fact it hadn't. So it's a new discovery. So far I've read the Bible in English, bits of it in Chinese and Italian (hey I needed a book to learn Italian, so what's a free Italian book you can get anywhere? The Italian Bible. haha) umm... I digress. Anyway you always get the same thing no matter which Catholic church you go to. Only the sermons and the hymns they choose to use are different, really. The others all mean the same thing. If you know the Mass well in English, you understand it all in Chinese as well. In fact, it starts to carry a certain poetic meaning, especially in Chinese which is a poetic language. The way Chinese is used, it's economy of words, conveys more in less words compared to English, and I think that just makes it so poetic. Chinese has always been the language of emotions for me. Yes I use English far more than Chinese and I always dream in English, but while English is the language of the head, Chinese is the language of the heart. Least, that's how I feel. I digress again. This Easter I missed the morning services and couldn't have time for the evening ones, so I went to one in the afternoon that I didn't know was in Chinese but that was okay since I understand everything anyway. The congregation was made up of a surprising number of singaporeans, even young ones. Well alright. I was the only non-oldie there other than a guy who was a son dragged along by his mom. Haha. (I knew because they were sitting just behind me)

Colin has been teasing me about my old 'Karen Potassium Hydroxide' moniker that was first given to me in sec sch by my chem lab partner because guess what, we were both KOH :D What that means, is that our surnames were both Koh. I had the interesting alliteration but I liked her name better because it had a special spelling (at least I thought it was special at the time) of Rebekah. She and I were part of a loose clique in our music/arts class, that I recall was made up of her, me, Lucie, Jessie and Yu Yang. Now that I think of it, we were pretty international. Only me and Rebekah were born in Singapore. Lucie in Czech Republic, Jessie (her birth name is Tran) in Vietnam, and Yu Yang in Shanghai, China. I haven't seen them for a long time. Organising an meetup is kinda difficult when you have to go across borders. The only one I met recently was Rebekah because she also studies in NUS, Business school and we met at arts the other time but she was in a hurry. I think fondly of her still . Her father was the pastor of the Calvary Baptist church just beside Cedar and she brought me there once and I felt odd. Haha. But still, her goodness, as well as the inherent goodness of the many Christians that I got to know over the course of my life, was one of the contributing factors of my own conversion. They had a real conviction about their faith, but it was never pushy, which I really appreciated.

Hmm... I slept really really late last night and was woken up at 11.30 am by my mom calling home, asking me to learn a language as my external module instead of taking biology last year (a waste of time, I agree) and literature this year (they say it's a waste of time, I completely disagree), but language is really not easy to learn and requires a lot of effort. I'd rather take another arts module or something. When I told my older bro and mom over lunch that I had taken literature this semester, their reaction was unanimously, "for what?". I resisted the urge to call them heathens because it would be rude. Sure, science and maths are important, and when I was young I had dreams of becoming a scientist (until my awful maths during sec 2 streaming made that dream pretty much impossible, which was why I went into music stream) but the older I get, the more I am realising the great value of the arts subjects. The government is so actively pushing for the science subjects it seems that everyone in sec sch and jc just wants to do something science related, and the arts stream in jc is very often laughed at for being the stream that people go to when they want to enter a certain jc but don't meet the cut for the science stream of that school. In jc, I always observed that the people chronically skipping classes were almost always those who were of the arts stream, which didn't do wonders for their reputation. But now I do understand that they were probably the first ones to understand the limitations of education, and not necessarily that they were bumming off. Laugh at the science stream fellows sweating over their H2 maths homework, memorising reams of equations and formulas that they will never use in their working life. I laugh myself at my utter stupidity at taking H2 maths (really, what Were you thinking??). That is a mistake that I might have regretted forever, but I no longer regret now because, that stupid subject is gone forever from my life *glares*

Hmm... I would very much like to write more but my brain is failing me. I'll leave a joke here as told to me by one of my fellow choir friends.

My friend described our ex choir conductor NK and said that he is someone whom, if you die and go to hell, you see the Devil there, and this guy with a pitchfork is saying to NK 'get behind me Satan!' and NK says 'ok!'. Probably only a person from ajchoir would get that joke, but well this Is my blog so so long I understand it it's alright :p