Thanks to a post by cassandraclare and some really fantastic writing tips from Jeff Gerke, I have come to a decision.

Well... a few conclusions, and a few decisions. Sort of.

*****

Nothing is impossible. But not everything must be proved possible.

I will not be a failure if I haven't published a full-fledged book (i.e. something more than 50,000 words) before I hit 30. But there's nothing to stop me from dreaming--or trying.

I am neither a failure nor a hypocrite for deciding that my earlier declarations to finish the first draft of Dreamseeker, the novel, by 31 December 2008 were foolish and hasty.

I am not ill-disciplined for deciding that I don't need to put a clear deadline to the book's completion; rather, I am being cautious and more self-aware.

I will give free rein to my maniacal desire to continue interest in writing fanfiction, because it is good practice.

Even when I don't seem to have "good/great" ideas, I will write something every day. Anything. Prose, poetry, lyric... anything. And I will post them--though the readership may be restricted.

It is neither stupid nor wrong to give my (future) music album(s) the same title(s) as my (future) book(s).

*****

There! Done.

If you got nothing out of that except the fact that I will not be finishing the draft of Dreamseeker this year, well... *shrugs*

Yet eighteen days till worlds collide
And realities will shift
You will be no more your own
So soon, you will be his

Yet eighteen days till change occurs
In both this realm and that
Where God the Triune sits in state
To witness as you step

Into a life where two are one
Yet separate and whole
Into a place where power flows
In measures yet unknown

In eighteen days you bid farewell
To childhood and the old
As heaven’s graces fall like dew
Upon your head and his

And we your friends will stand and call
Divinity from air
Into a covenant new-made
To guide you on through time.

There’s so much I haven’t said, in the nine days since I last posted. So many things to cover:

1. Jenny and Han’s wedding
2. The special anointing oil service
3. An important conversation with my mother
4. The special meeting with Ps Dan
5. My girls’ stage debut coming up this Sunday
6. A God-incidental conversation with an ex-classmate
7. Bridesmaid dress fittings for Terra’s wedding

And there’s still guitar-shopping with Esther Ho, little Elyssa and Elessar tonight! And Findecáno Helyanwë and Galadriël deciding to come for the Arrow career seminar tomorrow!

Perhaps I will find time to do it over the weekend… but don’t count on it. Plus, I’ve done practically nothing where the book project is concerned. Gah.

Disclaimer: Although this post was in some ways provoked by a friend's (who shall remain unnamed for reasons of sensitivity) entry, I must state clearly from the uptake that this topic has been part of my list of "things to rant about" for many, many years. No offence is meant to that friend. Also, all opinions expressed are my own, and while they may not hold water in time to come, well, as far as I've experienced and reasoned over my 25 years, they're pretty much true. Anyway, they are OPINIONS, not gospel, and I'll thank you not to react as though I made to declare them as such.

There are many things I dislike, and many of them come in the form of particular questions.

One question I particularly detest, with utmost distaste, is "What if, in XX number of years/months, you find out/realise that XYZ is not the right man/woman for you?"

Why? Because there is never going to be a right answer to that question. Because answering that question never brought happiness to anyone. Because that question has never, and will never, come from the lips of someone who's learned the hard way that this is one of those questions that should be chucked inside the trash bin labelled "wrong questions to ask" and left there for all eternity.

Firstly, while I used to believe it, long ago when I was very young and very foolish, I now know in my less young, less foolish state that there is no such thing as a "right one" for anyone. You may argue that looking for "the right one" is subtly different from loudly proclaiming that you're waiting for "God's perfect choice for you" (which obviously doesn't exist), but really, in essence, it isn't. It's the same old thing, really, and it's never going to help you to be happy.

Seriously, you will never find "the right one" for you. You can only ever find "the best possible choice, to your eyes, at that particular point in life that you choose to make a decision".

Secondly, if you're considering not giving someone with whom you experience mutual attraction a chance because of a murky future XX years down the road, what makes you think that it makes any difference if it's XX years, XX months, XX weeks, XX days, XX minutes, XX seconds, or right now? Just as you can never guarantee that someone will improve in time to come, so you can never guarantee that someone will get worse. Which leads directly into the third point.

Thirdly, a future together is based on trust, and trust in the now. Life's all about faith, or haven't you realised? You live in faith that you'll wake up in the morning. You go to sleep in faith that there actually will be a morning. When it comes to another unique individual, well, you just have to take things on trust, don't you? And while you can't trust another human completely to never break your heart, you definitely can trust GOD Almighty to keep you from being shattered beyond repair.

Fourthly, relationships aren't welded based on the premise that both partners are equals in terms of intellect, spirituality, finances, etc. etc. etc. Equality, or at least the semblance of it, does exist, commonly enough that many people think that it ought to stand for a One True Ideal. But that's just plain unrealistic.

I believe relationships grow best when two individuals come together in mutual trust, agreeing to work things out/through with the goal of seeing each other reach his/her highest potential. I believe that the decision-maker in going forward in a relationship is the amount of potential you both see in each other -- not the faults. The faults are going to need acceptance, not fretting over, although you definitely are going to be spending years upon years doing just so. That is what makes the decision that makes a powerful promise upon which a strong, stable relationship can be founded.

Yes, a meme, taken off mindstorm83's journal because it's in the middle of the night and I'm maudlin and sleepless.

*****

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of whenever "today" was when this meme started going 'round).
- bold what you have read.
- italicise that you started but couldn't finish.
- strike through what you couldn't stand</strike>.
- add an asterisk to those you've read more than once.
- underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment*
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma*
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations*
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World*
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility*
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse*
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Miserables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse 5
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame*
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Well, I'll be! It seems I've read more stuff than expected! :P Now, time to improve on the list. :D

It pisses me off no end when Personages think they can pick and choose who is allowed to be excused from last minute work and who ought to expect to always have to accommodate and handle last minute work.

Especially one Personage, who really has proved time and again that he is not interested in anything besides getting the job done, and that only to his own specifications, while the rest of the world who is working just as hard, or harder, can go hang.

Whoa.

We are now officially one year — exactly three hundred and sixty-five days — away from our wedding.

*wibbles in anticipation*

I never realised till now that not having my own personal notebook/laptop/computer at home translates directly into zero blog posts for the relevant period.

I type these words in the office. :S

And it’s terrible, because so many exciting things have been happening that I would love to tell those who read my blog(s), but I can’t! I can’t even blog in the office because I’ll usually be rushing work, and if I supposedly stay late, I usually am working late, y’know?

Anyway. Let’s hope that Pearlyn comes home soon. She’s been revived—that’s just one of the news. Just that… we don’t have the required applications and programmes that I need in order to function. Re-format, y’see?

Ciao.

I have discovered a new (as in, new to me) SF author — Arthur C. Clarke.

Gotta go look for his stuff. Self-declared atheist he may be, but it looks like good SF, and that’s what matters when it comes to reading.

To me, at least. :P

First items on the list:
1. The Star
2. The Nine Billion Names Of God

Now, just have to get around to looking them up…

Funniest rant I've seen in a long time (seen on MSN):

The shit that happens to Bunny is super high powered corrosive technicolour birdshit.

I nearly laughed myself silly.

My little Pearlyn (that's my iBook) crashed yesterday following a routine software update. :(

I think she's a little too old, that's why -- she's about 10, 11 years old now? Still using the old hard disk, but running on OS X (Tiger)... Should've known that constant updating would tax her too far.

But it's cool in a way, 'cos it just proves that Macs last, y'know? A decade already, and this is her first known crash... And it's not even a real crash. More like a system overload.

Hopefully she can be revived. As soon as possible. :S Got a colleague who's gonna try working her over tonight, perhaps by firewiring (yes, I know that's not a real word) her to his newer, more powerful MacBook.

...he ever said (so far):

I don't care where I live, as long as I know that I'm living with you.

-- Sunday, 11 May 2008

CALEB'S SONG
(Joshua 14, especially verse 12)

The challenge now is here –- What cause is there to fear?
I will follow to the place where God has called.
And though the task ahead is great, there is no need to wait;
God's command is "Conquer cities fenced and walled."

This mountain I shall own, but not for me alone -–
For my children I shall claim this promised land.
Because the Word of God is sure, the future is secure;
All the power we need is in God's mighty hand.

Take courage and be strong –- we'll sing the victor's song,
All the blessings God has promised we may claim.
So let us hasten to obey, our Saviour leads the way;
He will help us win the battle for His name.

Give me this mountain, give me this mountain;
To the land where giants grow,
That's the place I want to go.
Give me this mountain, this very mountain,
I shall conquer in the power of the Lord.

-- Frank Garlock

It occurred to me recently that it’s really odd how people in general refer to a woman’s wedding day as her single most important and beautiful day, the one and only day in her lifetime on which she will look that beautiful, and how she should really make sure she has as many records of it as possible because most likely, she’ll never look as beautiful ever again.

Why should that be the case?

To my mind, on a woman’s wedding day, she looks the most beautiful that she has ever looked in her life up till then. Thereafter, it only makes sense that she should only continue to look more and more radiantly lovely as the days go on.

Why?

Well, partly because all the stress/pressure/anxieties/concerns unique to the dating/courtship period are finally over. These include, non-exhaustively, figuring out how to handle mutual financial investments (including the bridal stuff and the house) from two very separate and distinct accounts, having to plan circles around two enormously different families and their unique cultures, as well as two different addresses (late night travel is a bitch if you don’t drive, and a bitch even if you do), and having to synchronise two individuals’ different timings (and self-timing systems), being carried out in two different locations, prior to meetings.

All that honestly doesn’t leave a person time to relax, get lots of beauty sleep, pamper oneself with aromatherapy, healthy home-cooked food, anxiety-free trips home from later-than-usual dinners/parties, etc. Add to that the familial issues of asserting one’s independence and autonomy without irreparably straining relations prior to the wedding, and you have a Really Good Bunch of Reasons Why You Don’t Look Your (Potential) Best.

Once you live in your own place, with the right and authority to do as you please with and in it, and no longer need to spend extra time/energy/money on travelling between two locations all the time (the guy may spend more in theory, but I think if you really love your man you’ll want to help defray the costs, and don’t you also feel the strain in other ways? e.g. guilt), it’ll definitely start to show in your body and on your face.

Then of course, there’s the whole thing about how God loves weddings and how marriage is so totally His idea, and how living a blessed married life well-anchored in grace is basically Heaven On Earth, and there you have it — a set of Very Good Reasons Why You Should Be Progressively Looking Better. Oh, and yes, without make-up.

To my mind, a Radiant Glow Of Blissful Contentment is far better than the best that the best bridal make-up artist can do. Or stylist. Or gown. Or whatever.

Anyway. It’s almost 3am. I’m not sure how much of this is rambling. Heh.

I’m so excited! Alatariel Tinúviel- Telperiën announced at the meeting last night that she’s pregnant! :D

She’s two months along and looking well; isn’t it wonderful how expectant mothers acquire this aura of serenity and contentment, and start to develop this very becoming glow about them? :) She’s just as bouncy as ever, but with a sort of unconscious care that lends her movements an added grace.

Alatariel’s baby bump isn’t showing yet, but she let us see her recent ultrasound scans in an album of sorts — the little one is now about 3cm long, with a crazy pulse rate of about 200 beats per minute! And by November, he/she will be normal-baby-sized and ready to enter our world. I’ll never understand how God does mad things like that. I guess it’s enough to stand and marvel. :D

I’m particularly excited because Alatariel is a good friend, someone I’ve known for years, who I respect and look up to as a leader, and yet remains someone that I am comfortable with and consider one of my peers (yes, yes, it’s all very self-contradictory and complicated, I know). Also, she got attached to her then-boyfriend, Camthalion Tinúviel, on the same day that Elessar and I got attached (18 July 2005).

Now she’s married (as of 24 November 2007) and she’s going to have a baby. That’s like… Wow!

There’s no doubt in my mind that Alatariel and Camthalion will make excellent, if Very Unorthodox, parents. Lord, keep their family tight within your hands, surrounded with a special hedge of favour and protection. Great shall be their shalom, because You are with them!

It is the nature of things

To fall sideways between the slanting shadows of
Dark and light
Scrabbling there for a grip on the
Everyday quarrel between the open and the
Closed, where doors are neither locked nor open but
Broken, or ajar, or blown up, or closed but untried, and their keys
Lost, buried, nonexistent, wrong—

It is the nature of things

To lie weary and shaken on a pillow that’s wet with
Your fears
When hours ago it was victory you claimed, and the
Cheering figures beside you said their
Congratulations, and swore they would give of their
Everything, to do what you did, and the sunshine of favour was
Bright in your eyes and you
Smiled through the rainbows in front of your eyes—

It is the nature of things

And well we would do to remember.

Step Out In Faith
Forerunner. </i>Those Who Dare.</i>

We plan what we can do
How 'bout trying something new
That goes beyond our human strength
All this talk is really cheap
Unless we take that leap
And see what happens with God's hand

Oh we talk of greater things
Of higher ground we sing
But we enjoy our comfort zone
Oh my friends we've got to see
We're not filled with timidity
Let's be willing to take the unknown

Step out in faith
And see His promises come true
Step out in faith
See the Lord at work in you
For without faith in Him
We can't be pleasing Him
So step out in faith!

Join the international protest. Join the 24-hour Content Strike!

Friday, 21 March 2008, midnight GMT to midnight GMT.

Which translates to this period in SG: 8am, Friday, 21 Mar 08, to 8am, Saturday, 22 Mar 08.

I am serious.

Read these links and those in the previous post to find out why:

By beckyzoole: Content Strike: Friday March 21

By beckyzoole: Why are we holding the Content Strike?

By evendia: We are Livejournal

By christinex1001: Power to the People!

By naamah_darling: "This just keeps getting better and better." <-- Now, this is a good read!

Longer list of timezone info, by beckyzoole: Strike Times

And, the by-now (in)famous InsaneJournal post: http://stewardess.insanejournal.com/228245.html?format=light

I know I'm a little slow on the uptake where LJ-is-shitting-bricks snarling is concerned, but I suppose everyone starts somewhere.

Oh, I know that stupid things were happening. Have been for a pretty long time. I vaguely read some of the related posts, and I have people on my F-list who follow these things. However, I was never really affected... until I stumbled upon this article while randomly surfing...

I'm starting to give moving some real thought, especially after re-reading this other article. I still think LJ is good for me, and I have too many posts here that I consider valuable, to trash this journal, but I am seriously beginning to consider my options.

Have any of you people read this load of crap? I am now officially pissed off.

While it is true that I intend to stay on at LJ for as long as possible, seeing how I moved here from blogspot precisely because I found it (well it was, at the time) more flexible, user-friendly and open, I'm now wondering if I should resurrect my old blogspot account, or download my entire LJ, and move it (although it might be painstaking work) to my secretly prepared alternate account elsewhere, thanks to this link: http://fawx.com/software/ljarchive I've not had the chance to confirm that this thing works, yet, but I'll take any chance I get to give myself a headstart/back-up plan.

I mean, come on! I am outraged!

This is the song that Elessar and I wrote for Anna and Gerry's wedding. :)

*****

Verse 1
I cannot remember
The very moment when
I changed my mind about you
When I knew somehow
That we would make it through

And it may not come to mind
How my heart unfolded to the thought
That you and I somehow would find
A way to touch the sky

But I know this much is true
I am not the same without you
And I know this life could not be danced
If not for Jesus Christ

Verse 2
Now we stand together
Changed forever by
The goodness of our Father
And I know that He
Will surely bring us through

And although we do not know
What the days and years ahead may bring
Through Him we know, though cold winds blow
The sun will always shine

So today we're standing here
Proud to tell of how He's changed us
That the world may know this life we dance
We dance with Jesus Christ

Chorus
Three-way dance
Two could never dance alone
It's He who taught our feet to dance
And set our hearts aglow
Three-way dance
Right before the Father's throne
And in His eyes, I see us rise
To glories yet unknown

In this three-way dance.