the truth is that without home internet i go out more. but now i can blog and tell the world what's going on in london, in life and in my head.

p.s. this new bt service is not faultless. it connects whenever it wants. but at least i am at peace paying money to courteous bt, rather than the cowboy/gagnster isp that is tiscali.

man i miss blogging! my boss gave me the team programme for 2006 today, looks like we'll be working hard.

the pros of this weekend: 2 books finished in 2 days. WAH. i like reading, but i'm never that fast.

the cons of this weekend: i did very little else. (ok i tidied up the flat and fixed my camera) somehow i turned down two invitations so that i could stay put and read. reading is always at odds with going out. but sometimes i have to withdraw and see/hear/read something different and new, something that can get me to think how to better deal with my present and what to do with my future.

saturday: the joy luck club - amy tan
As a result of finishing this, i went to the charing cross library again this morning and lifted all the other amy tan books - lol. The book is made up of small chapters, written on behalf of four mothers and their four daughters, the result is fresh and exciting, you can't get bored. Their stories are of migrating from china to the states and raising first generation american daughters. Immmigration, mothers, daughters, including bits of chinese culture that i face regularly, I found the book totally consuming! The main thing is that all these mothers really want to give the best to their daughters, but somehow the gaps of cultural/political/economic situations that they grow up in are too great to allow good communication between the two generations. Furthermore, the 'americanisation' of the daughters is emphasized in the book through their marriages to white american men, who almost always have trouble impressing the mothers. Cliche, but always interesting.

sunday: shanghai baby - wei hui
i've only just put down the library copy but i want a copy of my own so that i can highlight it! i actually only read about 'shanghai baby' in another book that i was browsing on thursday, with the intention of buying it as a gift. The 'other' book was the 2005 Guardian compilation of the best articles written in the paper this year. One of them was titled 'If i like a guy enough' and was about how relationships work these days in Shanghai. Anyway, that article mentioned 'Shanghai baby' and how it was banned in China but was nevertheless downloaded daily from the web. Banned in China, but here you can even get it at the local library -lol. Well even though the girl has two guys at once and one of them is a drug addict, there are things in the book that i find very relevant. Only child from safe, comfortable family, spoilt in good education, used to being self-sufficient and with a relative sense of security about the future, seeks love, and wants to care for an incredibly sensitive, but depressed guy who loves her completely. The girl is 25 and the author must have been around that age when she wrote the novel. Which is amazing, because most of the books that I pick up are written by middle-aged men. This Wei Hui girl is one of us! 

(p.s. i don't like turning down invites though. i think if i was attached, and the fellow had to say 'i'm very sorry, stella couldn't be with us today because she'd rather stay at home and finish her latest book find!' that probably wouldn't down very well. my book habit feeds my single status and vice versa.)

yesterday at work i made several blunders due to absent-mindedness. but ai hua reminded me of this:

how can you be trusted with looking after people's souls if you can't even be good at more menial work?

true. be very good at what you do, and then god will give you the work that you want.

some thoughts in bullet points

• the world doesn't really need better buildings. the world needs better people.
  
• sometimes i would like to be the psychologist in infernal affairs. sitting quietly in the middle of a corrupt society and asking people questions to help them along.
  
• in reality, psychology doesn't really answer everything. it is very good at pointing out what's wrong with you. equally with anthropology, and cultural studies, and all sciences. a single science is useless in trying to grasp reality, as it isolates a single dimension in everything.
  
• we need a lot of love administered in measured quantities. not simply a lot of love.
  
• sometimes i like to sit back and help people achieve something. then i get impatient and wonder 'hey why be the support staff when you can be the performer, why be backstage when you can be centre stage'.
  in this crazy world, the people at the centre make all the money, while the people backstage help them have stable personalities so they can go to work and make all the money. while those in the centre stage get on with the business, the people backstage solve their personal issues, take care of them. you can't be centre stage without any support staff and you can see people failing at what they do because of unresolved personal issues, or because of lack of 'support staff'. support staff are the magic of this world, but it's something i don't really know about. there have been no support staff in my family. 
  i wonder what would bring more satisfaction: being in business making a lot of money, or counselling people for little money. i still have this dilemma and i'm not really resolving it, i'm pushing it to the back of my mind.
  
• as i'm pushing it to the back of my mind, it creeps up to the front and pushes away everything else that i try to do and focus on. as a result i have extreme lack of concentration these days. at work i manage to be ok, but last night i was sitting in a ballet and didn't get any of the story. 
  
• people who think themselves all powerful are helping no one but themselves. and i even wonder how much they are helping themselves when they are slowly building a distance from everyone else.
  
• i wonder whether i'm turning into my dad's mum. i wonder what she was really like.
  
• i'm glad i'm not turning into my own mum.
  
• today i went for lunch to my church, which is 10 minutes away from the office. i met some super people: karen, cookie (kookiang), natalie, steve. i wonder if i could also work for the church.
  
• i am sort of being in more than one countries at a time, but it's not a comfortable feeling, it mainly involves missing the country you're not in.
  
• on the other hand, in this country i hate the cold but i love the culture of encouragement. think 'encouragement' if anyone tries to belittle you in order to make you work harder. belittling is for people who can't discipline their own selves. belittling probably works in the army, if it works there at all. it is inappropriate in a peaceful environment.

on a different note, let's give it up for this blogring:

Are you Greek? Do You want to show off your greek pride? Or just simply talk about common greek things like your yaya's fantastic mussaca( I don't know but my yaya shure CAN NOT cook), or just about any thing else! Zito E ELLATHA!

hahaha...actually we talk about fantastic moussaka (please spell properly!) every lunchtime, because the only other greek girl at the office is quite keen to cook greek. so she borrowed my big fat greek cookbook. and now my ex-flatmate wants it too because she says it has the best tomato sauce ever. (sure but it's even better made with big fat greek tomatoes.) actually my yaya (grandmother) didn't live with us, and my mother never cooked because she was at work. the only cook in our flat was our filipino maid, who actually cooked from my mother's italian recipe books and her own memory of tried and tested filipino dishes.

i finished the 'memoirs of a geisha'. i marked all over it with a fluorescent pen and i recommend it with all my heart, because it's a seriously in-depth exploration of the main character's soul, fearless and controversial. the author did get sued by his 'research subject'.

sayuri, the main character, is made to convey a huge variety of feelings, and it is the descriptions of those feelings that i highlighted with my pen, ones i relate to completely and which i've never found in books before, perhaps intimate things are very difficult to write about. sayuri's wishes go through a lot of crushing, and for someone who is supposed to serve others, she does stick to her own goals a lot. but you know, in my world of career-minded women, it's nice to get the perspective of a geisha, someone who is taught to be a jewel to look at and who is there at the end of the day to comfort, restore and understand others.

it's cold in london now. i'm feeling a bit ill. i have never really liked the cold. why can't it just be warm? would that be too easy? ugh.

i finally went to royal china baker street at lunchtime. we thought we were early but we still had to wait a good 20 minutes. this time i noticed that the curvy wall is clad in gold leaf (!!!) and has a little 'good fortune' statue stuck at the top of it, which you can only see if you look under the suspended ceiling. i wonder how much the gold leaf wall cost, but it is certainly bringing good fortune and good money, because the space looks infinitely brighter and the elusive light reflected off the golden wall creates a very special environment.

a sense of loss

i am experiencing a sense of loss at the moment. i have felt this before but tried to push it away so that i wouldn't feel it so much. but this time i actually treasure this temporary sense of loss, perhaps because i have the strength to stay calm.

when you are lost, you become very resourceful in trying to overcome the situation. hence you attempt things you would not think of doing when you feel secure and sure of what you should be doing.

it's a trying time but i think it's very valuable. the most valuable times in my life have been trying times, when i had it easy, i didn't learn anything and in retrospect i regretted having wasted time feeling so comfortable i didn' t have to question anything. 

i want to suspend seeking security, i want to dwell in this sense of loss a little longer. you never find anything new if you're not looking for something new.

things that have started to change:

1. my friends. i am making new friends and some of the first people i met in london now feel very distant, like we have gone in different directions. i'm meeting a lot of christians from imperial, ucl and lse, i must say they are pretty impressive.

2. london. london is becoming a lot friendlier. the same old places are being given a new layer of experiences, as i link them to more people. it is no longer a city itself but a set of landmarks (the lui's flat, the old lui's flat which used to be my old flat, buckingham gate, the church on marsham street, the pub next to p's flat) connected to other parts of the world, like hong kong, singapore and china.

it will take two weeks from tomorrow to have internet at home, 1 week to cancel tiscali and 1 week to install something else. i'm just tired of waiting for them to fix my broadband and it seems like they are having a long waiting list of complaint calls, so i'll give another provider a chance.

at the internet cafe...

i forgot to say that i finished the 'chasing the dragon' book by Jackie Pullinger, i found the narrator a rather dodgy 'heroine' as she was single all her life and only ever chose to cure men. she would refer to them as 'her boys' and repeatedly in the book she made reference to how she had fallen in love with one of them. the few times that she was required to cure a woman, she gave up and referred them to...god. *rolleyes* needless to say, these women failed to find god's help. however, the book was remarkable in that it describes the slums incredibly well, makes you feel as though you were there with her.

now i've picked up 'memoirs of a geisha'. it started out really well, i was even using a marker to underline phrases (i try not to ruin books normally). but now the main geisha is turning out to be really nasty and is ruining my mood.

books like that really open horizons. i don't know much about kowloon walled city, or about the history of women in japan, and i'm really hungry for this knowledge. i am dreaming of one day drawing less and reading more.