Change Flaaash!

With my habit of rearranging/ changing things around or changing my mind all the time, it makes more sense for me to have something that will be easily taken down to CHANGE.

The Plan C- Change

This has always been my mantra and that allows me to do a change inventory on a regular basis. As I dip my toes into 2009, I’m trying to change something about my old thinking. Old thinking that’s not worth carrying around and isn’t producing right actions. The same holds true with a stuffed closet- you have many unused or old clothes in it, there’s no room for the new clothes. Sometimes you gotta let go of the old things, old attitudes… purge yourself and get rid of the bad or old stuff that are no longer nifty and you’ve got to make a room for change.

the white job

“Change means actions. If you don’t like something, change it.” Change is therapeutic. It somehow eases your ‘worked up’ senses. If you can recognize change as a basic principle, you can also do the basic things that you’ve been ignoring before. So let the change saga begin: pampering the flat to make it “a home” like hanging new draperies, organizing book shelves, mounting wall decors and painting the wall. How many of you try to make your apartment feel more like HOME by painting or replacing things to your liking? Painting your apartment is really FUN! The color that you paint your walls can help promote certain moods and can reflect on your decorative capabilities in huge ways. Changing dull gray walls to a shimmering white or splashing a fresh coat of gleaming white paint on a serene but agitated yellow living room can wondrously revolutionize your flat; your mood likewise. It just seems so much nicer now and more like home 🙂

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Out of the Strike Zone

People at work keep asking me why I don’t go to the canteen for lunch these days. Excuses like -I don’t have time- I lost track of the time so I forgot to eat- I have no appetite etc.- sound lame and inexcusable but I let myself off anyway from grabbing some grub. I am not on a diet; in fact, I love to eat. I am not trying to kill ‘me’ either. I am neither anorexic nor bulimic. And Mahatma Gandhi has nothing to do with this at all.

Lemmi tell you what has gotten into me. “I am on a fractional hunger strike: to stop the war between Israel and Gaza.” Yes, I am a hunger protester (but not unto death) until the war is over! But why fractional? I don’t miss my dinner:-). Hunger-striking for me is a way to connect physically with what I feel emotionally and what I know mentally. The slight damage that I’m doing to my body is nowhere near the devastation that people of Israel and Gaza have faced because of the bombings causing vast scale of death and destruction.

And how do I survive the ‘all- day- long’ work without breakfast and lunch? An apple or a carrot and water are enough to keep my brain ticking. Undertaking this blue out, unsponsored walkathon is a part of the protest. I’m not the walkingest person around but for a speck of world peace, I’d work at it. Venturing out into the sunny, but sub-zero Saturday afternoon was fun but not cool. As I endured the cold, my gloved hands were adventurously steady because they were frozenly dead. While walking, boy! I was shivering inside, “Now shall I still walk or shall I ride?” I opted to walk. Geezzz, the frozen north wind was stinging my skin. Every molecule of the airstream was like an acupuncture needle stabbed deep into my flesh penetrating into my joints and into the marrow of my bones. Yeah, outdoor walk seemed like a good idea, but not on winter days.

These insane ideas of strike popped up one day when I saw the videos of some students who were trying to get through to their families in Gaza. But whenever they got a chance to hook up, all they could hear was the deafening sound of bombs on the other line. Thanks to the internet! Their histrionic message- “Urgent humanitarian access for the people of Gaza”- was relayed to the world via www.

Today, after reading the headline news “Israel declares Gaza cease- fire”, I am breaking my fast as they halt the fire and I am out of the strike zone for now. Yipeee!

I don’t know if the things I’ve done are significant or trivial. But what I do know is that I didn’t do them for the sake of just doing them. My intention is anchored off the PEACE coast. Crazy, I think, I can do better than these.

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Loose Nerve

release your inhibitions...

Embrace your inner eccentric and try not to edit yourself — so what if you raise a few eyebrows, or provoke people into wondering what’s up with you? Their opinions matter less than the freedom you will feel by doing what you want to do in the way you want to do it! Trying to fit in with the status quo all the time is not only exhausting, it limits your creativity! So let your freak flag fly — ignore propriety and you are likely to inspire a few of your more adventurous friends to join you.

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Cats Talk?

If you are a cat lover like me, you might have also wondered “what on earth is my cat meowing about?”. I like translating a language to another language but when it comes to cats’ lingo, I’m not fully equipped to decode such. Basically, cats talk cryptically. I’ve been a keen observer of cats since childhood; hence I notice that cats make a variety of different weird sounds. I don’t wanna claim that my cat speaks a number of recognizable sounds but he really does. Even so, bit by bit I’m learning to read between the ‘meows’. A strange/ non-sense, albeit funny thought- there’s one sound I’ve been waiting to hear from my cat- his fart. It sounds totally gross but he skunkingly farts whenever he eats wet food aside from his kibble. I wanna hear him fart so I could at least wave him away before I get suffocated from his potent and utterly foul gas.

Another sound that’s eminently heard from cats is the purr. Though to most of us, the purr is often considered a sign of contentment, it also suggests a therapeutic function (the sense of relaxation) to humans that can be felt of course by cat owners when cuddling a purring cat- according to vets. Some cat owners aver that their cats can actually voice out “words”. Do they really think so? Cats’ sounds don’t conform to our concept of grammatical structure so we cannot really label cats’ sounds as words. Cats are just cats. Yes, they are smart but they lack language.

The way I understood/ understand my cat’s meows is by paying attention to his tone, rhythm, pitch, volume, and phonation. A cat-aholic as I am, I had to agree with Jean Craighead George that felines’ sounds vary according to their age, gender, and situation.

Kittens:
• Mew (high pitched and thin) – a polite plea for help
• MEW! (loud and frantic) – an urgent plea for help

Adult cats:
• mew – plea for attention
• mew (soundless) – a very polite plea for attention (this is Paul Gallico’s “Silent Miaow” which is probably a sound pitched too high for human ears)
• meow – emphatic plea for attention
• MEOW! – a command!
• mee-o-ow (with falling cadence) – protest or whine
• MEE-o-ow (shrill whine) – stronger protest
• MYUP! (short, sharp, single note) – righteous indignation
• MEOW! Meow! (repeated) – panicky call for help
• mier-r-r-ow (chirrup with liting cadence) – friendly greeting

Tomcats:
• RR-YOWWW-EEOW-RR-YOW-OR – caterwaul
• merrow – challenge to another male
• meriow – courting call to female

Mother cats:
• MEE-OW – come and get it!
• meOW – follow me!
• ME R-R-R-ROW – take cover!
• mer ROW! – No! or Stop It!
• mreeeep (burbled) – hello greeting to kittens and disarming greeting to adult cats (also used between adult cats and humans)

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New Year’s Pledge

It’s 2009… How fast the year seems to have passed!

And how I love New Year- it brings wild pledges of self- improvement. I bet most of you have listed or made resolutions about your lifestyle changes. If you’re that kind of person who strictly follow your resolutions, then you deserve my salute. I’m not a person who makes resolutions at the start of the year. What I do is just look back to the past and try to reflect on the changes I want (or need) to make and resolve to follow through on those changes.

Some old resolutions just vanished like melting snow because the goals they (not exempting myself) set were unattainable somehow. As I read the sharing of others, it didn’t really surprise me when they said they failed to keep those ‘I will do this and that’ lists. The truth of the matter is, we can’t change our life around a matter of weeks, it can take months and years to do it. The way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to pick a good specific goal, small or big, and then overhaul our life to in order to meet it. Duh.

HAPPY 2009!

I had purposely stopped making New Year’s resolutions because I kept breaking them. Yet, despite it all, I’m making a resolution this year and I’m putting hope above experience. I said, it’s just “a resolution” and that is TO KEEP RESOLUTIONS. Shallow? I guess not; I’m just trying to be a bit vague to determine what resolution means to me. “Resolutions are better done than said.”

It’s gonna be a tough mission to take corrective action this 2009. However, whatever craziness happens to my routine, I’ll try to enjoy the ups and downs of it. I may manifest doubts (obliviously), but I always believe I have wonderful way of seeing the bright side of everything. If a wrench gets thrown in my plans, I’ll catch it with grace and build something amazing with it!

Here’s another year of working hard and having fun at the same time, CHEERS! HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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