Yes or No to forgive and forget?

It's amazing how much I feel like blogging after being dormant for quite a few months. I should really be studying for my exam but yet I feel so restless and the need to feed my thoughts to the blog website. Suddenly I have a lot of things that I would like to share but yet I cannot say it out as I do not know how people would react to it. And I don't fancy the idea of broadcasting my thoughts either online to those people who know me. I don't know. It's just weird, that people read your blog and pretend to know you well. They might know what you've gone through but they are obviously not there when you were going through it. And that makes the whole difference. That is why I do not really tell people about my blog, I guess.

"The grass is always greener on the other side", the proverb goes. I definitely think so. There has not been a time that I have been perfectly satisfied with whatever I have. People tend to say that I have a lot of things that others don't and I need to be grateful for. Deep in my heart, I would be thinking 'what? there are so many girls who are so much more fortunate than I am. They have lots of things that I don't'. It is not until recently that I realised how lucky I have been. I have a very happy and caring family, not too many but really good friends, a considerably good education and moving towards a potentially one of the few money-making careers in the future. What else can I ask for?

Speaking about friends. It is always hard to find the perfect one who can understand and cares so much about you. Look around you, try to think how many people you had been angry at and chose not to talk to. I'm sure there are some friends that you keep just as acquaintances because they have some qualities that you do not think that they can qualify to be your friends. Try to remember some betrayals that had happened in the past, do you remember how hurt you were at that time? Does that remind you of how long you took to regain trust on friendship?

Now, I'm asking you to hold that dear to yourself, make a wish, and let it go. It is something worth remembering but not to hold on to. How long do you plan to keep that grudge? And you know that it is harder to hate than to forgive somebody. I know it is not easy but I have tried this a few times and it works for me. I am still friends with those who probably annoyed, betrayed or lied to me in the past. Probably impossible to be good friends with these again but it's better than making enemies.

What do you think? Do you have similar thoughts about certain friends who had done something to you and you would like to forgive him/her and forget about it? What would you do?

Yes or No to perfect honesty?

There are too many people around us who put up different masks when they see different people. Maybe we are like them as well; we smile eventhough we are not happy and we pretend to be ok with things when in reality they are definitely NOT OK. We feel frustrated because we need to be pretentious every second and not to be honest with other people. We feel tired of coming up with lies just to entertain some people that you don't want to offend. And of course, we try our best to shine our head of dept's shoes so that we get good marks. The question is, do we have to be fake for the rest of our lives?

Many times, we get away from arguments or grudges by being just a little "smart". We say things that we don't mean to and yes, it is OK as long as we don't harm anybody. That's the common perception. But what about trust? Can we still trust each other when we know that we would tend to be superficial? Does honesty have no perks? Would we want friends like ourselves?

My mom has always given good advice. She says " if you want to know why people do this to you, think about what you'd do in that person's position. Would you have done the same? If yes, then it is totally justified". If a friend asks me if her new dress is nice, I would be honest to her if I think that she looks fat wearing it. Is that a bad thing to do? Perhaps different people might have different views but I know that some would just want to compliment on the new dress all for the sake of not upsetting her. I'm sure dishonesty in this situation is not ground-breaking nor earth-shattering but it is still a breach of trust. Do you think we ask questions to listen to lies? What do you think you would say? Would you have done the same thing?

Would you have said the truth to your friend?
	Yes
	No
	Don't know...never happened to me before
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A brand new start

Today is a beautiful Sunday. I woke up feeling refreshed and ready for a brand new week. Hopefully it won't be like last week. Last week was such a nightmare, it had been a long with lots of ward rounds and appointments clashing with one another. Not only that, I was completely burnt out at the end of the week. Life as a medical student is so pretty interesting. My love for medicine grow after starting my clinical this year. In these 6 months, I have learned to talk to patients, empathise with their conditions as well as help them to get good advice and treatment.

Last week, I had a patient who couldn't speak English and I had to translate for him so that he could communicate with his doctor. It was in this short moment of time that I felt so important in the medical field. Not that third year medical students are useless but we all agree that 3rd year medics are a nuisance to doctors and patients sometimes. Back to the the patient, he was very grateful for my help and even gave me two packs of chinese biscuits to thank me. When I was eating the biscuitss, I thought the taste was so different from any other biscuits...they were the first that made me felt so satisfied and appreciated.

So many things have happened recently in my life. Some good ones and some bad ones. People say that we celebrate good news and learn from bad news. I wish I could do the same. In fact, there was one incident which changed my life tremendously. It was a hard decision, but I think it is the right one...and so let it be.

Yes or No to claimed truth?

Today as I was reading something about endocrinology, I found two books giving me the exact opposite explanation for the same thing. I was stuck basically for a long time trying to figure out if I had read and understood wrongly. After reading the same sentences for 5 times, I am quite certain that one of them must be wrong. This is a really difficult situation as the two books are equally popular among medical students (Kumar and clarke and Oxford clinical handbook...if you know what i mean!) Then I spent a few hours searching the internet for some clues and found out that K&C was wrong. Although I should be relieved cos I already know the answer, I am still quite surprised that a well-published book like that can have a mistake.

Yesterday, I saw a movie 'Perfume-The story of a murderer' . It is a really nice movie with good screenplay and effects. However, I find the story a bit disturbing (a lot of gory scenes) and the ending is rather cheesy and illogical. Basically the main character was a perfumer and tried to capture the scent of nicest smell in the world...women's scent! He'd killed many women to capture their scents, and to cut the long story short, he was in the end arrested, just shortly after he had succesfully brewed his ultimate perfume (containing all those smells from the women he killed). On the day of his death penalty, he appeared before the public and sprinkled some of his ultimate perfume on his handkerchief. When the public smelt it, they all bowed down and claimed that he was an angel! The most funny part was when his handkerchief was blown off his hand and the public went bonkers and started getting naked and lusty with one another. Even the Catholic bishop couldn't resist the power of that ultimate scent and was hugging and kissing the girl next to him! The public all hailed 'Angel!' and this merciless murderer was acquitted (What an ending?!).

Well basically what I am trying to link for what happened yesterday and today is: how much do we know about the truth? All evidence can point to a murderer, if the public and particularly the bishop claims that he is an angel (in a religious context), he must be an angel. Two well known medical books, considered as the bibles for medical students can have contradictory details. How much can you trust your sources? If you don't, what else can you do to make sure that you have the right information?

It's just like religions. We haven't seen Gods. How do we know that they really exist? Can bible, kitab or other religious books be totally trusted? In the olden days, these books were written by powerful political figures. They could be making use of their positions or public's trust to spread their power. Did they really hear God's voice (are you sure they they weren't schizophrenic?) Even if they are the exactly the same sentences and being said by saints and etc, can they be interpreted differently? There were wars in the past and somehow these books could justify their actions. Why?? They were some races being discriminated and yet these books claimed that God was punishing them. If God is ever-loving and forgiving why didn't God forgive them and give them a new start? and why are they still discriminated now, considering that the newborns have no sins. Why is there a past and present interpretation for the same book?

There are just so many questions that I can't find the answers to.

Erm, I hope ppl reading my website would not be offended with my remarks on religion. This is totally my own opinion and please leave a comment if you think that you can answer my questions. Sorry that there's no 'yes or no' table today because I have been quite lazy lately ( can see that I haven't been blogging for a long time).

Yes or No to adverts?

Yesterday when I was sitting down in front of the idiot box following the whole stretch of CSIs from 9pm to 12 am; Las Vegas, New York and Miami, I was so irritated by the high number of advertisements in between. Thinking of it, Astro subscription per month alone is not cheap and with the amount of ads, I can imagine how much Astro is earning! and who says that paid TV has no adverts? In Hong Kong, there aren't that many ads even on public channels. Even if there are, you wouldn't see repetitive ads on the screen; i.e. for CSIs yesterday I've seen repeatitive Nokia, Maxis and baby powder ads. What's more annoying than being able to recite everything on the ad afterwards?

Nevertheless, there are many advantages of watching ads. Some commercials are suppose to be educational and informative. Others might be cheating and confusing...now, let's check out the pros and cons of ads.

Pros	Rebuttal
Ads tell you about certain products that you might not have known	Ads only tell you what the companies want you to know. For instance, diet pills are advertised as effective and harmless pills but the side effects are not told on the ads.
Advertising is just an act to promote a product	Certain products are over-advertised and become branded for no reasons. 2 similar quality products might be sold at different prices for their names.
Ads are informative i.e. the Maxis ad tells you about the services that it’s providing	If they are informative, they should include the prices on the ads of those services.
Some programmes are expensive and therefore must be sponsored by companies. In return, these companies get to advertise their products on TV.	Yes, it’s true for public TV but pay-TVs?

Pros	Rebuttal
Ads are annoying cos they interrupt the watching process	Without the allowance to insert ads in between, there might not be such programmes cos public TVs might not be able to afford to air up-to-date programmes.
Ads are expensive	Although they are exorbitant, they really work to promote the products. Advertising is certainly something that companies can’t save on.
Ads are misleading i.e. it’s not true that you can remove stain by just putting cleaning agent on top of a stained shirt without scrubbing and models for ads take hours to put oil on their hair before they shoot the hair shampoo/conditioner commercials.	Yeah..ads are exaggerating but these ideas are to attract ppl to their products. How else can you create an ad? by shooting a documentary? Having an ad to show how models wash their hair will be funny.
Ads don’t tell you the whole truth	For the whole truth, it’ll take longer than a 5-10 second commercial.
Ads use models who have fine skins to promote facial products and hence are merely promoting the models than the products (cos their fine skins are really not the effects for using such products)	But tell me, do you want to see a fat, pimpled lady on the ads? Can’t blame the advertising industry, can you?

All in all, although I really hate ads, I can find more advantages than disadvantages of them. I suppose since the viewers are the focus, we are the ones deciding what we want to see. Just like the case of the recent news of a star photos being snapped while changing at Genting, the readers of the magazines bear equal responsibility as the press, for encouraging such indecent act. If there is no demand, I am pretty sure that the magazine would not be printing more copies. It has been said that the publicity of the issue has increased the number of searches for those photos online and it's one of the top 7 searches on search engines. The viewers or readers are therefore the ones who should be blamed.

What's shown on adverts reflects what the public wants to see. We want to see good figure models using mobile phones and hence that's what we see on TVs. Hence, we must always be alert of what our interests lead us to and thank goodness that we are not that unscupulous yet to be interested in viewing photos being snapped without approval (cos our magazines have not tried doing that yet!). And yes, you would be annoyed to see how many slimming and breast enhancement ads on HK mags because most women there are just so conscious about their figures and looks. And no, I'm not anti-HK cos I love HK for being the shopping heaven...hopefully it won't change after the GST(goods and services tax) introduction. Not only that, I must tell you about TVB dramas, MTR (compare that to our LRT) and food (dim sum, wanton noodles, beef-ball noodles and Shatin bbq pigeons)!

In conclusion, I feel that ads are generally acceptable although I would still complain everytime I see one on pay-TV.

What do you think?

Yes or No to adverts?
	Yes
	No
	OK OK la.
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Yes or No to privacy?

Living in a big community, it is hard to put a boundary to privacy. How much should other ppl know about us? How much can they ask? What shouldn't they know? and most importantly, how much they can do before we feel that they have invaded our privacy?

Just came back from Hong Kong, I was so furious to hear that Gillian Chung (one of the Twins popstars) was being snapped when changing at Genting. You wouldn't believe what the hongkees were reporting in HK! Internationally, it has tarnished Malaysian's image as a safe country and ppl just think that Malaysians are unethical enough to be setting up camera in the changing room. The funny thing is that the magazine(EasyFinder) which publishes (they still do!) the photos is a Hong Kong magazine and therefore the dirty job is almost certainly(giving it a space of doubt) done by the paparazzis in HK! And puhlezzz....Malaysians are not stooping that low! Nevertheless, I still think that Malaysians do have to bear some responsibility about the security at Genting. How come the paparazzis could enter the changing room so easily and a camera to be set up there would be creepy enough to scare a lot of artists from coming to Msia for performances!

Of course, snapping photos without approval is an invasion of privacy. Now, let's think about something more petty, like....reading ppl's smses on hp, reading ppl's emails, opening ppl's letters and etc. Would you be angry if somebody does something like that to you? Have you done it before? Honestly, I would be so pissed off if I find out that my friend/relative is doing such a thing to me. To be fair, I refrain myself from committing the same thing to others cos I believe that 'you shouldn't do something to others that you don't want to happen to yourself'.

Sometimes I just cannot understand ppl's curiosity on others; wanting to know where they have gone to, what they have done and so on. It is up to them whether they want to tell you or not and if they don't, you should respect their privacy. Have you heard of ppl sneaking into other ppl's rooms or record other ppl's passwords to enter into their emails or e-diaries? My goodness, are ppl ready to be stooping that low?

Even in the case of celebrities, they should have the rights to be alone and not stalked by paparazzis. I was so disgusted that some hongkees even commented that Gillian was purposely doing it and she was just snapped adjusting her bra clasp, it wasn't like she had never taken any photos with less clothing. Ya, I suppose that if you search for images for Gillian, you can see that there are some photos of her in bikinis but for Heaven's sake, you guys think that it's right to snap photos of her changing???

Hundreds of celebrities in Hong Kong are now lodging complaints to the government for stricter laws on publications by the entertainment industry. Hopefully, celebrities can feel safer walking on the streets in the near future. I do hope that the paparazzi who snapped Gillian's photos can be caught and put in jail (he/she deserves it!). You would be surprised to hear that paparazzis in Hong Kong are paid quite a big sum of money for photos like this. In a programme that I watched last night on Astro, a group of artists in HK including Jackie Chan, Andy Lau and many more gathered at Tsim Sha Tsui to protest about the loose laws on publications; it was mentioned that some paparazzis are paid up to HKD 500,000 for juicy news like this!

What do you think is the most appropriate sentence for the perpetrator who set up camera in Gillian's dressing room?

The most appropriate sentence?
	Jail term less than 2 years
	Jail term more than 2 years
	Being sacked
	Fine ( I don't know how much I should put here)
	Being stopped from working in the entertainment industry
	Fine and jail term
	being sacked, fined and jailed
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Yes or No to tit for tat?

Revenge is a dangerous word. It stimulates anger and hatred in most people. Gone were the days that people only link revenge with killing his father's killer or punching up the rapist. I would like to talk about the petty issues today, something so trivial that you wonder the other party has done it delibrately as a revenge.

It is not uncommon that there can be misunderstanding among friends. Even more, when you are staying under one roof or seeing each other everyday e.g. classmates. Sometimes small misunderstanding could lead to big arguments and nobody knows the real cause unless both parties calm down and explain to each other. It is such a shame that even long-trusting friends turn enemies due to a small matter. Recently, I have a friend who told me about her flatmate. They seem to be ok with each other but not the closest of friends. One day, they had a small disagreement on the utility bills and of course both parties were a little upset. Then, my friend decided to take a bath and halfway during the process, she noticed that there was no hot water from the tap and she was bathing cold chilly water and it was winter! So she was certain that the other friend had turned off the hot water button. Didn't ask her flatmate why, she just did the same to her flatmate when the opportunity came. The revenge to each other just continued for about three months. Until one day, my friend had to top up the electricity for the flat and they had always been postponing payment until the credits run flat, i.e until there was really no more electricity! Then she remembered that it was the same scenario on the first day that she bathed in cold water. Although her flatmate was in the flat at that time, another flatmate had gone to top up the electricity.....OOOOOOOOOOOOPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPSSSSSS!

I was literally scolding my friend for being so impulsive. For the whole three months, she was being troubled about bathing in cold water and definitely her flatmate had the same problem. It wasn't only that, my friend had to go to turn off the hot water button and stealthily went back to her room. Revenge is all about hard work! Besides, 'an eye for an eye' was going to continue if not for my friend clearing up with her flatmate after that. It all started from a small misunderstanding, how worthless!

Now to think it through, if something like what happened to my friend happens to you; let's say it was deliberate. Would you have done the same thing , i.e. vow for a revenge? Is it worthwhile to commit to something that is wasting your time and hurting the other party in the process? Let's talk about ethics here. Is it ethical? and is it against your religion or your beliefs to enjoy doing bad things to others. Are you sadistic? We are talking about misdemeanours here, not big crimes that will put you in jail. Are they justifiable?

I have always believe that revenge is not the best method. Doing small petty things like trying to make the other party irritated by turning off hot water button or throw away other ppl's things (that's what i've heard too!) is somehow unethical. If you don't like a person, show it and tell him/her why you think so. Being estranged to each other in a flat or in uni may be a better solution than to show how close you guys are but later commit some stealthy crimes, thinking that the other party hasn't noticed. Sometimes, it is only painful when you don't know whether the other party has noticed and things happen to you...you'll be troubled pondering whether it was done by them.

Another question to all of you, will you forgive somebody who had done petty things(like something discussed above) to you? Let's see what you'll do to settle this?

What will you do?
	Do nothing
	Confront the other party
	Act like nothing happen, then do the same thing to him/her
	Confront the other party, and then do the same thing to him/her
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So, yes or no for tit for tat?

Yes or No to tit for tat?
	Yes
	No
	On the fence?
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