today’s my birthday!
wholivesnearyou.com wished me a happy 76th birthday so that’s how old i must really be! why i never qualify for senior citizen discounts ah??? heh heh heh.
anyways i long ago gave up the idea of making birthdays seem like the most important thing in the world. saw this posted up in friendster and thought it really made a ton of sense. some of you may have read it before, but there’s nothing like learning a valuable lesson again 
$20.00
Sometimes we just need to be reminded!
A well-known speaker started off his seminar by holding up a $20.00 bill. In the room of 200, he asked,
“Who would like this $20 bill?”
Hands started going up.He said,
“I am going to give this $20 to one of you.But first, let me do this.”
He proceeded to crumple up the $20 dollar bill.He then asked,
“Who still wants it?”
Still the hands were up in the air.Well, he replied,
“What if I do this?”
And he dropped it on the ground and started to grind it into the floor with his shoe.He picked it up, now crumpled and dirty.
“Now, who still wants it?”
Still the hands went into the air.
“My friends, we have all learned a very valuable lesson.No matter what I did to the money, you still wanted it because it did not decrease in value.
It was still worth $20.Many times in our lives,we are dropped, crumpled, and ground into the dirt by the decisions we make and the circumstances that come our way.We feel as though we are worthless.But no matter what has happened or what will happen, you will never lose your value.
Dirty or clean, crumpled or finely creased,you are still priceless to those who DO LOVE you.The worth of our lives comes not in what we do or who we know,but by WHO WE ARE.
You are special. Don’t EVER forget it.”
If you do not pass this on, you may never know the lives it touches, the hurting hearts it speaks to,or the hope that it can bring.
Count your blessings, not your problems. If God brings you to it – He will bring you through it.
discrimination
[be warned : lilien warns you gravely this is a long and perhaps incoherent post. lilien is not from JC therefore she cannot write GP standard essays. lilien advises you to read only if you are suffering from boredomitis. lilien is also talking in third-party speak because she has been influenced by the characters Izzie and Alex from Grey's Anatomy. ]
i just saw an ex-classmate’s photo on somerandomwebsite and i started laughing like crazy. i tried closing my eyes, breathing in and out(relaxation techniques lah!) but the moment i opened my eyes and saw the same picture again, i knew i tak boleh tahan so i closed the browser tab and went somewhere else.
what is it about a person that makes him/her attractive/appealing? do you focus more on the physical or the spiritual/mental aspect? as humans, i daresay most(if not all) of us focus greatly on the physical until time spent with the person reveals more which may or may not force us to look into the spiritual/mental aspects.
let me tell you the real reason why i laughed at said ex-classmate’s photo.
firstly, according to worldly standards, she/he wouldn’t be considered attractive at all. thankfully(or not) for him/her, she/he actually finds him/herself pretty darned good looking. but i’m not one to totally judge everyone by their physical attractiveness(it would be shallow of me to do so lor, considering the fact that i’m not exactly Miss Universe myself). the main reason why i never found her/him appealing in any way was because he/she was a terrible gossip, majoring in malicious unfounded rumours about a classmate , minoring in exaggerating stories about another innocent classmate. even within her/his own group of friends, he/she managed to come up with snarky nicknames for each and everyone of them. with that, i found it extremely difficult to see any good in him/her.
i admit i was no saint, i made several lame jokes at his/her expense to express my contempt for her/his inept remarks. i even drew a crude chinese cartoon(i command you to stop laughing! lol.) that depicted him/her getting rammed down by a bus/train(at that time there were quite a number of MRT suicides). its kinda bittersweet to remember these kinda things cos they WERE funny if they weren’t actually about a real person per se.
last i heard, he/she was still the same, hadn’t changed a bit.
ooh. discrimination discrimination discrimination.
what right do we have to discriminate against others when we too are flawed, albeit in different forms?
let’s reflect a bit. i’ll give you an example.
Izzie’s most annoying personality trait is shooting off her mouth extremely loudly all at the wrong times. however, she doesn’t realise it because nobody really listens to themselves talking, don’t they(unless they’re radio deejays). however when she meets Alex who exhibits the exact same trait, she gets driven crazy because she is extremely annoyed by that trait. her friends Meredith and George don’t seem to be affected at all. a few weeks later Izzie watches a candid video clip of herself taken by Cristina and realises to her dismay that the very trait she disliked in Alex was in her as well.
interesting, isn’t it. everyone of us has a little of Izzie inside us and probably also have a Alex in our lives as well.
_____________________________
writing this piece was part of some reflecting i was doing earlier. although i know that being human, i won’t exactly fully stop this nasty trait, i will consciously make an effort to stop.
will you do that too?