Chicken

Today I was wondering why the drawing of my chicken looks weird when I realised chickens only have 2 legs. Not 4! I blame it on my subconscious mind for thinking of 4 legged animals while drawing it. MLIR

Didn't Dettol think this through?

Commercial for the new Dettol No-Touch Hand Wash System:

Hands touch some germy stuff and those germs can end up on your soap pump. FACT: Your soap pump can harbour hundreds of bacteria. But now there's the Dettol No-Touch Hand Wash System. It senses hands and dispenses soap which kills 99.9% of bacteria and it's enriched with a moisturizing ingredient to help care for your hands. The Dettol No-Touch Hand Wash System. Never touch a germy soap pump again.

Scenario:

Your hands are dirty. You go over to the sink, switch on the tap, pump 'manually' from your trusty ol' 'germy' Dettol soap pump, scrub your hands, rinse of the soap, and switch off the tap.

Dettol promises to kill 99.9% bacteria and viruses (or was that just all talk?).

Well then! What exactly is the problem of you touching your germ infested pump when after that you'll be washing your hands with Dettol soap anyway. Heck, you're not going to touch the pump again after you soap your hands, are you?! There you go. You're covered. Why then would you need the 'No-Touch soap system' like they advertised it in the commercial? It really doesn't add up.

It'll be different if Dettol came up with a 'No-Touch tap system'. The way I see it, it's not the pump that's the problem, it's the tap! Think-You open the tap with you bacteria filled hands (now it's a bacteria infested tap), wash your hands and got rid 99.9% of the bacteria (since you're using Dettol), and then you touch the bacteria infested tap again to turn it off. So, unless while you wash your hands with Dettol, you  put some on the tap as well to kill of the bacteria on the tap, you're back to square one. There you go team Dettol. You came up with the wrong invention for your commercial.

Dear CEO of team Dettol,

However, since you have come up with the 'No-Touch Hand Wash System', you really should think about changing your commercial.

Here's my suggestion to make some sense into your new invention which I must say looks very snazzy. I'd buy one myself just for the cool tech but certainly not because of the reasons you advertised.

How it should go:

Feel like you're using too much soap?

Find yourself having to replace the bottle every week because your stubborn child insists on pressing the pump 10 times every single time even though you've told him time and time again that 1 pump is more than sufficient (after all Dettol promises to kill 99.9% bacteria and viruses!).

Now, you can save soap with the new Dettol No-Touch Hand Wash System! It senses hands and dispenses soap to just the right amount. No more worries about how much soap you need to use. Dettol thinks for you! The Dettol No-Touch Hand Wash System. Never waste more soap than you need again.

Tomorrow, When the War Began

I wonder what they were thinking when they wrote "Tomorrow: When the War Began" (for those out of the loop, it's a movie coming soon to Australia and New Zealand cinemas near you on 2 September 2010).

Anyway, was watching but not really watching telly with my sister the other day when the trailer came on.

Sister: That's grammatically wrong.

Me: What is? (having not paid attention to the telly)

Sister: It said, "Tomorrow: When the War Began". It should be 'When the War Begins'.

Me: Ah! Maybe they intentionally put it like that to make you think there's some time quantum mumbo-jumbo going on. The war has already began but you just don't know it yet because it's tomorrow! You think it's tomorrow but maybe it was yesterday but you're in today and there was no war yesterday because the war really is tomorrow and because you're in today, you don't know the war is tomorrow but  really the war has already began but tomorrow. Maybe this is your tomorrow self talking so really you were referring to yesterday. Your tomorrow's yesterday is your today and your today seem so ordinary only because you've no clue really. SO the war has began (for you tomorrow self that is)! Brilliant twist, yes yes?! That's how they lure you in!!!

Sister: Eh, mmmmmm....no.

The fictional writers in my head: Boy, they sure gave a lot of thought into this. We just misspelled it!

Thought the thought was pretty funny. 

Now looking through the internet (trying to find that image from the trailer. Finally found the one I was looking for from trusty ol' Wikipedia-what would I do without you), found out that the movie is actually a book adaptation!

Tomorrow, When the War Began is the first book in the Tomorrow series by John Marsden. Smokes! Never even heard of it before this and now I find out there's 7 of them!  The last 7-series book I read was Harry Potter. Now, I'm tempted to check out this 'Tomorrow' series. If not for nothing, at least to find out WHY John Marsden used 'Began' when he was referring to an event that'll happen tomorrow. Or is he?!

Do girls just want be with good guys or do they prefer bad boys?

It really depends on the girl. I can't generalize everyone into the same category because different people like different things (or guys in this case). And it also depends on the definition of 'bad boys' I suppose (I'm way over-analyzing this but I'm looking at all aspects). Bad boys in a sense that the boy is not the nerdy, follows the rules to the tee type but still generally a good person OR bad in a sense of sleeps around, shoplifts and gets stoned every once in a while. (I wouldn't mind the first type of bad boy myself:)
I remember watching THS: Denise Richardson a few years back. E! was telling the story on when she was married to Charlie Sheen (known bad boy) but they finally got a divorce because he wouldn't change. They (the E! reporters/narrator) say girls (like Denise Richardson) are attracted to bad boys (like Charlie Sheen) because girls like to think that they'll be the one that'll change the guy to 'be a better person'. That usually never works out but I do suppose we do get one or two 'success stories'.
I myself am a firm believer of not changing someone to how I specifically want them to be like. If that someone wants to be changed because he (or she really) thinks that they want/need the changing, then that's fine. But generally people don't like it when their partners try to change them and hence the creation of the saying, "Accept me for who I am or not at all."
There could be girls that couldn't care less about changing their man and like them bad for the thrill of it. I can imagine that. We see it in movies all the time anyway.
Or girl and boy are both bad. That happens. Match made in heaven...or down below.
In other cases (like myself), girls look for those 'clean cut' man. They like knowing that the guy has a good background, good education, is a family man, and all the likes. You can imagine what I mean, right?
I must say though, I can't deny that I've been tempted by the idea of going out with the bad crowd having lived my whole life in a good, healthy, squeaky clean environment. Makes me imagine how it'll be like to let my hair loose and jump on the first Harley that rides past me. But yet again reality pulls me back and holds me to the ground. 19 years of lifestyle really can't change much in a single day. Still, a girl can dream:)

Ask me A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G!

Do you like to answer "yes-no" questions?

Sure. Simplest form of question there is, yes? And the questions only require a one syllable answer (easy peasy!) unless it ends with "...and explain why." Better yet, occasionally when we're to lazy to voice out words, all we have to do is either nod or shake our heads (which of course generally means yes and no respectively unless there's some culture in the world which uses the same gestures for the opposite meaning) or sometimes the answer yes and the nod (vice versa) go hand in hand. Must be out of habit really.

Do I like to eat? Yes/Nod nod
Is food good? Yes/Nod nod
Have I eaten today? Yes/Nod nod
Fussed about what I eat? No/Shake shake
Try everything at least once? Sure! Nod nod nod nod nod nod (adventurous girl, yeah;)
Live to eat? Err...eat to live:D

Ask me A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G!

Against the current

Do you know that feeling (WHO) you get when you know you have to do something and you know WHY you have to do it and exactly HOW you should do it and (WHEN) the time is now and the WHERE is here but you can't will yourself to do it? You know WHAT you have to do but your heart feels like a million pounds and you wish you could just rip it out. You just can't do it. You've hit the brick wall. You simply can't move forward. The path stares at you so intently that if looks could kill, you'd be dead with the intensity from the glare of the way forward but all you can do is stare back. Your legs won't take you any further and you feel your brain shuting down. There is no forward. Only the sense of helplessness.

Cure for this feeling of nothingness?

Reality.

It's when reality slaps you in the face, you force yourself to fight the current. Keep yourself from drowning even though a part of you wish the current will take you away. Far, far away.

Do you fear death?

Have you ever felt yourself slipping away? When you feel like you're hanging on to a string that's slowly unraveling and there's nothing you can do to stop it from breaking. All you can do is hang on to the little glimmer of hope that's left and watch the thinning string slowly but surely coming apart. Nothing to grab on to, nothing to live for.

Having never studied psychology or any of the likes before, I can't pretend to say I understand what goes on in the mind of someone that's about to kill himself. In the moments of your life when you feel  nothing but hopelessness and you can't think of a good enough reason of being or everything is going wrong when all you want is for one thing to go right, that's when you wish that everything would just stop and for it all to end. You curse the world and all in it for letting you live on when all you want is to disappear from the face of the Earth forever. 

Do you fear death? Are you afraid to die? Ever met someone sure enough of himself to answer "no"? In another given situation if I ask him to calmly walk in front of a firing squad, would his answer still be the same knowing then his breaths, his heartbeats, his thoughts are numbered? What will he think then? Will he think of all the things he's never got to do in his short life? Will he think of all the things he still wants to do? Will he think of all his fondest memories with his family, with his wife, with his lover? Will he then wish he wasn't where he is now and that he wants to live for just another day, do all the things he wish he'd done, see the world one last time? 

You might not fear death (hey, when I'm least expecting it, shoot me with a sniper right in my head) but I believe in everyone (or most at least) there is the fear of dying (hey, in a heist let me not be the one you're pointing the gun to my head at). See the difference? Is that perhaps why when someone wants to kill himself, he doesn't just takes a gun and shoots or why we don't see people walking right off the edge of the cliff? Before they pull the trigger, before they make the leap, there's that moment of hesitation. Hesitation of? Not wanting to die after all when coming face to face with death?

Dying I believe, is no simple thing. That's why when someone ever think of ending their life, they always try to think of the simplest, quickest, least painful way of doing it. At that moment in time, no doubt they just want it ended but when faced with it, we still hear stories of how someone managed to coax a man from jumping off a bridge or from a 69 stories building. That 'someone' probably said something along the line of "everything is going to be alright, it can't be all that bad, and you really don't want to do this." How does that 'someone' know? You're a stranger. You don't know the man that's about to jump. How do you know that everything's going to be alright? How do you know that it can't be all that bad? Do you know what his problem even is? How do you know the man really don't want to this? You don't. But then again, these people listen. While they're contemplating of jumping, all the thoughts of life goes through their head and it only takes an encouraging pep talk from someone who isn't their subconscious mind to convince them to do otherwise. And so they don't kill them self. Was it worth it though in the end?  

If you're someone who never had a 'worst than a terrible day(s)' in your life, you might not have an inkling of an idea what I'm rambling on about but then again, you might just after all know what I'm trying to say.

A young man is talked out of jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge
by a California Highway Patrol officer

Have you ever felt yourself slipping away? When you feel like you're hanging on to a string that's slowly unraveling and there's nothing you can do to stop it from breaking. All you can do is hang on to the little glimmer of hope that's left and watch the thinning string slowly but surely coming apart. Nothing to grab on to, nothing to live for.

What goes on in a sucidal's mind

Taken from:

http://www.suicide.org/golden-gate-bridge-suicides.html

It was in September of 2000 when Kevin was in high school and he started to hallucinate and hear voices because of his disorder. After a while, he couldn’t cope any longer, and one day when the hallucinations and voices were particularly intense, he decided to kill himself.

So he took a bus to the Golden Gate Bridge. He cried the entire trip, knowing that his life would soon be over, but also believing that he had to kill himself to end his torment.

Golden Gate Bridge

“I had heard that the Golden Gate Bridge was the easiest way to die. I heard that you hit the water and you're dead,” Kevin said. “And I remember picking the spot. This is the good spot. I'm not too close to the pillar. I won't hit the pillar. I'm not too close to the land. I won't hit the land. I'll hit the water and I'll die.”

Kevin was ready to kill himself.

But as he walked along, some indecisiveness crept in. He wanted someone to help him; he wanted someone to show him that he or she cared.

So he began crying as he walked, silently reaching out for help.

A female police officer rode by on a bicycle, but did not stop.

Two bridge workers also passed him without stopping.

The voices in Kevin’s head were now screaming at him in a cacophonic chorus: “You have to die!”

But something kept holding Kevin back.

“If someone just showed me that he or she cared,” he thought to himself, “I wouldn’t jump.”

And then an attractive young woman appeared, and Kevin knew that his prayers had been answered.

“She cares,” Kevin said to himself. And he knew that he didn’t have to jump. Everything was okay.

Kevin looked intently at the woman as she approached.

But the woman aloofly handed Kevin a camera and said, “Take my picture.”

Kevin couldn’t believe it. So he stood there crying, took the picture, and was completely convinced that no one cared about him – no one cared whether he lived or died.

He gave the camera back to the woman, took three running steps, and jumped.

But the second that he jumped, he knew that he had made a grave mistake.

“Oh, my God,” he thought to himself. “I don't want to die. What did I just do?”

He wanted to survive. Like a brutal slap in the face, the jump woke him up, but now he was falling head first to his death.

He quickly thought of three things that he needed to do to save himself. First, he asked God to save him. Second, he threw his head back. And third, he struggled to position his legs so that his feet would hit first.

BAM.

The brutal impact shattered Kevin’s body. But he did hit feet first, and at somewhat of an angle, so he was “lucky.”

Well, “lucky” to a degree. He survived, but he broke his back and will forever be deeply physically and emotionally scarred and handicapped by his horrific ordeal.

Strengths and weaknesses

In light of our upcoming first ever mega project, we were told to answer these questions as a form of 'self reflection'. Bring on the questions!

Q: What your strengths and weaknesses are in:

• Solving problems

• Writing extended reports

• Working in teams

• Giving oral presentations

A: Both my strength and weakness in solving problems would have to be that I think too much, or so I’ve been told. Sometimes the problem is such that deep thinking on how to approach it is the way to go but if it’s a simple problem, when you think too much about it you’re really just making things far more complicated than they are and frankly it’s a waste of time.

Having never written extended reports before, I can’t say for sure what my strengths or weaknesses are but I can imagine my strength would have to be my flare in writing (or so they’ve worked well for my essays) and weakness is the fear of not knowing what to write, it being a report. What if I have nothing intelligent to say?

I can honestly say I’ve never had any good experiences working in teams or groups before. I remember dreading doing so in high school because in the end students had the attitude of ‘every man for himself’. Coming to university, I’m now hoping we’re now adult enough to work in a team efficiently and effectively.

Nerves would have to be my biggest weakness when giving oral presentations and funnily enough my strength would have to be not showing my nerves. I find that rather fascinating when I’ve had people tell me I looked calm and collected when I deliver my presentation when really I felt like I was sweating bullets.

Q: How you can develop your skills to achieve you goals.

A: All the ‘usual’ answers come to mind. Join clubs and societies, do volunteer work, attend seminars, etc. Basically go to places where you’ll get involve with activities and get to interact with people from all walk of life. You do after all acquire skills by interaction, not by being holed out in your room.

What made you decide to pursue your current course/degree?

Most people don't know this about me unless it's someone who knows me very well but the one job that'll make me a happy camper is to be a teacher. That's where my greatest passion lies, teaching! But then I thought of doing something else first-a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, an architect can become a teacher (whether they make good teachers is a different story) but the converse might not be true.

So, why Engineering? Mostly it had to do between the choices the scholarship offers. Engineering, Accounting, TESL, Medicine, Dentistry. Didn't see myself in the medical line, would love to be a teacher (will be sometime in my life!) but I want to teach one of the sciences, not a language, don't like accounting since high school, so Engineering it is. Well, if I had to choose between anything really, Engineering would have to come out first. Among other things, I get to learn how things around us work. That's some pretty interesting stuff!
Funnily enough I remember when I was little (about 10?) my sister once told me that I'd make a good engineer (I liked twiddling with things. I didn't even know what an engineer was at that time!). She might've just been saying it to make a small kid happy or she really could've meant it.
Being in the line now, I'll make sure I become a good one:)

Ask me A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G!