An encounter
Murakami once said, “Chance encounters are what keep us going”.
Friendships are often the happy (or sometimes, not so happy) by products of chance encounters, and it was the result of an encounter some 6 odd years ago that kept me going this weekend. Support often comes from the most unexpected of places.
This humble heart is filled with so much gratitude.
The plan
There is a plan.
A 3 year one.
Granted, nothing is constant.
And we are merciless to the endless ebb and flow of, well, life.
But I hope this works out.
Evolution
I remember the early days of communicating via alphaneumeric text on pagers. Pagers! A device so unfashionable and almost obsolete now, our children will only ever see them in museums. Well, okay granted, doctors still have to carry the bastard device around for work but you’ll be hard pressed to find someone on the streets with a pager for personal use these days.
Then came text language and the furor it caused when examiners and teachers complained that children in British and American schools were using these so-called ‘textisms’ in essay writing, text language had a seemingly detrimental effect on the written word, they said. Studies were conducted and some reports suggested otherwise. A good platform to build phonetic learning in a way that they can relate to? Perhaps.
Super fascinating to see how mobile communication will evolve. I’ve just discovered emoticon speak, a seemingly garbled string of pictures that forces you to think out of the box to try to communicate what you are trying to say.
Fun, but quite time consuming as well 
Isaac and Ishmael
Snippets from one of my many favourite episodes from the West Wing.
Time split into moments
Where are you my passionate lover?
My soulmate?
My best friend?
What are you doing today?
What do your eyes see?
Did you notice how bright the moon was last night, casting her blessings on the quiet and the weary.
Did you walk with your head tilted to the skies, creating dreams with patterned clouds that dot the sky?
Did you stop in your tracks when you caught the scent of eucalyptus trees in abundance in spring?
Did we walk the same number of steps?
Inhale deeply as we drank our morning coffee?
Calm our hearts as we took in the beauty of the morning?
Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.
Mr Chua vs. Faraday
Mr. Chua was my physics and chemistry tutor for all of 1.5 years. A skinny, tiny man often sporting baggy shirts in muted tones, heavyset glasses and a delicate combover that gradually undid itself by the end of class. I still credit this man for pulling me out of the depths of Physics hell and into A1 heaven in a very short amount of time. My mother, as you can imagine, is eternally grateful.
His favourite physics fairytale was of him and Mr. Michael Faraday playing chess in a giant electric metal cage, a story he used to explain the concept of electric fields to us. It was a wondrous tale with loud electric cracking noises, electric bolts, tea and biscuits, golden stopwatches and Mr. Chua leaping off the tables and chairs (sometimes he’d actually jump off table onto chairs as he told this tale for the upteenth time). The sort of tale that one could build to epic proportions with a little imagination. The Faraday cage does exist in real life of course, the principles of which have real life applications, not quite the actual venue for two eccentric men and their board game.
Thank you Mr. Chua for your fantastical tales
Here’s a real life application, a rather jaw dropping one.
