|
|
|
read between the lines
today's recap yawn. it's nearly 5 and i just finished some subbing and part of my ad plan. thank god no sch tomoro.why so late? becos, yup, u guessed it....groupwork. it gets especially trying when ur a middleman and you come across this situation: assume everyone has a sort of ranking system or a sort of vertical-level chain for ppl to pass work thru, instead of doing the whole thing together. if you're in the middle, the ppl below u are supposed to hand u their work, after which u will go thru their work n edit / add to it, n then send it to the ppl/person above u. but of cos what happens is the ppl below u don't hand in their work, n then the ppl/person above u is waiting for u to hand something in, but u can't becos u don't even have the foundation work to begin with. what do u do? do u wait till the 12th of never for the ppl below u to do sth about it, or do u "bo chap siau" and jus do the whole bulk of it yourself so the ppl/person above u can get started on work, for the benefit of the grp? in the past, most of the time i ended up doing the latter. but lately, i feel it's relly not worth my time and effort to do a whole ton of work that other ppl r supposed to do. so that leaves me with another option: continue to persevere and become a temporary stalker-cum-human pager for as long as it takes. but the thing is, it's not that easy. it doesn't always work. so in the end, as a final resort, i either save my ass and bring everyone along on the ride to satisfiably good marks, or i refuse to do extra work n in the end the whole grp suffers with crappy marks. i've done both this sem....n both don't feel good at all. but such is the nature of this line of work....one thing seems to work wonders sometimes though....it's the power of prayer. but if there's anything this sem has taught me (n it's taught me a lot), it's that thru all things, the grace god gives is...sufficient enough to get through, with a little more to spare. how little? it depends...but there's always a little. oh great. 5am. in one hr's time i'm gonna hear the muezzin in the mosque howling away, n then my dogs are all gonna howl in unison. i think they think he's a big great dog in the sky, that comes on in the early hours of the morning and 4 times later on in the day. hahaha. no offence btw. today what that old reverend guy in church said was rather relevant. i'm not sure if i got the name right, but the announcer said that Reverend John Good was here with us today and that "he is an old friend of ours", meaning the church. when he came up to speak after the announcer asked him to say a few words, he mentioned somewhere that he's nearly 90...so i guess he must've been ard when our church got newly founded. anyway this is what he said....he said that in his old age, he found that friendships are really worth treasuring n he found that particularly so when some of his friends have passed on into the richer life beyond. n then he went on to say that it was said that the apostle john, when he was nearly 90 and was asked to deliver a sermon, merely said "love one another", n how jesus said "this sums up the law and all the prophets", that is, to love god n love one another (i'm paraphrasing cos i wanna sleep soon) n he said he found that relly important because friendships are the greatest expression of how much love we can give to others. hmm, i agree. but (and this was the agenda on my mind the whole day), what if they don't last? it pains me everytime to see a close friendship with someone die off or go into hibernation for some time before being awakened, if ever. i was asking this question to myself earlier tonite: do friendships have some kind of expiry date or something? because what seems to happen is, we either drift apart somehow, or one of us has to go further their studies somewhere too far away to visit or call. n then it gets awakened, for like, a short amount of time, either when they come back for the hols, or when the other party suddenly feels like it, n then they're gone again n suddenly all u have is outdated snapshots of their lives in your memory banks. it's not an easy thing to accept when these so-called "potential" long-lasting friendships turn sour or go cold for some time....it made me wonder again tonite, as i've wondered before, then isn't it better not to be too close to anyone in the future cos u noe they're most probably gonna drift away in the end? but, as my friend reminded me today, friendship is a risk....n if i don't take the chance, there won't even be a possibility that there'll even be a close friendship in the first place. it's just that....sometimes i just think it's so....wasted, the could-have-beens and the potentials. then u think, oh, would it have worked out if i did this, this and this? but god always has an almost immediate answer that comes to my mind for that one: i'll never know how it's gonna turn out anyway, so it's not like i can steer myself in the right direction because i don't even know what the right direction is. n i get relly irritated when the other party asks me questions i've already answered....it shows they're not listening, or they care so little enough about who they're speaking to that they forget about it after the conversation ends. cos i mean, logically speaking, the ppl on the top of ur list, u'd remember what they do and vital things about them...the recent ones. another thing that irks me is.... when there is a breakdown of communication, as in it's not even communication at all, in the literal sense. or to put it more clearly, when it becomes one-sided. it's during those times when i feel, heck, i might as well be talking to the wall and i think even the wall can give me more answers. for me i feel it must be mutual, or i'll feel rather betrayed, exposing my weaknesses and not hearing the same thing from the other side in return. hey, even the confession box can do that for me: go to a stranger and tell all my problems...not that i've ever been in a confession box anyway, though i've been to something similar. n another thing that relly annoys me is when the other side starts opposing u instead of accepting u for who u are. it says in the bible, who are we to judge our fellow brothers and sisters? everyone grows at different rates (or something like that)....but i hate it when they don't realise it, when they start to see me thru tainted eyes and come up with all kinds of conclusions about me that are merely just unfair assumptions made on vision alone (added with their own personal bias of what a person shud be like). gtg now. the dogs are howling |
|
|
.jpg){kind=link}