Things You Learn From Movies

I received this hilarious email from my dad in the morning, and I just had to share it with you. If you nodded vigorously and laughed at each point about Chinese and Indian movies, then you've definitely watched a lot of them. Well, I certainly did.


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Things You Need to Know About Chinese Swordsman Movies




1. Being the hero's parents will always be unlucky and will usually be killed by enemies when the hero is young, and the hero will become an orphan.

2. When a man is wounded and dying, he always manage to catch his breath and speak a few sentences to reveal the killer before dropping his head and declared dead.

3. Skilled people are able to fly over roof tops, up trees and across distances without any sweat. But when travelling to towns and villages, they still have to walk or ride horses.

4. The heroes need not have to work for money, but will always have gold and silvers with them to pay for their dishes.

5. The heroes and villains will meet each other very often no matter how big the country is and no matter where they are.

6. Healing internal wounds in the body is as easy as sitting down cross-legged, palms on the knees and smoke coming out from the head.

7. They can keep a lot of stuff in their sleeves and waistband and never drop them (carrying especially lots of those gold and silver ingots)


Things You Would Never Know Without Indian Movies




1. A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating but will wince when a woman tries to cleanse his wounds.

2. The hero cannot fall in love with the heroine (vice versa) unless they first perform a dance number in the rain.

3. Once applied, make-up is permanent, in rain or in any other situation.

4. Two lovers can be dancing in the field and out of nowhere, 100 people will appear from god-knows-where and join them in the dance.

5. In the final scene, the hero will discover that the bad guy who he is up against is actually his brother and the maid who looked after him is his mother and the chief inspector is his father and the Judge is his uncle and so forth.

6. Key English words used in the movie (usually said out loud between sentences) are No Problem!, My God!, Get Out!, Shut-up!, Impossible!, Please forgive me!

7. They drop down on the ground and roll and roll while singing and come out with different clothing.

8. They can run around the coconut trees, singing, batting eyes-lid, throwing glances at each other and change clothes all at the same time without being out of breath.

Gifts From Past Loves

What do you do with gifts past loves gave you? Do you keep them? Chuck them if the relationship went so sour that you can't even bear the thought of keeping any remnants of that relationship in your life? What do you do when you see gifts that your partner's past loves gave him/her? Do you ask him/her to keep these items away, or do you throw them away yourself?

I pondered these questions for a long time. Even though I'm now married, and happily so, I admit that I still keep a box or two of items given by past boyfriends. I don't have them with me in Australia, but they're still in the cupboard tucked away in my room at my parents' house. I've had relationships that ended amicably, and also one that ended badly, but I still keep the items they gave me regardless. Should I have thrown them out? I didn't bring any into my marital home, of course. They belong to the life I left behind.

With the first boyfriend I had, believe it or not, I kept everything he gave me. Even though I do not display the framed photographs anymore, some of the items in the room are still there. That person was my first love, and was part of my life for over 5 years. I didn't see the need to have to remove them.

The next relationship bit the big one. After it was over, even though I didn't throw the items he gave me away, I stored them in a paper bag, and shoved it deep into my cupboard, so that I may never see them again. And for a long time I didn't even want to take them out.

Yesterday, I took out a photo frame that my husband once bought to keep a picture of himself with an ex-girlfriend. Back when I first asked him about the frame (a couple of years ago, methinks), why it was kept away and not used, he told me what it was used for. I felt a twinge inside, and it wasn't good. I was actually jealous of something which happened a long time ago, and that it was still there in the wardrobe. I felt as though its presence was mocking me. Tim would have chucked it if I wanted him to, but I simply told him to leave it alone. After all, it belonged to him, not me.

Back to yesterday. I finally took the photo frame out, and I felt nothing. In fact, all I saw was, simply, an unused frame. There was no twinge, no mocking. It was all in my head. Rather than putting it to waste, I printed out a photo of us, taken at Brighton Beach, put it in the frame, and placed it on my side table.

That was when I've made the decision, that when I return to Malaysia next, I shall finally take that paper bag out, and donate the items to charity. I don't need them taking up space in the cupboard anymore.

It felt really good.

Tiny Ice Pebbles

Last week's crazy winds and rainstorm brought this to our balcony carpet.

Sleet! I haven't seen sleet since I left the UK. I remembered how painful it was to be outdoors without an umbrella when sleet was hailing down like they were high on steroids. It was definitely NOT fun to have tiny pieces of ice whacking your face.

The Book List

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."
- Charles W. Eliot in The Happy Life (1896)

I saw this at May's, and thought I'd nick it and see if I've read any of the books on BBC's must-read book list. Apparently, the average person would have read 6 out of the 100 books listed below.

The crossed out ones are the books I've read.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien (I only managed the first ten pages. Sigh)
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne (finished this at the bookstore. It's counted, right?)
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien (couldn't even do #1, never mind this)
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher

51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Only 27 out of 100. I haven't read as many classics as I'd have liked. These days I don't seem to have the capacity to sit through heavy fictions.

In fact, I hardly read fiction these days. Most of the items on my reading list in the past months have been non-fiction (mostly finance). Either those or glossy mags.

How I miss the days when I was so engrossed in a good book, I'd stay up till the wee hours of the morning just to get to the last page. I know of people who'd skip the middle pages and go directly to the last chapter (or even just the last couple of pages) to see what the ending's like. I never understood that. What's the point in reading a book then, if all you wanted to know is the ending? It's not just the destination that matters, it's also the journey, is it not?

Anyway, I should get back to that reading list above. There are plenty of books in that list I'd love to read. Thank goodness for the inexpensive Penguin classics available at Target (also available at Borders, but the same books are cheaper at Target). I'm going to get me some of those. Hopefully I'd be able to cross off more books on that list.

Shoop Shoop

Update: The ski trip was canceled. Hubs was too tired. Oh well, next year then.

Guess where I'm heading to this Saturday?




Image credit: SnowHolidays.com.au

I haven't done this in years, but I reckon it's time to face my fears and head the skis full on once more. To cut the story short, some kids laughed at me when I tried skiing for the first time, fell down, and couldn't get up. Not only did they not help me up, they pointed at me, laughed, shouted to their parents what I was doing wrong, and then ran away. Nasty lil' tykes they were. I was traumatised, I tell you.

Anyway, let's do this baby one more time, eh? Mt Buller, here I come!