Christmas musings

This Christmas I have no idea why I keep procrastinating with finishing up the wrapping of my Christmas presents and writing my Christmas cards. I’m not exactly overly stressed up as I do not have a lot of crazy projects at work to handle for the moment. Somehow I’m not really excited with the presents bit this year. Maybe because I have to wrap SO MANY (including my mum’s)!

With Christmas coming up and all the festive activities and promotions taking place in the hotel, it is so easy to forget why I celebrate Christmas. Being in Marketing Communications, I’m being forced to place myself in the mindset that promotions are the best way to pull in more business, and the best time to feature promotions is during the festive season when everyone is in the celebratory mood. Basically, it boils down to money – and I’m the one who has to do the dirty work of pushing out these news to the public. Again, it’s all about the money – because I’m being paid to do so!

I’ve got to keep reminding myself of the real meaning of Christmas. It’s really not that difficult – in my job, there’s always tons of information that comes along with the festive season, but in real life, Christmas means just one word – “Jesus”. I was looking through quotes about Christmas (I have the cheesy habit of writing poems and quotes in my Christmas cards), and I came across this quirky little poem which made me laugh:

Roses are reddish
Violets are bluish
If it weren’t for Christmas
We’d all be Jewish

How true! If it weren’t for the birth of Christ, we’d be like them Jewish folks still wondering when Christ will come down to earth. I wonder how they share the Good News when they cannot proclaim that Jesus has already come and gone, when we are already awaiting His second coming. Sounds pretty strange to me. Anyway, isn’t it wonderful to know that out of all the religions, Jesus is the only God who actually came to earth to ‘touch base’ with His people? (Buddha doesn’t count ‘cos he isn’t a god – Eh, unless you are a Satanic worshipper then you might be pleased to know that the devil is in town, at least in the Supernatural TV series hehehe)

I’m really looking forward to Christmas this year and meeting up with loved ones (too bad Mr Loh will be returning to his hometown; I’ll miss him terribly). Can’t wait for the annual sleepover with my church mates and my mini party with my clique from work. There’s lots more to look forward to actually.  After all that’s been said and done, I must say I’m truly blessed to have a happy loving caring family, crazy friends who love me, colleagues who care, and my dream job – among other things. But the greatest blessing of all is to have received the unconditional love of God. (Actually, folks, we’ve all experienced a love that knows no boundaries – we just gotta wake up from our stupor and realise it!)

Grub-grabbers

I totally adore my friends in the hotel (except for you, Alex haha)… They always crack me up and make my working days feel better. Today I managed to coerce them to pose for me (except Elaine who was on the phone, awww). Don’t ask me why you keep seeing cookies – we’re all hung up on food.

Melissa and her cookie-eating habits.

Alexd (it’s not spelt wrongly – inside joke) the purple monkey.

Willy was on holiday so no photos of him. But he doesn’t take retarded photos anyway.

A weekend to remember

After weeks of lulling around, I’ve finally had an active week!

The Body Worlds exhibition is in town again so decided to go check it out on Saturday. I visited the exhibition previously when it came to Singapore about five years ago and was thoroughly fascinated by it. I must say I was still fascinated this time around – there are new exhibits of course, including animals!

Some people have asked if the corpses are scary – all I can say is, you’ve gotta go see for yourself to determine. I personally didn’t think it was a scary experience, in fact I believe it is highly educational… for adults and kids who are OLD ENOUGH.

Why am I stressing on this, you may ask? Well that’s because there were these very fragile exhibits where foetuses were cradled by a small black cushion. I was appalled to see how a maid/parent would allow her toddler to stand on the seat of her pram and climb all over these exhibits. There is completely no respect for the exhibits or the real human foetuses on display. Then there was another teenage boy who purposely knocked right into the exhibit which made it shake and almost topple the foetus off the cushion! Was super pissed off.

Other than that, I have seen a few responsible parents educating their young primary school-aged children, who looked like they knew how to respect the dead themselves. I attribute it all to good upbringing.

Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the exhibitions. My experience was enhanced by one of the four volunteers who provided us quite a bit of information. Kudos to her! One of the things we asked was, how did they get some of the bodies to balance only on one foot? Apparently, there is a weight holding the foot down, but to ensure the body stays balanced, the centre of gravity is calculated and the body is positioned in such a way that it does not topple. This volunteer also informed us that the exhibitors were planning to display a Noah’s Ark in the future… Looking forward to that!

We spent Sunday at Steph’s place eating and eating and joking and watching a movie.  We celebrated my mum’s birthday and had chocolate cheese cake. That was interesting.  And as usual I fell asleep on the couch… Had a very long day – in my books.

I’m off from work this Friday, can’t wait!

Paper Hearts & Dettol Loving

When Jonathan and I boarded bus 162 on Saturday evening, I met a friend’s JC-aged brother. I waved to him while walking past and sat two seats behind. The boyfriend was on the phone and I was looking out the window when B attracted my attention. He passed me a paper heart which he made – “for you,” he said  – and told me not to unfold it because it “looks nice” the way it was.

The boyfriend was on the phone at the time, but he saw what happened. After he got off the phone and when B alighted, the boyfriend expressed – albeit in few words – that he was annoyed that another guy would pass me a paper heart right in front of him. “Ahh… Jealousy,” I thought to myself. It was cute though.

Remembering a long time back when the boyfriend had folded a ten-dollar paper heart and given it to me – which I ended up using at one time because I was short of cash – I then offered him my old one-dollar note (which Van had refused to let me use at Esteller) to fold into a heart. The boyfriend lapped up the offer. He happily took the dollar note and folded it into a heart and instructed me to put it into my wallet (and it was understood that under no circumstances was I to use it).

Being a girl, I naturally welcomed the attention – from two guys nonetheless! At the expense of sounding conceited, I have to confess that it’s rather flattering having guys tussle over my ‘affections’. (Yes, an actual physical fight between two guys took place because of me once)

… You were probably wondering what “Dettol loving” in the heading meant. It is a different story and has nothing to do with the paper hearts…

You see, because of H1N1, my colleague Matt and I have been taking turns spraying our department with Dettol to sanitize the air. As you can probably tell by now, I’ve been very paranoid and the Dettol smell assures me that the air I breathe in is clean.

My other colleague LL gets a little scared at my zealous attempt at trying to sanitize the entire department. So I threatened her via Facebook just now that I would “spring a Dettol-ish surprise” on her. When she left work, I carried out my threat. I stuck the following up on her already-crowded wall.

Then I left a note on her computer monitor…

I can’t wait to see the look on her face tomorrow.