Set fire on the bridge
As music paused
When streams of intimate heat
still lingers
on the silent notes of "El unico"

Drink my breathe
Block away your yearnings
Have you tasted the struggle
deep in virgin petals?

We are the gap between each word
The single moment of intensity
Hope became just a hope
And love is awfully shallow

Chew the flow
of "Milonguea del Ayer"
to a new depth
of weightlessness

As eternity touches
two true souls
You are not the same you
I'm not the same me

***

She knows it's wrong. She's glad it's wrong.

If it takes a whole life for a man to understand a woman, it probably takes longer for a woman to understand herself, the smarter the worse...

But why would a girl with sharp intellect marry a wrong guy?

Q. For money?

A. Maybe not. (for some other women maybe)

Q. For her ex-boyfriend wanted to come back that stirred her emotions again?

A. A lie or a wound will stay and will repeat again. She is smart enough to know she won't take him back. It's over.

Q. For a fairytale prince that gives her a life of a princess?

A. A smart woman won't bother.

Q  For a hope?

A. Definitely not. She may be capable of creating hope for others and herself.

Q. For excitement?

A. To the contrary, it's the "Death of Excitement".

Q. For being hopeless and exhausted with life at some point? 

A. 50% correct.

Q. For being smart and being a woman at the same time is a crime?

A. 80% right. Sentence these women to capital punishment.

Q. For hitting a wall or a ceiling somewhere?

A. 100% true.

Q. But still, WHY?

A. ....... And yet, WHY NOT ?

Here's how it happened. Career Woman and the Fairy Tale.

What are u talking about? Career woman? Fairy tale? The 2 extremes never blend. It's like putting together "a Monk" and "Great Sex".

When we were little girls, we dreamed of a prince on a white horse taking us to a castle, and live happily forever. But if life put you in a role of career woman, romance is simply out of the question. Does she want it? She tells herself she doesn't. Why think of something she has no luck for?

But one day, a Prince knelt before her with a ring. He was refined, charming, handsome, hopelessly romantic, and almost perfect. He offered her a fairytale wedding and a life of a fragile princess forever.

Suddenly she realized, she has been living to the expectations of the men's world. She has to be stronger than any man, smarter than any man, and she has to win over men by playing according to the men's logic and rules of the game.  (Because man can only understand their own logic and ideologies, they think it's good. But it's not always logical for a woman.)

She never cried. How strange?

She is afraid of showing anyone she can cry.  She has no right to tears.

She can't afford mistakes because she knows in a business world ruled by men, a man's mistakes will sometimes be forgiven, but not a woman's. When every man wants to tear this woman down, wants to see how she falls from the top, she is forced to perform even when she is tired.

But then, this prince appears, he offered her the RIGHT to weakness. She was just so exhausted and wanted a shoulder.     

Now, she is torn between a princess and a professional woman. A dreadful feeling arises.

Using a male's logic, she compiled a stupid SWOT analysis of whether she WILL or WILL NOT accept the offer:

But ALL her friends tell her to marry the prince....why?

HOWEVER, life is about funny twists.

One night, she had dinner with a few old classmates. While she could still recall how they hanged out as innocent girls, some are now having kids or about to give birth in a month or so. She looked at her girlfriends and their husbands. They gained 30 to 40 pounds, didn't care about how they look, and their kids screamed on the table.

"You gotta to wash yourself with ginger skin water after giving birth..." "Which hospital do you go to?" "This brand of diapers is softer...." "This is the baby snack my son loves, pumpkin flavor...." "He learned to say 'ma ma' 2 weeks ago..." "This brand of milk doesn’t have Omega-3...."  Motionless, she kept eating her food and felt like an alien herself.

She asked her friends a stupid question, "How's it like to get married? Anything changed?" They told her, "Well, it's all the same as before..."

Really? The "same"?  SHE WAS TERRIFIED !!!

She started to work on another list of what she wants now:

The idea of being a PRINCESS is too absurd for her now. It takes a professional suicide and the suicide of her carefree life...

She thinks… it'll soon be her birthday, “Why ruin a good day?”

****

It's the first time in HK.

Broadband dies down, even in this 3rd busiest trading floor in the world.

(I felt very sorry for those are very into online sex.)

It is said the Taiwanese earthquake has impaired our Internet connection to Europe, US, Asian region, etc. Well, basically all over the world.

You know what, I used to believed that we are going to die without Mobile phone, Internet or Octopus Card, the top 3 stuff for survival here in HK. Money is the 5th, right after credit card.

Yet, it proved creations like these can be very fragile.

And HK becomes funny today.

Not because of the disaster. (I'm not ruthless and cold, ok? And I truly hope all is well soon.) But because when you take time to look around, you will see how interesting people react.

At first, it feels like the end of the world. Groaning, moarning all over the place. 

Some colleagues become motionless without their favorite MSN and eBay.

Some just stuck in front of the LCD monitor, with their mouth open and don't know what to do. They used to get lost in the Internet world. Now reality becomes too real for them.

Some refreshes the HK Yahoo every minute because it's the only site we can access to. But something tragic is, one website won't provide enough entertainment.

Some started jumping around, murmuring something.

Some clients disppeared.

Some friends disappeared too.

For my company, things become more efficient than ever. Though I know internet-die-down is not so funny for some industries.

Back to the old days, we are now on phones and faxes until we can finally use our emails at noon, but unfortunately restricted to local HK.

As an employee, so sorry to discover how we have spend 50% (or more) of the working hours everyday to browse something not really useful. That includes me, of course.

Suddenly we have a lot more time. How funny.

My IT friend sits in front of his server, looks serious (but for what?), and keeps saying "shit" the whole day.
Obviously we have created more jobs because of the invention of Internet (could be good). But today, at least in my office, we proved that we can do without it.

For the rest of us, we can finally spend more time talking face to face with our colleagues. Which is a nice thing.

Thanks.

We haven't die !!

Something must have went wrong.

Since when did we have gender test in Asian games? How does it feel like to fail a gender test? And what if your friend fails one? What will you say to comfort him that becomes her, or, vice versa?

On a journal, it says nanotechnology might cure brain cancer one day by isolating these cancer cells from nutrients.  Without damaging the smallest blood vessels, it can dry them inside. And right next to it is an article about somewhere on the other corner of the world, a nanotech weapon was invented. As it implies, "kills more efficiently".

What makes us so schizophrenic?

We are living in these extremes. Both the best and the worst may reveal one single truth : We are not satisfied. We want to attain something that we are not. So we cannot be happy. And we indulge ourselves in misery .

It will be shocking to calculate the dollars we spent on happiness. A Million Trillion annually? or more? The truth is crystal clear. We are far from happy. 

Same as every year, I was busy in this performance tour for cancer patients and the disabled. The best thing I can do.  And I always enjoyed the little chat after the show. Moments like this often surprise me.

A girl got her face burned and an arm gone in a fire when she was 14, now 22, helped out in the Show. She told me, "It's nothing." 

Nothing? For a girl fully aware of what it means to be pretty and then being loved from the TV?

She said to me, "You are beautiful. You are like a goddess when you dance." She talked enthusiastically, her body a bit trembled as she moved.  I tried so hard to hold my tears.

Another patient, at around 50, actually has pity on us so-called normal. "We don't have your worries." She has no question as to why life give her such a challenge.

I feel shameful. We project our own misery on them. But they see through our misery. How stupid we are to think we are doing something to the "less lucky" ones?

And they look far more normal than we do. They are happier then any person I meet everyday. Not just because we entertainment people are there.

We are in two worlds of the same reality.

I can never forget their spontaneous laughs.  Some people that I met here laughed at almost everything.

As for laughing, how long have we forget how to laugh? Children laugh 400 times a day. Average adult about 5 times. And we are losing 385 laughs everyday?

I always feel annoyed when my friends complaining about anything. They enjoy making themselves victims. Indeed, they are cunning. Since we have a big market of unhappiness, they trade misery for love and attention.

It's less likely for a boy to care about a girl when she is always happy and carefree. Is it an insult to a boyfriend when a girl seems to need nothing? I don't know. But that's what girls (or boys) do, they make themselves helpless and miserable.

But what about the 385 laughs?

I grew up in a traditional Chinese family. It is amazing to find out the most frequently used word of my parents to their kids is "NO". My childhood was filled with "NO, NO, NO" from parents and teachers (why can't they say "Yes, but..." instead?), a lot of times followed by a good beat up that leave bruises all over my body. And this is their idea of love.
 
Adults pass on their misery this way. From the very beginning, they said "NO" to happiness and pleasure. Somehow they are responsible for killing the child in us. Slowly, we all become cunning. We hold up our joy and blissfulness as a child to fit into their miserable life.

If we regard ourselves perfectly normal to be unhappy, which is one extreme, is it also normal for us to be happy, like the patients do? Is it a matter of perspective?

Or, are we going to learn to be happy only after we lose something or someone important to us?

What is life about? Are we really living?

I want to share a story of unconditional love and true beauty.

Here's the piece of news from reuters.

A real Christmas story

Fri Dec 22, 2006 9:07am ET

 

HONG KONG (Reuters) - A Hong Kong schoolboy who died in a traffic accident has brought festive hope to at least seven other patients through the rare mass donation of a large number of his vital organs.

Fourteen-year-old Miu Chi-ho died from brain injuries after being hit by a bus several days ago, but doctors were able to save the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, skin, bones and corneas of the healthy and athletic teen-ager.

"There were at least seven recipients of the organs," said a spokeswoman with Hong Kong's Hospital Authority.

Miu's 41 year-old mother, a single parent on social welfare, ignored the protests of superstitious relatives in insisting on the donations to "bring hope to other families," Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper reported Friday.

"Even though I'm devastated, I want to do something for society," the paper quoted her as saying. "(My son) is very great. Even though he's left us ...

 

Continue reading on Reuters ...

 

Merry Christmas!!

With LOVE,

 

You know Alice? No?

Yes, that Alice. Modern, sophisticated and confident.

Sick of romantic stories, she fell in love with the loneliness in a big crowd and the glamorous emptiness of Central.

As usual, she started to get drunk in FINDS. And slowly, she felt stupid and dizzy. Suddenly, she saw a group of bar-hopping bunnies in tux bounced by, and they hurriedly hopped to D-i and KEE.  Burning with curiousity, she followed one bunny tux all the way down to this WONDERLAND.  

Drunk and tumbling, she saw people in the place all with big white tags hanging down their chests. And her own tag wrote, "Miranda + Charlotte + Carrie". And she thought, "SHIT!"  She wanted to be Cinderella since she was a kid. And neither Miranda, Charlotte, nor Carrie seemed to be happy. It's always happier to be a princess with no brain at all.

Or, for a man in this place, the tag of any girl is nothing but a "PUSSY".

She looked around. Came a gentleman-like banker, wrote on his tag beautiful capitals, "DRINK ME".  Another gorgeous man flirted Alice with his charming eyes, carried a tag that said "EAT ME". Alice was fascinated, "Since when did we have truth in bars?"

A supermodel in Armani suit started to talk to Alice, "Honey, you are curvy," followed by a line she hated most, "Oh dear, from where did you get this gorgeous arse?"

"I know. I bought it from supermarket yesterday." she replied when she checked out his tag that marked "Fancy a fuck?"  She smiled, pulled out a pen and started to write on the tag of this supermodel, "SHORT DICK, BIG EGO."

Yet, the Charlotte in her was crying. She had this love bubble that bursted faster than the tech one weeks ago. It led her to re-evaluate herself.  Being a good girl wasn't easy. In investment terms, her long position incurred great loss. The reason could be, the market shifted to speculations on some short term JVs. 

She felt good by herself for years, but once invested her feelings, her whole life changed. Maybe she should be a speculator as well. No pain, no trouble.

While she was thinking, a 193cm, 6-pack handsome boy hooked her up with a mouthful of sweet talks. On his tag wrote BOLD numbers "22".

And "24"?

She knew she has nothing in common with this "22". Which is good. Just like a speculative stock, she didn't need to understand anything about him.  He's just a ticker symbol.  And she could change to nothing more than a number. That's all. And "22" is really crazy for her. 

At this very moment, she started to understand why the market went for a speculative JV. She felt sorry for this boy. And she felt sorry for herself.

23 days to Christmas.

560 cups of Coffee.
235 Tangos.
15 days in Europe.
10 Nude photos.
5 glamorous Gowns
4 hairCuts.
3 Castles in the Air.
1 Promotion.

Empty handed? No. But my hands are empty. No better. No worse.

So I count my purse.

I am HK$227.9

Shit! Who the "F" am I ?
Here it is. One Heart. One Soul.

From Unknown to Unknown.

A match and a candle

<<Step Up>> brought me back to my teenage days when I was a little ballerina. Same mother, same hardship, teaching the same bunch of ballet kids. (I really miss this cute hip hop guy.) It was the time when I lived my dream.