日本語のudang

Types of writing prawn : 海老/蝦/エビ/えび

Specifically...
海老(えび)＝shrimp
車海老（くるまえび)＝prawn
伊勢蝦(いせえび)＝lobster

But according to Google translate,
海老 can mean shrimp or prawn, and
蝦 can mean shrimp, prawn or lobster.

Decisions to make

And follow through:

• My values (Passionate Honor, Audacious Fervor, Relentless Belief, Contagious Belief)
• My personal values (Industriousness, Cleanliness, Vigilance)
  
• My intention
  
• My conduct & speech (Respectfulness, Integrity with prudence, and Assertiveness on situations)
  
• My opinion
• My actions
• My livelihood
• My concentration/focus areas
• My family
• My family (if viable)
  
• My finance
  
• My retirement
  

Like with Like

Categories:

• Singapore Dance Theater (SDT) (Brochures, Write up)
  
• Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) (Updates, significant correspondence, Bills, Sectors to assist)
• Vitae (Done/Doing/To Do/Long term Goals)
  
• Spirit man (Done/Doing/To Do/Long term Goals)
• Fitness (Done/Doing/To Do/Long term Goals)
• Books List (Read/Reading/To Read/Write-ups/Reviews)
• Things to Return/Exchange (i.e. DVDs, books, discount cards)
• 
  

Paperwork

Usually when I come home, there would always be a new stack of envelopes waiting for me to open.
Boy, it's not anticipated; not only is it a hassle to rip them out, but also the archiving or tasks that needs to be done.

To clear the chunk(on top of accumulating envelopes for the past weeks!), I learned to separate them into roughly 3 piles (divide & conquer):

1. Trash (with bin & shredder)
   
2. Archival (with Punch holder, page protectors & filing pigeon hole)
   
3. Action/Tasks (via phone, PC, or manual-pen&paper, with time observation)
   

Guidelines to sort stuff to the piles:

1. Trash: envelopes, advertisements that come with bills, fliers for events you're not interested in, coupons for products you don't use or stores you don't frequent, duplicates, old or outdated materials, numbers or notes you no longer need, manuals, receipts, or warranties from products you no longer own, etc.
2. Archival: Group like with like i.e. receipts and records associated with taxes, warranties and owners manuals, significant correspondence, appraisals, cv or resume, product information, account information, financial records, insurance policies, benefit information, dental, health, and immunization records, things associated with particular hobby, etc.
3. Action/Tasks: names, numbers, and addresses to input; accounts to reconcile; calls to make; correspondence (rsvps, thank you notes, job applications, birthday cards, recommentations, invitations) to write; numbers to check; questions to ask; decisions to make; products to register; policies to review; things to return or exchange; taxes or claims to file; new files to make, etc. Just remember to keep this list of items low, i.e 12!
   

Questions to ask

Q: What does it take to stay organized?
A: Lifestyle change

Q: How to make my time really count?
A: Set time checks. Choose to be purposeful.
Decisions to make. Time needed to follow through.

Safety net

Or better named as the Starter kit, consists of: Version control, Unit testing and Project automation. It is an infrastructure in software development to address the needs, namely Design Time with Freedom to experiment, Ability to backtrack to a stable state, Reproduce any work product as of any time, Ability to demonstrate progress, for an exploratory environment.

Version control stores every version of every file you work with. Whether you're writing source code, articles, songs, poetry, version control acts as a giant Undo button for your work.
Newer distributed version control systems such as Git or Mercurial are well suited to support private experimentation.

Unit testing provides you with a fine-grained set of regression tests. You can use unit test results to compare alternatives, and you can use them as a solid indication of progress. In any endeavor, you need objective feedback to measure progress.

Automation ties it all together and ensures that the trivial mechanics are taken care of in a reliable, repeatable manner.

With the above 3 steps, you can learn efficiently and safely: explore even if you're not sure where you're headed, invent and apply what you've learned.

Expensive Lessons Learnt

What was I doing?!!!
May 2010
Sometimes when signing up for credit card, it comes in a bundle of many things, i.e. for HSBC, it came with a Ready Credit account which required something like an annual fee?
Some misconception - paid $70 (part of the annual fee) but, in the midst of it, slipped my mind to retrieve back the payment cos on the same day a few minutes after I paid, after their staff's explanation of this account type's "loan shark" nature, I terminated the account.

Heart comes in sizes too...

Ever bought tickets for ticketed events and then at the last minute, realized that it would have to be forfeited or transferred to others due to circumstances i.e. double date, or being quarantined?

The study of people comes in handy at this transferring juncture.
Some entrust ticket to others yet expecting full refund... and
some generously give up with no strings attached.

One's helpfulness may be another's poison.
Middleman sometimes do get hands burnt... but even bigger is the burn scarred at the heart.

Over-Committing

Take a look at what you are saying Yes to, i.e. in terms of Time, Finances, etc.

If you say Yes to something, and then resent the time it takes to follow through, then it probably is something you should not have agreed to in the first place... except, if the things are really crucially important to you and loved ones, and that they would match your long term goal(s).

Prioritize. 24/7 on a budget - which stuff done are towards your true intentions, that can truly improve life quality, versus gradification?

And if pressurized to commit when you know you should say No, begin by saying a half No, i.e. "I really can't today, but I may be able to sometime in the future." Then work towards a definitive NO.

Out-of-Focus

Bokeh is the term used to explain the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur in photography, and is usually seen in good quality macro shots, in the areas that lay outside the depth of field.

Seeing beyond the present.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

by Daniyal Mueenuddin
(W.W. Norton & Company)

A collection of beautifully crafted stories that exposes the Western reader to the hopes, dreams and dramas of an array of characters in feudal Pakistan, resulting in both an aesthetic and cultural achievement.

---
Review extracted from Washington Post, February 15, 2009

Because of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Rohinton Mistry, to mention just a few of the most prominent authors, American readers have long been able to enjoy one terrific Indian novel after another. But Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is likely to be the first widely read book by a Pakistani writer. Mueenuddin spent his early childhood in Pakistan, then lived in the United States -- he attended Dartmouth and Yale -- and has since returned to his father's homeland, where he and his wife now manage a farm in Khanpur. These connected stories show us what life is like for both the rich and the desperately poor in Mueenuddin's country, and the result is a kind of miniaturized Pakistani "human comedy."

In the original Comédie humaine, Balzac had the ingenious notion of tying his various novels together by using recurrent characters. Eugène de Rastignac is the protagonist of Le Père Goriot but is subsequently glimpsed in passing or sometimes just referred to in several other books. In like fashion, Mueenuddin interlaces eight stories, while also linking them to the household of a wealthy and self-satisfied landowner named K.K. Harouni. In "Saleema," for instance, Harouni's elderly valet, Rafik, falls into a heartbreaking affair with a young maidservant, and we remember this, with a catch in our throat, when in another story we see him bring in two glasses of whiskey on a silver tray. In "Our Lady of Paris," we discover that Harouni's nephew is madly in love with a young American woman named Helen; later on, we discover that he is married -- to an American named Sonya.

Many of Mueenuddin's stories conform to a common dynamic: We learn about a character's past, then zero in on the central crisis of his or her life and, even while we expect more development, suddenly find everything wound up in a paragraph or two: "The next day two men loaded the trunks onto a horse-drawn cart and carried them away to the Old City." (Flaubert or Chekhov might have written that.) In other instances, even so minimal a resolution remains cloudy: Mueenuddin just stops, having given us all that we need to know about the future or lack of future in a love affair or a marriage.

The epigraph to In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a Punjabi proverb: "Three things for which we kill -- Land, women and gold." Throughout the book the Harounis are gradually selling off their ancestral lands to pay for business losses and a Eurotrash lifestyle. (Two of the patriarch's three daughters reside in Paris and London.) Nearly everyone in the book is more or less corrupt. In "Provide, Provide" we learn of the machinations of Jaglani, the manager of K.K. Harouni's estates in the Southern Punjab. When Jaglani "would receive a brief telegram, NEED FIFTY THOUSAND IMMEDIATELY," he would "sell the land at half price, the choice pieces to himself, putting it in the names of his servants and relatives. He sold to the other managers, to his friends, to political allies. Everyone got a piece of the quick dispersion. He took a commission on each sale." But even the immensely shrewd and politically powerful Jaglani has his weakness. He begins to sleep with his driver's sister, a young woman he employs to cook and clean for him:
"Finally he could not deny to himself that he had fallen in love, for the first time in his life. He even acknowledged her aloof coldness, the possibility that she would mar his life. And yet he felt that he had risen so far, had become invulnerable to the judgments of those around him, had become preeminent in this area by the river Indus, and now he deserved to make this mistake, for once not to make a calculated choice, but to surrender to his desire."

In Mueenuddin's Pakistan, happiness is usually short-lived. Jaglani's beloved develops a urinary-tract infection, then discovers she cannot bear children. A man finally achieves success, only to be diagnosed with cancer. When a party girl resolves to change her life, she discovers how hard it is to be virtuous. On every page there are wonderful, surprising observations and details: A judge says of his wife that "you need only see her disjoint a roast chicken to know the depths or heights of her carnality." The rich young Sohail Harouni suddenly recites from memory some poetry by James Merrill. An old caretaker builds a wooden cubicle that can be dismantled and simply carted away whenever he needs to move. In every instance, Mueenuddin convincingly captures the mindset or speech of any class, from the hardworking Nawab, a roustabout electrician with 11 daughters, to the flamboyantly decadent Mino, who imports tons of sand to his country estate for a "Night of the Tsunami" party. But my favorite character is the mysterious judicial clerk Mian Sarkar:

"There is nothing connected with the courts of Lahore that he has not absorbed, for knowledge in this degree of detail can only be obtained by osmosis. Everything about the private lives of the judges, and of the staff, down to the lowest sweeper, is to him incidental knowledge. He knows the verdicts of the cases before they have been written, before they even have been conceived. He sees the city panoptically, simultaneously, and if he does not disclose the method and the motive and the culprit responsible for each crime, it is only because he is more powerful if he does not do so."

Mian Sarkar -- half Sherlock Holmes, half Jeeves -- actually functions as a detective in "About a Burning Girl," and the result is the most light-hearted of Mueenuddin's stories. I was only sorry that he didn't include more about this "man of secret powers." Maybe he will in his next book.

As should be clear, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a collection full of pleasures. I saw only a single improbability in it: At one point, a gorgeous young wife grows dissatisfied with her hard-working and high-minded husband's routine love-making. So she dons a pair of stockings and a garter belt and, otherwise naked, lies fetchingly in their candle-lit bedroom. The husband comes in, glances at her and says, "So that's how you wear those!" and then begins to trim a broken fingernail and talk about a problem on the farm. Not even a Princeton graduate, which he is, could be quite such a moron.

Michael Dirda
mdirda@gmail.com
---
A series of 8 interlacing short stories written about the outcomes of the descendants of rich Pakistani & people around them including their workers while treading on polar topics i.e. the old versus young, frail versus healthy, rich versus desperately poor, city life versus farm/country, official wife versus concubine, prudence versus wild, living upstairs versus living downstairs/anywhere in between and of circumstances in life, decisions, loneliness and of love - delicately narrating miniaturized "human stereotypes".

Favorite character: Lily in "Lily" and Mian Sarkar in "About a Burning Girl"

What happens without goals?

"In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely
loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become
enslaved by it."

— Robert Heinlein

Consider what you're doing. In what way is that advancing you toward your goal, versus daily trivia?

A study done at the Dominican University showed that three factors contribute to helping you accomplish significantly more toward achieving your goals:

• Written goals
• Public commitment
• Accountability

Days and weeks may seem suddenly evaporated without clear purposes; personal or career-wise.

The Incredibles

Marathon runners hit a "wall" of fatigue halfway through the race. If, however, they can grit their teeth and smash through that wall, they can find resources of energy to carry them for the whole grueling 26miles/42.2km distance.

In life, i.e. learning Japanese, is like running a mental marathon; bumping up against not one wall, but an endless succession of walls! You get through Hiragana to find Katagana waiting for you... After which Kanji try to tongue twist you and Grammar Forms tower atop formidably.

Be bold and courageous!
He who faces the giants and bowl them over are the Incredibles.

What do I want?

Temporal happiness cannot solve the state of being, i.e. confused & easily vexed, which is affected by success or failure of goal achievements, especially if one is just flowing along.

I can't Go On, I'll Go On

"Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he
who has nothing else."

- Baltasar Gracian, Spanish Jesuit philosopher

You must go on.

Procastinate

How to move away from such murky situation:

"We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change
cries out loudly enough to force upon us
a choice between the comforts of further inertia and
the irksomeness of action."

-Learned Hand, 20th century American jurist

With laying-out-of-options & sheer WILLPOWER.