it is now friday afternoon at 3pm and i have this premonition that after tonight's sleepful rest, the next time when i'll conform to the shape of my warm inviting bed is 2 weeks down the road. there are so many papers due, so many exams to take and one big big senior design presentation to make that i think school when i am awake and think school when i fall asleep so much so that sometimes i dunno whether i am dreaming i am awake or awake when i think i am dreaming. you get the idea....

some of the singaporeans are meeting up afterwards to pray, share and have a dinner together. initially it was just that. no agenda or fixed format. but then word got around that it is a gathering cum pseudo farewell that i am organizing for myself (what?!?). so now there is this obligation for me to come up with a speech or something like that so that people won't feel kind of cheated of a good friday evening by the oldest singaporean undergraduate here at UIUC.

not that i am going to make a speech only out of obligation. In fact, now that the situation presented itself as such, i am thinking i might as well use it that way. People have, for the whole of this semester, been asking me so much abt what i feel now that i am finally graduating that it is finally sinking into me that i am really going to finish school and leave this place for good. you know lah....i'm an emotional retard; i dun feel a lot abt things until it is over. like when people say bye bye at the airport and cry that they will miss me. that's when i think in my head, "err...okay... you can still call me if you want to, you know. Not like we'll never see each other again." But then propriety disallows me to say such things (at least not aloud) so i always try my best to express in my own way that i'll probably miss him/her too and then spend the rest of the 16hour onboard the trans-pacific flight trying my bestest to induce myself to actually start the missing process.

Good grief. I sound like a pig incarnate, ungrateful and totally devoid of love.

But you know what's the really funny thing? it;s when i stop trying consciously to miss a person and then see the person again face to face years down the road. that's when  i feel down in my heart how much i actually wish we have not been apart all this while. That's when i go (in my head again), "wow...you know i really would have liked us to have spent these past years together than apart."

Some of my friends may notice that i always have this funny incomprehensible expression on my face when we part or meet (again). if it is the former, that's me trying my hardest to miss you. if it is the latter, that's me actually having missed you. if you dun see the expression at all, then it probably means we have not gotten to know each other really as well as we shd have. People tell me my heart is on my face. i think that is true. the good thing is i know i'll never be good at lying so i dun bother to try at all. the bad thing is, sometimes you are better off not letting others know how you actually feel. e.g: when your good female friend spends a whole afternoon baking you a horrible tasting cake and ask you what you think of it. Or when your much hyped music pHD friend asks you at the end of a world renown pianist performace how you simply cannot not love the piano genius and want to kiss his fingers one by one (think the piano guy is russian and called Ivo P something) .

sigh, as i look back, i think i'm psychologically impaired or something like that. and i am a psych major some more. No cure already lah..... just must confess this impairment to my future spouse so that she wun think she really married a pig incarnate.

Oh, i digress. tsk tsk tsk....

so now i am summarizing in my mind my entire 4 year stay over here for the speech later on. what it actually meant to me. how i have changed...how i have not changed.....how i wish i have changed..... i look back at the times i spent with my pastors, Pastor Meier from TCBC, Pastor Grogan and Pastor Terry from Urbana Assembly and now Pastor Dong from CCCC.  i think i'm a very stubborn sheep to manage, partially because i have always figured things out on my own and never really had a mentor in my life who taught me the "the ways to be a good person": My dad retreated into his own world when his career crashed and my mum was way too stressed about bringing in the dough that she just could not afford to be around the kids for long without feeling she was burdening us unnecessarily with her worries. My elder brother is the nicest brother i can ever ask for and he made things a lot easier through it all, though sometimes i feel he is the loved kid in the house and i am the troublemaker. My younger bro still is a mystery to me: he's really nice, the kind of people you want to have around when you are going through the pits (and the kind of people you would normally forget to thank after you get out of them). I just dun understand why he did not rebel in his teens, like me. My sister, err...she is the alpha female in the family...the way she takes possession of the couch from 3pm to 6pm everyday after school and we cannot go near her when she sleeps or face her wrath shd she wake up to our noise (i once kena scolded by her for answering a phone call when she was sleeping)

Yeah, though we all are born again christians, that does not mean we have reached the nicey nicey ending of a nicey nicey story. But Christ gave us the hope to push on when we dun dare to hope anymore. He taught us we were loved when we felt no love for ourselves and He taught us to love when we felt no love for others. I think He is the glue that held us all together. He's so awesome; everytime i think of my Lord, my heart goes soft and my knees grow weak.

Maybe i shd just share this in the gathering afterwards.....  dysfunctional pat and his dysfunctional family. :=) neh....i'll most probably stumble more than i build.

Just came back from boston yester night and went out with jessica and vivian for morning breakfast at a self-perceived-french-but-actually-not-quite-french place called le peep.had some good quality chat which helped me to understand my friends and myself better. came back to prepare for my ECON 301 exam and then popped over to daniel's place for a farewell party for casey.

small patrick made food for us all which showed effort in the presentation and variety. was somewhat quiet over the whole evening. there was a lot of laughter but somehow we all clammed up when we tried to share a little bit more of what we have been thinking and feeling inside. we were eager to laugh and be jovial at each opportunity presented; i guess that was how we got to be comfortable with one another in the first place. and i guess that's how we choose to be comfortable with one another now.

i wanted to know how casey has been doing over there in michigan but felt there were other people more appropriate to do the asking, as i am the latest to know casey among the crowd present and have not really spent much time to know him before he left. i did ask one question though, when daniel gave me an open invitation to. Jiamin said that once i start, casey shd be prepared. or something like that. i dun really comprehend what that means actually. judie once commented that i ask questions that cannot be answered. From someone with much tact and love for others, i think that was wise council for me to be more sensitive to the occasion and person. after all, jane (chen) did say that she had the feeling of being interrogated when she conversed with me.  

but honestly, i'm not really interested in finding out whether Casey is flying or taking the bus back to michigan. neither am i into knowing what potential problems he faced registering for classes next semester. Or if he is staying in his previous landlord's place. I just wanted a glimpse of what he'll be thinking of on his long and quiet ride through the night back to campus, be it by bus or plane. i want to know whether he is happy and his outlook to the days ahead (within and without of classes). i want to know whether he has found close friends to share his life with over there, friends who can grow and mature together with him in prayers and in deed, just like the friends he has come to love and to part with here at uiuc.

Maybe i am reading too much of myself into the people around me. :=)

it is now 3.13am and i am just done with a shower after coming back from Jacob's place after a night of karaoke, the playstation 2 game where you dance on a piece of electronic mat and of course, my fav boardgame: Settlers. initially wanted to go straight home after ICCF as there seemed to be so much to do back home, with boston only 3 days down the road. But there is a time when you have to treasure whatever time you have left  before things are no more. and i got to ask myself what are the kind of memories i want to bring back home with me, a reality that is fast approaching.

as i look back, I actually got to know some of the folks from ICCF better after playing settlers at jacob's place. that was back in the days when he was still staying at Goodwin Apts. i still remember the night when i had the most incredible amt of chewy squid tidbit in my life. i think i ate about 3 whole bowls of it. it's called peng2 hu2 you2 yu2, after an island in taiwan called peng hu where jacob's parents come from. apparently, all the kids born there can swim like crazy. so there we were playing settlers and i was thinking hey, quite an easy game after all. as it turned out, i kept losing for the first few rounds. "just trying things out and getting familiar, no big deal," i told myself. then afterwards, i realize i simply couldn't win. bad strategies, no foresight, no coordination, no realization of what other players were aiming to do.... and so i kept losing, for days and then for months. drats...  after school started again, we had less time to do silly things together and keep late nights and we put Settlers away.

A couple of weeks ago, i told jacob that for me to be able to graduate in peace, he'll have to at least let me win once. Just once. otherwise, i may very well give him a call 10 years down the road when we'll all be at goodness-knows-where just to hunt him down to play with me again. After ICCF, i gave jacob a call to ask him whether he was keen to play and we went over. Played a game with jacob and Frank, a counsellor working on his doctorate at truman university. i lost the first round despite everybody purposely giving me opportunities to recuperate. and then i won the second round without help.

Wow.

so this is how it feels like to win after wanting to win for so long. this is how it is like to yearn for something and finally get it.Yet to be honest, it feels pretty much like nothing. i felt quite empty/ shallow/confused/stupid to think that i actually tot i'll feel elated. hmm...  i could almost hear echos going round and round between my ears. "now what?" i heard a voice say. "Now nothing, idiot," the other voice replied. "it's a game over."

arghh... the greated tragedy of life. To yearn and not get; to get and not yearn. life can be just agonizingly passing time flipping between the two.

"Man's way is death, a chasing after the wind. But God's way is the narrow one leading to the barn. few have chosen to walk the latter way: fewer have finished it triumphantly. "

Makes me realize there are many other "settlers" in my life, if you get what i mean.

Am going to have our 2nd last bible study today at the Illini Chinese Christian Fellowship (ICCF for short). we are sharing from matthew 13 on the parables of the weed/wheat and the mustard seed/yeast.

it is amazing how much you can get out of an investigative bible study with friends who are willing to engage. i was over at daniel's and michael's place and we talked about so many hardcore issues like predestination, will of God, and condemnation. thru the parable of the weed, we come to realize the tendency for man not only to judge but also to condemn when the servants of the Lord took the initiative to ask the Lord whether they shd pull out all the weeds. God's timing is not reflective of his weakness; rather it is his mercy of giving more opportunities for weeds to become wheat.

will be baking a banana bread later on to illustrate how a small amt of yeast can make such a big difference in our lives. going to parallel yeast to the time we spent in prayers. it may just start at 5 minutes out of the entire 24hours and you wonder what effect it can achieve. you dun really feel different before and after praying. but just like yeast, prayers needs time to work its way through the entire dough. when the dough starts to rise, that's when you can really see the power of yeast!

went to catch a piano performance by Ivo Pogorelich, a famous pianist from russia. by the end of the performace, i assure you there are literally people who will go up to him and kiss his fingers, one by one. Pei-I, a piano major i got to know, proclaimed him as god. and boy is he good. the way he plays the piano is crazy, he was so fast and accurate that he literally got to adjust the height of his chair somewhere in the middle of it all so that it will give him more leverage to bang down on the keys. i have to confess i'm a music retard. but looking at him play, it more than reminds me how God can give different people so different talents.

also went to celebrate Andy's bday after that at Jing Yi's place. the cake was awesome and i had almost 2 pots of gao shan cha by myself. jing yi was just shuttling in and out of the kitchen reflling the teapot. i was wondering why she was so busy until i realize that she had been so kind to ensure that everybodys' cups get filled when emptied. but alas, she knows not well enuff. the more she poured, the more i drank and the more i drank, the more she poured. so while the rest were engaged in talking abt Ivo Pogorelich and his marriage to his piano teacher at the age of 22, jing yi and i were engaged separately in a rather intense session of tea-drinking and pot-filling. at the end of it all, my bladder was so full that i had to go. and i think it may very well be the last time Jing Yi let me sample her gao shan cha from taiwan again. o well, it was good while it lasted... :=)

My only class got cancelled today and ashwin, my senior design group mate asked for a meeting. in the email, he said that he has noticed several weaknesses in our team that must be brought to light and he encourages the rest of us to to do so as well. i confess we really did a horrible horrible job at the last presentation and i think the team members got rather heated up later on as we got bashed by professor palekar, our faculty advisor. palekar tot we have been quarelling and kept asking during the session whether we are working together fine. ella is out of town for her thanksgiving break with her boyfriend while chances are ashwin will be ard the whole period. I'll be away from monday afternoon to friday at boston with Tony. so got to try to do as much as i can before that. discipline patrick, discipline. no more pretending to read in bed when my truest intention is to induce myself to fall asleep so that i wun feel as guilty as jumping into bed straight from the start. as i am typing this, i can't imagine a 25 year old still  whining about taking naps. that sucks, yah?

In an email i wrote to a friend:

"In psychology, we learn something called self-fulfilling prophecy whereby a person who thinks he will most likely fail would consciously or unconsciously sabotage his own work (like procrastination etc) so that he may prove himself right. A lot of it is becos of the fear for failure and the unwillingness to accept the fact that sometimes we may try and still not get what we hope for.

In this aspect, I think myself King of such prophets. :=) should really quit my procastination habits. "

woke up early this morning after sleeping early at 11pm last night. wanted to pray before i begin the whole day ahead. as i was praying, it was obvious to me that the years of being a christian has reduced my prayers to some christian jargons that may actually mean little of what i am really trying to say deep within. am reading the purpose driven life and a passage about honesty with God left a deep inprint in me. how we can be honest to the extent of complaining, crying out and being able to lay it all in front of God with no feel of condemnation or the need to present the best aspect of yourself to Him. That was how David cried out to God in his many Psalms and God love David dearly. As for me, i easily slip into the Christian patrick mode when i pray, read the Bible and interact within the church. outside, i am the hardcore work addict who cares more for the goals than the means. a lot of times, i try to be what i think people see me as rather than present me as who i am (part of the reason is that sometimes i'm not really altogether clear myself who this Patrick Lee is like).

"We find ourselves in the Bible. We discover how God views us and through the process, we understand who we actually are, above our culture, past experiences and formed habits. Because God is the creator of us all, He knows us beyond how much we can know of ourselves at the moment. When you get to know God more, it also means you get to know yourself better."

So this is my prayer for myself: that God will help an obstinate mule become a good sheep able to discern the voice of the Good Shepherd and willing to follow His lead. Mule to sheep? Nah...impossible. But hey, who says God must follow man's possiblity rules?