Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food | Video on TED.com

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food | Video on TED.com

was watching this podcast on my way back from tokyo last saturday...

it makes me start thinking....

thinking how lucky i was during my growing up days, it was then when i have lunch and dinner readily served for me be it after school or tuition classes or just a day out.

during my secondary school days, i actually envied my friend who get to eat out after school.

i thought it was so cool...to be able to hang out with friends and to have lunch together, guess i looked at it as more grown up then.

oh well, it does seemed grown up to me then....come on, to be able to pay for your own meal and perhaps i looked at it as a way of being able to take care of themselves too.

i might see myself as kiddy coz i need to go home after school and my grandma still cooks for everyone...

i forgot what it was that i felt at that time, but my guess is i want to be cool!

watching jamie oliver speak about teaching every child about food makes me think real hard....i was trying to remember when did i started the 'eating out' culture...

it should be during my uni days, when i no longer live in my hometown.

i then asked myself....why do i eat out?

well, first of all...we are not allowed to cook in our dormitory in uni, some smart ass actually burnt down the entire dorm while using their coil heater apparently...

after uni, i was living with a bunch of my old friends from hometown...why didn't we cook then?

so i guess it's true....we can't cook! we know nuts about cooking......

and most importantly....it only costs us RM 2.70 in section 17 to get those economy rice with 2 meats & 2 veg...isn't that handy?

only last year did i started cooking myself...and surprisingly, it wasn't difficult at all!

but too bad, i've stopped doing so for a long long time ever since work started getting hectic.

i think i should start cooking again soon...

what difference can i make?

i've lived more than a quarter of a century...suddenly today i asked myself, am i capable to make any difference? gave a thought of what i've been doing in my life up to now and a lot of memories came back...

the first thing that came to my mind was a project that was initiated by a group of us during our high school days. we called it "TEENATURES". what is it that we do? i'm sure a lot of us remembered how soft drinks was sold during our schooldays...yeah, it was sold in red paper cups with Coca-Cola logo on it. a friend came up with the idea of recycling those cups instead of seeing it being thrown away everyday. with that objective in mind, we started the "teenatures". we promoted ourselves in the school upon obtaining permission from school management. we told our fellow students to help save the environment by recycling all the paper cups by throwing it into a special garbage bag instead of the normal dustbins in our school canteen. we will collect the cups and store it in a room which was given by the school to the "teenatures". trust me it wasn't smooth sailing...we have fellow students purposely destroying the cups because in their mind, they thought we are collecting the cups to reuse it again...not a lot of people understood the meaning of recycling...it was frustrating for us and in the end we were forced to give up due to the lack of support from our fellow students...

secondly, my mind travelled to KEBATIM....this was a project done by the Fifth Collegians in the University of Malaya. in short it's a project for the orphans....we raised funds, we do a lot of side projects such as colouring contest for school children, a cross country event which is opened to public, we go around looking for sponsorships and many others...all these was done in order for us to have all the money needed during the peak event, where we bring in around 80 orphans to live with us for a week in the Fifth College. we hoped by having them here; by giving them workshops; by bringing them out for field trips etc...they will be motivated to to also be a university students like one of us...

today, we are trying very hard to make a different in the work that we do...we try to make better commercials, we try to make better edits, we try to look for better shots, we try to find the better performance of the talents, we try to find music that works better...

come to think of it, the difference that i'm trying to make now is actually smaller than what i have been doing during my school days. maybe the only thing that seemed bigger is the difference that i'm trying to make for my family and even that i don't think that i've done enough...what a shame...things got even worse after i started watching TED...there's so many great people out there!

so i thought...maybe i should be living my life closer to the fullest...hopefully one day, i can make some significant difference...being 1-800-ahcai.com is definitely not good enough...

is our job that bad after all?

i live my life everyday commuting from home to work and from work back home...everyday i have stories to tell be it good or bad, interesting or boring. most of the time i complained about the clients i have to face everyday and how stupid and ridiculous they are. sometimes the problem at work got so bad that i thought i've had the worst day in my life...

someone i just worked with recently said this to me, "look at it this way, we only have ridiculous clients, clients who asked for a lot of unreasonable stuffs....at least, we don't have clients dying on us unlike some doctors and surgeons, and we don't have to fight to prove our client innocent when our client is actually a murderer or some pervert who raped dozens of women...ALL we have to do is put together beautiful picture." i heard it and i thought, how true is that!

爸爸写的字

我是家里唯一一个不上中文学校的小孩，我上小学的时候看的都是 Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Roald Dahl 等等写的书。那时候爸爸就一直在写歌，在报纸上投稿，有时候还写一些歌评。。。

从小我就一直想看懂爸爸到底在写些什么，但因为没上中文学校这一切都没办法做。很多时候我还是会尝试去读但以我那时候的中文水平是不可能完全看得明白的。有时候只能让爸爸和妈妈读给我听。

到了中学，我开始听中文歌。还记得那时候听王菲，郭富城，黎明，张洪量等等。还记得一开始我习惯一边听一边用我自己明白的拼音方式写下歌词，一句一句慢慢背下来。背着背着也背了好几年！

2003年，我来到了上海工作。刚来的时候真的不太习惯。。。所有东西突然就变成了全中文！有时候到餐厅点饭都有点困难。记得有一次我打电话到上海邮政局要叫个快递到北京，那一次跟服务生电话上的对话是我这一生永远不会忘记的。

服务生： “你的全名”

我： “周采奕”

服务生：“什么周？”

我：“啊。。。喝。。。周呀！”

服务生：“是圈吉周吗？”

我：“哈？？”（我马上问了公司的人，他们也不是很清楚。。。毕竟都是马来西亚人）

服务生： “是不是圈吉周？”

这时候公司的同事想了一下并且告诉我说应该是圈吉周！

我：“对，是圈吉周”

服务生：“是什么人啊！自己的姓是什么都不懂！”

2009年7月26日的那天就是我在上海整整六年了。到了今天也没有在有人说我自己的姓是什么都不懂了。我的中文水平就是你们现在看到的这样。不是特别好但也不差。

昨天我上爸爸公司的博客看了一下。看见爸爸在上面写了好几篇新的东西。。。看了以后我真的很开心，开心得我大声笑出来了！

这才是我学会中文最开心的事情。。。爸爸写的字，我都看明白了！！！

weird dreams....

i tend to have weird dreams every now and then....and i suddenly thought i should write them down...

dreams of being a murderer

to date, i think i have about 5 murderous dreams which started sometime last year. my friends find it disturbing when i tell them that i have dreams of myself being a murderer, actually to be more precise these dreams actually focus more on details of how i get rid of the body instead of really physically killing someone. the one thing that is consistent is the person whom i killed in my dreams has no reference to anyone i know. the other thing about my dreams are it's very very vivid...and very detailed...interesting?

story 1

one of the few which i remembered very very well occurred sometime mid of last year. the incident in the dream took place in taipei. i have a counterpart in this dream, this counterpart helped me to get rid of the body. no details of how we killed that person, no details of who that person was....my dream starts with us in a high rise flat in taipei. we are in a room with the dead body, police is about to reach the house. we were thinking very fast...finally we figured out what to do...we took the body out of the room and headed towards those rubbish dumping tunnel available in high buildings (those where you throw your rubbish and you can hear it sliding down)...we opened the rubbish tunnel cover and BANG there it goes, the body slides down. once that was done, we ran to the lift and managed to leave the building before the police arrived...and i woke up.

story 2

recently i have another dream....same thing, no identity of whom i killed but this time it was a man (a man with a wife actually). no details of how he was killed, but i've decided to cut his body into pieces (this actually reminds me of the novel OUT by Natsuo Kirino) and disposed it in difference places...the funniest thing in this dream was, the husband and wife was a newly wed and they are supposed to take some pictures together. but nobody in the room except me knew that the man is dead. i was praying that they will not find out....i was very relieved when someone in the room suggested that since we can't find the husband we can always take shots of the wife first and DI in the image of the husband at later stage when he's found (isn't this hilarious?!)...well, my dream continued with "a few years later"...everything is normal, nobody found out i killed the man.....and i woke up.

dreams of things being swapped around

just yesterday, i dreamt i was in a park with seats...i was there with a friend without identity in my dream, just someone that i know. we were sitting on the park seats and after a while we left. after a while i realised i didn't have my bag with me so i ran back to the park to where we were seated with hope that my bag is still there. upon reaching the seat, i saw my bag still lying on the grass...but it was open and my laptop sleeve is next to my bag. i reached out for the sleeve and found it's heavy...i'm very very happy, my laptop is still there! i opened the sleeve, took out the laptop and saw that its not my macbook; it has been swapped with i think it's either a samsung or toshiba!! still silver colour but not my macbook...i was devastated....

still yesterday, the laptop losing dream just carried on without further explanation on it. i headed home and when i reached home, i saw that something else has happened! my new white DAHON BYA 412 has turned into a black one!!! someone has swapped that as well....

some other weirder dreams

this dream is weird...very very weird (but people told me it means money coming in)...my dream opens with a static POV, no moving, no tracking, nothing....just static...what i saw was just a coffin with a little plaque placed on top of the coffin. i can't read what's on the plaque, it's just there. the same visual just stayed for a while and the dream ended...weird?

rainy days...

it has been raining and raining and raining for the pass few days....and apparently there are more to come. sigh...i don't like the rain for many many reasons.

- my shoes will be wet

- end of my jeans will touch my wet shoes and the wet road and it will be wet and dirty too

- have to carry umbrellas, which means i will forget that i have umbrella with me and left it behind

- it's hard to get a cab, and i have to stand in the rain for very long and might even need to fight for a cab

- laundry is always damp

- missed the sun

- hard to wake up in the morning

- cold at night, which means crawling into a cold bed...

- traffic is slow

- people are gloomy, depressed and just moody

there's so much inconvenience and depression when it rains....i think it's time for the rain to STOP!

surprise...surprise...

Took hf's nano with me on the flight back to shanghai...i pressed play without even be bothered to see the song that was halfway playing. the song that came through the earphone caught me by surprise!

i've forgotten when was the last time i listened to this song, loved the familiarity! i can even see the movie playing in my mind as i was listening to the song. i see meg ryan, i see tom hanks...and i see the dogs!!!! 

does the following ring any bell to any of you?

funny how i feel more myself with you

than anybody else that i ever knew

i hear it in your voice, see it in your face

you've become the memory i can't erase

so yeah...if any of you know what i'm talking about...do the following:

- SING IT OUT LOUD

- WATCH THE MOVIE AGAIN

and smile...