[Added cool art pictures from City Hall in previous entry. Check it out!]

Terrence is a Malay-born Chinese who went to engineering school in Singapore but decided afterwards that priesthood was his true calling. I had a chance to talk to him for the first time today when I went to go volunteer at the CDC. He is currently in his second year of priesthood training and spending time with the AIDS patients is a part of his job.

While we waited for the other volunteers to arrive, he asked me if I was Christian and if I ever gave serious thought towards any religion. I told him that while I did not prescribe to any particular religion, Buddhism was probably the most compatible with my philosophy of thinking.

"Religion is something everyone should seriously look into at some point in their life," Terrence said. "People don't really give enough time to thinking about their spirituality."

And indeed, I've never been a very religious person, and I wonder if I ever will be. Even my so-called spiritual explorations from childhood have been cursory at best and has never amounted to anything permanent. It goes something like this: light Bible-reading in fifth grade; awkward eighth grade agnosticism; and rabid high school atheism bred from a regular diet of Ayn Rand, Nietzsche and Camus. And now, I'm a typical godless Angeleno who uses the phrase "not religious but spiritual" to sum up occasional private conversations with a vaguely benign deity, exploring Buddhist temples, hanging out with my Hindu friend and not being Christian.

After I was done volunteering, I thought of all the things that would suddenly become irrelevant if I were to completely immerse myself into a pathway of God. Things like whether or not your shoes match your purse, or if so-and-so has a crush on you, or if you have a crush on so-and-so, or what shiny new furniture to buy from Ikea to make the living room in your apartment look the right shade of effortless hip. Filtering everyday life through the prism of a higher calling does not necessarily make life any easier or simpler, but I would imagine that it negates a lot of unnecessary crap.





I went to Singapore's National Library for the first time today to check out an exhibition opening of Singapore's woodcut artists.

I really like big libraries in big cities. If I weren't so tired, I would go into more specifics of how awesome they are.

But for the time being: big libraries good.





Black and white good. Do you know what else also good? The free food and drink that came with the exhibition opening. Boo-ya!



This cutie-pie on the left is Zineng, my Southeast Asian Studies classmate who has been kind enough to give me the down-low on all things worth checking out in Singapore. Not surprisingly, he also has a really cute story about how he met his girlfriend involving an airport and a love letter.

What the fuck, these things are only supposed to happen in movies. What a jerk!

--

Hung out with two Japanese exchange students the day before.

Hanging out with them makes me realize that the gaps in my Japanese language are a lot bigger than I previously suspected.





The weather was nippy that day. Get it? GET IT?