Letting Go

I was a make-up junkie. I bought new product every week. Not that I wore a lot of make-up, I just liked to horde and play with them. I had enough to work with to copy most anything off Face Forward.

Then triathlon happened and no time for make-up and most of my base colors were already off because of my perpetual tan. Now, what I need on a daily basis is my powder, mascara, cheek color and a lip gloss. And my favorite shade of Shu Uemura lipstick that a friend picked out.

Early this year, I gave away more than half my stash. I kept my favorites and limited edition products. That was pretty easy.

But today, I did the unthinkable -I let go of my precious Chanel limited edition rouges. And some absolute favorite Dior glosses, the prettiest Face Stockholm dust, Awake lip color and even my Estee Lauder bronze patina that never even made it here.

I gave it to my friend's wife who is now studying make-up with Arbee, my absolute favorite make-up consultant at MAC. Arbee and I were shocked to see each other at the class when I dropped off the stuff - he then proceeded to tell of my afternoons at MAC and Bobbi Brown, convincing clueless women into buying stuf they don't need. But I digress ...

I'm glad I gave my favorite stuff away. It's a sign I'm finally over my make-up phase. It wasn't easy letting go, but it felt good.

So, sue me.

Go ahead.

Please sue me.

I really would love to see you do so. File that case against me. I beg of you. I've been kind of bored and this would be so much fun. Come on now, please?

Okay, come background : tri race organizers are threatening to sue someone for selling pics taken of the race, claiming they own ALL copyright to images taken at their race. So when a fan takes pics at the Olympics, the IOC owns the copyright to that? I was there on official assignment for a magazine and what the magazine did not use, a newspaper asked permission to publish. And yes, my EIC at the magazine allowed me to give my pic to the paper to use. Public race, public place, no invasion of privacy. Here's some reading for you on IP law. It's a fun read, I promise.

They want to sue me and some other people. You know, while you're at it, go sue every single spectator who took a picture at your event. GO. AHEAD. This will be fun. Really, I'm just sitting here waiting. Actually, I'm flipping you off and laughing my ass off at the preposterousness [my god was that word long - I'm impressed!] of the whole deal.

Let's see you try this shit on me. Don't you know I missed my calling as a lawyer? I absolutely loved being in the courtroom and reading contracts and the whole deal. Really, this would so make my whole year!

Shock Weekend

I like to shock my system into training. I like to start a training season with a bang, basically trying to kill myself in one weekend to prepare myself for all the training in the next 6 months. I'm trying to cram fitness for the National Duathlon Championships in two weeks but really I'm preparing for the first target races in 2007 - The HK Half-Marathon and the National Triathlon Championship. After that it's SubIT, OSIM and the Singapore Half Ironman. I get tired just thinking about all that racing.

So this weekend it was a short but difficult 85K on the bike on Saturday, followed by an easy 15k on the run on Sunday. Sounds like a lot but that's really much - deep in training, we do a minimum of a 100k on the bike, peaking near a hundred miles. On the run, the 25k last week was just baby steps towards 50k weeks. I haven't even started swimming yet. Good luck with that. I'm going to be swimming through December. And I love the cold! Not.

Today, I've got the sniffles but nothing a little Airborne can't cure.

The weekend is a test more than anything, to see where my paltry training over the last two months has left me. I've been basically just training when I want to - and that was not a lot. And after last weekend's bitch of a ride with 25k uphill non-stop, it's a surprise I managed to run 15k the next day without wanting to kill my run partner. That's a good sign.

Shock weekend is also an inspiration for the rest of the season - if I can do it coming off from virtually nothing, I can do anything they throw my way.

And with shock weekend, comes my favorite part - where doctors prick and prod me for tests I don't even know what for. Yes, despite my thyroid condition and 17-degree scoliosis, I am a triathlete.

Let the season begin.

Weekend+

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Confuzzled Morality

There is nothing unusual about moral complexity. Women -- and men -- live with it every day. It is what it means to be a human person. We are in favor of a woman's right to decide when she will give the gift of life; after all, gifts must be freely given. We love life and want to act in its interest, and so we are in favor of supporting women's own desire not to become pregnant when they do not wish to bring a child into the world, we strongly support the right of every woman to continue a difficult but wanted pregnancy, and we will do everything we can to support her economically and emotionally.

It is time to change that. A moral discourse that calls on individuals to act responsibly toward the creation of life cannot be separated from a call for social justice -- including measures like those in the Ryan-DeLauro bill which affirm that it is not women alone who are responsible for respecting life, but government as well.

This is exactly where I stand on abortion - and it is a position I have held through most of my life. Abortion was a popular topic of debate in high school and college and Roe v Wade was at the very center. I've argued and won on both sides. But as a personal choice, I am pro-life. I wish for others to have the same freedom to make that choice. If they choose otherwise, that is to terminate a pregnancy, adequate support and facilities must be made available to them by the government. Further to that, I firmly believe also you need to be smart enough to not get yourself knocked up if you're going to fuck around. Okay, let me rephrase that. People who engage in sex for reasons outside its original purpose must take steps to ensure that it does not turn into an act of procreation.

I refuse to talk about morality with my mother for fear of sending her straight to the ER for a heart attack. If she only knew where I stand on most things, she would be going to mass more than once a day. Too many people live their lives by other people's morals and standards. If you stacked up mine against the norms a catholic school girl must have - I should be in the 9th level of hell. They are ambiguous and flexible at best - mostly guided by a sense of tolerance and respect of free will. [The rest of my life, I try to live using the Four Agreements.]

Thankfully, sufficient education has afforded me the ability to be able to decide for myself where I stand on most things. I believe in the death penalty. Homosexuals are fabulous people. I like foie gras but I won't wear fur [it's too expensive, makes you look fat and it's a bitch to maintain]. I believe in lying and cheating when justified. [Though, I must admit, I am too good at justifying things I do]. Some other things, I have no stand or opinion. Maybe I haven't gotten around to trying to wrap my mind around those things yet.

I am no great thinker or philosopher. But, I'd like to believe that I think. To loosely quote someone famous : I think therefore this is the way I am.

Just Shoot Me

This photograph breaks just about every rule they teach you in photography class : my subject is blurred and dead center, I was using digital zoom and there's more noise than New Year's Eve. But this is the one that started it all.

I've never been much of a visual person - I can't draw a straight line with a ruler to save my life. I grew up thinking my talents were more musical than visual. Until this one happy accident that lead me to believe [maybe falsely even] I can do this photography thing.

Through the generosity of my gadget-freak of a father, I've moved through several cameras over the years. After the first one that took the pic above was lost in a very crowded street party, it was replaced with a slightly better one. When I felt limited by what I was shooting with, I decided to buy myself another slightly better camera with a better macro function, more manual control and a better processor. I promised myself I wouldn't buy a DSLR until my skills deserved them. I saw so many old farts in photo class who had the spiffiest cameras but who couldn't shoot for anything. I didn't want to be like them.

But Christmas came early this year and I am now the owner of a Canon 350D. I love it. But I'm still frightened by it - this camera makes me nervous.What if I scratch it? What if drop the damn thing? What if I become one of those I used to laugh at? What if I never get any better than I am now?

Looking through my flickr and other online galleries, I am glad I see some progress with my photography. But still, I refuse to call myself a photographer. Juan is a photographer. Louie is a photographer. I am not.

I'm still someone who relies on happy accidents for an acceptable photograph. Through practice, research and some equipment upgrade, I've managed to increase the probability of those accidents. But that's not where I want to be.

I want to be able to have enough talent to translate what I see inside my head into something I can see on my LCD. [I used to think talent is something you're born with - until this article changed my mind. Talent, Craig Tanner says, is a set of skills you develop over time with desire.]. I can capture what I see - and I strive to capture what I see as truthfully and beatifully as I can. I want to go beyond that and be able to create something of my own. I have no desire to learn how to draw or paint, but I desire to create with my camera.

I need to learn how to understand photographs, understand light and its properties and finally be able to use light to translate my vision. And that's all still a long way from where I am now. But know I can do this in the same way I made my writing happen - with a lot of patience, practice and deliberateness.

If that doesn't work, I'll just stick to singing and cooking up chaos in my kitchen.

Welcome back, me.

I'm back to blogger.

I deleted the old version of this blog because majority of the 489 posts were useless crap. A lot made me cringe - especially those chronicling a relationship that now makes me wonder, what the hell was I thinking?

In the two years I've been gone from blogger, none of things I talked about matter anymore. Not to me, not to my family, not to my workplace. Could we say I've grown? I sure hope so.

If I told you about this blog, thanks for moving with me. I'm still pretending to be anonymous and that people care about my writing so not everyone knows about this little sort of secret. If you stumbled upon it randomly, I hope you can stay with me a while. I'm keeping the LJ for stuff that don't really matter - music, movies and other drivel I'm prone to writing when I want to write for practice. But, for the things that really matter, here is where it's at.