Update for third week of January

This is the third week of January 2007.

Updates for this weeks are:

1) Jiamin invited me to her district meeting on Friday evening. It was a great meeting and I would like to write down some of the thoughts that came up during the meetings.

(a) The lotus sutra was written with many stories, like the Parable of the Phantom City, the Parable of the medicinal herbs. The functions of these parables is to make difficult concepts accessible to the public. Like these parables, our life stories are meant to be meaning lessons and material for us to use to share our buddhism with other people. Why do we face problems? Cos if we rise from our difficulties and succeed. We can use our life stories to motivate and encourage other people who are going through similar problems.

b) One of the members use the image of Mount Fuji to motivate her chanting. I think images work for me as well. Hence I will use the image of Mount Fuji to tell myself that I must chant and be as stronger as Mount Fuji.

c) Do not harbour any doubt when you are chanting. Dun let the negativity affects you.

After the district meeting, Jiamin and I went out for icecream supper!! Haha... but i still prefer the icecream from Christina's!

2) WS, JM and I met out for dinner on Saturday evening. We had delicious Thai food. Yummy yummy. After dinner, we watched a movie, Donnie Darko, at the tv lounge on level 6 of sidney pacific. Donnie Darko is a psychology thriller. Hmm.. reminds me of Molholland Drive. But i think Molholland Drive is more scary and much more exciting towards the end.

Donnie Darko is pretty good too. I remembered how Jy used to say that american movies failed to use background music, lightings to create a sense of fear effectively as they concentrate a lot more on special effects. I think Donnie Darko used the background music and lightings very effectively. haha.. mebe this is because it is filmed in the 1980s but special effects are not that great yet. So the point is when u gain some, u lose some? Hmm.. I think it really takes a lot of effort into making a good movie and maximising the technology that you have to create good efffects.

3) Officially started on my rotation project. Spent a week reading and doing some preliminary experiments. Hmmm.. now i know why my prof said that my preliminary experiments were done well cos they are actually better than the first results i got from the actual experiments. haha...