My supposed personality type(s). Is it true ah?

Your #1 Match: ISFP

The Artist You are a gifted artist or musician (though your talents may be dormant right now).You enjoy spending your free time in nature, and you are good with animals and children.Simply put, you enjoy bueaty in all its forms and live for the simple pleasures in life.Gentle, sensitive, and compassionate - you are good at recognizing people's unspoken needs. You would make a good veterinarian, pediatrician, or composer.

Your #2 Match: ISFJ

The Nurturer You have a strong need to belong, and you very loyal.A good listener, you excell at helping others in practical ways.In your spare time, you enjoy engaging your senses through art, cooking, and music.You find it easy to be devoted to one person, who you do special things for. You would make a good interior designer, chef, or child psychologist.

Your #3 Match: ISTP

The Mechanic You are calm and collected, even in the most difficult of situations.A person of action and self-direction, you love being independent.To outsiders you seem impulsive, surprising, and unpredictable.You are good at understanding how all things work, except for people. You would make an excellent pilot, forensic pathologist, or athlete.

What's" Your Personality Type?

First match is kinda accurate, second match is almost accurate. But the third one is a bit iffy to me. Does anyone find me impulsive, surprising and unpredictable. I would think I'm pretty close to predictable. :P
Oh well, these personality profile thingies are probably all crap anyway....

Yay, it's a good day! - Part 2

Ok, continuing from where I left off about yesterday, which was my good day.... In the afternoon, after my taekwondo class, I zipped back home, hosed myself down in the bathroom and was on my way out again for yet another one of my visits to the WAO child care centre in PJ with my church buddies. I don't think I've blogged much about these little visits of ours, so I guess I'll go with a little background first. What started out as well-meaning visits at the beginning of this year by a bunch of blur youths from my church to a child care centre (caring for children of abused women, usually abused by their husbands) has slowly been turning into a big project in which we've been trying to get our whole church involved. We've even named our team Project Elijah, which of course, has some reference to some Bible scripture... won't go into the details of that lest this entry gets too boringly draggy. Anyway, our team has been having some big dreams for Project Elijah, thinking of ways of getting the church to help us out by asking for volunteers to go visit, or asking them to 'adopt' a kid, which is not literal adoption but just praying for a kid and occasionally buying them gifts....and of course, offerings in the form of money money money to fund our activities with the kids. We've even been brainstorming ways to increase our funds as well as awareness of Project Elijah by making bookmarks, cards, whatever that will have the name Project Elijah all over it..... which feels a bit weird-ish to me coz' it's almost like we're starting a business...hehe. But it's for a good cause, and we're hoping in the future we'll be able to rope in enough people to start another group that can visit other places like orphanages or whatever. I never thought it would end up this big, but I think it's great coz' at least we church people are getting off our lazy bums and doing something to help and love others instead of just talking about it all the time on Sundays. Putting our faith into action...that's what Christians should be doing but more of than not, we don't. I'm glad we're doing something to change that. Woo hoo!
Anyway, back in the present, yesterday the bunch of us hauled our bums over to the CCC. Sadly, quite recently a few of the kids we had become so fond of had to leave the home, and we didn't even have a chance to say goodbye to them. But yesterday, there were a couple of new kids...the only two Chinese there and they'd been there for definitely less than a week coz' we visited the place the week before and they were not there yet. Anyway, these two new kids are siblings - a 3 year old girl and a 2 year old boy, whose names I shall not reveal because the details of this place and the children are supposed to be hush-hush, just so to protect the kids from their nutty fathers. But anyway, these two super cute kids were also super shy at first, and wouldn't say a peep to us. Didn't really help that they could only speak Mandarin, and most of us there couldn't speak Mandarin except for a couple of the guys, who had to serve as translators for the rest of us. I thought they'd be that quiet throughout our whole stay, but boy, was I ever wrong! The two warmed up to us really quick, and after a while they were both going nuts, joining in our games and running around. The girl especially took a liking to me, even though half the time I couldn't understand what we was saying to me, and she would bug me to carry her and swing her around. And when I was too tired to do so, and started running away from her, she would chase after me on and on like the energiser bunny! Very good exercise, that was....
Later on, our fun took on a more serious note, when the girl finally stopped running arond long enough to open up to us and tell us her story. She was talking in Mandarin, of course, but one of the guys, William, was there to tell the rest of us what she was saying. She said that she hadn't opened up to anyone since she came to the child care centre. She told us that once she saw her father beating her mother so bad until she was lying on the floor and the girl thought her mum was dead (but fortunately, she wasn't). And she also that she wished her father would love her mother, her mother would love her father, her father to love her, her father to love her brother, and so on and so forth. And she also said a lot of other incoherent stuff in between that William couldn't get. The amazing thing was to see such a young girl express herself so well at that age, and knowing the things she's had to witness within her own family. She wasn't crying or showing any sadness at the time she told us her story, but I couldn't help myself. It brought a tear to my eye. But at the same time, I'm happy that she opened up to us. I mean, here we are, a bunch of perfect strangers she'd known for only a couple of hours, and she was pouring out her heart to us. To our whole team, one of the things we'd been hoping for is that we would be able to give these kids some happy memories and let them slowly trust us enough to open up to us and tell us their problems. I mean, we can't erase their bad memories, or give them a drastically better life, or protect them from their fathers.... but we also know that holding onto their pain will affect them for the rest of their lives, and we've been really praying that we can have that chance to help them heal from their pain and maybe even forgive their fathers. And to have this girl to exactly that on the very first day we met her, well, it's a joy to me. In fact, this little girl has even motivated me to start picking up more Mandarin, just so I can communicate with her better next time and understand her feelings. Hehe, I always thought the only thing that would ever make me pick up Mandarin would be if I needed to be able to speak it for my work. I left the child care centre yesterday feeling happy that the new kids took to us superbly well, and we got to understand their problems a little better.
To add to the joy of yesterday's experience, today at church I was playing guitar on the worship team, and the worship went smashingly well too (I'll attribute the use of the word 'smashingly' this time to fatigue due to taekwondo training just now. :P). Just one of many times when the practices doesn't seem quite right, but once we get to the actual thing, the musicians all played perfectly and everything just flowed like clockwork. Just love it when that happens! And after that, our good ol' Pastor Mal was asking if anyone wanted to give testimonies, and I felt a little something in me bugging me to go and share about yesterday's experience with that little girl and hopefully it would interest more people to pray for these kids. Of course, I was kinda shy shy lah, so I only went after a couple of people did their testimonies. And considering I think it was the first time I'd ever stood up there in front of church sharing something like that with the church, I think I did a pretty good job tugging at the heartstrings. Haha! :P I told them about that little girl's story, how she'd opened up to us, and how I hoped everyone would take it upon themselves to keep on praying for the kids for healing in their lives. A tad bit corny, but I shared from the heart. And I'm proud of myself too, coz' usually I want to share stuff like this on front of church people but I'm usually to nervous to just open my freakin' yapper and just say it.
So yeah, it's been a good couple of days. :)

Yay, it's a good day! - Part 1

It's Saturday and it's been a very busy day with me being out all day since 8am until about 10.30pm.....I'm about to collapse from fatigue, but I've had such a great day today, I just really wanted to blog about it. I dunno, I felt of lot of things just went well today, and not just today but also last night when I went for my new cell group. For anyone not of CBC youth origin, the cell group members have all been kinda messed up and mixed around so our cell groups now all have different cell members. There are only three people from my old cell in my new cell now, including me and my ex cell leader, Theng Terk, who now just is a member (with some leadership roles, of course), and Kelvin, who was a member is my old cell group but is now the new leader of my new cell group. Yesterday was our first meeting, and I think it went off smashingly well...and considering I would never normally use the word 'smashingly' in my daily speech, it just goes to show how much I'm dying of fatigue right now. But anyway, I had the dubious honour of being the one to do the first praise and worship session at our first cell meeting, and I even surprised myself at how well it went. Most of the time when I play, I feel it doesn't really turns out right and is kinda draggy or something, but yesterday everyone was really into it, and everything just flowed great....it was an awesome worship time. I'm betting it was a little Holy Spirit giving me a hand....maybe it's one of those signs this cell is going to really work well together with anointing and all that good stuff. Forgive me,my non-Christians friends who my use of perplexing Christian jargon. :P Anyway, yeah, I have a good feeling about this cell group.
But anyway, that was yesterday, and today is today. Today, as I always do on Saturdays, I had my good ol' Taekwondo class. And since my class started at a later time than most classes (11am), I decided to hop around some of my instructor's other schools and help out a bit, and ended up at a class teaching some yellow belt kids. They were kinda fun to teach, even though they were a bit undisciplined, talking all the time and saying stuff to each other while I was teaching. I would joke around with them a bit too, and they took to me well too even though most of them weren't familiar with me. But when the time came round to it and I told them to be serious, yell loud, do their taegeuk (pattern) well, they all did well and yelled so loud I swear anyone at the other side of the school would have heard them. And these were just 8 kids! That was pretty fun.
As it happens, that assistant of mine who still gave me the cold shoulder today even after my explanations and my apologies, happened to be at that school I was helping out at the time. As expected, she didn't want to look at me, and I had to pointedly go up to her and ask her if she was going to my school to help out later or not. She said no, and had already told our instructor about it. And I said fine and went off to do other stuff. She can wallow in her little "She-did-me-wrong-so-I-don't-wanna-forgive-her" attitude if she wants. I have a class to teach, and even though she is a good assistant, if she's gonna have an attitude like that and not cooperate with me, I'm more than happy to let her go. As it was, even without her, I managed to teach a good class today with only my two remaining permanent assistants, plus another one who came over to help out. In fact, I was quite surprised today, when I had a class of well over 70 students today and all the kids were so superbly well behaved today. They were very quiet during the stretching exercises, when usually they're all be talking about making noise like it was a 'pasar malam'. And when I was teaching some kids and told the others to sit down, they were pretty well behaved too....well, except for some of the younger ones who still acted a bit like noisy monkeys. But wow, I really to say this has gotta be something to do with the fact that I'd been asking a bunch of people to pray for me and my taekwondo class this past week. Thanks to everyone who did! :D Especially to Poh Lin, who prayed that the kids would respect me, even though I didn't specifically ask for that....that must've been one power-prayer! :P And to top it all off, when I had a talk with one of my other assistants today, even though he'd heard all the crap talking about me from the girl assistant, I asked him if it really seemed to him like I was ever scolding them, and he said I was ok. Which is good, coz' he doesn't agree with why that female assistant got pissed with me, and he still supports me. I talked a bit more with him, and he even told me that while I was in Australia, he was around to hear some of the other assistants talking crap about me, saying that they hated me for some strange reason. I don't wanna drop names, but I know the two black belts he was talking about. One was the black belt who was assisting me before he got sent to another school a few months back. The one who had always acted so nice in front of me, and then slowly I find out he's been saying all this nonsense, not just this year but even LAST year when I wasn't around. *roll my eyes* The other black belt is possibly the most crudest guy I've ever met, with 90% of his vocabulary consisting of vulgarities and not a very likable personality. I didn't like him much before, but I can safely say I've never been rude to him or anything.... I pretty much just tolerated his presense whenever we taekwondo people hung out. And ever since I found out that this guy did something to one of my best friends which was nothing less than detestable (not at liberty to talk about that either, but let's just say, if YOU found out this guy did this to someone you cared about, you'd wanna beat the crap out of him too), I've been thinking even much less of him. So to find out today that these two particular fellas have been talking a lot of crap about me...well, it's interesting. But it hasn't brought me down one bit. For one thing, my assistant's willingness to tell me these things shows me that he has a good attitude and isn't one to believe the crap that other people say, which makes for a good assistant. For another thing, his support tells me I'm not the annoying person the other girl seems to take me for. For another-nother thing, knowing that those two pathetic crap-talkers think so lowly of me makes me even more determined to work hard in teaching my class well, with the few assistants I have, so that the students will do so much better than when they were in charge, AND I will have the respect of my students, AND I will build a rep as a great taekwondo instructor like the one who taught me. Of course, I might be getting too far ahead of myself, and there's always a chance of failure...but hey, a little bit of motivation in the form of a desire to prove my critics wrong will probably help in a big way. :D
Anyway, that was just the morning of today. I haven't even gotten round to the afternoon, when I went to visit that WAO child care centre in PJ. But anyway, considering, I've blabbered on a lot about taekwondo stuff again, and I need to wake up early for church tomorrow. So I shall continue blabbering on about my good day, tomorrow! Heck, maybe tomorrow will be good too, and I'll have even more to blabber about. Ciowz!

Another award. Yay!

Oh joy! A little good news to brighten up my day! I just received a package from Monash Gippsland, the campus I was at in Australia, and I received an award for academic excellence in Second Year Environmental Science. I don't know why they put it as second year even though I was in my third year there...perhaps coz' I was taking second year subjects. Anyhow, small technicality. The main thing is not only the nice little piece of paper saying its an award for academic excellence of yours truly, but also the nice little cheque that came with it! Was supposed to be a book voucher for the Monash bookstore over there. Thank God it came as a cheque to me, coz' quite frankly I'd much rather use the money on something more useful and enjoyable than something from the pathetic Monash Gippsland bookstore, which is even smaller than the bookstore at the Malaysian campus! Good grief! Anyway, yeah, I was dancing around with my puppy a bit after that. :P

5 easy steps to destressing Naeem

You know, with all the stuff that's been going on lately, it becomes more apparent to me how difficult it is to get older and be laden with more responsibilities. When I was younger, I really had nothing else to worry about except studying hard and acing my exams. Now it's half a year before I graduate and probably start working and having to worry about saving up enough money to buy a house and car, paying for the bills, being in charge of whatever I'm in charge of once I start working, etc etc....and a few more years down the line, I might be married and having to think about starting a family, how to raise kids, how to deal with a husband who doesn't pick up his clothes or something, and probably have more work responsibilities as I get promoted in my job. Already, just being in charge of a taekwondo class is giving me plenty of headaches...I wonder how on earth I will manage to deal with the even harder stuff later on in life. And I always try to be the level-headed person....not losing my cool, trying to learn from mistakes, being patient with difficult people, trying to live up to what I think is ethical and all that stuff. But sometimes, when I just really don't feel like being the level-headed person, but I don't wanna blow my rep....this is an example of how I relieve my stress (according to exactly what I did just about a half hour ago...):

Step 1: Put my pet dog Sassy in my room
Step 2: Roll Sassy over on her back
Step 3: Proceed to rub her tummy at a rate of at least 10 rubs per second with both hands
Step 4: Start screaming and rambling on about my problems while continuing to rub her tummy at a rate of at least 10 rubs per second. For example: "Aaaahhhh, Sassy!!!! Why does life have to be so difficult? Why do people have to make life soooo complicated? Why can't people just be more like dogs? All you dogs have to do is look for food, and then after you eat enough, you go sleep and play and shit and pee, and that's your life. Of course, some dogs have it worse than you coz' they're strays and if they can't find their food they die of starvation or disease. But you have it sooooo easy. All you have to do all day is sit around and look cute with us and we feed you so you can be so fat and pudgy like you are now, you fat, little, pudgy, piggy dog. And you can just play and eat and sleep and shit all day. But people have to do this and that and worry about a heap of stuff and make life so complicated for us with our businesses and economies and responsibilities and emotions and yadda yadda yadda. Don't you just have a great life? You don't have to worry about any of that stuff. I would just love to have a life like that, except that I can't go out unless my owners decide to take me out....and I'm stuck eating gross dog food all the time. But nevermind...you know, this is why I've always wanted to work with animals so much....coz' they're so much more easier to work with than people. With animals, it's plain and simple. Either they like you and they show you their affection, or they don't like you and they run away to protect themselves or try to eat you. But with humans, noooooOOOooo, it's soooo much more difficult. People can pretend to be nice to you and all, but just turn around and they stab you in the back. Or they only know how to complain and complain and complain about other people without ever giving support or encouragement. And everyone's just so caught up in their own problems that they don't care about anybody else. And the worst part is, I'm probably just like everyone else when it comes right down to it. Aaaarrrggghh!!! I just feel like killing myself sometimes.... No wonder so many people just take the easy way out and kill themselves. That's so sad. Isn't life so sad, Sassy? Ha? Ha? HAAAA? Do you understand what I'm saying? Can you possibly understand how I'm feeling and show me a little loyal dog-like affection instead of just staring at me, u blur little Shih Tzu???"
Step 5: Look at Sassy for a while, who just gives me one of her usual innocent looks, and say "*sigh* Go eat your food, you fat puppy" as she waddles out of the room and I wish I had a Golden Retriever instead.

P.S.: Don't worry, I'm not suicidal. Just one of those silly things I say when I need to destress. :P