1) Utopian Academy of Arts is a good name for this one… This struck a personal chord because my mum was a public secondary school English teacher for some 40 years, her entire working life. Despite being courted by the private sector several times, she remained – at times inexplicably – in Malaysian public schools throughout.
My dad studied botany on scholarship – mixing natural or synthetically created minerals and cross-breeding various plant species to achieve desired results in the crops (agriculture is after all one of Malaysia’s top economic contributors), and so we lived in several very different and distant parts of Malaysia. Transferring about, my mum found herself occasionally in some very tough neighborhood schools. Once, she had a stint as the “discipline teacher,” – in a school in a relatively poor area. Think lower secondary (i.e. aged about 13) kids who willingly sold themselves for cash… (For e.g. the market price for a boy’s first time was already several thousand ringgit, “if you knew where to go,” and they usually wanted the money to buy a motor bike. (Public transport was relatively unreliable.) Some kids who badly wanted/needed the bike thought this wasn’t a bad deal, especially the boys, who said they didn’t mind getting the experience AND a bike (they could choose to say no, and they usually preferred single middle aged women who wanted some experience))
It was in this environment that my mum began free English tuition classes for any kids who could stay back in school before going to help their parents mind night market stalls or etc. The classes made her wildly popular.
And then one day she got tired. It’s the only time I remember her tiring of her job. She had driven her “new” second hand car to school for the first time. It had gotten scratched up with a pen knife before lunchtime. Devastated, she stopped the free classes, much to her students’ dismay.
In about a week, her students dragged a boy she’d never seen before in front of her desk. “I’m sorry, Cikgu,” he said in a mixture of chinese dialect and Bahasa. “It looked so new, and I had nothing to do… You never drove it before, how was I supposed to know it was your car…” Her students offered to “Teach him a lesson real good,” if only she would restart her classes, but at the time she couldn’t.
“When I gave those free lessons all those afternoons,” she told me, “I never thought those kids could scratch up a car simply because it looked new and they were bored. It shouldn’t have mattered, whether it was mine. That is completely not the point, when I give free lessons. Neither is offering to beat him up because the car turned out to be mine…” She applied for transfer shortly after.
That wasn’t the only “tough” school she worked in, before or after her car got carved up. (To be exact, immediately after, she was in a top results-producing public school for some years before accepting an offer to move to a brand new “tough” school where she felt she was needed more. Visiting while on leave, I’ve actually joined her for a school function held in that canteen. All the kids were polite to me, but it took more than an hour for my hearing to recover, when we got home. Idly I think this is one reason in old age her ears aren’t tha-at good :D)
Held To Account. Heard of the Starfish Story? Thousands of starfish get washed up after a storm, and the next day there’s this little boy flinging them back into the water with all his might, as far as he can throw, one at a time. When asked why he’s doing it – he can’t possibly save them all or even enough to make that much of a difference – he flings another one in and says, “Well it made a difference to that one.”
Principal Burkett has a Masters’ in Education from Harvard
“…You are here because someone in your life wanted you to have a better opportunity. Our goal is to get you ready for high school and get you to college…”
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2) The amazing person who wrote My Lovely Wife In The Psych Ward. Dislike the title, the article is so, so much more. She was Type A. He was more surfer dude.
Giulia was besieged by seriously psychotic tendencies requiring heavy medication. That’s not the story. The marriage is the story. (And, if you really wade through the whole thing like I did – hands up, who came to the part where she delivered their son and thought Uh-oh she is SO going to be at her biggest risk for a relapse? Post partum depression to me is HUGE. And really not acknowledged enough in many Asian societies. For real – yes pregnancy in itself is hormonal, but if you are going to be delivering a baby at some point, watch out for the possible depression that follows.
Because if like me you are someone who has never even had PMS (and strode about with 25 kg pregnancy weight barely noticing it because you barely had any morning sickness or etc either) you will really not know what hit you. I will always remember the massive difference between my post partum with Rockstar vs the Miss. I technically had far less life stress with Rockstar than the Miss in the months following delivery – but being aware of the possibility of depression and prepared for it made a massive difference to my well-being after. So, be prepared: depression is really no joke. (And in Giulia’s case it appeared to aggravate her psychosis to her worst incarceration in a mental hospital.)
They don’t just look awesome.
The article quotes from R.D. Laing’s 1960 The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness: “The cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed.”
Another way of referring to Shakespeare’s Madness Is A Form Of Genius theme from Hamlet.
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3) Break it up with some pictures… Meet Gluta, The Happiest Dog In The World. Stray dog in Thailand who can eat satay neatly off the stick finally gets adopted. 2-3 months later, she becomes severely ill with cancer. Watch the footage in the link; don’t worry, there’s a happy ending 🙂
My name is Gluta
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4) Did Sierra Leone’s Hero Doctor Have To Die?
“…Pooley frequently found corpses sprawled in the toilets, lying in pools of contaminated blood from the IV lines that they had ripped out of their arms during the night. One morning he walked into the ward and saw a naked male adult lying dead on the floor, and a “sweet-looking” naked toddler sitting in his blood. Somehow, the toddler survived….”
“…90% of Ebola patients should theoretically survive if diagnosed promptly and treated aggressively. …90% of Americans who contracted Ebola survived. …50% of Africans who contracted Ebola survived…”
One of my biggest fears, of deadly diseases or complications, is bacterial meningitis. When Rockstar was 2-3 months old we even rushed him to the emergency room; we had had reasons to fear, and thank God it was a false alarm. Aside from events earlier in the evening that led up to the 2am hospital trip with screaming Rockstar, I had once lost a relative inexplicably to bacterial meningitis. It is the inexplicability of it that especially stayed with me – when you know theoretically say, how certain deadly diseases are spread you know theoretically what to do to effectively lower your chances or those of loved ones from catching it.
But when you have no idea how it happens, you don’t know exactly what to do to prevent it. So you fear everything.
Then less than a year ago, the CJC room mate I am closest to from Singapore days was randomly tagged on a Facebook post (she would tell me after that she had no idea why the picture suddenly surfaced again, but anyway – it really is something, that I saw it when I did. My Facebook activity is sporadic at best, and I had missed related posts for several years, until this picture. )
It turns out my friend and former room mate lost her first child and only son to bacterial meningitis several years ago in as random an infection/ complication as my relative’s. Her son had been about 6, then – close to Rockstar’s age at the time when I first found out.
No, you don’t understand. This friend of mine – she had a tough childhood. When I say tough, I mean beyond “simply” poverty or a broken home. But the kind of person she was, sitting at the desk couple feet from mine in our dorm room……….. words cannot fully describe the person she was. Is.
There are people for whom everything seems to go their way in life – and who don’t think so (:D) and there are people – beautiful, beautiful people – to whom the most horrible things happen (and they don’t think so either) and it goes to show time and again how there is simply no correlation between the amount of crap you get in life vs how much you’ve already had.
Several months after her first and only son died, I was actually in Singapore to visit another friend, desperately homesick, having just moved there and had a baby. I wasn’t sure if she was still post-natal-depressed, but whatever – she was miserable. My former room mate, she was the strong one. The one who didn’t need the Hi, How You Doing? call. But I would fervently wish I’d called anyway. Thousands had attended the funeral, she would tell me eventually. She had grieved horribly, terribly. I had no idea that had happened to her those few years ago, until less than a year ago.
But that day as I struggled and struggled to find the “right” thing to say after all that, what she said was, “He must have been so special, to have been called back to the Lord so early.”
And it’s true.
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5) More eye candy… Side by side portraits of children and their parents.
Separated at birth. Sort of.
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6) Miss-skit is a pic, titled Land Ahoy, Mate-y! As the Miss weathers the storm at sea with her trusty elephant backpack and Rockstar’s oft-worn, slightly faded, Paul and Shark yachting jacket (which was, to begin with a huge find in the branded warehouse department)
Whee.
