Be Warned: This Weekend Is Kinda Heavy

1) Doggy daycare pool pawty.

Floating dog

Gorgeous blondes

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2) Have you heard of the Ice Bucket Challenge? Crazy self-torture for a good cause.

He’s done it.

And the Beckhams show how it’s done (pic from hellomagazine.com)

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3) 11 year old Autistic Boy Wonder From Penang receives letter from President Obama. Delwin Cheah is a talented artist. His parents say they don’t know who sent a book of the boy’s artwork to the President of the United States. Who wrote him:

“We face many challenges, but with your help, we can build on what we have already achieved and forge a brighter tomorrow.” 

(I especially love stories of strengths and achievements in unusual, unlikely places… You guys watched Lucy? I didn’t like a lot of the depictions (all the info of a miraculous 100%-utilized human brain stored in a thumb drive thing?), but the core story of how little the human brain is really utilized I find an inspiration to find new ways of doing things. (I mean, some high achievers in the corporate world have “learning disabilities” like say, dyslexia (cf Gary Cohen of Goldman Sachs).

Scarlet Johansson as Lucy

And we are limited in our view of what abilities/”dis”abilities are of “use” because we don’t use that much of our own brains (whether to look for new ways of doing things or etc) to begin with) 😀

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4) BE WARNED: I couldn’t get through all of this next one. Some of it is really, really disturbing.  

(I’d say just stop if you can’t get through it. Though yes my threshold is pretty low in general – I’m the person who hates watching even fictitious more “normal” violent stuff on film. You guys remember back when even a simple kiss would be censored on Malaysian tv? (Not sure re nowadays). I’m the then-19 year old who once called in to Patrick Teoh’s morning radio show to complain that while simple kisses were being censored on tv, a full-blown movie about incest had made it on prime time. (No actual kissing in the movie, any cares.) Anyway there are now even long reads about this series of long reads – how people even came to reporting this problem.)

I came across this awhile ago. I wrote a whole page, and then I scrubbed it completely.   I chickened out of posting it yesterday. This the reason for a hurriedly done TGIF/ weekend post that appeared to miss my usual yarn-y commentary. Not that I didn’t write, but that I didn’t post.

Under a new title: This Story Isn’t For Everyone. The original (and one of the stories in the link) was “You’re 16. You’re a pedophile. You don’t want to hurt anyone. What do you do now?”

The initial story was about young people – many of them teenagers themselves – who form non-offending pedophile support groups and tried to get help before they actually did anything. One 16 year old had a mother he couldn’t tell about his “problem”. But when an unsympathetic therapist told her, his mother went and found a real therapist. She has some real courage too. 

So it’s here because… Some – many – of these people had never actually done anything. They could walk away without ever risking being reviled for the potential to commit one of the most heinous crimes as society today deems it. They could’ve walked away without ever being judged. (Me, I couldn’t even get up the guts to post this a couple times, for fear of being judged.)

People came out and spoke a lot about this, because the easy anonymity of the internet simply gives rise to cheap shots, bullies…….. and people who had been abused themselves – some of whom then reached out to the ones who were seeking help. From that same anonymity.

My story in linking this is how in the midst of great evil there is also great courage and a genuine wish for better. It isn’t just a story of the existence of terrible evil, it is also one about the existence of incredible strength. Great evil doesn’t disappear just because you don’t write about it and pretend it’s not there. But in pretending some evil doesn’t exist, do we also forfeit seeing the good as a result, do we miss a chance to be renewed by the incredible resilience of the human spirit that we get to see in others.

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5) Here’s a little more good… 99 Year Old Sews A Dress A Day For Children In Need.

She’s up to 840 and aims to make 1,000 by her 100th birthday

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6) Here’s another… Hair Stylist Gives Haircuts To Homeless On His One Day Off.

Every little bit helps…

Kind of All Hands On Deck To Help In Any Way feel-good story.

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7) … I’ll post my (human) kids another time. This one JD shall end with some old(ish) pics the 5 Star Dog Hotel she boards at whatsapps us when we’re on vaccie. (Yes, they totally have dog pools and etc – it’s actually a fairly common staple of the dog boarding houses out in New Territories (and most of the big, good boarding houses will be all the way out there because there’s more land… They are happy to drive over to this side of the island to pick your dog up for a fee…))