Thursday 20 August 2009

Words..

Words don't make much sense to me now. I've read less, understood less and comprehend less.

I need mental stimulation. Recommend a book, please.

Or get me where I am sufficiently abused so I may pick up and charge again.

I first listened to this song while in secondary school. The song played and played again as years passed by and only in 93 did I start listening to the lyrics and tried to make logic of what they had to say.

A while? Awhile?

I've been confused with these two words now and again and tonight decided to surf it out. Found this:

A While vs Awhile

One of our readers, Robert, wrote to ask Daily Writing Tips:

Here’s a couple of words I use all the time interchangeably. But are they? a while vs. awhile Help me out, o oracle!

No problem, Robert! This one’s pretty easy to grasp:

A while is a noun meaning “a length of time”

  • “I slept for a while.”
    - (compare with “I slept for a bit” and “I slept for three hours”)
  • “I was away from my desk for a while.”
    - (compare with “I was away from my desk for two minutes”)

Awhile is an adverb, meaning “for a time,” or literally, “for a while”.

  • “I slept awhile before dinner.”
    (compare with “I slept deeply before dinner” and “I slept badly before dinner”.)

As you can see, the words can be used almost interchangeably in some cases – but a while needs to be accompanied by a preposition, such as “for” (“I slept for a while”) or “ago” (“I left work a while ago”). Awhile always means “for a while”.


http://www.dailywritingtips.com/a-while-vs-awhile/

Wednesday 5 August 2009

One step nearer

He made my day lighter.

On the drive home, just 8 minutes away from destination, He revealed to me that life is about the destination. It's about moving to a destination hereafter. In similar form of the unexplained future, He made me see that death is part of this unexpected future. No certainty comes from living, neither would there be from dying. No one is surely living tomorrow, neither shall we be able to say how we would live, hereafter.

It is how best we prepare ourselves now, to assist in destination hereafter.

For those who have been following my writings for the past few months would notice that I've written quite a lot on the fear of dying, the fear of being alone, the fear of the unexpected. Those are genuine, I tell you and I cannot begin to describe how I felt when I felt them. I have always been fearful of lonliness as, the Malay saying goes, "Kubur asing-asing," which means to each their own graves.

And in my travel today, it finally clicked: my future with destination Jeddah is as uncertain as after-death itself and the only way I can make the best out of it is to make the best with my preparation.

And I move one step nearer.

Saturday 1 August 2009

Gambar!

It pays to smile in photos.

It helps me reminisce past moments, even if they weren't really happy ones but with the length of my attention and memory span, I'd almost forgotten why they weren't happy and focus on the smiles when photos were taken then instead.

They're here :)