Staying Strong

Little Caleb really suffered today. He has not eaten or drunk anything since last night, in preparation for today's surgery. The surgery was scheduled for this morning, but was pushed back again and again until this evening. He was crying for water for hours and hours, and couldn't understand why he has to suffer. At the end I have to get creative and filled a little sponge with water and moistened his lips repeatedly through out the entire afternoon. Little did he know the same has been done on Christ, but for a greater suffering.

The doctor successfully drained out the infectious pus in a cyst in his umbilical area. And how big is this cyst (a cavity containing a liquid secretion)? Just hold up your hand and form a fist, and that is how big the cyst is! The doctor only drained out the pus this time, and will remove the cyst altogether only in about two months' time. He didn't want to do both today to avoid complication. So poor Caleb has another surgery waiting for him in two month's time. He was already worrying about it, and I tried my best to explain to him why.

However, sometimes suffering is beyond explanation. We will just have to trust God and live our lives to the fullest and cherish every moment, in sickness or in health. And with this happy thought in mind, here let me show you what we have done to make this afternoon go by easier. We created a new, exclusive line of masks using hospital food trays and various hospital supplies I "borrowed" from the nurse :P Superhero Forever! Hang in there, kiddo!

Resilience

What a stressful couple of weeks. My son has a fever that has persisted for more than a week now. Last week I have to take days off work to take care of him, and ended up creating together this exclusive Batmobile called the Invisible Dragonfly (the glass mug was only used to showcase the "invisibility" of the vehicle, and not part of the structure). Pretty cool, huh?

And I am glad that we are enjoying a streak of soul-warming sunny days, which give hope and life to just about everything in Vancouver.

Today we finally decided to bring him to the hospital to do various tests on him to seek an explanation for the persistence of fever. He ended up having holes on the left hand and IV on his right hand. But this didn't deter him from his quest to refine his super-hero drawing skill. I asked him to give his arms a rest for a couple of day, but here you see this rightie insisted on using his left hand to draw Magneto. Such is the resilience of the human spirit! =)

Floating

To Bridge

Sonnet 18

A sonnet from Shakespeare for your Valentine's. The poem is about a lover, and the power of language to preserve her beauty.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The Road Not Taken

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;  5

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,  10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.  15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.  20

This early Robert Frost poem must be one of the most well-known yet also most-often-misunderstood poems in human history. I have seen it being printed on Hallmark Happy-Graduation cards, with the obvious misunderstanding that this poem depicts a person who chose the road less traveled and achieved success and now could look back and congratulate himself for the good decision. Read it carefully again, and one should see the poem is not about this at all. It is an existential meditation on decision-making and the anticipation of remorse, doesn't matter which road you have taken.

Transformers

Here is my movie review for the February issue of Angel's Heart Monthly:

Transformers epitomizes the very worst of blockbuster movie-making, an assault on the senses and an insult to the intellect. One needs not to know more than its title to learn of its purpose, but I dare say the filmmakers are aiming at something nobler than showing automobiles turning into robots. In fact, on a deeper level, the movie is about one teenage boy's unflinching quest to procure the hottest wheels in town and the hottest girl in school (in that order), and along the path of his chivalrous pursuit, he just happens to meet a bunch of really cool robots that frequently undergo metamorphosis for no apparent reasons. Of course, some robots are good and some robots are bad. Being the good boy that he is, our precocious protagonist obviously sides with the good ones. After more than a few mighty explosions, the boy finally saves the Earth and conquers the girl. And, yes, he gets to keep the robots too.

When I first watched a segment of this movie during a Christmas house party, I was dumbfounded by the sheer ineptitude of the show and the utter lack of judgment of the parents present. It is fascinating how so much money can be wasted to create something so inconsequential, so lack of ambition and creativity. I have nothing against summer blockbusters, but, really, do I have to suffer through such ludicrous and juvenile story line to be mildly amused by a few monotonous and ultimately exhausting action sequences? During my entire viewing experience, there was not a single moment that I cared about any of the characters, earthlings or robotic humanoids. I didn't come with the expectation to be inspired, but I also wasn't prepared to be denied of an engaging story. The movie is produced by Steven Spielberg (Jaws, E.T. , Minority Report), a filmmaker we can always count on to create blockbuster thrills with uncommon intelligence. Shame on him for allowing director Michael Bay (Armageddon, Bad Boys) to deliver nothing more than a wet dream of a male teenager.

And what were the parents thinking of when they showed this movie in the Christmas party, where kids as young as my four-year-old boy was present? Wasn't it obvious the movie is not only devoid of any moral value (which I totally expected), but also an excuse for the filmmakers to display relentlessly their fetishes of the anatomy of the machinery and of the female gender? Or did they miss the many cheap laughs generated by the not-too-subtle racial stereotyping? Is it not enough for the film to be merely dumb, but dumb and offensive? At the end I have no choice but to play the bad guy, and kindly asked the party host to stop playing the movie. I wondered, if the filmmakers have the insolence to manufacture such ineptitude and spend millions to market it to the very young ones, shouldn't they at least have the decency to make it suitable for family viewing? But at the end, the responsibility to protect the young minds rests firmly and squarely on the hands of the parents. One parent present at the party declared that her almost-teenage girl has watched this movie fifteen times, and I wondered what sort and degree of damage has been perpetually inflicted upon the girl's self body-image when she has to repeatedly witness the camera lingering on and caressing the picture-perfect female body via the sexist lens. I challenge all the Christ-following parents to stand up against the giant marketing machine and fight for cultural transformation, beginning within their own households.

Last summer, a self-declared movie-loving friend of mine lamented that after watching Transformers, he has no other movies to look forward to for the rest of the year. This is a very bewildering statement, considering 2007 was one of the most luminous years for the movies in recent memory. There were instant American classic like No Country for Old Men, unrelentingly ambitious morality tale like There Will Be Blood, sweeping literary adaptation like Atonement, wonderfully inspiring family entertainment like Ratatouille, heartbreaking human drama like Away from Her, and not to mention a wide array of lighter fares like Juno and Once that have gone on to become surprising critical darlings. To believe there was a lack of interesting movie offerings is to deny oneself of the opportunities to be amazed by the many possibilities of the cinema. Or maybe my dear friend has confused popularity with quality, and couldn't see beyond the neon signs of the ubiquitous marketing machine. If there is a way the audiences could become a cultural transformer, it would be in how we choose to skip movies like Transformers and immerse ourselves in the blessed creativity of the good artists.