Stop Digging Your Nose

Friend: Have you heard? Our ex-minister might be charged in court for sodomy, do you know sodomy is illegal?
Me: Oh, its not sodomy, he might be charged for oral sex.
Friend: Oral sex also illegal?
Me: Yeah, because they say its not natural.
[after 10 seconds pause]
Me: I think digging the nose should be illegal as well!
Friend: .........

How should we interpret whether something is natural or not?

I don't think cutting our hair is natural, we should just let it grow. Same with our finger nails.

I don't think wearing clothes is natural, we are born without it and we are the only specifies that wears clothes.

I don't think driving cars is natural, we are born with legs!

And to repeat, our nostrils are supposed to be used for breathing, its not natural to put our fingers in there.

After finished watching the Confession of Pain,

Friend: Actually, Tony Leung is not a bad guy.
Me: Why?
Friend: Because he have a reason why he commits murder!
Me: I think most of the bad guys in our world also have their reasons for commiting crimes.

Since a long time ago, I have been taught that Greed is the root of all evil. And most of the crimes are commited because of Greed. Now I think that there is another level that is deeper than Greed, which is the Fairness.

Greed might explains why bad guys commit crimes, but sometimes its hard to explain why good guys commit crimes, and I think its because most of the time, they feel that the world should be a fair place.

My Dad have once told me, that to compete with the bad guys, sometimes the good guys have to use dirty tricks as well, but he has no answer when I asked that "doesn't that makes the good guy, a bad guy also?". He just explained that not everything is as easy as it seems when it comes to the real world.

Now I finally have an answer for myself. A good guy does not need to use dirty tricks, if he is not competing with the bad guy, and if he is not thinking that the world should be a fair place. Whatever the bad guy accomplished, the good guy should never think that he should accomplish those as well. Whatever the bad guy did, the good guy should not think about retaliation.

When asked the question "this is not fair, why does this happen (to me)?", Buddhism attempt to answer this question with the concept of reincarnation. That if things are not fair in this life, it will be when taking all your lives into account. You suffer in this life because of the bad things that you did in your previous life, to make it fair. When you do good things and did not get any rewards at the end of it, you will be rewarded in your next life, to make it fair. I think other religions have problems (correct me if I am wrong) answering this type of question, besides just asking its followers to just have faith.

So to me, Thinking That The World Is/Should Be Fair, IS the root of all evil.

Too Troublesome To Recycle

Recycling, that's one of the things that I tried to force myself to do everytime, but then, sometimes it is just too troublesome to do it. For example, I just have two empty cans of soft drinks that I just bought on a hot day, I used to just throw it in the dustbin with everything else. Its troublesome to pack them up, wait for more to come, and send to those specialized places who accepts empty cans for recycling.

After that, I thought about putting all the cans into a separate plastic bag, but still I will throw it together with all my other thrash into the rubbish room. But that too, I wonders, whether there will be people who look at the pile of plastic bags in the rubbish room and isolate those that they see have empty cans inside. Nah, I told myself, nobody will take that trouble to do that type of sorting.

One Sunday morning, I was awaken up by some cans crunching sound that comes from the bottom of my apartment, a look below, I saw two people actually went through every plastic bags of rubbish in the big rubbish container and take out all those empty cans! So, contrary to what I have believed, they not only sort through plastic bags that contains all empty cans, they even open up those plastic bags that have one or two empty cans inside and take them out! It really struck me right on the head how much those empty cans can mean to these people that they took the troubles to do that.

So nowadays, a bit of convenience to myself (for being lazy in not sending those cans to recycle centres) and to those rubbish collectors, I try to put all those things that I think are recyclable into separate plastic bags, and make sure they are easily identifiable.

I will stop to think that recycling is not worth the effort, any more.

Celebrating Christmas

Was over at one of my friend's house a few days before last year's Christmas. When I found out that her Christian sister have a strong feeling against celebrating Christmas! And all these while I thought that the Christmas celebrations are started by Christians! Anyway, I tried poking on her:

Me: so I heard you don't celebrate Christmas.
She: yeah.
Me: so funny, I thought you Christians celebrate Christmas?
She: no, that's a misconception.
Me: why you do not celebrate Christmas?
She: because Christmas is never mentioned in the bible.
[I have waited for this moment to come]
Me: why are you celebrating your birthday then? Your birthday is also never mentioned in the bible.
She: ...

As a Buddhist wanna be, there's a lot of cultural celebrations that doesn't seem to "fit" into the whole Buddhism thing, but I don't ignore them, of course nor do I celebrate them vigorously. A lot of times, cultural events or celebrations are created just to bring people closer together, more over, at the current time where people are just so busy with life, the simplest excuse will do.

Make Sense?

After my dad found out that I joined this talk about "How Cradle Investment Program can help you", my dad enrolled both of us for the "Money & You" mini program. Since my dad already enrolled, so what the heck, I thought I just went ahead and see what they have to say. Since most of the time, I try to learn from them in this type of talks. Not from what they teach, but from them.

So I noticed two things, the speaker, always end with the question "Make sense?" at the end of every third statement he says. For example, he will say something like "In order to achieve something, you need to find someone who have achieved it before and learn from him, make sense?". Well, I guess he just said it to make the speech more interactive and keep us awake, but after a couple of times, I find it very funny. When you ask people the question "make sense?", it can only meant a couple of things

1. what you said does not make sense
2. or your audience are idiots because they can not understand
   

Funny, funny, luckily this is the first speaker that I have heard that keep on using the phrase "Make sense?".

At the end of the mini program, the speaker started selling the real program, which cost RM4988, and straight away he went into explaining that we will get more value because they are giving out free entrance to another 3 talks which costs around RM4000 in total FREE! So we are getting something like buy 1 free 1, and then he started giving discounts, RM500 discounts for the first 3 people who sign up today. I was thinking, wah this guy must be really desperate.

Then come the killer, he said, "what I can tell you is, the cost always increase, 4 years ago when I joined the program, its only RM3988, bla bla bla, and it have been consistently increased". It sort of remind me about what one of the founder of skali.com told us over the Cradle talk the other day. The 3 ways that a salesman tries to sell, 1. convince you, 2. confuse you, 3 (ta da) scare you.

I wonder if these discounts and scaring techinque really works, it certainly made me want to join the program less, not that I am really that interested to begin with.