Saturday, February 20, 2010

AHHH I had such a wonderful day doing work. I slept 12 hours, got up, and started the day by finishing off my SW3219 tutorial. It was very exciting to complete! We were made to watch this pretty awesome movie on youtube (Homeless to Harvard - the Liz Murray story) and assess the case based on the child-centric theories which we had learnt in lecture 4 (which I had skipped by accident). On doing my own research on the Risk and Resilience perspective, and on the Attachment Theory, I learnt a bit about myself too. Refreshed.

The next half of the day was spent completing the literature review for the research proposal we're supposed to hand in on Monday. It was a terrible experience getting the topic settled but I had a great time reading up and writing the draft paper. Granted, it was tiring going 7-8 hours straight like that and I had to take several breaks (to watch Yakitate, to practise for tomorrow's mass, to bathe and to eat) so that I could keep going.. But the finished product is pretty awesome and for that I'm so happyyyy! Love this sense of accomplishment. Even missed the second half of the match unwittingly because I got so carried away tying up the loose ends.

The only bad thing I can think of is how upset my stomach feels at the moment. Argh. All the sweet snacks have gone down and it feels awful now. So much for using the intense mental activity as a good excuse to indulge a little. :(

@10.58pm
Thursday, February 18, 2010

Cool. Wanting to attach more scanned images from the textbook to Jem and Nico to read, I just searched "logic" in my gmail account and came across a really old email that APY sent out to MOPY CG. I'd put off reading the long article again and again and eventually forgot about it, but I'm kinda glad that happened, because I think the email would have been lost on me if I'd read it in July, 2009. In response to a Newsweek article which hailed Obama as "more Catholic than the Pope", Dr. Fred Liewehr writes:

"Townsend is representative of those who have ignored two thousand years of Church teaching in order to make God in their own image. They apply moral relativism to today’s problems and arrive at some sort of secular humanism that proposes solutions that are entirely outside the realm of reasonable, let alone doctrinal, thinking. These solutions are seen by them as “charitable”. They would contend, for example, that it is charitable to abort a baby than to risk the chance that it might have problems, be they medical, parental, or social, later in life.."

… Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. - Pope Benedict XVI

(taken from this www.Catholic.org article)

Indeed.. Once the prevalence of moral relativism has been brought to your attention it's just too easy to spot its manifestations and consequences in a whole myriad of issues. I really hope we can hold on tight and fight for the faith, and for the lost.. Out of true love. Love grounded in truth..

@9.30pm


FRUSTRATION. that's why sometimes I really think it's better to do individual work, even though it means having to do everything.

Azuma relief!


@5.06pm
Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Came back from Ash Wednesday mass an hour or so ago.. It was really wonderful, probably because I made the effort to pay as close an attention as I possibly could. And I was rewarded with joy and consolation. So glad I went :) What a beautiful date with Jesus! I'm looking forward to playing for mass this Sunday with the SFA choir again. It's been a while!

It was so nice to see other people with ashes on their foreheads at the bus stop after mass. At a glance I knew that they were fellow Catholics. How lovely it'd be if we could identify Catholics by their love at a glance. :)

@11.27pm


Random thoughts

The three pillars of Lent - almsgiving, prayer, and fasting - are based on the denial of the self. Dying to the bondage to material wealth, sacrificing time and energy, and denying the basic pangs for food.

Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus.
-The Imitation of Christ

***

Even science is advancing into the realm of the postmodern. I suppose that quantum mechanics is a clear manifestation of that. The concept of the independent observer is questioned and rejected in certain circumstances.

The shift from objectivism to interpretivism in social research -
Increasingly, the idea of generalisation and categorisation is being thrown aside. Everything is subject to interpretation; the focus of science is now on the understanding of such interpretation and subjective experiences.
Yet if this is so, the complexity of the world we live in increases significantly. We can no longer draw on the power of the "common denominator". How then are we going to evolve if the way our brain is built is to search for patterns?

@5.52pm