Served up!

Yay, went to the school website a while back and saw these pics of me in action playing competitive tennis! So yeah, I have on the SLC tennis team the past two years. We're obviously not Div I or anything remotely in the same region, so it's pretty non-competitive and fun.

It's also been crazy playing tennis on early spring nights where it can go as low as 6degC! Thankfully, tennis practice is a really laid-back affair, unlike soccer practice, which is the total opposite. The coolest part of being on the tennis team is that we get to play our conference finals at Flushing Meadows! No playing on the show courts obvously, but still, it's a fun experience.

Mid-air while serving. Good clearance, I must say!

Completing the serve motion, up and over. I think serving's the only thing which, despite my lack of proper tennis training, is pretty orthodox and correct. The rest is all a bit japalang.

Hitting a forehand. Bad positioning here, for any would-be player reading, because I'm backing away from the ball, rather than stepping forward to receive it (see how my left leg is behind my right. It should be about even instead)
That's the really really small team we have. From left, that's Coach Hassan , Vaughn, moi, Adam, Ben (who are brothers), and Eelum. Hassan was also the soccer team's coach. He's a really cool guy. He was a lawyer, but left the practice to become involved in coaching instead. Vaughn's NYC born and bred, Adam and Ben were German-born, but live in NY now too. And Eelum's int'l too, from Nepal. And that's my mini-intro of my team mates. No idea why I felt the need to do that.

Too bad there aren't many pics of the soccer team, and of the ones that were taken, I'm not in them. :( lol.

Raccoon City-esque

I almost missed my connecting flight to Singapore, thanks to the delay in the flight from Minneapolis to Tokyo. And then, there was the OTT flu screening at Narita. Before passengers are allowed to deplane, health authorities board each plane to screen passengers for signs for fever, etc. We had to fill out forms that make it possible for them to do contact-tracing as well. The entire process took friggin' 45 min, and meant I left the plane already past my scheduled flight time to SG. Thankfully, the latter flight waited for those of use stuck.
Imagine a bunch of workers all dressed up like that coming up the plane. As if we were in some Resident Evil movie or something... The guy is using some thermal scanning device to catch for signs of fever in passengers. Apparently, if so many as one person registers a high temperature, the entire plane is forced to stay behind.

The nice lady who took my health form.

All of us were given these yellow forms that cleared us to go through customs. We were told to wave our forms in the air, because there was apparently some discrepancy between the number of forms handed out and the number of people of the plane. That took a while to resolve. Thankfully, no one on the plane had fever, and we were cleared to leave after this. Pardon the blurred screen -twas my phone screen. But, I think the blurriness adds a certain imagined sense of paranoia, no?

Sheer Genius

Two of the most important goals of United's campaign this year.

Just like that, a star is born.

And this one....what else can you say but 'wow'. It actually takes like 1 sec for the ball to go for foot to goal - that was how long the distance was. Really, Messi has an amazing ability to keep the ball stuck to his feet, but Ronaldo has the overall package and is the best player in the world.

Swine Flu Humour

This is probably not such a good idea right now.

Let's hope I don't get quarantined or something when I fly back in two weeks.

Candid Camera

Yay, captured on camera! This is me asking a question at a lecture on China's economic/political future by a guest speaker on campus last week. My prof sent me the photo. Love how my electric blue tennis shirt (had tennis practice after that) stands out in the pic, haha. Anyway, the big guys behind me, the girl to my right in glasses - all are my classmates in my Diplomacy and Intelligence in Modern History class. I was the last person to ask a question, and the speaker was like, "of course we have to have a question from a Chinese," so I had to clarify that I wasn't from China. Lol.

On democracy and the emergent state

While reading the chapters on the Vietnam War in Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy for my history class earlier, I was struck by these 2 sections:

"Unlike democratic theory, which views truth as emerging from a clash of ideas, Confucianism maintains that truth is objective and can only be discerned by assiduous study and education of which only a rare few are thought to be capable. Its quest for truth does not treat conflicting ideas as having equal merit, the way democratic theory does. Since there is only one truth, that which is not true can have no standing or be enhanced through competition. Confucianism is essentially hierarchical and elitist, emphasizing loyalty to family, institutions, and authority."

"In the West, political pluralism had thrived among cohesive societies where a strong social consensus had been in place long enough to permit tolerance for the opposition without threatening the survival of the state. But where a nation has yet to be created, opposition may appear as a threat to national existence, especially when there is no civil society to provide a safety net. In these conditions, the temptation is strong, often overwhelming, to equate opposition with treason."

Now, Kissinger was talking about Vietnam or Indochina in the 1950s in these sections. But, which other Southeast Asian state could he have be referring to just as well? Gee...I wonder...

Singapore's political situation in the 60s was hardly as precarious as that of Vietnam, but still, as a newly-independent state, wary of both Malaysia and Communist influences, and with Confucian values as its foundation, one can see how and why the PAP government was able to successfully engineer a siege mentality in the populace which gave it legitimacy to crush opposition under the name of national security. The problem perhaps is that the trope of the nation under siege has been used time and time again such that we have been conditioned to dismiss the merits of having a strong opposition. Obviously though, this is just a breakwater that will not stand the waves of time. Civil society is developing in Singapore. The number of local political blogs and the alternative viewpoints they offer are testaments to that. So, then, it all comes down to a clash between democratic theory and Confucianism? Maybe there is legitimacy to both forms of government-running. Singapore's economic success is prove that the latter works, I suppose. The question is: Which one serves the state, and which one serves the people?

The Fed Express reaches its stop.

Nothing is forever, and this .gif (from Federer's loss to Djokovic in the worst match of the year) sums up the great Swiss presently. Can't say I'm not enjoying it! Heh.

On the subject of tennis, now that Safin is pretty much done, I'm having trouble finding someone new to support. I do like Nadal very much, but he doesn't inspire Safin-levels of passion. Murray, I really like his game - big first serve, powerful off both wings, great hands, great touch, very intelligent player with lots of variety. But that personality is a massive turn-off. Ugh.

And Maria, please get well and come back soon! The WTA needs you badly!