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blogging about blogging

awards i forced myself to win, blogging about blogging

I’m a little starstruck is all

February 2, 2011

Before I forget, Happy New Year (the Chinese version this time) again everyone! The great thing about being Chinese is that we get to celebrate the new year twice so if your first one sucked, you get a do-over. If your first one was great, then you have a shot at partying a little harder the second time. Win-win.

For reunion dinner tonight, we’re heading to the in-laws for steamboat, then back to my mom’s place for a juicy slab of wagyu. The only way I can eat all of that is to starve myself till dinnertime and do my shred right before, which should make me just about hungry enough to eat a horse.

Whatever you’re having for dinner tonight, have a good one.

For the big news, I made it to the finals of the bloggies. Hang on, I need to say that again, THE BLOGGIES, y’all. Granted, it’s the best asian blog category, which is like the best foreign language film category at the Oscars that nobody really cares about but heck, I get to go crazy fangirl on the other blogs nominated, ie my all-time favorites thebloggess, thepioneerwoman and hyperboleandahalf, as well as all the other heavyweights. Ok, I’ll stop gushing now. But seriously, one day I’ll fly to Texas and stalk Jenny till she has a cup of tea with me and maybe I’ll even get to stroke one of her taxidermied friends.

If you’ve been here a while, you probably know that I love you guys too much to flood you with advertorials or badger you to vote for me in contests. But it’s the bloggies and I’ll have to make an exception to that rule (just the second part). So that the scrawny asian kid gets to hi-five Brad and Angelina at the blog oscars. Figuratively speaking.

Go here to vote. Or just to check out some of these blogs. They’re really, really awesome.

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blogging about blogging, stuff best described as not safe for parents

Somebody needs to fix Facebook.

December 9, 2010

I was trying to upload pictures of our trip to Universal Studios yesterday on Facebook and I got to this page where the face recognition system groups all the faces that look alike into the same group for easy tagging.

Apparently, both my kids look alike, which is hardly surprising seeing they came from the same factory. But apparently, they also don’t look like me because my face was put into another category. That’s fine, though, because I’m not the picky sort when it comes to having kids that look like my clones.

What’s really disturbing is that Facebook thinks that if my sister and a fake Marilyn Monroe came together to have a baby, they’d get my kids.

Seriously, I couldn’t even make this stuff up. Thanks a lot, Facebook. You’re obviously broken.

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blogging about blogging

No, I didn’t wear jeans for the awards.

July 11, 2010

Yesterday was the Singapore Blog Awards and for the first time since I got knocked up, I found myself stepping into a club. A real one with dim lights and loud music. Ok, so they only served orange and cranberry juice (you don’t want any drunken speeches) but the criteria for being a real club is the disco lights and booming music. So, double check.

And in case you were wondering, I didn’t go in my jeans. I did think about showing up in my derelict collection of faded jeans and ripped tee (because hello, that’s cool) but I totally lost my coin-collection mug so that didn’t quite work out. Instead, the husband helped pick out a little black number from River Island. Then with my mom being in Sydney and all, we had a bit of problem working out the babysitting because let’s face it, nobody wants to be stuck with 2 babies on a Saturday evening. Good thing we managed to con my brother and his fiancee into taking Tru and my aunt helped out with Kirsten while we sipped our virgin screwdrivers.

Oh, I did manage to meet Ris Low, who was boomz as usual, though sans leopard preens. To be precise, I was sitting next to the guy who sat next to the girl who sat next to Ris herself, but I’m pretty sure being in a 5m radius counts as meeting. I’m such a sucker for celebrities, you know. I’m now also boomz by association. Nice.

Also, since we were already all dressed up and didn’t have to haul 2 kids around, we managed to sneak in a kickass dinner at Dan Ryan’s Chicago Steakhouse, one of our favorite places for 12 oz slabs of meat. I can’t believe it’s been 3 years since we last went there and I finally had a decent meal with the husband all to myself, so yes, it was a pretty awesome night. What can I say, I love date night.

If you don’t already know the results, the award went to Violet, who is admittedly far more insightful, so congrats babe!

Although I do want to say thanks for all the support and votes and encouraging emails this past month. I’m really touched by all the love. And this nomination is really a tribute to all the other mommy blogs because you guys are my inspiration. You make me realize that being a mom doesn’t make us outdated and uncool. You make me feel like I’m not the worst mother in the world for feeding my kids cornflakes for dinner or having them throw massive hissy fits in public or shouting penis at the top of their lungs. That motherhood is all about the journey, and enjoying every moment of it, even the awful ones. That it’s about making mistakes and learning from them. That it’s really a privilege just to be able to know them and love them.

I spend all this time writing the blog and reading all your blogs and I’m really glad that I took the plunge and decided to start blogging. So award or no award, I want to say thank you. You are the best blog-friends a girl could ever ask for.

Updated: I wanted to show you guys pics but I didn’t turn on the flash so I look like a mass of black in all the photos. To make up for it, here’s one from my prized derelict collection, which I totally didn’t wear.

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awards i forced myself to win, blogging about blogging, i embarrass myself sometimes

I promise to be more *insightful* from now on. Or less. I’m not sure.

May 25, 2010

Just found out yesterday that I made it into the top 10 finalists for SG Blog Award’s Most Insightful blog category.

Kelvin: Congrats, you made it into the top 10 for Most Insightful.

Me: For real? Most insightful? There’s hardly any insight in the blog. I think at some point they’ll realize they’ve made a terrible mistake.

Kelvin: Don’t feel bad. How *not* to be a parent counts as insight too.

Me: Thanks hon, you always make me feel so much better.

And then it degenerated into banality about how Truett was spitting out his food again, which you probably don’t want to hear about.

In any case, be prepared for some major insight in the next few weeks just so that I don’t get disqualified from the category completely. Because I did my homework and checked out the rest of the blogs there and I realized that they actually do give insight on stuff like dating and health and technology and here I am flooding you with photos of my kids. So I’ll be loading up on some serious insight here from now on.

What the heck, I might as well start now. Did you know that an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain? Because it is. There, you’re welcome.

I’m not very good at this insight stuff, I’m still working on it.

Anyway, in exchange, you’ll have to promise to vote for me. Ok, stop it, I can see your eyes rolling back into your head. I’m not done yet. You’ll have to promise to vote for me everyday. I told the husband to promise and he was all like “WHAT?! it’s so troublesome. I don’t even read your blog everyday.” Which is the point I banned him from surfing his Arsenal blogs until he voted me for. I also hinted at the possibility of some serious boom-chica-wow-wow action but he knows he’ll be getting some regardless. The guy has got some serious moves. Ok, too much information, I’ll stop now.

But seriously, if you like the blog enough, you can head over to OMY to vote and I’ll be eternally grateful. If not, I’ll probably end up as the only blog without any votes, which will be reminiscent of that time in Primary School where I had this sing-off competition with another girl during Music Class and after I was done, nobody voted for me because my friend said it sounded “really awful and she was saving me from further embarrassment“. Worst thing was, I didn’t even want to sing in the first place but after that, I hid in a hole for a few days and I’ve never sung in public again, not even in Karaokes. True story.

Oh, while you’re at the voting, there are some other superb blogs  in some of the other categories which I’m sure you’ll like and you can vote for them too.

1. Best Individual Blog – ED Unloaded

2. Best Lifestyle Blog – Miss Glitzy (my schoolmate!) &  Story of Bing

3, Best Photography Blog – Hendra & Leonny

4. Best Food Blog – Camemberu

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blogging about blogging

The accidental blogger

August 25, 2009

I was in one of my contemplative moods earlier today and one of the things I contemplate about most is how my life turned out so different from what I expected it to. I’m not the kind of girl that has the next 30 years all planned out, but I do have a general idea of what it will be like. It used to change all the time, like one day I’d be going on a book tour LA (after releasing my NYT bestseller) then another I’d be some fancypants advertising hot shot screaming at lowlife executives (you don’t get to be a hot shot without the screaming). In none of those scenarios, I’d be sitting at home with curlers in my hair blogging on the laptop.

First of all, I never had a thing for blogging, which is why I’m only jumping on the bandwagon an entire decade late. When it comes to the Internet, I’m one of those suspicious old farts. It’s evil, I tell you. It’ll mysteriously syphon off all my money and spy on my every little move. Plus, I’m a fiercely private person and the thought of having random folks well-acquainted with the intimate details of my personal life gives me the creeps. What if I get stalked by a psycho and get chopped up into a thousand tiny pieces and fed to dogs? Bet you didn’t think about that, did you?

Also, how weird would it be to have complete strangers giving you knowing winks and nudges or coming up to you and say “Had a nice weekend there, aye? Hard at work making #3, I see” (which by they way is NOT happening). Then there’s the likelihood that in my fit of shock, I reach for my pepper spray right after I paralyze them with my karate moves… only to find out that they’re totally harmless die-hard fans of Mother, Inc.

That’s also why I never kept diaries or journals – so they don’t fall into the hands of preying eyes. Ok, I did keep a diary once, back when I was like nine, and it had entries like “Dear Diary, I fell down the stairs at school today while trying to jump 4 steps in a row, but I missed and took a tumble and landed flat on my face with my skirt ridden up to my waist in front of a bunch of boys who actually died laughing. Please let me die.” There were also a few other incriminating entries, none of which I want to recollect. A few years later, I decided it was too painful to read so I burnt it and scattered its miserable ashes into the sea.

That’s the fate of my one and only diary, so it is hardly surprising that I’m not a fan of this whole idea of blogging.

But having kids, it turns you into obsessive compulsive freaks who MUST keep a record of every little fragment of their lives. The first roll, the first step, the first crap on my thigh that gave me rashes for a week. So since it hasn’t stolen any of my money yet, the Internet is now my new best friend. I spend hours everyday surfing blogs of other mothers (and I am also addicted to FML – it makes me feel so much better about my life) to find solace in the fact that plenty of other moms have gone on ahead and survived to tell the tale.

More than that, the beauty of blogging is the community. It opens up a world of possibilities and connects you to people you otherwise would never have a chance of knowing. Motherhood is one of the loneliest jobs and by far the most difficult. Now that I’ve taken the plunge into the blogosphere, it’s turned out to be the best decision I’ve made in a long time and I ain’t turning back.

So once in a while I get the occasional troll, but they can eat my dust because I KNOW KUNG FU. And believe me, if you can find me, I can find you too. That’s the beauty of the Internet.

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blogging about blogging, Kidspeak, side effects of motherhood

Talk to the hand

March 27, 2009

The toughest part about being a stay home mom has gotta be the death of adult conversation (No, not THAT kind of adult conversation). Me, I’m a conversation junkie, so its like taking away heroin from an addict or candy from a kid.

I used to play this game when I was a kid where everyone keeps quiet and the first person to speak loses. I majorly sucked at it. I was always the kid that had to say something first. Or else I would go into withdrawal and start twitching uncontrollably. Anyway, awkward silences make me nervous.

Now, there’s just complete silence at home, except for my son’s occasional shrieks (mostly in the key of E minor), which I have successfully tuned out as ambient noise. There isn’t any office gossip, juicy updates or intelligent conversation to go around (Tru, mama thinks you’re a genius, but I just need some time to decode the shrieks), and my brain feels like its gone into permanent hibernation.

When it gets really bad, I sometimes go on a 2-hour soliloquy. I also talk to the ants (before I crush them), birds (mostly curses), and other animals unfortunate enough to venture into my house. But the satisfaction is just not the same. There’s also a nasty side effect. I get so used to talking to inanimate objects that I forget I’m doing it outside sometimes, which makes me look like a total fruitcake.

And so I write. But it’s still a monologue, with the occasional response from you nice people. It’s kind of depressing, really. Now I know why people go for those extortionate chat lines that charge you $50 an hour. The only thing that stopped me was the long and unpleasant conversation I would have with the husband after he finds out.

So do me a favor. Send a little conversation my way so I don’t go down the slippery slope of schizophrenia.

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