20th to 23rd March Good Friday Weekend

what have i been up to the past week?
eve of good friday-- dinner with colleagues at royal plaza on scotts.
nice spread, good quality, $800+++ for ten of us. quite expensive, but i guess it is worth the quality.

good friday holiday
went out for the whole day with pammy & joo joo.
city plaza offers hair extensions and eye lash extension from $50 onward. i see more malay teens as patrons. that place reminds me of people's park where you get lots of hong kong & korean fashion but at slightly cheaper prices.
next stop to marina square. pam's mom needed good walking shoes for her china holiday and the family likes crocs. i am not a fan but joo joo's bronze/gold pair is especially nice.
good that i have a home to retreat to and pam came over to unwind, chat and watch HBO till late. joo joo is a very intelligent kid and she understands when her mom tells her she needs her personal time and space to be with her friends. pam, in my opinion is doing the best job as a young mother among my other friends. i don't know if it is the genes, the food nutritient, the nurturing or all the above that have joo joo be such a bright and intelligent girl. although some people may feel pity that pam is a single mother or that life is unfair for mother and child, for me, i see that they are being loved more than ever and that they are free from abuse and free to be themselves, albeit life must be tough but life should be good, if not better.

what else did i do.........?

trying to recall.... saturday,, oh ya read "the five people you meet in heaven" and "tuesdays with morris"

not bad la, the second one squeezed a few drops of tears out of me.

it is always easy to let the daily churns and routine in life loose our sight of what's important.

so, the question is,,, what is important for you?

oh ya, i remember what i did on saturday

we went to the bank to meet our "financial planner" again.

you remember the other time this guy helped invested my CPF money?

i think he made 3 thousand dollars for me out of 40K or so. 7.5% is not bad at all.

so this guy,, his name is Steven Foo, worked as a FPA,, i don't know what it means,, financial planner associate? or something,, just the guy sitting at the table, selling you some investments you know nuts about, using the money you are detached with (CPF) and often people have the grave mistake of feeling to distant with the money in CPF and take risk they normally wouldn't have, had they been using the cash in their hands. i said distant, because our government makes a point to keep our untrained hands off till we age or need it for a terminally costly illness. (for the record, i feel that it is a good idea. and brendan says that it is because i am the younger generation who benefits from the scheme) so anyway, back to Steven.

Steven has been promoted from FPA to manager for three branches.

this is POSB we are talking about and i congratulate him and i think he must have done an EXCEPTIONALLY good job for him to be recognized and promoted over just 18 months, given that i think POSB must be one conservative bank. the last time we met him was that long ago and i asked him how does he make his living. it is a simple question and not rude to ask. he said mainly, he relies on commission and he has to make i think he said a million in profit or a million invested money, in the portfolio he carries, every month. i think i heard it correctly or remembered it correctly cos it was 18 months ago. but anyway, what i got from him was his determination to succeed and more importantly, he was humbly determined. i got the feeling that it is not a job he is depending on but rather, it was some kind of challenge he has given himself. so anyway, having read that i don't need to know everything about investing but rather, just put my money with someone who knows and is himself an investor, to make him my planner is a good idea to me and that was what we did. so again, i am back this time with 56K invested. Steven is now training a young chap who somewhat made Steven his mentor & wants to achieve what Steven did in the same short period. but hey hey, he was not even listening to me when i was asking a question. he was talking at the same time and talking about his product all the time. i don't get the feeling he cared.

this is the big difference between a stamper and a star performer. a stamper is just doing a task,, stamp passport (sorry, excuse my example) and a star is either born or self made.

i don't think my point is credible,, my point is,, a star probably has gone through some really rough patches and emerged wised and grand.

i told that to my friend Sueanne before. i asked her. hey Sueanne (she doesn't like being called Sue), i said you know, Sueanne, i always feel that some people eludes a kind of compassion, calmness and has an air of grandness, all these qualities come out at the same time all the time, it is the persona and i always feel that these people are outstanding and also, they have gone through some troubled times but somewhat came out of it a victor. i said she has those qualities, "did you have a hard life before?" i asked.

she totally knew what i was driving at.

she smiled and told me her story.

so anyway, back to why i'm telling you this.

there are just some people, not many of them i see, are like that. ,,,,, an air of grandness not born from the grandness of their family but the grandness of life. life's tougher sides most of their younger time. there is a sense of them "getting it". as in, not being bitter or sour but in fact, appreciating it or embracing it. and these people are just so good to look at.

their humility and calmness make them walk like Mosses.