Have you viewed the Motorcycle Diaries? It's a film about Che Guevera and his friend who traveled in through many countries South America before Che committed himself to his eventual struggle. One can say it is a 'road and buddy movie'. I am getting more mesmerised by the songs in the soundtrack. They are so haunting, melancholic, sad and moody . There are some upbeat tracks, full of Latin vibes and South American music traditions, both ethnic, 60s and contemporary. I don't know why I keep on listening to the soundtracks over and over again...

Shaping our lives.

We make or break things.
We pick up the broken pieces and try to put them together again.
We try to mend and glue together fragmented pieces of ourselves.
We scoop up the shapeless form and try to make recognizable shapes and forms to make sense of our lives.
Are we the creator of our lives?
Music massages our souls, and let them resonate in our beings.
We crave for messages from our beloved.
To be soothed and bathed in comforting thoughts.
Cracked vessels of yesterday were forlorn forms discarded on shelves, hidden from view.
We made them and are not able to throw them away.
Imprints of past designs thought us valuable lessons.
Can we form shapes for our hopes and desires?
Shapes of being, depictions of our intent.
Are we making enough?
Have we enough material and faith to shape our lives?

Why is traveling so potent and powerful? The kind of traveling that I meant, is the one that 'feels up your senses'. Every bump on the road, every detail on the buildings, every line creased on people's face and shapes and colour stands out, asking me to discover them. I get so much buzz from traveling, like an adrenaline rush which begs me to pack my bags and just go. I cannot just do that impulsively now. I have my PhD to complete and to curb my wanderlust bug.

I cannot help comparing traveling with being in love. You want to know everything about the one that you love. The history, the place where your beloved came from and every aspect of your beloved's physical, emotional and mental being. You want to search and find out as much as you can, as this need to understand comes from your very being to meet your beloved.

What has conservation got to do with being in love? If we get to meet and understand our beloved, we take the next step in trying to protect our love interest. I would like to think that I am not stiffling my beloved or place the person in a cage. No not at all. But conservation has that principle of protection where I cannot help but see some similarities with being in love. Is it true to say that we want to conserve what we love?

Am I dealing with two different subjects now? Conservation, on one hand and Being in Love on another?

There are many dimensions to one and another. One belong to the realm of the world and the other in the realm of a human being. The connection exists in the dimensions that cover the senses. Sense of beauty, sense of wonder, sense of awe, sense of seeing, hearing, touching, all senses...

So when conservation is devoid of life and is just cosmetically done up and pose as an object with no life and no use, that's all it is, a museum piece, an artifact. Surely there will not be love in that!

Could one be in awe just looking at a conserved piece of artifact? Would that be enough. That is when conservation and being in love differ. Awe is not love.

Hence, senses are not enough to connect conservation with being in love. Senses are not enough to connect the world and the human being. Senses borne from being in love, is not love itself. Love is more than just senses. It has a mind of its own.

You can take the girl out of the kampung, but you cannot take the kampung out of the girl... Love beckons, and love grows. The longing to return is great.

Does this makes any sense? If it does, good. If not, please do not get frustrated.

A lot of things had happened to me since I last posted. Well, yes, it had been more than a year, and that is quite a long time. It is odd that I had suddenly decided to abandon blog writing. Well, I knew that I was not going to abandon it altogether... so, here I am again. A lot of things that I have learned about myself. One important thing that I have learned is not to take myself for granted! Usually we say that or hope that for someone else, but we have got to learn to love ourself first. Someone had told me this before, to love myself. I did not understand what she said and what it means. Love oneself? Is it self-love? Apparently, it has to do with respecting oneself and like I said, not to take oneself for granted. Physical evidence of not loving oneself includes not eating properly, not exercising and taking care of one's body, and or abusing oneself. That sort of thing. So, I did an overhaul. I think it was late 2001, when I decided to spend my half month bonus on a full medical examination, complete with a physician, a rehab specialist and dietician. I have not looked back since. Although I could do with a second reconditioning of my physique and a second love affair with myself, I am in much better shape than before. Last month is probably one of the most important months of my life... February 2005, etched and engraved in my mind, as the month to start many months! Perhaps I will write about what happened later on. We shall see...

There was an 18 year old student writing in the Malaysian Transport and Planning Egroup that I subscribed to asking for opinion on whether he should take urban planning. The following is a personal message from me to him. Tell me whether I had given good advice or whether the way I gave the advice was okay....Hi there. I take interest in urban planning and the role of planners in our society. It is true that planners be they specialise in Transport, Urban (Physical) or even Strategic usually try to get jobs in government and I know personally quite a few of them myself. However I know quite a few of transport planners and urban planners that works as consultants and in their own companies. I think we do not have enough of them in Malaysia. I see that there will be a need for people in this sector because we are increasingly being urbanised. I am trained as an architect, but I see myself needing to have an interdisciplinary outlook. I need to know about planning as much as I need to know about construction. But at the same time we also need to specialise. It has to do with our Information Age where it is not just information that we are getting but how to use the information. I do not see myself solving just problems in Malaysia but also in the Asian and the Pacific region. In fact my study is based on the UK case studies which I know will help me understand the Asian and the Pacific situation better.

The world is getting smaller.

I think you can also start with a more solid course like civil engineering and architecture and expand on your interest in urban planning later. But you must like DESIGN. Design occurs in both civil engineering and architecture. Architecture would be better for you so that you can easily branch out to urban planning. Best place to study urban planning is in USA such as MIT if you can afford it. But I am sure there are other places.If you take architecture, they will only expose you to urban planning in your 4th and 5th year.

All the best.

One the research methods that I employ for my PhD work is the Delphi Technique or Delphi Process. Whatever it is, one of the difficulties on managing this process is to 'chase the participants'. They are namely busy local authority officers understandably sending the answers to the questions that I sent to them weeks ago, very late this week. It was a nervous time for me, like all times when it is the first time. Whew, all of them managed to be in by today. Now I can do the follow-up questionaire after getting an equal number of participants from the different groups. It is a relief, but later this evening, I had bad news of 'dead fishes'... Now, I am under scrutiny with a public inquiry about these dead fishes. I am innocent! Only God knows...

Picking up skills. Is that what you do all your life? Now I am picking up researcher skills. How to read, analyse and use the material to do my paper. How to interview people. How to manage my research. Yeah, well I had some of the skills before and could use them again, because I had interviewed people before (or so I think) and I have managed before (or so I think again) but not when I was researching, so it is different now. A lot of the time you have to relearn and redo, because you take it for granted before. It was by the side, or almost a hobby. And most of all, it was not done to inform on my PhD which I need to convince my examiners, so that is the difference! It is a lonely journey, and it makes you peel yourself layer by layer to the bare bones. So much introspection going on about yourself that you reckon you are researching about yourself and not the research topic! If you do not do that, you may come across some problems based on denial. So be courageous.

Once a designer, always a designer. I was trained to be an architect for a total of eleven years, including year outs! Design was my passion, and then I became an academic. Teaching was also my passion. I had to make a decision between both passions. In 1996, while doing my masters, I decided to dedicate my life to teaching. There was one time when I had the opportunity to make lots of money. Some time during the year 2000 or 2001. After much debating, I decided to stick to teaching. The only problem with teaching is that it is never only teaching. You will be saddled with administration work or bureacracy intricacies and often political intrigue cancerised into the whole institution of higher learning. That is when the pain starts to swell and you suddenly wished the aggravation is not worth it. But so far, I have stuck to it. And so the story goes...I still love teaching, but now I have incorporated design into it!

I like to write, so I reckon I should create a blog. It was encouraged by Atok last year, some time in September, I think. So, this is my first post. If I manage to hang in there and write and write until I die (hopefully for some time yet), then this very post will be a historical event in my life. "The Day I Posted For The First Time In My Blog", or whatever. Hmm...I think I will approach writing this blog as if I am just writing to myself, apart from the fact that other people may be reading my writings. There is no other way to do it. Well, brilliant! Always wanted audiences for my thoughts anyway. That must be one of the main reasons why I wanted to teach. More of that later... So, here I go!

Right...this is the second posting. Just added some stuff in here nicked from another website to describe myself. I am a researcher and I love this experience...well, at the moment it seems. Wait till I have to do the writing up later, drafting and redrafting my PhD work. I love teaching as well. I do miss home very much, especially the day to day teaching at the School of Architecture at University of Malaya (UM). Met with a UM colleague just now. Had lunch at her house. Could not stop talking about teaching which formed much of the topic of conversation. She happened to be an ex school mate as well. (TKCOGA, for those interested to know...) I got to keep on going with my PhD work and fix the image of my niece and nephews and godchildren in my mind as the reasons to finish as fast as I can, so that I could be with them. Concentrate...