Advice...?

I tend to spend long hours chatting with friends and giving out some advice on occassions when they seem to need some. I take pride in the advice I give and it has many a time helped the person I was chatting with. At times though I wonder whether or not some of the advice I give is in their best interest or mine. Am I giving them advice that I myself would follow? Would I practise what I preach? It is very easy to give advice but not so easy to follow it.

Should I give advice to others? There's a very popular saying taken from the Bible which goes, "Look not at the speck of dust in your brother's eye when you yourself have a plank in your own eye. Instead, remove the plank from your eye so that you will be able to see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye." It's difficult to do that. How many of us are free of enough problems to give advice without requiring any? Everyone needs advice whether they want to admit it or not. No one is perfect enough not to need any. Imagine then how hypocritical it is to tell others how to live their lives or what actions they should take when we ourselves may not necessarily have our own lives sorted.

Why then do I still keep giving advice to others? Maybe because I believe deep down inside that my advice will be able to help them. But then, that's the sin of pride. How dare I believe that my advice can actually help others? The truth is, I just can't really think of any justification for my "advice-giving". There is no good explanation that affords me the authority or credibility to provide advice to others. Yet I like doing it and believe I can help. Pride is a dangerous trap. I'm caught in the middle. If I don't give advice I would not be able to help someone in a certain matter. Then again, what makes me think my advice really will help? Maybe in the end it is just ear candy. It's nice to listen to but not practical to follow. Maybe as well it may be bad advice.

I guess the only assurance I have is that in the end it is the person receiving the advice who needs to determine whether or not he/she wants to follow it. But then again, in certain circumstances, the person asking for advice is in too bad a shape to make good judgement. The more I try to defend my "advice-giving" or explain it the more I find that I am unable to justify this practice. I'll still keep going on though. Even if I can help one person it would be worth it. As long as I don't harm others in the meantime...

All that jazz...

I really love jazz. When did I start loving it? I'm not sure but I really got into it this year. I was listening to a lot of Frank Sinatra last year so I guess I was always headed down this path. Probably listening to songs from the soundtrack of Cowboy Bebop also skewed my taste in this direction. Once I got into office this year I felt like I needed to liven things up a bit so I made sure my computer was playing some music all the time. Since I didn't have any mp3s in my office computer, I decided to use the Windows Media Player radio stations. Also, since I was working, it needed some good music that would not distract me. Enter: jazz.

I finally managed to get my friends to come along with me to the popular jazz club here in Club 199 called No Liezz earlier this year. They have a different live jazz band playing every Friday night. Last night I went there for the second time with some friends. There is a cover charge of $5 but since beers, wines and base spirits cost $3, buying 2 drinks would already save you more than the entrance fee. It was Friday the 13th so the jazz band for that night was going to play "superstitious jazz". Didn't find anything superstitious about the jazz. It was great though! They were really good and played some of my favourite tunes including Fly Me To The Moon, The Girl From Ipanema and the theme from the Pink Panther. They even did a jazz version of "Livin' La Vida Loca"! It was a musical feast to my ears and thoroughly calmed my mind. It feels so good to have a Vodka Martini while listening to jazz. To cap the night off, my number was the first to be called out during the raffle draw and I won a bottle of Chardonnay! Talk about value. I probably left with more than I came in with...

I feel pretty cultured recently. Just last Sunday I made use of my free tickets to a broadway musical called South Pacific being performed at the Adelaide Festival Centre. It was my first stage play and I was looking forward to it. The story was a love story/drama musical with an orchestra playing in the background. The songs were all very catchy and the storyline was not too bad to boot. All in all it was an enjoyable experience and I couldn't have really asked for more from the play. I have another free ticket to attend a violin performance next week and am really looking forward to it.

I was having a friendly argument with a friend recently about how a person is defined as "cultured" and what is involved in becoming cultured. I was basically just teasing him that to be cultured you need to know how to enjoy all the different aspects of life from musicals to plays and even to all types of food rather than always falling back to what you are familiar with. What is culture anyway? It is meant to be beliefs, patterns, attitudes and behaviour that a group of people practise or live by in their daily life. However we always say that you need to learn to adopt certain practices which are not necessarily familiar to your background. For example, a person who eats with his/her hands every day as part of his/her culture would in the formal world need to learn to adapt to the culture of eating with a variety of cutlery. In this way you are actually losing culture to gain it. Interesting no? I guess there are two different meanings to the word culture. One as I have defined previously. The other one is something created by society to elevate the group practising that culture to a higher level as compared to people not practising that culture. This is usually a Western culture where men should wear a suit with a tie, adopt a "ladies first" behaviour, using polite words and terms in speech and so on. These people tend to look at others who are not as prim and proper as they are as being of a lower-class than them. Pity that most people can't accept others as they are and that outward appearance accounts for most peoples' perception towards others. Culture is difficult to change and can only be done gradually over a long period of time. Oh well, let's all just live and let live shall we? At the same time we can learn more about other cultures while we're at it to appreciate the diversity present in this world. There's so much to learn and experience so why be content with your own island when there is a whole wide world out there to explore? Enjoy all the colours of life. I know I am!

Read all about it...

I got my picture in the paper today. A real big picture in fact. The statement was very small though. I had a call about a week or so ago from The Advertiser newspaper here in Adelaide and they wanted two students from my university to give some comments for a report they were going to do on the Federal Budget. Obviously I chose myself and another person to be involved in this interview. The idea was that we were supposed to make a "wishlist" of sorts where we indicate our hopes for where more money from the budget will be allocated to (e.g. tax cuts, more road works). They were to then contact us on the night the budget is announced, explain the way the budget affects us and finally find out our reaction towards the budget allocating a rating over 10 of how much it fulfilled our expectations.

In true presidential fashion, my wishlist consisted on the hope that more money would be allocated towards the higher education sector. I fully utilised my experience at a previous Senate Inquiry on Student Income Support to state my case that a lot of students are struggling financially to make it through university and that more support needs to be provided for this purpose. I asked for an increase in AUStudy and Youth Allowance as well as rent assistance for Youth Allowance (or was that AUStudy?), reinstatement of the textbook subsidy and removal of taxes on bus tickets. They gave me a call right after the budget was announced and explained to me that the income support in AUStudy and Youth Allowance were increased however most of the other things I hoped for were not touched on in the budget. Obviously I stated my disappointment especially due to the fact that international students would not benefit in any way from the budget. I gave the budget a 6/10 rating which I felt was very generous. Anyways, they slapped a huge picture of me "studying" from textbooks" and included my comments. I was quite disappointed that the comments published were only a fraction of what I said and that they missed out some key points. My portion does not even mention which university I came from or my position! Oh well, what can you expect from the media? It's not the first time they've done this to me.

Quite a number of people told me about my photo in the papers. A good sign that students actually read the newspapers! I've had my name appear in the papers many times for comments but this was the first time my photo was actually published. I wonder if those who don't know me personally recognise the photo? I think I can start a scrap book now with a compilation of articles in the papers where my name appears. I've kept all of them since the first time my name appeared in the papers here. Sometimes when I expect something to appear in the papers but am not sure when, I will go online to the newspaper website and search for my name in the archive. I can't get the full article but I identify the date of the paper and head to office to take the page. Let's hope I can get myself in the papers at least a few more times before my term ends. It needs to be in good light of course.

Haven't been having much time to blog. Exams are coming in about a month and I am struggling to catch up with studies. Somehow or other I just can't get the motivation to study. When I have the time I do other things such as this. I need to start focusing on my studies. The NLC Annual Conference starts on the last day of my exams (how convenient) as well which sort of messes my plans up a bit. Regardless, I'll have to do my best and make sure I get through this well.