15:09.

"Long, long time ago, I can still remember
how that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance,
I could make those people dance
and maybe they'll be happy for a while.
But February made me shiver
with every paper I delivered
Bad news on the door step,
I couldn't take one more step.
I can't remember if I cried
when I read about his widowed bride...
but something touched me deep inside
the day the music died."

- American Pie, Don McLean

24 years. It has been a while since I first cried.

We are mid-ankle and deeper into another November now. On quiet days like these, blessed loneness in the home, you just want to sit and feel time move by. They kind of dance sometimes, one of those graceful fairy type of boho whirl, as they keep moving on.

You sit there, knee deep in thoughts, enjoying the comfort of life and focus not on any one thing running around in your head or heart.

24 years is a long time.

More than 10 years after the existential bug struck, a quiet little tall girl has grown up. Everything physical have caught up to the mental exercises and thought trains long used to choo choo-ing through the convoluted mind of that girl-next-door.

"My, how you have grown. It's been a... little while."

- In a Little While, U2

Numerous things still confound me. And then, there are the things that drive me crazy. Things like stupid prejudice, like racisim, like ignorance, like bigots, like those who actually really believe the world exists to serve them, stupid social classes, stupid things the very institution and existence of money causes, games people play, how twisted society can be and have become in many aspects, how I partake too sometimes. Stupid system. Stupid insecurity that makes people act like baboons on speed. Doofus.

I would like to protect everyone I love from every thing wrong I see, every thing vile and crude and evil, that harms and spoils and destroys.

Not that I can, and not that that stops me trying or wishing sometimes. Yet, God is in charge and what I can't, I know He can. Thank God....

Thank God for Him. Thank God for saving me from the miry clay. Thank God for loving me and making me right with Almighty.

"Where would I be if You have not been by my side?
How could I rise to meet the morning of the day?"
- Don Moen

What to say? There's a keen sense of the existential in the air surrounding me. A keen awareness I am in something bigger than I know and I am not in control. I wait, I pray, I wait some more.

What has happened this past year?

The sweet miracle of ray and me.

The rejoining the journo world.

The bitchiness, slamming, ego matches played out alongside the gorgeousness of music reporting plus the unexpected shift to being more a lifestyle journo instead of news these days.

The maturing... man, I grew older this year, didn't I? Learnt so much.

I sat down with my journal and chronicled what I've learnt. The points just increased and increased as I filled the pages and picked up the pen again and again when the Word reminded me of yet another blessing, another lesson, another revelation.

Am going to post some up one day, methinks, not now 'cause the reflection is ongoing but it has been awesome.

Are we already at the end of 2005?

*breathes out*

:)

I love You, Lord.