Don went back to HK for vacation and I asked him to buy a ping pong racquet as he is going to buy one himself. The racquets at work are very crappy. They are the cheapest ping pong racquet I ever seen. A piece of foam glued on the wooden paddle, it doesn’t even have a proper rubber surface. When hitting the ball using that racquet, you hear a funny sound. The racquet I got is a very deal, only CAD$10. It is an entry level double happeniess brand and come with two ping pong balls. I used to own a ping pong racquet when I am small. I think I can play better with my racquet now. Often, I am confused about what is the correct name of this game, table tennis or ping pong. Table tennis is the official name only because ping pong is a registered trademark owned by Parker Brothers, the owner of Monoploy.

Today is the first day in the weekend with sunshine for the past 2 months. Out of various reasons, I didn’t ski at all in January. So I can’t let this good day to ski slipped by. I was thinking about going to Whistler or Cypress. Whistler has 50% discount on all lessons this weekend, but I don’t want to drive 2 hours to Whistler alone, so I went to Cypress instead. We have lots of snow dump last week, the snow condition is really good. Unfortunately, after I have my first run, there was a power failure in BC Hydro and the whole mountain is out of electricity. It took them almost an hour to get the backup generator running. I am glad that at least I am not yet on the chair when the lift stops, I feel sorry for those who got hanged in mid air for an hour. The lift resume at the time for ski lessons, so I don’t have to waste the lesson voucher. I didn’t take any ski lessons for 2 years, I found that my skill deterioted as my bad habits come back. In today’s lesson, the instructor reminds me on the proper techniques and I feel more comfortable skiing on black diamond runs now.

I heard a meaningful story in the homily in the mass today. It is like this. There is a man goes to a tailor to custom make a suit. The tailor is very talented but not skillful, as a result the suit doesn’t fit him well, depise having very nice style. The pant is just too tight. He can’t walk comfortably. The tailor offered him discount for the suit and plead that he will lose money if the man don’t buy the suit. The man is too nice to refuse the tailor and end up with a unfit yet stylish suit walking out the door. Because of the suit is unfortable, the man walks funny. On his way home, he passed by a park where two man are hanging around. One of the man notice this guy with a new suit and says to the his friend, “I feel really sorry for that cripple.” His friend answer him, “Yes, but he got a really nice suit.” The morale of this story is that if you don’t fit something, don’t force yourself to fit in. Even if you are forced in and have a good result, you won’t get the credit for being good. People will only notice the one changes you, but not the true self of you.

Today, the header line of most of the newspaper is the ship accident in Egypt. More than a thousand people had died. This kind of accident happens once in a while in developing countries lacks of proper safety regulations. It is unfortunate, but this news doesn’t deserve being on the headline in Canada. It is just a single event happened in a far away country. The incident has no impact on our life, nor we can do anything to help. Maybe it will make us sympathy the victims and give donations. But if the systematic failure is not fixed, this type of accident will repeat again. The newspapers only use this disasters to catch eye balls by the large number of death. Every day, more than this number of death in Africa or Mideast are ignored, only because theese deaths are not news-worthy. I am disappointed on Newspapers these days that only care about their profit, and forget the mission of making the world a better place. Only a piece of news have impact on us, or we can impact on, worth to be on the headline.

In this school year, the food court in SFU has opened a “Bubble Boy” bubble tea franchise. Now every week during the break in my philosophy class, I will buy myself a bubble tea. In the first week, I am the only one getting it, and caught attention of some classmate. I am surprise some of them don’t know we can buy bubble tea on campus and some even never tasted bubble tea before. Last week, there is another guy joined me to get bubble tea. This week, we have 4 guys went over there in the break. It seems bubble tea drinking has gain momentum in the class and I would expect more people join us next week. There isn’t much to do around the classroom in the 15 minutes break anyways. Two of the guys drank bubble tea the first time today. They found that quite interesting. Slowly, bubble tea become a main stream drink of local Canadians. Maybe some day, we will see Starbucks serving bubble tea to cope with the trend.