Sam Tsui and Kurt Schneider are my YouTube heroes. After dozens of reinterpretations of popular hits and watching Sam sing with six other copies of himself, here’s their first original song!

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Don’t Want An Ending

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Coming across No Spend Month over at Small Notebook was timely. I thought I was doing pretty well getting my spending and saving under control but I fell off the wagon big time the last couple of months.

I’m going to Hanoi and KL in October, and I’m still paying off my credit card bills from the last KL trip. Very bad!

I managed to put away a small amount of spending money for Hanoi and briefly considered throwing it at my credit cards to make the debt go away. But I decided that what I saved should simply not be touched for any other reason.

But for now, I have two salaries to go before I go on holiday, and a fairly decent chance of killing off those bills first.

So September onwards, I’m limited to the essentials only, so I expected to spend a lot of time alone at home with my past spending sins to keep me company.

You might have noticed that I’ve not included family in this project. I live with my parents, so I don’t have to worry about rent, utility bills and such. And my parents are already pretty damn good at being frugal. I just have to look out for myself.

That’s my objective. Here are the details.

Budget:

RM450, or RM15 a day.

Which includes:

• Eating out, which is impossible to avoid completely because of work.
• Entertainment, which I’m really good at thoughtlessly doing.
• Groceries & household items

Does not include:

• Bills
• Savings
• Insurance
• Work expenses, which includes petrol
• Health/Fitness expenses

Absolutely not buying:

• Books or magazines
• Clothes

There we go. I’ll update as I go along.

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No Spend September

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On the topic of exercise, the yoga enthusiast said:

“I’ve noticed over time that as life got more hectic with work, kids and duties, exercise was always the first thing to be dropped out of the daily schedule. So I decided to work my life around my yoga routine.”

You can download and read the article over at Alia’s blog.

Do you see how she makes perfectly good sense here? The kind of sense that smacks you in the middle of the forehead with the truth that most of us refuse to acknowledge?

We all have one or to important things in life. For most of us, it’s work. Not family, health or personal development. A lot of people thinks they can’t even afford any of the above without drawing a stable income.

Admitting that work is not your top priority in life makes you sound unreliable and undesirable as an employee. I imagine that most traditional employers feel more comfortable hiring someone who’d swear up and down that they will live and breath their job for ever and ever until they die regretting that they couldn’t have spent more time at work.

What kind of life is that?

I think the reason why I can relate to Alia’s exercise philosophy is because I’m kinda already doing it. Putting fitness above expected priorities like work.

Three times a week, which is pretty amazing because I was a very sedentary creature and happy about it until last year.

Crazy Monkey Defense (CMD) is on Monday, which is the day we all agreed on. I ended up being irregular a month in because of work, but after talking to my immediate boss, he doesn’t give me night functions on Monday any more. I usually get early ones instead, but it’s fair enough.

Kettlebell on Wednesday. There’s only two of us regulars in the class, so both of us feel obligated to show up so the other doesn’t have to suffer alone! No night functions coz Thursday is my day off.

And ballet on Friday, also a day off. This is the last month of class. I might replace it with something later on.

I make it a policy not to talk about work on my blog, because people who did that in the past usually find themselves awkwardly inconvenienced and/or unemployed, but I’ll bend it a little here for context.

Around June, I found myself thinking about work and where it is going. I didn’t feel challenged. I get a lot of assignments that I felt was inconsequential and plain boring. I knew that I could easily change that by having a quick work with my immediate boss, but I held back for some reason I couldn’t identify at the time.

I asked myself some key questions. Do I want to do the hard stuff at work so that I can go home feeling like my article might change things and people, maybe win recognition from my peers or even awards from Shell Kenyalang or Petronas?

No, I don’t. I’ll leave the real work to people who know this is their calling, and the awards to people who need the recognition or prize money to validate their existence. I just want to go home with time and energy for family, friends and me. Especially me.

Having easy things to do means that I’m not creatively exhausted at the end of the day. This is important because I’m trying to work my way back to a place I’ve lost and have been fighting to get back to since I started this job. I think I finally got there, but that’s a story for another day.

I am not and don’t want to be the best reporter in town. I want to be the person I can look back on with no regrets, no matter what I happen to work as.

After all, nobody lies on their deathbed and wishes they spent more time in the office.

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Work, Fitness & Balance

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This is what I’m listening to on infinite loop this weekend.

And since I’m a pop culture retard, I only gathered who all the people in the video are based on comments here and there. :P

I also heart the dorky cute guy look.

Lyrics under the cut.

Terrified - Katherine McPhee, ft. Zachery Levi

You, by the light
Is the greatest find
In a world full of wrong
You’re the thing that’s right

Finally made it through the lonely
To the other side

You set it again, my heart’s in motion
Every word feels like a shooting star
I’m at the edge of my emotions
Watching the shadows burning in the dark

And I’m in love
And I’m terrified
For the first time and the last time
In my only life

And this could be good
It’s already better than that
And nothing’s worse
Than knowing you’re holding back

I could be all that you need
If you let me try

You set it again, my heart’s in motion
Every word feels like a shooting star
I’m at the edge of my emotions
Watching the shadows burning in the dark

And I’m in love
And I’m terrified
For the first time and the last time
In my only

I only said it ’cause I mean it
I only mean ’cause it’s true
So don’t you doubt what I’ve been dreaming
‘Cause it fills me up and holds me close whenever I’m without you

You set it again, my heart’s in motion
Every word feels like a shooting star
I’m at the edge of my emotions
Watching the shadows burning in the dark

And I’m in love
And I’m terrified
For the first time and the last time
In my only

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The edge of my emotions

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Left Pile:
Richard Adams – Maia
Martin Hocke – The Lost Domain
Tad Williams – Tailchaser’s Song
Brian Jacques – Triss
Brian Jacques – Mariel of Redwall
Brian Jacques – The Outcast of Redwall
Brian Jacques – Taggerung
Brian Jacques – Mattimeo

Centre:
Orson Scott Card – Past Watch
Barbara Ann Porte – Hearsay: Strange Tales from the Middle Kingdom

Right Pile:
Rachel Ward – Numbers
Rachel Ward – Numbers 2
Keith R Lindsay – In The End
Vikas Swarup – Six Suspects
Tabitha King & Michael McDowell – Candles Burning
Dean Koontz – The Taking
Dean Koontz – Odd Thomas
Margaret Atwood – The Handmaiden’s Tale
David Hewson – A Season for the Dead

Ya, really.

Everything except the two Numbers books and Six Suspects came from the Crown Square Book Fair earlier this month. The damage is a little over RM200. I’m officially not buying any more books for the rest of this month and at least for the next three months… unless the third Hunger Games book gets here this year.

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Books – August 2010

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