Who Do We Consider Our Hero?

The question looks quite simple, doesn't it? Yet, I think it's one the questions that I find very difficult to answer. There are just too many options. If we pick one person, we might be considered biased as they are others who have been pretty impressive to our eyes.

Some people consider one of their parents as a hero. In broken families, this is very often the case. For the children, their single parent might have provided them with the basic needs and comforts as much as possible. And their only love comes from their single parent. There's no surprise that they will look up to their parent as their role model and hero.

However, in a normal family, a child who has been showered by love by his/her parents would rarely choose one of their parents as their hero. One main reason is that they are afraid if they would be considered biased if they were to favour one parent over the other. So, they just decide to sit on the fence and prefer to choose someone else as their hero.

Many people, especially girls consider a certain movie actor as their hero. I know that those actors are indeed heroes in movies. But, is it right to consider them as our hero and role model in life? I prefer to leave that argument aside as I feel that different people think in a different way. To me, just as we a players in the stages of our life, actors are just players on their own stage.

Many boys, on the other hand, like to make people that make the world moving as their hero. I'm not talking about all those politicians who wield their axe of power and change the course of the world. I'm talking about those guys who make the place a very entertaining place to live in.

For example, some boys are really fond and amazed by guys who do stunts. They can range from amateur skateboarders to professional wrestlers. The reason is these guys do things that are really out of the box. Wrestlers in particular really do become the heroes of many wrestling fans because they are strong and have great showmanship. Their charisma is just to attractive to some.

International figures who were or are involved in humanitarian efforts are another group who can proudly call themselves the heroes of others although they would certainly not do that. Quite a number of people consider people like Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa as their hero because of their efforts in giving other people a better life. To be frank, the majority of people who consider this group of people as their hero are adults who have come out of the materialistic shells to realise what life really is.

Now on behalf of children. Ever wondered why children can't seem to let go off the fact that cartoon superheroes are really the superheroes of their life? Well, children are so pure in their thoughts and feelings that even they know that people who save lives and do good to others are great people. I always use to think of the reason I used to be so hooked up on superheroes when I was young. Well, at least now I'm big enough to think of the answer myself.

I'm sure you must be wondering who my hero is. I gave so many options but I have to admit that I've not really chosen anyone as my hero so far. I do have role models as an example and a motivational figure to propel my goals. But, I think I still have a lot to find out about life before deciding on my true hero......

A Great End To My Special Day Of The Year

Well, just to let you guys know, today is my birthday. I'm turning 17 today. Life moves on fast right?

My day started off with a few birthday wishes at 12 from my sisters and friends. This year, there were 4 friends who wished me at 12. Then, I got back to sleep and woke up at 6 to go to the park for a good morning workout.

The day progressed with birthday wishes from my friends and family members. My birthday this year was a little different as my mum was overseas. That meant that I won't be able to taste my mum's delicious cooking and cake that she does for me every year on my special day.

In the evening, I went to aeon to get some new clothes for my birthday. I walked the whole shopping mall and finally decided to buy the 3 for RM50 T-shirts from Padini. I kinda liked the captions on the T-shirts.

After that, I returned home for the cake-cutting ceremony. As usual, I always celebrate my birthday at home with my family. It was going on as usual until my sister presented me with my birthday gift.

It was in a big red box. At first, I thought it was going to be a few things together in the box. Stuck at the front of the box was a nice birthday card my brother had made for me. In my eyes, it looked artistic and I'm really thankful as my brother actually took the trouble to make it for me. When I opened the box, I was taken by surprise.

To make it simple, it was amazing. My sister had presented me a photo frame, not just the frame but with a wonderfully edited picture in it. It was actually a picture of me, or I should say pictures of me since I was young until now. My sister spent her time to look for my picture for every age and arranged it in 17 boxes to show how I've changed throughout the years.

I would love to post the picture in this blog post but I don't know how to do it. It's quite heart warming and touching to see that my siblings have put in so much effort to ensure that I had a wonderful birthday.

After those touching moments, I logged on to facebook to check out the birthday wishes on my 'wall'. I was surprised to see that there was a staggering 170 birthday wishes on my facebook 'wall'. I took my time to return their kind wishes with words of appreciation, one by one.

As I looked through every picture in that collage of pictures, I realised that I have indeed grown up by quite a lot. To be honest, I don't think I would want to change my past as I've enjoyed most of it. Being a 17-year-old now, I know that I have to grow up away from immaturity but my great childish memories are just too amazing to let go off......

Another First Time

Yeah, the title says it all. I had another first time experience. This time, I was representing my school in an Info Hunt competition held in Bukit Cahaya, Shah Alam. I wasn't alone though-I had 11 team mates who were also representing my school.

The Info Hunt wasn't like my previous experiences of being separated into groups. This time, we raced as one team. I was actually a last minute inclusion in the team. It was because a few members from the original team pulled out as they were taking part in an accounting quiz in Taylor's University. Lucky me!

I've been there twice before, most recently during a trip there for Skytrex. The weather was cool as usual. We reached there quite early. And, it was a case of the famous Malaysian timing again as most of the teams arrived pretty late. One of the teams even arrived after one of the teams had started their race.

Basically, each team comprised of 12 students. We were then told to divide ourselves into two groups as we had 2 different paths to take. It was actually using your IQ skills to solve questions at checkpoints combined with great stamina and endurance for running. We really had to run as the time was very essential in determining the winner.

Each team left every 10 minutes. After the draw, we found out that we were the second last team to leave. So, we just sat there relaxing and sulking at the long long wait. I even managed a good nap and still had about an hour to wait after waking up.

Finally, race time! I was so delighted just to get off my seat and do some light warm up before starting. As soon as we got our first clue, the two groups in my team set off in different directions.

There was one huge problem in my team-not many were athletes and barely a few actually exercise. So, I knew before the race that tiredness would play a major part in that race. But, my spirits were not going to be brought down so easily as I was determined to ensure that my friends had a wonderful time that day.

As expected, fatigue caught up on my group members even before we reached the first checkpoint. The route was really long I have to say. I mean for non-athletes who were racing and to be given such a long a hilly route is quite a challenge. One of my friends had donated her blood the day before. So, she was low on haemoglobin and obviously-her body lacked oxygen.

I was determined to help her through the race. Whenever I go for such competitions, I always feel that happiness is more important than winning. One thing I was amazed about was her determination to continue. She looked so damn tired and her pulse was extremely high but she just wanted to continue. I didn't want to demotivate her by asking her to stop.

At the first checkpoint, after a long climb up a hill, we were given some mind-boggling mathematics questions. This Info Hunt was a real test for every one. One moment we had to run our hearts off, another moment we had to dig our brains for answers. The time limit just made it even more exciting.

At the third checkpoint, both the groups which separated at the beginning met each other. We had to race as one team from that checkpoint onwards. Again, I was amazed at how my team members were so reluctant to give up.

Then at the final challenge, they gave their reluctance a second thought. It was just pure running to the finish. It sounds easy except for the fact that it was uphill most of the way. I knew I was going to be ok with it as hill running is part of my training. But I had to do some thing to help my friends.

Some of them fared well, pushing themselves through the challenging path. The others were clearly having a big barrier to overcome. So, I tried my best to do the right thing every group leader would have done. I ran back and forth, up and down the hill to motivate my friends at the front and especially at the back.

After a gruelling 58 minutes of running and solving questions, we finally completed our race. We were pretty delighted to have completed the course. After lunch, we sat back at our original places and patiently awaited the outcome of the Info Hunt. There were many awards at stake but unfortunately, we didn't win anything. After everything was over, me managed to hang around at the animal sanctuary in the park and we had a good laugh there.

We didn't go back empty handed that day. We gained a lot of experience and had a good workout in the hills. I had one great time there. Besides enjoying my so called hill workout, I learned a lot about not giving up and pushing yourself harder even at the most gruesome of times. All in all, hats off to my wonderful team mates for making sure we had an amazing experience throughout the race........

P.S. We finished sixth. A surprising result for us too!

A Different Exposure

I don't know what's up with this year, but I've been getting unexpected experiences ever since the beginning of the year. Well, this time, it was the Physics Explorace which was organised by the District Education Department.

If you have been following my blog and was expecting this explorace to be similar to the Chemistry Explorace a few weeks ago, I can assure you that you're only 5% right. You're 5% right because there were one or two checkpoints that were similar to the checkpoints in the chemistry explorace. You're also (only) 5% right because it was a whole lot different.

On my way to the Management & Science University which was the venue, I was trying to recall what my teacher had said during the briefing in school a week ago. So, it was supposed to be more challenging than the chemistry explorace as this time, we were supposed to really race each other to complete the challenges in the shortest amount of time possible.

As soon as my 3 other friends and I confirmed our registrations for the explorace, we were divided into random groups. This is the part I loved the most during the chemistry explorace because I got a chance to know new people. This time, I met a whole new bunch of people too (actually just 4).

Well, this time, it was a little different. As soon as I found my group members, we kinda like clicked together pretty fast. It was all thanks to the girl from Methodist Girls School. She was quite the talkative type and to be frank, she initiated all the conversations at the beginning of our unofficial ice-breaking session.

Ok, let's get to the real deal. We started off from the lecture hall after a short briefing. It's been a few weeks ago since the competition so I can't really remember exactly what happened. The first experiment was to test the relationship between the length of the ohmic conductor and the resistance of the circuit. This experiment is one of the most uncertain experiments because malfunctioning ammeters and voltmeters are very common. Fortunately for my team, all the equipments were working well.

Other than that, in one of the checkpoints, there were 2 experiments to complete on properties of light. The first one was to test that light moved in a straight line. That was simple. The next one was to make a smaller beaker look invisible in a bigger beaker. It took us some time to interpret the instructions carefully before managing to complete the experiment. Basically, we had to place the small beaker inside the big beaker and pour oil into the small beaker until it appeared invisible.

In one other checkpoint, there were also 2 experiments to complete. Well, this checkpoint was the most challenging one as we faced a hard time to provide an explanation to the experiment we conducted. The worst part was the application question based on the experiment. (For every experiment, we had to provide an explanation and application in daily life except for the ohmic conductor experiment).

The first experiment was to trap a boiled egg in a conical flask. Basically, we were supposed to put the egg into the conical flask which had an opening which was too small for the egg to pass through. One of my group members then came up with a wonderful idea. He burned a piece of paper and chucked it into the conical flask while it was burning. Then, immediately he placed the egg at the mouth of the conical flask. After a few tries, we managed to slot the egg through the opening due to the reduced pressure inside the conical flask as a result of decreased volume of oxygen from combustion.

For the second part, we had to bend 5 matchsticks and place them in such a way that the bent parts of all the matchsticks were touching each other to form a star. Then, we were instructed to drop a few drops of water at the centre and observe. As the water droplet hit the centre, the matchsticks first came close together and then moved further away. We were staring blankly at each other for an explanation to the beautiful phenomena we just experienced. After the time was up, we found out that it had something to do with capillary action that we learnt in Biology (We could not figure it out because we were thinking too deep on Physics).

Well, that was all the experiments we did. In other checkpoints we had a quiz, a crossword puzzle (actually a few), a memory test ( we failed badly at remembering the names of Filipino scientist that we had to memorise in 5 minutes) and a spontaneous quiz. In the spontaneous quiz, we had to answer 10 questions, one by one, and we got a chance to throw 2 ping pong balls into a beaker from a distance for each correct answer. We managed to answer 9 out of 10 but never got a ball into the beaker.

We finally completed the race and settled down in the lecture hall to wait for the others and to know the results of the race. Again, the unexpected struck the team which had a whole lot of fun and never really mentioned anything about winning-my team!

Yeah, my team won the explorace...and it was my second explorace victory after winning the chemistry explorace. I was quite surprised to have won. Then, it was deja vu again when my school was announced the overall winner for the explorace after marks were accumulated based on the performance of the 4 of us representing my school.

It was another amazing day I have to say. A wonderful experience with different types of experiments, mind boggling quizzes and memory tests, various situations that required analytical thinking and to top it all off.....2 winners medals. A great day indeed......but more importantly, the experience was extraordinary........