happy new year people!!

new year's eve was quite a quiet affair as all of us didn't really feel like going out, so we just decided to stay in hall to chill and drink till 7+ in the morning. we found a new staple food for our drinking sessions - hotdogs cooked in boiling water. it's easily to cook and tastes pretty good on its own even without any sauces.

ben got really drunk admist all the drinking, we had to drag him back to the room and hurl him onto the bed. i had to hurl profanities at him to make him stop trying to get out of bed to go wherever he was planning to go in his drunken stupor. he realized later in the day that he busted his face from god knows what and chipped half of his front tooth. we suspect that he fell off the bed halfway through the night and face planted into the ground.

went for the new year hat tourney after sleeping for 4 hours, as much as it might sound like a bad idea, it turned out to be quite fun. although during the first game, with all the alcohol still in my system, i was sprinting up and down the field, and when i finally came to a stop and cooled down, i felt like i was going to faint anytime. as fun as it is, it's not exactly a very good idea to play when you're stoned and tired from a night of drinking.

some new year resolutions:

• study harder (almost seem to be on the list)
• work on photography
• do more freelance jobs
• stop procrastinating
• workout more to prevent recurring injuries
• get a 24-105mm L

made some "motivational" posters using some of the photos that i took last weekend at the ultimate league:


i have no idea how much trouble im going to get myself into when i see them during league on sunday, but oh well, i guess they're fine with it as long as people find it entertaining. haha! (sorry google and hayden :p)

as you can see, this post is kind of incoherent and the reason for this happening is that im freaking tired right. im pretty much just typing in whatever i can remember now before i knock out on my new mattress. sealy mattresses are good, i feel my lower back getting better already. hah. so much for trying to make a coherent post.

have a good year ahead guys!

Labels: hall, personal, Ultimate

just went i thought i managed shake off the back injury that i picked up in hong kong 2 months ago, i managed to strain my groin and hamstring in my first training in 2 months.

it's really quite frustrating for me because it seems that i've been constantly injured for quite a while already and my game is just going downhill because of all these injuries.

usually even when im injured, im still able to push myself into playing very hard but it seems like my body is refusing to act that way even when i try to push it. robin and mondster were telling me in hong kong that i look like i was holding back on my game during the competition.

maybe it's just my body refusing to get injured anymore..

Labels: misc, personal, Ultimate

*phew* there was a bit of a downtime for the site due to some bills problem. i get kinda edgy when this kinda things happen.

yes, i've been missing for a very long time. life's been through a pretty bad patch lately, hence the hiatus. went to hong kong for an ultimate competition, came back injured, then everything started going downhill for me in life. might be because of the niggling injury caused a substantial amount of morale to do things to vapourize. i started ruing on the fact that im injured, taking one too many fags and just laze around, not working on my injury, or rather, not working on anything at all. not a very good idea considering that it was so near to my submission week and reading week (which is now).

the only takeback from all these things is the fact that i suddenly realize that i have a lot of time on my hands the moment i took a breather from ultimate. it'll be a good thing i guess, im starting to feel a lot more refreshed and i think im ready to start again (provided that my back doesn't aggrevate again).

got my first photography job for a christmas dinner through my sister and im pretty excited about it. makes me wanna take time of studying and do some preparation for the event, BUT it'll have to wait, i have a good feeling about my results this sem and im not risking it.

and yes, i'm doing photography, anyone who needs to engage a photographer or has friends who needs to, please point them my way. my online portfolio is still in the process of construction, so for the time being you can look at my portfolio here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/egomy/

ok, back to studies!

Labels: hall, personal, school, Ultimate

.. is not my age. sorry to disappoint you people, but im much younger than that. haha.

anyway, that's the number of hours that i was awake for from friday to saturday and it left me barely alive after that. even fell into a slight fever in the middle of the night and left me half dead when i was at training today.

night cycling on friday night was fun as of every year and we did crazy stuff to one another as usual (actually just to joanna and tim at times), how many times in a year can we act like we're fighting with each other at glutton bay and hang someone upside down over the railing of the singapore river.

this year's route was much better than last year, more straight roads, less uphills and longer eating times. really makes it relaxing that the "training" route that we had last year which made our legs feel like jelly by daybreak.

i left east coast straight after we reached the destination (east coast, duh.) and headed straight to seng kang for SMU's Ultimate competition, Grab Huck Score. this is also the event that chalked up the number of hours of me not sleeping. i had half a mind to let the competition slip because i was too tired and i pretty much had to play 95% of the points. but looking at how much effort everyone was putting in, i thought we'll just go all the way.

had to play the other NUS team in the quaters, we lost but the other NUS team went on to win the whole competition, which was still good although i didn't get to play in the finals (or rather, a good thing that i didn't play, i can't imagine the state that i'll be in if i played). i've got a very good feeling about the whole NUS Ultimate this year, people are enthu and hardworking, we've got quite a potential team this year. hopefully it'll turn out well.

Labels: hall, personal, Ultimate

it's insane that i'm still awake right now, this is my 3rd night in a row that im sleeping after 4pm and it's totally not helping that i've stuff to do at night till late. someone asked if i was busy with work. well, i AM busy with work, just not school work and it's really worrying. i really have to stop playing DOTA after clearing all my hall stuff and actually do some school work. it's about time to start revising my work.

on another note, was at sentosa for a beach tourney over the weekend and it was pretty tiring, came back with a semi-swollen ankle (old injury), a graze, cut on my back and pretty pissed off. pissed off at the fact that the filippinos that we played against in the tournaments were so much faster than me. haha. i'm not pissed off at them but myself, seems like im still not as fast as i want to be, it's giving me more motivation to run more. it's always a joy to play with the filippinos in any Ultimate Frisbee tournament, they're all really fun and friendly people.

pretty glad that i played in the tournament with an "all-star" team, it's rare to play with experienced players from different clubs and countries in one team. and i really have to thank jason for showing me how it is to be playing with heart, something that i've think that i've lost over the years and perhaps to a certain amount of laziness as i become more seasoned. reminded myself of the days when i just started playing, i made up whatever i was lacking in skill with heart and just played really hard. i haven't been able to do that in recent years and it felt good to be doing it again. now to make sure that it stays that way.

will leave this post with a photo montage of the singapore flyer that i made for a part of my assignment:

check out the full assignment here if you're interested to see more:
http://www.egomy.org/triggerhappy/2008/10/assignment-4-urban-fantasy-1.html

Labels: design, hall, misc, personal, Ultimate

not good enough.
just simply not good enough.

i know the weekend's and the tournament's over, no point brooding over it, but i just can't help it. there were a lot of what ifs in my mind after the last game on sunday. what if we were more calm, what if we were better drilled than we were over the weekend, what if nobody was bothered by the pressure.

i wish i could have done more, or rather, i know i could have done more, if i was as fit as i was back then, if i wasn't injury laden, if i tried pushing my body to work harder.

would there be a difference if these were more than just simply "what ifs"? i don't know and i'll probably never know since it's over now.

5 yrs into building this team and i really thought we were going to have what it takes to get a result finally, i really wanted it damn badly, but i guess things don't always go your way. that's how life is, you just have learn how to deal with it.

im trying to deal with it now, it's just that i can't swallow this harsh reality fully right now. it's a result that's unbelievable even to bystanders looking at us.

it's time to regroup, get back to peak fitness and time to push this body to new limits.

guys, a year's a long time to make a difference.
less thinking, get to work.
i know i will, what about you?

Labels: food for thought, personal, Ultimate

it's been a very long time since i've felt so genuinely disappointed about something and today i felt this dreaded feeling once again. it was pretty bad i guess, to the extend that i didn't really feel like going for the team dinner (sorry guys) and stayed in hall to help out with the orientation instead.

i asked myself why i was feeling so disappointed: was it the fact that i expected too much of my teammates that when they under perform, i'll feel that it's not enough? or the fact that i have too much faith in them and when we don't do well, i feel like we're selling ourselves short in the game?

came to a conclusion that it's more of the latter and when i look back, i realize how people react to my so called "faith" in them. some people think of it as a joke and smirk when i become too serious when im explaining things during training. a few think that the "faith" that i put in them is too much to take, in turn told me that they think that not good enough and want to go to the second team instead.

im sure there will people think that im being emo and all because i didn't go for the dinner, frankly, i really don't care because this is how much this team means to me, so much that it's one of the main priorities in my life and it gets frustrating for me sometimes.

maybe im just tired, maybe i should try having people telling me what to do instead then maybe they'll know what im talking about.

i just hope that something like today won't happen again because i really hate feeling like this, makes me feel like an asswipe.

Labels: food for thought, personal, Ultimate

a team, its identity and its culture are all constructed by people who are in the common group where they share the same interest and goals. they build their culture around their interests, goals and things that matter.

this is what a team is made up of.

but sadly, the very deconstruction of a team lies on same set of principles that constructs it.

in the end the ones that give their everything to the team suffers all the repercussions when the team falters. it gets even worse when the very people who, ironically, are part of the team construction contribute to the deconstruction and downfall.

as the captain of the team and someone who has contributed so much to the team, i am at a lost of words of how im feeling now. it's just bad.

Labels: Ultimate

i was in bangkok for an Ultimate Frisbee tournament and the tournament was structured in such a way that everyone will be randomly placed into 1 of 10 teams for the weekend so everyone will pretty much play with people from all over asia that they don't know.

as many of you know (or don't know) the demography of the asia ultimate scene are predominantly ex-pats, mostly from states, canada and australia, so chinese names are always going to be a problem for them.

usually i would just introduce myself:

"Hi, my name is Wei - Liang."
*awkward silence from teammate*
"Just call me Liang"

but this year round my teammates took the initiative to transform my name into "William" and it really caught on with them. even so when they announced my name at the end of the tournament, they used "William". some of the guys from singapore were totally lost when some people were talking to them of a certain "William" from singapore and they couldn't stop laughing when they found out that it was me. am i gonna get hell from them when they get back from bangkok or what. haha.

anyway, bangkok was great fun, meeting people from thailand to alaska, it's a very cool mix of people who come together to play a common game. 7 games in 2 days really took a toll on my body and i'm feeling it as im typing this.

strained quads from running too much, bruised hip from a hard landing on a dive, sore thumb from a knock. rachel and eileen never fails to remind me that i always bring back injuries when i go for tournaments and i guess they're right. at least the injuries are not so bad this time round.

photos of the weekend coming soon!

Labels: Ultimate