Carrie Underwood: What I've Learned

I was so nervous when I was on my way to L. A. I'd never been on a plane, and I was going alone. I kind of got teary-eyed. My dad was driving, and he said, "If you want to go home, we can go home, and you never have to think about this again." And I thought, If I don't go, I'm choosing for this not to happen. It will be my choice. So I figured it would be easier for me to get kicked off American Idol than to have it be my own decision.
I've learned the most throughout my life from age twenty-two till now.
As you step off that stage, you're pretty much alone.
My cell phone is my best friend. It's my lifeline to the outside world.
There's no handbook.
People can take your words and make them into something awful and something you never meant it to be.
It's hard to find normal celebrities.
It's hard to find people who don't want something from you.
Atlanta? Tough town. It's hard to get people to show up for anything. What do people do there?
I know what I like to listen to on the radio. I know what I like to sing along to in the car. So any time I heard a song for the first album, I'd put it in the context of, Okay, would I turn the channel? Would I listen to this whole song or would I skip to the next one? It was really important to me because all I knew was how to be a consumer. I didn't know how to be an artist.
After I released "Jesus, Take the Wheel," people started saying, Oh, it's kind of risky. You're coming out with a religious song. And I was thinking, Really? I grew up in Oklahoma, I always had a close relationship with God. I never thought it was risky in the least. If anything, I thought it was the safest thing I could do.
I remember when I first started headlining, thinking, They paid money. I remember being young and saving up my allowance to see an Alan Jackson concert. And I was like, these kids are saving their allowance.
I've seen people that get onstage and sing while they have tears running down their face — I can't do that. When I cry, it starts like in my throat, so when I have something that's really emotional, sometimes if I access that too much, I can't finish the song.
Singing is just a feeling set to music.
If you don't mean it, they're going to know you don't mean it.
Same thing if you're feeling happy. You know, it just enhances everything you're going through. Hearing it put to music makes you realize someone else is going through it, too.
"Baby's Got Her Blue Jeans On" was my anthem as a child. It was about me. I was Baby.
A guy can come in and have a big beer belly and he doesn't have to be anything but himself, whereas women have to wear the heels. We're probably missing out on a lot of wonderful talent.
Simon's obviously very smart. But he's not the smartest person I know.
When people think of what it's like to be famous, they think of the Ritz. But I've been in hotels where I will not take my shoes off. I will wear flip-flops in the shower. I've seen more basements of venues than I've seen of the United States. People think, Oh, you travel around, you get to see the country. I've seen basements, I've seen concrete, I've seen pillars.
Being on the Idol tour — I'd never been onstage like that before. I'd sung at Okrafest, where ten people were listening.
Americans don't need Carrie Underwood telling them who to vote for. They're smarter than that.
Nobody's going to tell me that my dog doesn't love me. That's crazy talk.
Don't buy a puppy because it's cute.
I can't watch animal movies. I watched Beverly Hills Chihuahua and sobbed, because of all the dogfighting stuff they had in there. This little Chihuahua gets stuck in a Mexican dogfighting ring, and it's supposed to be funny, but oh no, it's not. Because I know that stuff is true.
Is "Cowboy Casanova" about the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys? No. I would never immortalize a guy that did me wrong. I would never give him that much credit.Read more:

(http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/new-carrie-underwood-interview-0110#ixzz0vDmdyZUf)

Apprendre le français avec des images

An Overnight Web Sensation: Greyson Chance

(from http://ellen.warnerbros.com/)

Just a week ago, 12-year-old Greyson Chance had been living a typical life in Edmond, Oklahoma. He enjoyed listening to his favorite band, Augustana, and playing the understudy in a local production of “Oliver.” Little did he know, he would soon become the newest web star!
After recording a unbelievable performance of Lady Gaga's “Paparazzi” at a talent show, he uploaded it to Facebook and YouTube -- and had no idea what would happen next. In just a few short days the video received over 2 million views and overnight he became an Internet sensation!
Even though he's only in the 6th grade, Greyson has shown a clear talent for music. In addition to his cover of “Paparazzi,” he has written two other songs, “Broken Hearts” and “Stars.” He dreams of being a solo artist in the future, and is well on his way.Read more:

Are there still loose ends dangling?

It's about time to get back on track. Last week, I travelled around Taiwan by train, and had a great time with my teammates. But this week, I have to get something done as I was told by Mom not to put off anything that should be finished earlier.
Thus, this morning, I got up not too late so that I could take back the documents for reimbursement and also fetch my passport. Meanwhile, I also went to a doctor for I felt my back pain worsen. The doctor prescribed me some anti-inflammatory pills and muscle relaxants. And much to my relief, I did get better after taking this medicine. I told myself as well that I should stay healthy for without health, life is like a bird withour wings and without hope.
Having take a siesta, I sat in front of my laptop for a while, surfing the Web and lazing the afternoon away. At around 3 o'clock, I went out to meet Eric, who gave me some receipts and certificates so that I could do the reimbursement.
When the night fell, I rode my scooter to Yonghe, and went along with driving training coaches to San-Siah. Yet, I only got one chance to drive the whole route in 3 hours. What a waste of time.
Still, all was not lost. I got to know a freshman-to-be tonight. He had a very different background compared with me. He studied in a senior high school in Paraguay, and is going to study in Fu-Dan university, China, this september. His major would be medicine. We talked about each other, and idled away the three hours together.
On our way to Yonghe, the driver and coach, droved qutie fast, even up to the speed of 180 km/hour. Shocking, isn't it? Some 30 minutes later, we reached out destination, relieved.
Now it is 20 mins to 2 o'clock. What did I just say about health? Ok! I did make an exception today.....

Sleep tight and sweet dream. ^^

More than a normal cat

CAMBRIDGE, England — He came unannounced out of an Indian monsoon, hauling himself onto our Delhi verandah one morning 16 summers ago — tiny, skeletal, bedraggled, a black-and-white splodge so limp as we lifted him from the polished flagstones that we feared he’d drowned in the sheeting rain.
Even by alley cat standards, he was not much of a kitten, the size of an open hand, unable in those first few hours to stand without falling down. More pitiable, his whiskers had been snipped off, an indignity suffered when he’d petitioned for refuge in a shanty near our home, where children made sport by taunting strays.
Last week, as he reached the end of his adventurer’s life, 5,000 miles and a world away from his beginnings, we comforted each other with those first memories of the cat we came to call Scuzzi — for the scruffy, ragamuffin state in which he arrived as much as for the scrappy, streetwise, step-aside, endlessly talkative character he became.
It is not in the nature of cats, at least in the case of the platoon of strays we have adopted in our travels around the world, to freight themselves with speculations about their fortune in finding human refuge. From the get-go, Scuzzi behaved as if he knew how blessed we — as much as he — were by his turn towards our verandah when all other hope for him was gone.
Over the years, he became an indispensable part of our lives and our children’s, a loyal companion yet always a vagabond, his wandering habits blending seamlessly with our own.
So when the debilities of old age finally beset him, with his cat’s brief span dooming us to a painfully early parting, the family debate about whether to end his life prematurely, or grant him the last full measure of sovereignty by allowing him to die in his own time, was as agonizing as anything we have known.
Life has its rhythms, with endings that return full circle to our beginnings, and so it was for Scuzzi. On that first Delhi morning, an Indian government horse veterinarian, the only kind available, waved away suggestions of a quick end to his suffering. He assured us that Scuzzi would survive, and ultimately thrive, with a proper diet and the balm of human kindness.
And it was to the mercies of another vet that we turned at the end. By then, Scuzzi had entered the last throes of kidney failure, barely a third of his normal weight and so stiff he could no longer lift or turn his head. Just as at the beginning, he was threatening at every step to topple as we took him on the final, halting tours of his favored garden retreats.
Even then, the old fighter had not wearied, nor his primeval radar failed. From the moment he emerged from Delhi’s drains, he had the DNA of ancestors who survived generations on the meanest streets. Later on, his chatty ways with humans won him friends wherever he wandered, and the open doors of others’ homes provided him with a network of favored retreats, sometimes for days on end.
But he was never so amenable with animal kinsmen, particularly cats.
His strongest urge, to the end, ran to patrolling in search of a handsome Black Persian — a stray — who made his home amid the tangled undergrowth around our Cambridge home. On one side, there was the battlefield we called Falluja — the sprawling gardens of a world-renowned expert in international law, with Jack Russell terriers resident and primed for Scuzzi’s incursions; on the other, the deep woodland of one of Cambridge’s sprawling colleges, which became Scuzzi’s Anbar.
Many were the days when Scuzzi and the Persian met in combat, Scuzzi coming home with deep scratches on his face, fur hanging in clumps from his flanks. No counseling, no remonstrance that he, too, had once been alone, unfed, and frightened, made the slightest impact. For Scuzzi, civility ended where the hinterland began. Once aboard the good ship of family life, the drawbridge in his mind had been raised, and no other cat could hope for rescue.
His long-range patrols astonished us. Once, when he had been missing nearly a week, my wife, Jane, then working in Baghdad, reproved me at long distance for not having called the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which has a missing-animals database in Newcastle, 250 miles away. Waste of time, I thought, but I called all the same. “Black-and-white cat, you say, Cambridge? No problem,” the R.S.P.C.A. man said, clicking his mouse. “He’s on the roof of the university library, been there five days.” And so he was, three stories up, cowering from a losing fight with one of the library’s own battalion of strays.
Now, with the family gathered and only hours to go, he was still agitating for a chance to go out on one last, remorseless patrol. And it was that instinct, in the end — the fear that he would disappear into the undergrowth, too weak to return and too remote to be found — that helped settle the family debate that had lasted weeks, through the cat’s equivalent of dialysis, insistent blood tests, and variations in diet. Anything to keep him alive.
John Grieve, the thoughtful family vet who had cared for Scuzzi as his illness worsened, told us consensus was imperative if we resolved to end his life. After scouring the Internet for advice, Jane and our two adult children who grew up with Scuzzi, Jamie and Emily, agreed that with all quality of life gone, and nothing ahead but suffering, the humane thing was a painless end. But my sense has long been that death is in the gift of God, or Providence, not man. And I felt we should treat Scuzzi as we knew him — the most independent, do-it-my-way of all our cats — and not deny him the right to exit life on his own.
The singularities of our family life weighed heavily. As a career foreign correspondent for The Times, and the son of an itinerant air force officer, I have lived a vagabond’s life; so too has Jane, whose family lived more than 200 years in colonial India. For 30 years and more, assignments in far-flung places have been the root condition of our lives. Wherever we have gone — Africa, Soviet Russia, China, Bosnia, India, Afghanistan, Iraq — we have adopted strays.
Perhaps that has been because, in a sense, we were strays ourselves; or perhaps, more simply, because the animals, at each move, became mementoes of all we’d left behind.
In the last week, our debate stretched on. What would Scuzzi say, if he could, I asked; as he rested on Jane’s shoulder, what did those sad, amber-green eyes convey? Help me to my end? Or let me live, until I let go on my own? His suffering was evident, but so, too, the family’s anguish. I saw, finally, that I risked becoming something I had come to loathe in years spent in places ruled by ideology — a man capable of placing principle, tortured or otherwise, before kindness, common sense, and the common good.
On Tuesday, Mr. Grieve arrived to administer the barbiturate, needle and vial wrapped in a towel. He suggested we gather where Scuzzi would be at ease; we chose an upstairs bedroom flooded by the warm light of a sky-blue summer’s day. Then we laid old Scuzzi to rest at the foot of the garden, deep beneath an apple tree where he liked to laze away his summer days, his last retreat a cardboard shoebox set within a haven fashioned from slabs of gray Welsh slate.
I thought then of Rupert Brooke and his poem “The Soldier,” which I have carried in a fraying, folded paper to distant wars. Days before he died in 1915 en route to Gallipoli, Brooke wrote of languid times spent with friends before war came, in the lush meadows along the Granta, a river near our home — terrain that Scuzzi, too, had roamed. Looking beyond the possibility of his own death, and what became his burial in a foreign field, Brooke saw eternity in ways that soothed away all pain.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,A pulse in the eternal mind, no lessGives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentlenessIn hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Back pain

I didn't feel well after my round-the-island trip. I did have a lot of fun during the trip, but as I came back to Taipei, I began to have a sore throat and feel great pain in my back, to such an extent that I couldn't bend.

I thought I would have got a lot better this morning after sleep, but things just went from bad to worse. Whenever I coughed, I felt the unbearable pain in my back. Most of the time, I had to stand or sit upright, or I would again go through the agony. I couldn't help feeling myself like an old man, who had great difficuty moving. Weirdly, it seems that I have fast-forwarded my life, and have becomed a weak, dependent and miserable old man. Now, I pray that I could get well tomorrow. And I will no longer easily damage my back, and be more careful and attentive to my health.

Day 1-花蓮瑞穗

Our trip started with the first day's "white water rafting" in Hua-liang. Early in the morning, we took the train from Taipei main station to 瑞穗 station. Here's the picture taken from outside the station. Actaully, at the end of this trip, I found most of the stations alike in their facades.

After the rafting and the shower.........

This is the restaurant where we had dinner. The food wasn't really delicious and filling. So, we had some snacks after that.

This is the place where we stayed for one night.(poker night)

The 5-day round-the-island trip

Our basketball team has long been thinking about taking a trip somewhere, yet it is not until this Monday that we went on our first trip together. This trip meant a lot to me. Having been on this team for three solid years, from freshman to junior, I made a lot of friends with whom I went through thick and thin. Sometimes, we fell out over a trivial question; sometimes, we made fun of each other and laughed all the times; there were also times when we lost the basketball games and got into a bad mood; also, we beamed at our foes from time to time. Anyway, we had so much in common as we all love playing basketabll, and we enjoyed each game and practice(or most of them.) Sure enough, the time we spent together will be a pleasant memory.

However, time will tear us apart. I am going to the States this September and Arthur will serve in the military this November. (William as well). So, I really treasure this 5-day trip, which turned out to be really awesome and fun.

New Divide

I am trying to be a different, or better, person. I want everything to change for the better. But this somehow puts me under some pressure. Surely I do have the "can-do" spirit, but I should still take stock of my health. Change isn't easy, yet sometimes necessary if you want to be a better person(Doesn't have to be an overachiever, not to metion a underachiever). However, "haste only makes waste,"as Confucius puts it. So, I think I need to pace my efforts, as pushing myself too hard may backfire.

A new divide isn't anywhere in sight, but I know it is somewhere out there. I should have faith in myself, and hopefully life will find a way for me.

This is my brand-new blog. If everything seems about right, this would be my blog, where I will post anything during my stay in the U.S.