Because I shower Wuan with love and show my appreciation the other 364 days too. Valentine’s Day is over-hyped and over-commercialised to deceive us into parting with our hard-earned money in the name of love. Does an overly expensive bouquet of red roses really prove love and devotion? Not for me, not anymore.

I guess age has a hand in all these. Having been made guilty for not buying a present on this day for many years, I am now more the wiser. Wiser, not miser. I buy Wuan gifts whenever I come across something that I think she will like, not only on Valentine’s Day, but throughout the year.

I just checked the price at an online florist. They charge RM250 for a bouquet of two dozen red roses plus delivery when it would only cost RM120 on other days. The day when I spend twice the amount for something will be the day I need to see a psychiatrist. I can think of many other ways that I can sensibly spend the extra amount on.

In a short while, Wuan and I will be going on a long road trip again. I am going back to Penang to get some legal matters sorted out. The long stretches of undulating landscape bores me. Six hours straight on the road is a pain. The only consolation is the familiar food that I am going to get to enjoy. I have become a visitor to my own hometown like a tourist coming in for the sights, sounds, smells and savouries and then leave without any qualm. I feel a little lost right now. There is this ache, this emptiness whenever I think of Penang. They say home is where the heart is. But where is home?

The very thought of my cold and very dead body being snatched by overzealous people in the name of their religion and being buried under rites foreign to me is unnerving. Dead man tells no tales but should that ever happen to me, you can bet that I will turn over in my grave in protest.

Therefore to prevent my body from being confiscated by body snatchers in the name of their God and religion, I am stating the following for the benefit of my next-of-kin, the courts of law, the religious order of my chosen faith and anyone who may have an interest in the very dead body of mine and my estate.

If I were to suddenly die today, I would like to reiterate now that I have never renounced my current faith in Roman Catholicism. I have never converted to another religion, specifically Islam. I have never practiced what is required of good Muslim men. I will believe in Jesus Christ as my God and Saviour till my very last breath.

All my life, I have eaten pork and will continue to enjoy the one thousand and one ways it can be cooked. I have consumed liquor and would have continued to do so had it not been for my chronic kidney disease. Against the teachings of my chosen faith, I admit that I do gamble occasionally. I cannot help it. That is me practicing being Chinese to the very core.

So, please Mr. Body Snatcher, please leave my corpse alone. I am not of your faith, never will be. If you have records to prove it, I assure you that those are forgeries. Having my body does not guarantee that you have my soul. Let God and God alone be my judge and punish me for my sins. If I have to go to hell according to your beliefs, so be it. Whatever, it is , let my remains rest in peace. My final wish is to be sent off as a Roman Catholic. That is the least you can do for a man who can no longer speak for himself and stand up for his rights. That is called respecting the dead. Faham?

The Digital Awakening turns five today. To date, this blog is eleven entries short of one thousand. There neither was the inkling if I could sustain for this long nor write so much when I first started. Now that I have survived thus far, I can safely say that The Digital Awakening will be around for a long time to come. This blog will be updated as long as I am able to write.

Within these virtual pages, I have chronicled the extreme of experiences that I never thought I would ever go through. They are the most exciting times of my life - from the heart rending to the joyous, from the frustrating to the triumphant, from the mundane to the once-in-a-lifetime experiences. I have gone through all that and more in the relatively short period of five years. In this span of time, I have done more than I ever did all the years before that.

There is a proud sense of accomplishment as I read back the first few entries that was written in 2003. From those few short entries to now, I realised that I have grown so much. I was a mere spectator to the happenings around me then. Now I have become an active player jumping into the thick of the action on matters that affect me most. There is this saying that there are people who wait for things to happen and there are people who make things happen. I want to be the latter. I cannot expect other people to fight my battles for me. If I do not advocate for myself, why should other people bother?

Along the way, I have made many friends, and displeased a few. For the friends who had extended their unconditional friendship to me, I say thank you to you. You have coloured my life and made it so much more vibrant. To those who were offended by what I wrote, my only regret is that I did not spend enough time to explain to you why I did what I did in a tactful manner. My sincerest apologies for having hurt your feelings.

I would like to especially thank Sharizal, Dee, Bryan and Jason who were benevolent and crazy at the same time. They supported my cause by shaving their heads together with me to raise RM5,000 for the Hospice-at-Home Programme in Penang. I could not have asked for better friends who are willing to go bald to support what I did. You people are the greatest!

I would also like to thank all the bloggers and generous people who had donated to this project. Your acts of kindness had supported the National Cancer Society of Malaysia Penang Branch provide hospice services to people needing it. Although you may not feel the impact of what you had done, know in your heart that someone who was terminally ill had benefited from what you did. To all who had contributed to this effort, please accept my sincerest gratitude.

The Digital Awakening is an apt name for this blog. This was where I was awakened to the possibilities of things that I could accomplish. Truly, disability is a state of mind. I thought I could never travel to faraway places again due to my disability. Not only could I travel, I have been to places that I never even dared to dream about. The credit goes to Dr. Kenji Kuno, Mr. Shoji Nakanishi, Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Human Care Association for showing me the way, and as a result, how I can use that knowledge to awaken other disabled people. This is what I am doing now.

This blog will continue to be the place for me to express my thoughts and opinions. It is the archive of my struggle within, the things that I have done and places that I have been. Most of all, this blog is a gift to myself for that one day in the future when my memory is not that good anymore. This blog is about me, myself and I. It is about my journey through life. These are the stories that I want to tell myself when that one day comes. Thank you for five wonderful years. Here is a toast to many more five years to come.

Why The Digital Awakening? This is one topic that I have wanted to blog about for the longest time but never got around to doing it. Instead, I have written about the people who had inspired me to start blogging several times already. Now is as good as any time to explain how this blog got its name as it will be five years old in a few days time.

When I first started at Blogspot, this blog was christened The Chomping Block or something to that effect. I cannot remember the exact name now. It sounded corny and was discarded not long afterwards when I got a domain name and moved to paid hosting. The blog was running on Movable Type then. It has been running on Wordpress since September 21, 2005.

I was not that prolific those first few months. It was also a time of great distress for me as the beginning of this blog coincided with a time when Mum’s health began its downward spiral. In some ways, I am glad that I had the opportunity to chronicle those times of grief. It allowed me to understand myself better as I sieved through the multitude of emotions and expressed them openly for all to read.

For many years, I had no inkling of what I wanted to do. I saw my paralysis as an impediment and accepted that I could never look after myself and be independent again. Mum’s illness made me realised many things. She can never be there to look after me forever. There was no question to what I had to do. Either I learnt to manage myself or be swept away by my apathy. That was the beginning of my awakening.

Having a blog for me to express issues that I could never talk openly about was truly a blessing in disguise. This digital medium is better than the handwritten journals that I had kept and lost. I could actually write and rewrite entries until I was fully satisfied that it represented and interpreted the struggle within me precisely. This is one of the beauties of blogging as compared to keeping a physical diary.

With that,it is not difficult to see how I came up with The Digital Awakening. Even now, every thought that I put into words here teaches me something new about myself. It was through understanding myself that I realised the direction my life should take. The milestones are already laid. The Digital Awakening is all about me living one day at a time as I get closer and closer to those markers. It is about celebrating life and accepting all the good and bad, the happy and the sad, the joyous and the frustrations as a process of living. The Digital Awakening is my life chronicled.