CURRENT MISSION

Go on exchange/summer school/study trips again XDD

ABOUT ME

I am an economics major (with a minor in entrepreneurship) who did her thesis on an Environmentally Responsible Happy Nation Index. This, and experiences from the Road have been definitive in making me do the things that I do now. :) Which makes me both awfully fearful and extremely inspired all at once - and in a twisted sort of way I'm loving it because it makes me feel so damn alive.

Entrepreneurship is the closest a sane person can get to experience schizophrenia. And I know ALL ABOUT MADNESS: late dad was a schizophrenric, mom's education got aborted due to the Cultural Revolution, first partner suffered from depression and my ailment - my ailment is that I can get caught up in too much logic sometimes. Though fortunately, love has always had a strong presence in my life.

Parties and reading and volunteering are lovely things to me. My weakness is good food and alcohol. My greatest strength is a fundamental curiosity that drives me to seek new experiences, climb greater heights, etc. in life. :) But like the rest of the human species, I am prone to laziness and procrastination so...

I blog at http://blog.ernie.sg if anyone's interested in reading an economics major's perspectives on whatever caught my fancy, heh.

PHILOSOPHY

A quote that I love:
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way, an honorable way, in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory." Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl

This I believe:
- Love is our only salvation in this lonely planet.
Correction: I don't believe the above statement to be true anymore. It should be more like "love will find you - wherever you are - when you refuse to settle and are no longer seeking to be saved.", I think now.
- God is Love.
- Knowledge reshapes destiny.
- Happiness is only real when shared.
- We are super social by nature.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I don't have a couch to offer but fosho I can bring people on food hunts, parties and visiting artsy-fartsy/interesting places.

Singapore's only abandoned HDB estate: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150510402819097.465949.650204096&type=3

An annual Open House of artists' studios fashioned out of old British army barracks:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150910801339097.524371.650204096&type=3

SAVOUR gourmet food festival:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150925951419097.526465.650204096&type=3

Interests

Alc_h_l, Chit-chat, Clubbing, Good Food, Hedonism, Music, Movies, Photography, Reading, Stories, Travels, Behavioral economics, Entrepreneurship, Epistemology, Love, Microfinance, Philosophy, Power and Politics, Reason, Religion, Science, Sociobiology, Technology

• poetry
• photography
• festivals
• education
• dining
• partying
• clubbing
• politics
• technology
• movies
• reading
• blogging
• music
• communications
• economics
• teaching
• entrepreneurship
• logic
• religion
• science
• volunteering

Music, Movies, and Books

Favourite books:
Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy
Letter to A Christian Nation
Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)
Stumbling on Happiness

Favourite movies:
Into the Wild
Little Miss Sunshine
Pirates of the Caribbean
The Classic
The curious case of Benjamin Button
The Legend of 1900
Before Sunset
Closer
Fight Club
Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind
Lost in Translation

Favourite music:
Top 40 hits, hip hop, R&B, house, dubstep
Adele
Akon
Beyonce
Colbie Caillat
f(x)
Girls' Generation (SNSD)
Leona Lewis
Linkin Park
Maroon 5
Mayday
P!nk
One Republic
Jane Zhang
Lady Gaga
S.H.E
Wang Leehom

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Pulling my 22nd birthday TEDx-style lightning-talks event off

Conceptualising + kickstarting UnEconomics 是非经济学 2011 on "living the good life in a capitalist economy"

Meeting a complete stranger after a whole slew of disasters, both man-made and natural

Teach, Learn, Share

My thoughts. I enjoy thinking a lot. :)

Countries I’ve Visited

China, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand

Countries I’ve Lived In

China, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand