Amazed

I'm so amazed by several things around me recently.

I'm amazed by the wonders of internet; how it enabled me to chance upon a long-lost childhood friend, allowed me to "find" and meet my distant cousin in LA, and permits me to re-create many of the chinese & local dishes we have been craving for, amongst others.

I'm amazed at how easily money flow out of my pocket. It suddenly dawns on me that when you are not earning your own dough, you tend to spend money without giving it a second thought. Is it because you do not have to work for it, thus the value of money dimishes once it reaches your hand? Or is it because you knew you will never die of hunger and cold with a working spouse and doting parents, so the need to save now takes a back seat? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then you are such a selfish and abhorrent being. Perhaps, that "you" is me. Then I will be very amazed at how disgustingly atrocious I am.

Lastly, I'm truly amazed that NONE of the women I saw along Miami Beach and the Bahamian Beaches had any stretch marks. Not a single line of it. With a couple of friends getting pregnant in recent months, the topic of pregnancy stretch marks had surfaced numerous times. I'd never knew how bad it could be, till I saw it with my own eyes that those red wormy lines can be really gruesome looking. That particular sight had since etched deeply within me, and I've been trying to look for ways to prevent that from happening to me even before we start a family. Naturally, when I was on the beaches, I'd started looking at women's bellies. Women of all ages, from young adults to mothers-with-kids-in-tow to old grannies, and I am extremely astonished that none of them were spotted with any of those unsightly worms! If you talk about cellulite, yes, majority of them bear the brunt of its presence together with sagging skins. But where are the stretch marks?! How did they manage to make them disappear or even prevent them from appearing? How is it possible that none of the hundreds of American women I saw had those while almost all the Asian women had to live with the red ugly worms after pregnancies? Could it be their diet, or the creams/lotions they applied to make their skin so elastic? I've now embark onto a mission to solve this huge mystery...