The Long Goodbye

"Momma always said you've got to put the past behind you before you can move on. I guess that's what my runnin's all about. I had run for 3 years, 2 months, 14 days and 16 hours."

Time to stop.

Re-join me at the other blog.

This will be the penultimate entry on this blog. There really isn't a reason to continue any more now that life's taken a different turn for me. Consider this everything I could have, and should have, said before everything became different.


Thank you. Thank you for being my best friend for the last eight years, seven and a half of which was the happiest I've been in a long time. Thank you for being my lover and my confidante. Thank you for being there when I needed you; through the difficult decision to quit teaching, through the dark days after I returned from Meulaboh. Thank you for having loved me when I've already admitted I won't be the easiest person to be with.


I will move on. I will take only what I need from this flat I thought would be our home for a long time. Anything else, you may wish to do whatever you want with them. It will probably take me a few trips to move what I need out. But I do have a clear idea what I'll need, and what I don't want any more. Unfortunately, because it'll take me a while to find a new place, I cannot make changes to the mailing address at ACRA yet, so most of my cheques will still come here. I hope you will keep them at a spot where I can just pick them up.


I don't know where I'll go. But I do know that I'll still be in photography. So, that'll be the circle I will be running in.


Take care of the mooch. Perhaps now, when it's just you, he won't attack you for no reason. He's too cute to be given away and has been great company to me on the nights when you were at work or at meetings, aggravating sometimes though he may be.


I will remember the great times we've had and the bad too, for those are the times I learn from my mistakes. I still don't know what's happened between us, but as I've said: I will do whatever makes you happy, and if that means you do not wish to be with me anymore, I can accept that.


Once again, I'm sorry things couldn't work between us. I still dream of that apartment in English Bay. But it seems like a lifetime away now.


But you've got to know what you want in life too. I don't want to hear that you're unhappy because it's still the one thing that escapes you.


So that's it. I wish you happiness. I wish you well. I wish you the achievement of your dreams.


Goodbye.

Boobie Talk

Blonds of the world can start wailing now (from salon.com - membership required)

Cancer Found More Often in Dense Breasts

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By JEFF DONN Associated Press Writer

January 17,2007 | BOSTON

Cancer turns up five times more often in women with extremely dense breasts than in those with the most fatty tissue, a study shows, signaling the importance of a risk factor rarely discussed with patients.

On mammograms, fat looks dark, but dense tissue is light, like tumors, so it can hide the cancers. But this study confirms that cancers are also more frequent -- not just hidden -- in women with dense breasts.

That means that density is a true risk factor, along with other strong predictors like age and the genes BRCA1 and 2. Yet specialists say that breast density is rarely considered with other risk factors in discussions between doctors and patients.

"It's been ignored to an absolutely unbelievable degree," said study leader Dr. Norman Boyd at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto.

The Canadian study by cancer centers in Toronto and Vancouver focuses on how and when cancers were found over eight years in existing records of 1,112 women collected between 1981 and last year. It is being reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.


Breast density comes from the presence of more connective, duct-lining and milk-gland tissue than fat. But a woman can't judge her own density; it is routinely evaluated from a mammogram.

Previous studies had linked breast density to a higher rate of cancer, pointing to both masking and a separate biological risk.

In this study, women with at least 75 percent dense breasts showed five times more likelihood of cancer than women with less than 10 percent density.

The researchers went further by calculating just how many more cancers were found at screening, within the next year, and in the years afterward. Cancers found within a year were considered likely to be present, but masked, during the earlier mammogram. But a true biological risk was seen in cancers discovered by mammogram or long afterward.

In this study, cancers were 18 times more likely in women with the densest breasts within the first year after mammograms -- the masking effect.

However, cancers in women with the densest breasts were also more than three times more likely to turn up at the time of screening and after the first year following a mammogram. That confirms and helps quantify the true biological link between density and cancer.

"I think the masking thing is important, and it does happen, but the most important thing is that this is an incredible risk factor," said Dr. Karla Kerlikowske, of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco, who wrote an accompanying editorial. "This probably counts for a large percentage of the cancer that's occurring."

Breast cancers are the second most lethal kind after lung cancers in women. About one in eight women will get invasive breast cancer during her lifetime, according to the American Cancer Society. Last year, roughly 41,000 U.S. women died of it. Worldwide, it kills about 370,000 women each year.

In this study, density of more than 50 percent accounted for 16 percent of all cancers and a quarter in women under age 56.

Robert Smith, a screening expert at the American Cancer Society, said this study and its predecessors will encourage a rethinking of cancer screening.

For now, women can ask their doctor about their breast density based on a mammogram and how it might affect their risk. However, experts say it's too soon for doctors to provide solid advice to individual patients.

For one thing, quicker, more accurate tools are needed to measure density. Some experts believe that ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging or computerized mammograms may ultimately prove better at finding tumors in very dense breasts, but it's still unclear how much value each might yield for its cost.

"In a perfect world, I would have my wife do an ultrasound, MRI, and a digital mammogram," said Dr. Gary J. Whitman, a radiologist at University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. He was not involved in the study.

Some believe lifestyle changes or even preventive drugs may one day be recommended to women with this risk factor.

Meanwhile, specialists hope to identify genes that promote density, because they might act as targets for cancer drugs.

In another study in the same journal, a research team at the University of Michigan described a newly identified set of 186 genes that appears to predict whether a breast tumor will spread.

Other so-called gene signatures have been discovered for breast cancer, but this one is also linked to survival in lung, prostate and brain cancers.

Oh wait. Dense breasts, not dense women...

Okayy...

"You are not ready!"

Er, okay. Don't need to yell...


***

And, as it would appear, neither are you, Blizzard, as evidenced by the major crashing of the server at 4:20 am Singapore time.

Oooh, not pretty.

Sweetness

Ah, the sweet dream-filled sleep of the balls-less and care-less. Not GST 2007 worries for this one.

Five Things

I should have done today:

5. Get the hair cut. It's about four weeks overdue and way too many people have asked if I'm planning to grow it out again. And I don't like looking like a toilet brush.

4. Woken up later. Had too much to drink last night (see point no. 2) but wanted to be a little more productive. Oy.

3. More work-related stuff instead of spending most of the afternoon on Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. On a related note: ding!

2. Gone back to a party that was rather happening last night. Made the mistake of deciding I should stay home and spend time with loved ones. Yeah, I can be fucking stupid sometimes.

1. Give up already. You know, just give up. Why fucking try if I'm the only one doing the trying? It's fucking 3.30 am for cryin' out loud.

Sometimes

I get images sent from others that make me want to share them with more people:

Because not enough jokes about Luke and Leia exist in this world. (Planned the storyline right from the start - yeah, right).

I've always thought they were a tad vicious.

And now, we get to my favourite of the lot:

I case people were wondering, to 'pass' in some other countries that exist in this world means to 'overtake'.(Apart from the Star Wars one, I don't have any idea whose copyright the others belong to, so if someone knows, let me know.)

Grief

If you were there on the opening of the Remembering Tsunami show on 21 December, then you'll already know about the plans to have a photographer's forum at the gallery every once in a while. I'll be involved in the first one (along with some of the others who had their works shown on the 21st, of course), details follow:


Topic: Photographing Grief: Regarding the Pain of Others
Venue: Kay Ngee Tan Architects, 16/17 Duxton Hill
Date: 6 January 2007
Time: 2 - 5 pm


I hope to see some familiar faces there.

For The Record

Not drunk.

And for the record also, this looks like fun. I'll only know when I wake up tomorrow to try it and not get arrested for drink driving.

And also, Nokias are still stronger than most. In image: stains where the condensation from my beer seeped into my phone. Still working. Was able to transfer some more songs onto my phone's playlist. Heck, look at the 'Additional Information' tab on the Flickr page. I took the damned photo with the phone.

So there.

My Life in 2006

Guess, like the missus, I'm going to make this an annual thing (as long as I remember):

Figured I should start the ball rolling for 2006 before I lapse too much. When you're four tables away from me, you shouldn't be chewing your food with your mouth open and loud enough that I can hear you... Like this pigeon I found at the foot of our block recently - I do hope it's one of the neighbourhood cats that did this; better than the scary H5N1 that's going around - my hopes of getting to vote have been dashed. You'd think that with all the hands-free sets out there, and the availability of bluetooth sets - some with enough funky flashing blue lights to give even a closet beng heavy wet dreams - people would learn to drive without having to resort to actually holding the mobile phone to their ear. In the meantime, while I make plans for the next couple of weeks before I leave for Japan, more images from the two days on Ubin. 10 years as a short story. "... whatever card also can! As long as there's a card!" Been thinking a lot more about the whole theft incident and something that the client said yesterday had been festering in my mind, only to be given an airing today. Made the mistake of answering a doorbell in the afternoon yesterday. Or 'cover-up' (and a good reason not to be home this evening). Was minding my own business catching on things happening in the school with a colleague (ex-colleague, that is) when this came in: "Don't be left behind! Even Ministers blog! The new wave is Mobile Blogging! Now you can post to your blog site from your phone. Register at..." Becoming Royston is sold out.

I might be wrong, but I think there're more words here... I gotta start writing shorter sentences.