#allison chan

[yes-lukewinter]

Allison Chan, Ocean to Forest, Death to Life

[thepoolscene]

The Pool Scene - Allison Chan, Li XiaoLong, Samuel Lai - Womens Pool and Billiards

New Post on http://thepoolscene.com/womens-pool-and-billiards/title-defended-liu-shasha-crowned-world-champion

Title Defended: Liu ShaSha Crowned World Champion

Liu ShaSha of China successfully defended her title and proved to the world that she is the best in women’s pool by snatching the World 9-Ball Championship title for a third time. A tight tug-of-war would be expected between the defending champion and the current Euro Tour champion Jasmine Ouschan (Austria), but the final resulted with a rather surprising and preposterous score of 9-4.

In the playoff, Chieh-Yu Chou of Chinese Taipei took the 2nd runner-up place by beating Chihiro Kawahara 9-7.

When the battle reached the semi-finals, Liu was then the only player from China left in the field. If she goes out at that stage, record would be made for the first time ever that no Chinese players were in the final since the tournament had moved to China in 2009. Immense pressure then on Liu’s shoulders.

Nervousness also came from other sources, such as being in the final again, the burden of defending the title, the desire to lift the trophy up for the third time, the possibility of winning the most world titles amongst team China players,… all these contributed to Liu’s tension and it was shown on her face during the final match.

“All along I was playing from behind throughout the whole tournament. I did not perform well. The thought of defending the title had been haunting me. Too much nerves and pressure. My coach was trying to adjust my thoughts by asking me to focus on one ball at a time; but with him being on the bench not much could be changed anything while I was out there at the table…” said the champion after the match.

The night before the final, Liu was telling us about her desire to defend the title in Guilin. “70% of the performance will depend on psychological, if I could clear my mind then I could play well. Judging on the regular training, being in the top 4 is already satisfactory. The final tomorrow will be mere expectation. Whether win or lose I’ll just play my game.”

In the double-elimination stage, Liu beat Bai Ge and Han Fang to move into the next round. After that, she knocked out Akimi Kajitani of Japan (9-0), Wei Zih-Chian of Chinese Taipei (9-5), her Chinese colleague Gao Meng (9-2), and then the 3-times Amway Cup champion Chieh-Yu Chou in the semi to reach the final against Ouschan.

In the group round, Jasmin Ouschan won over Jennifer Barretta and Kelly Fisher with 7:5 and 7:3 qualified for the single-knockout stage. After that, Ouschan defeated Park Eun-Ji (KOR) 9:4、Chezka Centeno (PHI) 9:8、Pan Xiaoting (CHN) 9:6 and Chihiro Kawahara (JPN) 9:8 to booked her seat in the final.

Having successfully defended her title, Shasha had already won the World Women 9-Ball Championship three times, passing Kim Ga-Young of Korea (2), and fell short with just one from the all time legend the “Duchess of Doom” Allison Fisher of England.

(Li XiaoLong / Samuel Lai / Allison Chan)

[allison-f-chan-blog]

8 page excerpt of my novel in progress

  KALEIDOSCOPE

By: Allison Chan Beaulieu

As of FEBRUARY 2013

CHAPTER 5.1: - Apprentice

In the quiet pause before the intake of breath, behind her eyelids every time she closed them to rest after too much reading, the same picture would re-appear in Sarah’s mind. She only dared to glimpse it for moments at a time, though she felt its presence all the time.  She tried not to blink, tried not to see it, but she knew she couldn’t keep her eyes open forever.

Sarah put down the book in her hands. She looked around the room, looked at anything to keep her eyes occupied.  Her jeans pinched, so she got up and shook her legs out. As she leaned against her drawing table to stretch, her hands caught her attention, namely her wedding ring, which was still there on her left finger. Seeing it made her feel troubled and confused. Her husband, Joseph, once told her that the wedding ring was a source of strength for her, but instead it made her feel angry and sad. Yet she couldn’t take it off.

  She forgot to concentrate on what she was doing, and got distracted by these thoughts. Soon enough those aimless thoughts lead her back to her problem. Once again she was all too aware, to her left, of the queer electricity of a keen gaze upon her. It sent a static buzz all up and down the left side of her physical body. She stood up and turned her head towards the source of the buzz, and closed her eyes.

There he was again in her mental landscape exactly as he had been day and night. Adom Machen was his name. He stood on the ledge of a stone roof on a very tall building. The wind whipped his coat and his hair in wild directions, and tugged at the hems of his black suit. His head was tilted up slightly, his eyes were askance at her, and his arms were outstretched as if he was about to take flight.

Inside her mind, Sarah’s own body was duplicated in mental form. With her eyes closed she tilted her head down towards her feet, and in this mental landscape, she saw that she wore a pleated black dress, and a pair of shiny black pumps with two inch heels on her feet. She stood next to Adom on the ledge. The wind buffeted her so hard that she thought she might fall off the top of the building. What might happen to her in real life, if she did fall inside her mind, would be very bad for her and she knew it.

Sarah put her hand out to Adom, but he was just beyond her reach.

Adom’s gaze, seemed to her to be, like that of a passenger who looks at a taxi driver when both know the way is lost. Like a passenger, he waited for her to decide what they should do next.

  No matter how many times this scene played in her mind, inside every broken thought, every blink of an eye, in the dead space between exhale and inhale, she could never find the answer, it never came. She was utterly lost but dreaded to tell him so, for fear that he would jump.

She knew only three words to stop him and hold him in place. Sarah would look him full in the eyes. With her heart and soul poured into every word, she would say in a low, gentle voice, "Don’t look down."

He gave his attention to her at those words. Then he followed suit as she stared up into the imaginary blue sky, and his eyes strained to see whatever it was that she pretended to show him.

But each time, she would lose the connection to him, just as soon as Sarah broke eye contact with him to look up. She would lose him because he was unable to follow her.  Because she was going nowhere. So this precarious scene would return to the start with his intense gaze upon her, and the scene would replay in her head, and it kept ending the same way.

She was afraid that if she changed the smallest thing, he would jump and she would never see him again.

At 6:00 pm, Joseph arrived home from the photo studio. As he took off his grey coat and put down his keys, he asked her, “Well, how did it go today?”

“Not so good...” Sarah replied. She looked up at him and felt a pang of guilt when she saw his expression.

      He had a small, friendly smile on his pale, tired face. It didn’t hide the sadness around his mouth, the corners pulled sideways instead of upwards. And his normally blue eyes were washed out to a pale grey.

His eyes made her think of watery grey clouds on a winter day.

Above those eyes, his black eyebrows went up, waiting for her to finish her answer.

She paused, then said, “I’m still having trouble with the walls.”

Joseph encouraged, " Practice building your shields the way that I showed you. Concentrate.”

She nodded half-heartedly.

Joseph became impatient, “You HAVE to protect yourself. It's because you've been so open to him, that you’re so vulnerable to his attacks."

She didn't want to believe him. She asked, "If I shield myself, how will we know what he's thinking?"

Joseph said, "His choices right now are apparent. We'd only be sticking our necks out if we try to watch him all the time. Right now, your protection is more important."

Then she asked her real question, "What do you think he is thinking? I mean, since I am away, now?"

"I can tell you what he was thinking when you sent your last transmission and closed your contact with him." answered Joseph. "He can't understand why you would leave him now. You both made promises. He left his family over it, and you haven't. He regrets ever having let you get so close to him. And he's not letting you get that close to him again."

  She nodded," I know, there's others with him. They surround him."

Sarah knew that while she was learning to block him out, Adom was distancing himself from her too. He was still there, but not as easily reached. He only appeared in her mind, when and how he chose.

Instead, she felt the others more apparently now. Adom had put them between her and himself. They blocked her out unless he told them to move aside.

She said to Joseph, "I noticed them once before. I don't know why I never thought about them when I was with him."

"You didn’t look for it to mean anything." said Joseph. "But I'll tell you what it means, because I saw the others during your transmission. He has retreated into his inner circle. It’s made up of extreme fans and close friends. You're on the fringe of that circle now, looking in."

Joseph’s brow crinkled with concern, "Leave it alone, Sarah. There's nothing you can do for him. Don't think about it."

Sarah nodded, but she found it difficult not to think about everything, so much had gone wrong. The memories plagued her with fear, doubt and confusion.

“What if this is a ploy by Joseph to win me back, to keep me away from Adom?” she thought. “He’s protected me and taught me so much, but why?”

“There’s really no-one I can trust... I can’t even trust myself.” Sarah thought.

Joseph left the room while she was lost in thought, and went into the bedroom to change out of his work clothes. He returned after getting into a t-shirt and jeans, and he pulled up a chair to sit down next to her in the livingroom.

  “Let’s try a different way to make your mental shields stronger and stable. Think of energy as a tangible object," he explained, "a simple, basic material, malleable, like clay. Think of building it into bricks, then use the bricks to build walls. Make the walls solid, unbroken, and thick, so that no-one and nothing can get in."

"But, can you hear me if you need to?" asked Sarah. “I don’t want to be completely isolated.”

He answered, "The walls you have against me are already there, Sarah. If your barriers against Adom were just as good, there would be no worry of him breaking through. He would never be able to hurt you.”

“I can't get anywhere near you. I only know what you tell me out loud..” Joseph’s voice wavered slightly. “I wish I could take them down. I mean, make you forgive me."

He drew in a breath and said, "Now you know why I need to help you. I have to help you. I have to prove myself. - Not so that you'll stay with me, I've given up on that, but to show you that I can change. I don't want to be remembered by you only as a horrible husband that you once had."

He choked up despite himself, but forced the words out, "I can be a decent man. …I need you to know that. And if, after all this is over, you still feel you have to go away, I want to be remembered by you as a friend. I can't bear you hating me."

"I don't hate you, Joseph, not any more." Sarah said gently.

"No. It may not be the same as your first outburst, but it's still there. Part of you is still angry with me and doesn't believe me. If not for talking like this to you face to face, I'd be a stranger to you." he said.

  Sarah’s hand pressed the side of her head as she said, “It’s so hard to think, lately. I've been getting these pressure headaches. They make it so difficult…” she paused as she fished around for a thought that she needed to ask, “... Are you saying that I'm supposed to hate him in order to make my shields strong against him?"

"No, no, no. Not HATE him. That would be trading one poison for another. You have to separate yourself from him. It would be justifiable for you to be angry and outraged towards him, but not hate. Look at how he has hurt others and used them, and what he's already done to you."

“Maybe. But you hated everyone except for me,” she said. “One standard for the one you love, and another standard for everyone else. I don’t know what the difference is between the two of you.”

“That’s why I have to prove it to you,” said Joseph.  He changed the subject, “How’s it working?”

“The shield is a bit easier this way,” she replied.

“Good. You’re ready for the next thing,” he said.

Joseph explained to her, how to open up to hearing or receiving thoughts sent by others, under normal circumstances:

"I want you to know how your gifts of hearing and sending should be naturally.” He said. “Not how they are when you're being used or influenced by someone else. This much I can teach you, and you need to know it, to have a clearer, balanced picture of what and who you really can be. Not how Adom would want you to be.”

     There's ways to test whether or not you're capable of sending a thought to someone else. Here’s how -" and he explained the process step by step.

Sarah tried out the Joseph’s test the next time she went on an errand.

After French class the next day, She went to the main branch of the Royal Bank, in the Place Ville Marie complex. While she waited in line, she tried to think of waves of nausea, and stomache-churning chills and fever. When she got to the next available wicket, she smiled to the lady teller, but concentrated on 'pushing' the thought-feeling of nausea from herself to the teller.

At first the teller smiled and was pleasant, but a moment later a confused frown crossed the lady’s face and she suddenly looked sickly pale. The teller put one hand to her head and the other to her stomache, while she struggled to finish Sarah's transaction. "Have a nice... day..." her voice trailed off.

Sarah thanked her for her help and immediately stopped sending as soon as she saw the results. But as she walked away, Sarah felt a touch of guilt and mischief. She wondered, did she just commit a sin?

That night, she told Joseph. "It worked. I tried it out on someone I didn't know, who couldn't possibly know if or when I might try to send. But, did I do a bad thing by doing that?" she asked. "Am I a bad person, to have done that to a stranger?"

He replied, "You're not planning on doing it again, are you?"

"Well, no." she said.

"Then it wasn't a bad thing." He said.

…To Be Continued…

[penguinfeet-blog]

but actually not because I love life right now

if I loved farts

...

but I don't that's gross