I spent two days this week as a judge of the FIRST Robotics Singapore (FRS 2006) competition. This is a fantastic experience which is great fun and I would recommend to anybody.
Teams will be awarded their prizes today but I wanted to give my own special mention of some of the participants who grabbed my attention.
Hua Yi: Cyclopeantency Sensation
All the judges were impressed with these guys. They were "the real thing." It's obvious that they eat, live and breath robotics. They had by far the most advanced design and certainly would win the "most high tech accessories" award had there been one. Saying that, they did not win the "Nuts & Bolts" award. This was due to the guideline given to judges that the winner had to have the design which most effectively met the objectives of the competition. Theirs did not due that. They had a fantastic robotic arm but it was not really the best design for picking up balls. I will be recommending to the organizers that next year they offer a "Most Sophisticated Design" award in addition to Nuts & Bolts. Winner: Most likely to get Good Enough to be Dangerous.
Swiss Rolls
Swiss Cottage had 2 teams: Swiss Rolls & Swiss Atomic. Atomic had almost flawless game play throughout the competition. Swiss Rolls had a bad first day using an inferior ball collection mechanism but made a switch and by the end of the competition had moved from a ranking of 30 to about 7. So full marks for best mid-game adaptation. I initially met them for their Project Management submission which was eventually ranked in the top 3 (out of 35 submissions). I was extremely impressed by their team manager, who's enthusiasm and effectiveness is burnt into my mind. The effort they put into their Project Management submission needs a Special Mention as they made a gargantuan effort. So why didn't they win? The judges felt the report wasn't pithy enough and could have benefited from some significant culling. I have no doubt that with clearer instructions as to the judging criteria, this team would have probably won. Winner: Most Focus & Perseverance.
Temasek Secondary
These guys also ranked in the top 3 for Project Management. In fact they were my personal pick for the award based on the written submission which was on par with reports I've received in the investment banking world. I was very impressed with one of their 3 team members ("A") who was amazingly well spoken despite his young age. He was articulate, chose his words carefully and came across as the most polished individual that stood before the judges during the competition. The Temasek team only spent 1 month in preparation for the competition and had perhaps the best hooking mechanism in the field (an inverted anchor-like device which, once engaged, would crank them up and achieve vertical suspension without taking the daring kamikaze runs off the platform that some of the other teams had opted for). The only reason they didn't with the Project Management award was that some judges felt that only teams that had attempted to meet all the course challenges (e.g. ball collection) should be eligible for the prize. Personally I think if you have one month, choose a very specific strategy and manage your resources to get a submission into the competition, that's good project management. Winner: Most Poise & Professionalism
Free Advice Worth Every Penny
If you were in the competition and want some insight/feedback on the judging, you can reach me by e-mail (robots AT missbossy DOT com). I am open to questions. Teams that are looking for sponsors can contact me and I can try put them into contact with rich bankers that have more money than sense.
Labels: howto, personal
I remain a relative newbie at choral singing. I could do this for another 10 years and I'd still be a novice compared to most of the people in the choir who have been doing this their whole lives.
Still, having been at this for about 2 years now, my awareness and understanding is starting to grow. When I started I was just trying to keep up and do my best to respond to the conductor. But now I can participate and yet hear a lot more of what's going on around me.
After I joined the choir, I spent a lot of time getting my music theory up to speed. To me it's mostly math and I was very quickly doing grade six theory. The composition part also came quite naturally. I'm yet able to capture all the music playing in my head but getting a few rudimentary pieces down for the sake of music theory was possible. I also spent a fair amount of time on ear training. I still am not able to tell what inversion a chord is in but I can pick out any major or minor interval and can do basic music dictation.
So bottom line is, I'm not about to write a symphony but I have my basics.
Yet, I'm far from being able to sight sing – ie sing what I read – unless it is ridiculously simple. If I read something I know, even if it is a tune I haven't seen before in print, I can usually recognise it. But give me something new that's atonal and forget it.
I've also realised that my timing is pretty good – better than a lot of people. My vocal projection and confidence in pitch, however, remains weak.
Unfortunately, because I began this singing business with such a weak foundation, I developed some bad habits. I started by imitating others and learned to quickly adjust my singing to what I heard around me. But now, I continue to make these adjustments, automatically, even when it is to imitate errors. As I mentioned, my sense of timing is pretty good but if someone comes in too early or late, I question myself and usually adjust accordingly. I'm not really sure how to now find confidence in my own ability.
I suspect there are not that many people in the choir who sing with that kind of confidence. There are only a few "leaders" and the rest of us adjust. This is evident on nights when our numbers are light and we don't have the critical mass of such singers. During those rehearsals, it's a lot harder for the conductor to get a committed response from us.
So what does it take? Is it possible? Can one transcend such mediocrity?
There's really no way around it. Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it. In an actual learning experience, progress is irregular; the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way. But the general progression is almost always the same. To take the master's journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so-and this is the inexorable fact of the journey-you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. . . .
George Leonard, "Journey to Mastery"
Labels: personal
Sunny my reflexologist was here this afternoon. This involves a lot of massage oil, some aromatherapy and me moaning occasionally and saying "tong, tong!" which is Chinese for
pain. Sunny doesn't speak much English and that's usually the extent of our conversation. But seems he knows enough to be able to communicate that
Lan Shui's wife had his first baby (and just remember: you heard it here first).
Sunny left around 6 after which I prepared dinner for two friends who'd come over. The centrepiece of the meal would consist of salmon cooked on a plank of cedar over the BBQ. This is a big thing in Canada now and I'd transported a piece of wood three thousand miles for the occasion. Admittedly I felt vaguely guilty for my complicity in the death of a tree just to add some flavour to my dinner. But what the hell, Salmon on Cedar sounds kinda cool.
According to instructions, you have to soak the wood for an hour and then, after placing the salmon on top of the wood, you have to "put the wood directly on the coals." Coals, schmoals. I soaked the wood and followed the instructions. Except I wasn't using coals: I was using a gas fired BBQ with an open flame.
I left the salmon for 10 minutes while I went to prepare the salad. When I returned, the wood had caught fire and the entire balcony was flooding with smoke. In about one minute, I went from smelling like a Javanese spa to a Canadian forest.
The fire was put out with a cup of water. The salmon was saved. In fact is was cooked perfectly though it seems a bit much to risk burning down the entire building to reach culinary excellence. In my defence, it should be noted that I had to cope with two earthquakes during food preparation - one while surfing the net for instructions on how to use the wood, the other while trying to put out the fire before succumbing to smoke inhalation.
So I had two earthquakes, a fire and still pulled off the perfect dinner.
Tags: salmon, cooking, bbq, lan shui
Labels: personal
Health Warning: I'm about to ramble...For all of you who have been reading this blog (and I mean all three of you) you will note that my blog has had a facelift.
And as we're talking, I apologize to everyone who wrote me at my gmail account. I don't know what possessed me to use that as the contact address for this blog other than perhaps, at the time, I was chuffed that I got an account. But actually I only use it when I'm expecting a big-ass mail which is rare. Then I go in and find someone wrote something nice like a month before and now it's too damn embarrassing to reply, even if I really want to say, "Yes I know Glenda is even skinnier in person." But that's sorted now and I swear the addy given works.
And as I'm being gushing, let me just do a mental purge. If it's not apparent from some of my other posts, the peak-oil alarmists have gotten to me and I'm now convinced that we're on the verge of a major oil crisis that within 40 years won't even leave us with enough petrochemicals to make plastic for gameboys. What kind of world is that?
There's absolutely nothing that can be done as we run headlong into disaster (trust me, the world is full of too many powerful greedy people to think we're going to prevent another Easter Island). So the best thing to do is to figure out which stocks to go long and otherwise distract yourself. To this end, I've found listening to Adam Curry and Dan Klass can go a long way.
I also caught the SSO tonight - their first concert back since "the tour" which I'm told was very well received save for the performance at West Point. Well who booked that gig? It's a military academy. They don't get excited for anything but news of the revival of Bob Hope.
Oddly, the concert prompted one of those hotdog moments (you know - "make me one with everything"). I was sitting there thinking how cool it was to be enjoying this unique moment on the planet (while others were having their own unique moments watching Dog the Bounty Hunter or something). Then I realised that besides those enjoying their "Dog" in Singapore, or a sunrise somewhere in California or a football game in Italy, there are probably some aliens, lightyears away, taking in their own cultural moment and that we're all just points of consciousness in the universal continuum. I mean whoa - all this from listening to Mozart. Mahler you could understand - you could easily evoke leagues of Klingons listening to Mahler. But Mozart? This was a just chamber piece - a little violin concert (K219 - "Turkish"). It shouldn't have your mind wandering further than Vienna.
The conclusion is that I need to get out more and talk to real people instead of spending all day messing around with cascading style sheets (a unique form of torture that web geeks flagellate themselves with).
Labels: personal
I'm back in
Singapore having spent the last two weeks in Toronto. Although it was around zero Celsius for my entire trip, thanks to modern heating I was never cold. However I'm now sitting at my desk and my extremities are turning blue due to over zealous air conditioning. Time to go run my hands under warm water... again.
It's a sunny day today... I can tell because when I was outside this morning, I could look straight up and detect a powder blue backdrop to the haze. But as I'm not in the habit of walking around staring at the zenith, the day looks altogether overcast. Staring across to the horizon, through several kilometers of smoke, everything is dull and grey.
I forgot about this global warming thing the whole time I was in
Canada. For a while, I joined the blissful ignorance of those in temperate climes. Well let me tell you people: you're in for a BIG surprise! The planet is already going up in smoke. It's just happening to some of us sooner than others.
PS:
Signs You've Been Here Too LongLabels: personal, rants
After my friend's initial scare with elevated CA-125 levels, she had a CT scan which was negative for swollen lympnodes.
So fast forward 1 month and she did another blood test. This time her CA-125 level had increased from 68 to 101. Well 101 is usually her lucky number but not this time. Panic.
It's worth pointing out here that one reading higher than the other doesn't mean there's been an increase. There's a lot of fluctuation throughout the menstrual cycle and just taking the test a bit closer to ovulation can give you a high number.
The GP figured it was endometriosis. The gynie figured it was endometriosis. Every medical person I canvassed figured it was endometriosis.
"
With Ovarian Cancer, you're looking at readings of 500 plus." Well that's not what I read on the net but the feedback was comforting. However, a risk remained and the gynie said she'd need to do a laproscopy to be sure.
This happened yesterday. The result? As predicted, there was a bit of endometriosis but that wasn't the culprit. Apparently the elevated CA-125 levels are being caused by a cyst on the uterus. This hadn't been detected by any of the pelvic scans. It's benign and can't be removed without doing a hysterectomy so it stays. The cyst on her ovary is also benign. Turns out it's not a dermoid - perhaps an endometrioma.
I guess she'll always have to live with high CA-125 levels now as the source couldn't be removed. Otherwise it's a good outcome.
Labels: personal
Christmas came early for me this year.
I had a bad scare last week. My dearest friend got some bad results back from her health screen. Ultrasound and X-ray detected a mass on her right ovary and her
CA-125 tumour marker (for ovarian cancer) was
68 - twice the acceptable level and 7 times normal. She made an appointment with a gynie.
I consulted Google, of course. It wasn't comforting. Ovarian cancer is one of the deadliest cancers going. It's called the silent killer because it usually has no symptoms until it's too late. The risk factors for Ovarian cancer include age (usually >50), no children and some genetic risk. Apparently prolonged use of oral contraceptives has some prophylactic benefit but genital use of talcum and consumption of caffeine and milk have some positive correlation with occurrence.
It was a 5 day wait to see the gynie. In the interim, I did my homework and came up with some dietary prescriptions to help improve my friend's health (as well as my own). I also had a chance to find out if there was some stress that had contributed to this health problem. There was. We has some good talks.
After 5 very nervewracking days for me, I joined her at the gynie. The gynie said that given her age (43) and elevated CA-125 levels, there was certainly a risk however given the characteristics of the mass, it was almost certainly a dermoid and not malignant.
Dermoids tend to be:
- well defined
- calcifications (bone, teeth and hair)
Cancerous Tumour tend to be:
- not well defined
- fatty and liquid
Her mass was a small (1cm) hard calcification. It was probably benign.
The options she had were:
- wait three months to do another scan and blood test
- do a CT scan to see if there is lymphnode swelling (another sign of cancer)
- do a PET scan (very accurate but $2000+)
- do a laproscopic biopsy (invasive and may actually spread malignant cells if present)
- do a conventional surgery to remove the lump and/or ovary (overkill)
She will do a CT scan so that she has a bit more info. If that comes back clear, she will wait 3 months otherwise I will plomp for a PET scan for my own peace of mind. Ovarian cancer can grow extremely rapidly so if there is a hint of it I'd rather pay to ensure we catch it early.
Generally however, I'm feeling pretty good that this is going to be OK. The added bonus is that we found a really awesome gynie (Motoko Yeo at Paragon) who is both knowledgable and willing to take the time to explain the risks and answer all your questions.
So this ended up being one of those scary gifts that reminds you what's important. In one fell swoop it has made me more compassionate and it also gave me an opportunity to chat with my friend about her cares and to offer some releif. This is better than any Christmas present I could ever hope for.
Good links:
Ovarian Cancer, is the second most common gynaecological malignancy; endometrial cancer is the commonest. However, because of its high mortality, ovarian cancer is the commonest cause of death from gynaecological malignancy. The lifetime risk of ovarian cancer in women is 1.5%. Approximately 60% of women who develop ovarian cancer will die because of it. The relatively high mortality of ovarian cancer is largely due to the fact that most cases present late, when the disease has already reached an advanced stage. The peak age of incidence of ovarian cancer is 70 years, but 50% of cases occur in women under 65 years.
Despite numerous epidemiological investigations, a clear-cut cause of ovarian cancer has not been defined. Positive family history, late menopause, nulliparity or late childbearing are risk factors.
- GE Healthcare
Labels: personal
I can't really spell. I blame it on phonetics and french immersion. Nowadays I can hide my disability with a spell checker. Once upon a time I couldn't.
In university, I was involved in a student rally that turned into a bit of a fiasco. We were trying to keep school fees from being increased. I was in charge of getting the posters done so I ordered a few from a student run poster company. On one of the signs, I had them write "
Responsability" (sic) - it was six feet across.
The rally attracted about 2000 students and our picture appeared in several newspapers locally and nationally. Soon after, there were a number of letters to the editor suggesting that we didn't need cheap education so much as a good dictionary. A political cartoon appear in the Toronto Star depicting a couple of professors looking out from a balcony onto a group of students with posters reading "we need kwality ejukation" and the like so one prof says to the other, "Maybe they have a point!"
So it was possibly the worst spelling mistake in Canadian history and I can take credit for it.
Those were days of idealism.
It's about 20 years later and these are now days of pragmatism and sometimes disappointing realism.
I had a chat with an individual today who was complaining how a bunch of NGOs are trying to keep banks from funding a certain project because it will have a negative impact on some whale species. This is a person with influence. I probed him to determine if they might not have a legitimate complaint. His last word on the subject was "It's ridiculous because I spoke with several scientist friends of mine and about 20 of the 100 species they're trying to protect already have no more females left. It's already a lost cause. Besides, there are loads of projects worse than this."
I was later given a pamphlet from my company's environmental department entitled Repons
Ability. I can't really bring myself to read it.
Fittingly, this evening I watched "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" which is basically a movie about how some people will do anything for greed. Whether it's selling diet pills or pouring mercury into rivers, I'm already well aware of how far people will go for personal gain.
...
I never owned up to that spelling mistake. The poster shop got the blame... but I know they just painted exactly what I wrote down.
At one point though, you need to own up.
These are all thoughts just tumbling around my head with no direction. What's clear is that I'm not part of the solution. But I have time to change that. Will I?
Labels: personal
I don't know how to take it when someone is really nice to me. When someone is genuinely, selflessly nice, I kind of fall apart inside.
I just got off the phone with a colleague of mine. He is a relatively young and extremely successful managing director at my bank. He has been promoted and is now moving out of Asia. I called him on a deal, and he took the opportunity to thank me for my help over the past few years. He was incredibly sincere. He said, "You have made a difference in my career."
That's just such a nice thing to say that I was left speechless and was basically incapable of responding in any intelligent manner.
I don't know why I can't control my emotions when people are personal like this. I wish I could have responded in kind, with sincerity, because I have enjoyed my working relationship with this person. Instead I just ended up saying something superficial, hanging up and blubbing.
Labels: personal
After forcing myself to get loads of rest over the weekend, my tinnitus has subsided completely... well as complete as it gets. The very faint high pitched whine is still there at night if I listen carefully. Otherwise I can enjoy total silence.
And as for the horrible little bubble in my mouth, I finally effected a permanent cure by hacking the whole thing off with a pair of nail clippers then dousing it with betadine and adding a glass of wine to my lunch (I'm going with the theory it had antiseptic properties). All in all, it was around for about 3 weeks.
This is not my first, nor most dramatic self-inflicted invasive treatment. The worst was when I got a fish bone stuck in my throat. The doctor in emergency, who tried in vain for 15 minutes to shove a shoe horn down my throat, said there was nothing there. The X-ray came up clean and I was told I'd probably just scratched my throat. I was, however, warned to return immediately if I got a pain in my chest because that would mean the bone had pierced my thorax and I would die.
I went back home but was extremely uncomfortable. There was definitely a bone there and I had no intention of waiting for my thorax to be pierced. So I reached down into the base of my throat (a good 8-9 inches from my lips) and pulled out a triangular bone that was 5mm x 8mm (a fish bone - not mine - and looked like a part of the spinal column). Pretty scary that something that big could go undetected on an x-ray...
Labels: health, personal
On Saturday afternoon I ended up being sent to hospital with a possibly broken neck. Not good. That I'm sitting here now typing this means it turned out OK but at the time is was rather frightening.
I went to an offsite for work on Saturday at Sentosa. It consisted mostly of sports which were meant to encourage team spirit. This included volleyball, soccer and a very strange rugby-American football hybrid. We played on small sand pitches which for 7 aside teams was a bit of a squeeze. Given the variety of people's sizes, levels of fitness and sheer competitiveness, a few injuries were to be expected. This translated into a number of badly kicked shins, some twisted ankles, one broken ankle, a dislocated finger and some garden variety scratches and strains.
I was playing what was being called touch rugby when the incident occurred. As you could pass forward this wasn't rugby at all but the concept of touch tackles was there... and completely ignored. Because I have a good arm, every time the ball would go out of bounds, I would pass it up the field to a team mate who would then score. We'd run this about 5-6 times and were really creaming the other team.
So all I had to do was play defense and throw the ball in. The guys were getting pretty rough with each other and some serious tackling was happening which was against the rules but wasn't being stopped. I guess the refs gave up trying to stop these alpha males from their natural behavior.
Our side's defensive tactics were proving too effective so the other team started to load the big guys up front. The were getting frustrated and the game kept getting rougher. At this point I should probably not have been on the field at all.
I had made a mental note at the beginning of the day that while on the playing field, I would avoid Ben at all costs (he is notoriously aggressive and has claimed a few victims over the years). It was a good strategy poorly executed. I didn't realize he was nearby when the ball was thrown into our end. He jumped up to make the catch and when he came down, his 90kg landed on me (which incidentally was caught on videotape and on replay looked very much like a WWF slam). He clipped the back of my head which whipped back and I hit the ground like a ton of bricks. I heard my neck crack and felt searing pain as my head whipped back against the sand. I was hurting and more than a little freaked out.
After some commotion, I heard an ambulance. They put the neck brace on then strapped me to a body board and I was sent off to Mount Elizabeth hospital (which took about half an hour with traffic). At the hospital I was X-rayed and declared fit - no breaks. Just a wrenched neck with promises of serious stiffness for the next 2 days.
As a team building exercise, the day was unusually successful in my case. I don't care much for rah-rah outward bound kind of stuff. But when I was hurt, I realized that I had total confidence in the people around me to make sure I would get the best of care. I work with extremely intelligent and competent people who just so happen to be very caring as well. Yes they are competitive and tough but when you need them they are extemely reliable. I know a lot of compassionate people, but if I had to choose who to surround myself with in a time of crisis, I would pick the same people who helped me on Saturday. I realized that I have huge confidence in their abilities. They are extremely capable and I have high regard for them.
So all in all, despite my scare, I think I came out ahead.
Labels: personal
I just thought I'd share a few pictures of the show mother nature has been providing me lately.
It rained most of the week with mornings looking either like this:
Or like this:
I suppose if I had nothing better to do at 7:30 in the morning I could have waited around for some lightening to dramatize the shots... As it stands, I've always got something better to do at that time: sleep.
The rain was mildly exciting at first. But after a few days of it I became somewhat vexed. Traffic in the morning is like sludge when you can't see more than 10 meters in front of you. And it messes up your schedule because everyone now has an excuse for being late.
People tend to be tardy in Singapore anyway - the whole rubber time thing is part of the culture. The government bangs on about being courteous and timely. But despite the enthusiastic poster campaign, most people think showing up 15 minutes late is totally acceptable. The rain is a convenient excuse to stretch that further... as if it was some kind of rare phenomenon and not a common experience of life in the tropics.
Well back to the plot.
Today all mother nature's foul mood was forgiven. My view is normally pretty good. Today it was fabulous. The skyline, usually a plain concrete grey on sky blue, was superimposed on a backdrop of glorious white mountainous clouds.
It was breathtaking.
Labels: personal, singapore
According to Einstein, matter in the universe is a constant. Therefore, shouldn't clutter be a constant? It is, after all, a major source of matter.
Matter can of course be commuted into energy according the all great formula E = mc
2. Extrapolated, this implies that as my clutter builds up, my energy levels decrease.
In fact, the total energy in the universe should decrease but of course being at the center of the universe I am likely to feel it more than others. That or maybe it's a local phenomenon and each person is creating an energy vacuum in the middle of their orbiting junk.
So, I regularly find myself trying to purge my home and office of the mountains of things that have built up. How do I accumulate so much that becomes so useless? Is this the last stage of a consumer digestion process? I consume, consume, consume and then finding myself bloated go for a dump.
Because I moved house last month I've had something of a detox in that department. Old gadgets, VCDs, books, clothes... I've given away, auctioned away and thrown away a fair amount of crap. Yet I remain feeling bloated.
I've always felt weighed down by my possessions. Still I continue to accumulate. I hate the fat but still eat.
I think I'm unusually possessed by the idea that I need to zenify my life and get rid of all the clutter that's hanging on to me like an anchor. The anchor is pulling me down. I can feel it hooked into my chest. It's heavy... tugging, tugging, tugging... Why does this disturb me so?
The anchor analogy has been screaming from my subconscious for years. I always assumed that it was just an eloquent way to express the cumbrous feeling that this clutter has on me. I figured the anchor was the symbol and the clutter was the problem. It just occurred to me I've got it backwards.
If I could cut anchor, I could sail free. The anchor ties me to a regular life, a regular paycheck... The day in day out dreariness of going to work in a job which, although vaguely interesting just doesn't capture my imagination or put me in the flow.
I spend a part of every day thinking about how I can liquidate, rationalize and rid myself of unnecessary things. It's all just a symbol for the reality of wanting to cut anchor. I don't need to move at the speed of light to turn this matter into energy. Any speed will do as long as I'm actually moving.
Why can't I cut loose?
Labels: personal
I thought we'd have to wait until October for the rain to wash away the smoke. But we've had unseasonably wet weather the last few days - a mini monsoon so to speak.
The monsoon just means the rainy season. It's very different from a typhoon which can blow away buildings and cause floods. It's the beginning of the typhoon season in Hong Kong. But here in Singapore the monsoon, which starts around October and runs to Jan, just means a bit more rain than usual… and some brilliant lightening storms.
For the last three nights I've been awoken by massive cracks of thunder. My flat looks out over the Kallang basin and it acts like a huge dish amplifying the sound. In the morning all is calm, but the water in the basin has been brown and muddied by the run off from the rain.
I love to watch nature's fury but she's been rather inconsiderate lately by scheduling her shows at 4am. Although I really have nothing else scheduled at that time, I'm not generally in the mood for entertainment before noon.
...
Lately I'm stuck in this "going nowhere" funk. I've been reading this blog and it's done my head in a bit.
I've been reading it from the beginning over the past week– so I've been following her life on fast forward. It's like reality TV. She (Anne - another Anne) starts off living in LA. She's staying with friends because her once amazing life kind of fell apart and finances aren't going great. She has a job at a very cool Barnes & Noble bookstore where everyone is rather switched on and loads of interesting people (from the famous to just plain weird) are coming in all the time. The pay sucks but it's fun. It's my secret dream job.
But time runs out at her temporary accommodation so she moves off to Baltimore and in with her mom and step dad... and ends up back at a B&N. Where the first B&N was in technicolor, this one is in dark shades of sepia and has all the charm of an Eraserhead movie. People are dull, fat, boring, ugly and stupid. They are uninspired and negative. They are barely alive. They are frightening because they are the walking dead. They've already given up on living and they don't even know it.
This goes on for ages and just at the point I figured I couldn't take it anymore ("just get out dammit!") she gets her shit together. First she gets her own place and then lands the kind of job she's better suited to: doing research for HBO. I'm glad I found her blog after she made that move because I couldn't stand hearing her tales of the suburban nightmare over a prolonged period of time. It just hits too close to home.
People here are not fat and ugly… They're skinny and covered in name brands both fake and real. They are image conscious. But they are certainly not inspired nor switched on. There are exceptions - but for the most part they are boring, self-centered and uncreative. I really don't know what they think makes a life.
What am I doing here? I'm living on Hello Kitty island. I'm making a pile of cash and hording it like dung beetle in the belief I'm going to make a break for it one of these days. But when? How much is enough? What security blanket do I need to just go for it? People with bank accounts like me don't usually fantasize about working in a Barnes & Noble in LA (or do they?). When am I going to get MY shit together?
Labels: personal
When I stepped outside today the smell of smoke was strong. But even inside I can smell it now. It seeps through under the doors and between the window seals.
I like the smell. It reminds me of autumn and burning leaves. It reminds me of a time when there were seasons. September was always such a wistful month. Returning to school meant getting older... and even when I didn't have school to return to any more, the smell of smoke and the first cool winds of impending winter triggered the same emotional tape playback.
That was when there used to be snow. That was when shorts had to go into hibernation. My shorts are now perennial.
The smell of smoke here starts in June - not September.
I first smelled it about 11 years ago. I woke up because I thought my apartment was on fire. It was two in the morning and I ran around like a dog sniffing in every corner. Finally I opened a window and realised it that it wasn't my flat that was on fire: it was Indonesia. They were clearing brush for plantations. They were burning out what was left of forests that had been stripped of trees for pulp and paper mills. I was stunned by my realisation. Where was the World Wildlife Fund?
The smoke (aka "haze") can travel a thousand kilometres and still smell like they're burning brush just down the block. It's illegal, of course, but the law in Indonesia goes to the highest bidder. We may be spared if the winds turn and blow the smoke over Jakarta. Otherwise this will be with us until the monsoon douses the flames in October.
In '97 when the haze got so bad they had to evacuate towns on the Malaysian peninsula and Borneo, I used to joke that they were burning Indonesian Rupiah. The Rupiah had gone from 2350 per USD to 17,500 that year. The haze set the perfect setting for the economic crisis. The smoke turned the sun a blood red. The end of the world was nigh...
They put more controls into place after that. But I guess with the current president on the verge of losing power in an upcoming election, everyone who is banking on that connection will eke the last bit of value they can before a decent president comes in. IE - last chance to rape the land. Megawati is literally going out in a ball of flames.
So in Singapore I'm getting older and it's only June.
Labels: personal
There is something deeply symbolic about wanting to cut yourself off from what you are in order to become what you want to be. We were mesmerised by the Bijani's story because they reflect our own dual nature.
We admire them greatly because few of us have the courage to take the risks to rid ourselves of the familiar in order to grow.
Of course we wanted them to live. But had they lived, we would have praised science. Because they died, we praise the human spirit. In this day and age, we need the latter more so they have given us much.
Either way, few doubt they made the right decision. They chose to risk all to live life to the fullest. They died at the high point of their lives - full of hope. That's a good death if there ever was one.
Labels: personal
