no time

-- to blog what with reaching home bone tired every day long after sundown. in brief: dinner at the marina mandarin with gsk interviewers and candidates on saturday (good; everyone very welcoming and chummy despite most people having enough letters appended to the back of their names to make up a decent-sized alphabet), then pell mell to addy's for awfully chocolate cake and saunders and french. sunday: church, then out with yen and two of the british candidates i offered to get lunch with/show around. over-ordered at westlake and struggled mightily with trying to explain the concept of yu sheng to obviously-baffled company (me: all the ingredients have significance because chinese words can be pronounced the same way but mean different things. yen: like punes. me: yes, or plays on words.) then to the botanic gardens and the evolution path which featured signboards describing the various stages of plant phylogeny, signboards with such marvelous titles as "the flowering of the world". et cetera. today: sniffling most of the morning. cover letters bad enough to send me into conniptions. silent curses at boss for trying to correct my already-correct spelling. then, at 5:30, hurtling down the ecp at 150 km/h so as to be on time for gsk cruise on the cheng ho (minz, or anyone familiar with chinese history: was he the one with the yellow umbrellas?). taxi fare: $24.60. ouch. tried to make conversation with one of the panel members about schizophrenia except probably made huge fool of self for talking about pharmacological treatment of negative symptoms, which i suspect is not really done. got mildly seasick, correctly identified someone's west indian accent (mother from mauritius), misidentified kusu island and staggered home half-dead from exhaustion.

will try and get some reading in before bed.

cp continues to call me in the mornings in the hopes that his taunting will become the subject of every single entry on this blog. i must say he has been quite successful so far

At work, when i'm especially bored, I sift through my old sent-mail box, and lament the fact that less than a year ago I was busy - frenetically busy - with things that I actually wanted to do: labs, the SSA, R&B and just generally having a good time. A little strange, perhaps, but I think only natural, part of the process of grieving, coming to terms.

(Choonping: I was genuinely smoking out: was out of the main office, purportedly at a meeting, if by "meeting" you mean "sitting in the canteen all morning drinking coffee". It wasn't lunch. I haven't reached that state of depravity just yet.)

Currently reading: The Catastrophist - Ronan Bennett
(how many books can you name that are set in the congo?)

9:42 a.m.

[handphone rings. i pick up.]

me: hello
cp: hi! it's me!
me: hi. what's up?
cp: you sound depressed.
me: is that all you called to say?
cp: actually, yes. [laughs] so what are you doing now?
me: right now? i'm calling people to offer them jobs.

[pause]

cp: the irony of all this is sheer poetry isn't it?

and he had just woken up. i am mocked, mercilessly.

conspiracy

the first shuttle bus to tanah merah mrt from my workplace departs 5:32 or thereabouts; the one after that a good 20-25 minutes later. Which means either

a) one leaves the office just as the minute hand whispers past the six, incurring baleful looks from colleagues and bosses alike, or
b) one resigns oneself to catching the second bus, whereupon one thinks: oh well, may as well look industrious in the mean time and earn brownie points with TPTB, particularly as the bus stop outside ALH provides no shade whatsoever, and is, in fact, at the perfect angle to receive the brunt of the sun's rays at that time of day.

which means that they get a good 15 minutes extra labour out of us every afternoon. for those of you keeping score, that works out to a whopping 3390 minutes, or 847.5 hours a year. devilish.

the surviving fish is looking very pleased with his act of darwinian supremacy. i shall rid him of smugness by getting him another friend next week.

how boring work is

my stapler

dinner at addy's

= da bao from adam road hawker center + steamed prawns, fresh from the straits of malacca + a too-good-to-eat fruit platter (eaten). choonping called me up mid-afternoon to apologise in advance for his absence (he was going to cook), but since i didn't know about that beforehand i could not feel too disappointed (as i think he hoped i would be).

~~

whereas we were merely bitchy in rjc, i'm beginning to feel that we're now honestly bitter and vindictive and all too ready to take potshots at everyone and everything, and while i don't want our misery and acrimony to be justified, the sorry fact is that it rather is. and from that, you can extrapolate the post-prandial topics of conversation, which means that all that needs to be said has been.

(except: thanks for the fforde, su-lin. anyone else who wants it can get in line behind yen)

one (1) of my fish died

i wish -

- that i could blog during the day, mostly because every ten minutes i come across a cover letter that sends me keeling over in undisguised mirth (and then disappears from my memory because something even funnier comes along). the grovelling and bootlicking is hysterical, not to mention the e-mails that show up in my inbox with the subject heading: APLLICATION.

damnit

my final interview for glaxosmithkline is on the 4th of february, and i just found out that i have yet another interview tomorrow for the dyslexia association of singapore (dorcas!). naturally, both of these jobs are more desirable than the one i have now, with the better of the two being further away. murphy is on full-time employ when it comes to my affairs.

definition

you know your workplace is ulu when:

1) the only people on the bus in the morning are employees from your company, and army guys.
2) the army guys get off first.

only coffee can save me now

first day

I believe it has come to pass that when it comes to office life, we are at the point in the cycle where life has begun to imitate art. It hit me during the welcome speech - I got that funny disembodied feeling, the one where you feel like you're outside yourself, watching, and I knew exactly why - the desultory rambling, the painful cliches, they triggered something, they overlaid the narrative so exactly that the scene became drama, and I had no choice but to step outside myself and watch. The feeling persisted. It held.

Or maybe it's just because I'm hankering for the South and Beaufort again:

"To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to a marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.' I would say, 'Breathe deeply,' and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life, the bold, fecund aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen, and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater. My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides.

I am a patriot of a singular geography on the planet; I speak of my country religiously; I am proud of its landscape. I walk through the traffic of cities cautiously, always nimble and on the alert, because my heart belongs in the marshlands. The boy in me still carries the memories of those days when I lifted crab pots out of the Colleton Rivier before dawn, when I was shaped by life on the river, part child, part sacristan of tides."

The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy

more books

mph book sale at expo a far sight better than the one i went to last week, the trip improved first and foremost by having a fellow reader (su-lin) along (also called yen, who didn't pick up her phone (me: maybe she's at work; su-lin: but that's the only time she gets her calls (OWTTE))). afternoon began with brief detour for coffee and trudging through endless hallways searching for an atm (sign on door: CASH TERMS ONLY; CASH TERMS in my pocket: $6.65), but that over and done with, the book-buying began in earnest. the exhibition hall being something of a melee, two was definitely better than one in terms of back-watching and noticing things left behind in the heat of battle. pratchetts again notoriously hard to find. minor tiff over who was to get wyrd sisters and much despair over being unable to relocate a left-behind copy of the truth. confessed to su-lin that if we found a copy of something rotten, i would have to fight her for it - as it is, managed to get through the day without any bruises, dismemberments or defenestrations, so that was a good thing. non-fiction not worth speaking of. children's section very inadequate, containing mostly tv show novelisations and sweet valley high.

after several hours, emerged with only 6 books (remarkable restraint, now that i think about it; i have a feeling that some of my stuff was stolen from our box, although thankfully not the horizontal instrument which i pulled from between a couple of unassuming romances with surprise and glee) and lumbago. su-lin much more succesful (or prodigal), despite her assertion that she will not be able to read at all for the next five weeks (yah, right). but yes, it was fun, and next time more people should join us (cp could not because he had to spring clean, something which amused me greatly because it was a very me excuse - and no, we found neither the graves nor the yolen, sorry).

Currently reading:
The Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy. Is this a very girly book to be reading? Or just a trashy one? I fear it's both - but whatever.

bridge

did reasonably well in the bgb on tuesday and wednesday - top 15% finshes both days - and i am quite sure now that we don't totally suck. after all these years of struggling, it's heartening to have sure markers of progress, to be able to look at a result after a board has been played and know that we've done the right thing, and for the right reason. the spats and disagreements that justin and i have are about higher-level things as well - psychology, technique, fine-tuning our judgement - and this, too, is an encouraging sign.

players like kantar, zia and roseneberg have all spoken variously about the stages of improvement in bridge, and in particular about how intelligence and problem-solving ability do not necessarily correlate with skill at the table. kantar, in particular, has written (i believe) a series of essays on players who "get it", and what exactly that means and entails - ability to think about the right thing at the right time, ability to see things from the points-of-view of the other players, knowing when to concentrate and when to let go. this was hardly comforting to me when i was picking up the game eight years ago, and there were times when i despaired of ever "getting it" - but now, now, i am convinced that at the very least i have not stagnated at that awful plateau, the stretch - sometimes impassable - that stands between the advancing player and the expert in any game.

some things haven't changed. there are still a million details of our system to be discussed. i still feel bloody terrible after, well, many sessions (although for vastly different reasons than i had in the past). i'm not an expert - yet - but at the very least i'm now sure that the path towards that goal is open to me, may be traversed. and that's a big thing.

not an option for grad school

Currently reading: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - one of the Philip Dicks that I never got to - surprising really considering that I'm a sucker for catchy titles. His style of writing, I find, is very comforting; you never get the feeling that he's going to let you get lost in his worlds the way some other SF writers do.

In the hierarchy of guilty pleasures, I place him somewhere in between reality shows and mudpie.

lost

the [doo-de-doo censored cakes]-issued schematic to the [dah-de-dah that place] looks like it was drawn by someone with zero spatial sense and an oversized crayon.

eta: now this entry makes no sense at all! whee!

no appetite. had scrambled eggs for breakfast, and forced myself to eat a small bowl of noodles for lunch, but it's 10 and there's no way i can stomach any dinner. i'm not vomity, but my gut feels like it has a very large round stone in it that isn't going anywhere.

today and yesterday: gastrointestinal malaise

today: had appointment with last of duke interviewees. felt loath to cancel - dragged self out of bed into gloom and rain. on the way home, popped in to borders to spend $10 voucher obtained from last month's xmas shopping. purchases: alan hollinghurst's the line of beauty and the gold bug variations (richard powers) which was in my hands almost by reflex due to sheer delight in just seeing it on the shelf. kafka on the shore nowhere in sight, though i probably wouldn't have forked out for a hardcover anyway.

library sale

On today and tomorrow in Suntec! (Well, you've missed today.) I got a nearly unblemished copy of Galatea 2.2 for 2 bucks, and one of The Colour Purple, paperback, ugly cover (not that I really wanted it, but was miffed that I couldn't find anything else remotely worth the purple note, so bought it as a gesture of futility). I probably went too late; the rest of the fiction on sale definitely was nothing too special (read: mostly Catherine Cooksons and tatty Ruth Rendells) but there will be fresh lots tomorrow morning if you get there early. If anyone does go, and finds any Pratchetts in decent condition, BUY THEM FOR ME. Thank you!

(Oh dear, this PSA is going out rather late.)

music

i've had patty scialfa's stumbling to bethlehem on my ipod playlist for months now and am not yet sick of it.

and on an almost entirely unrelated note, if anyone here has watched the polar express (family aside), i have made a startling realization about the song the three kids sing just before they get to the north pole (i'm wishing on a star/and trying to believe etc.) it has been in my head for a couple of weeks, and i now realize why: if you take every tune on earth ever composed, superimpose them all on one another, and compute their exact average: this is the song you will get. listen to it and tell me that i'm wrong.

the feeling that free time is scarce is returning, and for now, that's good. the final period of freedom after a long break always contains a fury and a unique kind of desperation, the need to hold slippery increments of time under ones fingernails, first days, then hours, then final meals, last goodbyes. like the december holidays or those awful weeks before enlistment. i say awful - and they were (and these last days kind of are as well) - but these are also wonderful in that everything has become precious again, every idle afternoon, every hyper-protracted lunch, every time i wake up in sunlight and not to the beeping of an alarm clock.

there's little marginal reward in taking long breaks as opposed to short ones - most
everything is unappreciated except the beginning and the end - but really, the fact that i know this doesn't make me feel that i should have done anything differently. maybe i just never learn. or maybe i feel that being completely unproductive is like kicking sand in the face of conventions and norms. or maybe i valued my free time over the last three months more than i think i did, or will in retrospect.

whatever the case may be, i'm excited again. excited that i have to tell someone that we are meeting "next tuesday afternoon" and not "any tuesday afternoon", thrilled at the countdown, that the devalued currency of time suddenly has stock once more.

and next week, on this very page, i will be cursing the fact that it's all gone. we are perverse animals, and, time and again, must be forgiven this fact.

thought

it occurs to me that with under two weeks of free time left, i should be taking as many naps as possible.

here i go.

abbrvns

is anyone who reads in the habit of calling plaza singapura 'ps'? was definitely a little lost today when darryl asked to meet at said 2-letter destination; 'ps' to me has always been short for post script or playstation but never the mall, which is, was and always shall be plaza sing. moreover, i feel that no other building name has been reduced to mere letters in our lingo - certainly we pare the more unwieldy monikers down: forum, wisma, taka etc., but i don't think anyone would dream of shortening those to fg, wa or t.

anyway, that is not interesting. what is interesting is that snoopy's place, the cute cafe with horrid food, has been replaced by this haut monde (-ish) establishment called tuscan, which serves not tuscan food but an eclectic mix of french and mediterranean-type dishes. we were too late for lunch and too early for dinner, but were lured in anyway by teatime special which was dessert and coffee for $6.90. not five seconds after we entered did we realize that we were sole patrons for the afternoon, which meant a window seat overlooking the courtyard where giant plastic flowers were being planted in readiness for chinese new year.

we had the creme brulee and the molten chocolate cake. the first was excellent: light, not too sweet, and very substantial for the price. the cake, on the other hand, could have been richer and warmer: promised magma flows of molten chocolate were not forthcoming from within, and the whole affair was, i think, slightly overdone. other offerings were tiramisu, pastry selection and chocolate walnut cake, all of which sounded (and looked) worth a try.

i shall stop here in annoyance with my incapacity to describe food and say that i do think it's worth a visit before it either (a) vanishes into obscurity (b) closes down or (c) gets swamped by crowds. if anyone wishes to, as they say, ponteng, we could go next week before i begin my penance (i mean, work). or dinner is good too.

bean's blog

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Some of you know Bean.

And some of you don't.

oompa loompas

I had heard about this a while ago, but was reminded again today that Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka is going to be twelve kinds of awesome.