t h i s g u y ' s p l a c e

my day off work started at 2pm after i slept at 5am after mad rushing something after procrastinating on it and after a long day of kl city meetings.

woke up hot and bothered and checked my email to see if my boss got the work i sent in at 5am and turns out it wasn't too bad after all (if only i started on it earlier). chores. and hit the highway at 4pm to begin my short sojourn away from my quiet lonely house and the office that's eating up my life.

seremban's a cool place to live. really. 45 minutes away from the city and the food is great, people are nicer (weirder) or maybe it's just the fact that she's here. we had baked crabs that cost too much for 2 people but managed to finish it anyway. wandered around town and back with after buying a frisbee and the biggest indulgence of my weekend so far - a whole can of longans all for myself to eat.

it's only friday night but sunday will come too soon. i think i need a break from work. like a long one. my life feels like work followed by a series of interrupted holidays too far apart from each other. maybe i'm still used to school holidays that lasted for months. i can't imagine how refreshed i'd be if i could take a month off and how productive i'd be when i got back to work after that. sigh.

while we're on that, i'd like to also work from home more...

---

i like not sleeping alone.

:)

started with waking up on the right side of the bed
getting a nice parking space in the building
a relatively manageable workload that's interesting too
nasi lemak delivered just the way i like it
colleagues in a good mood
spontaneous picnic excursion and car sing-a-longs
kfc & cendol in the park
good meeting to reflect on positive things
relatively early end to the working day
dinner with an old friend
west wing
ben & jerry's ice-cream
joel behaving well for a change

i'm blessed. and certainly grateful for days like these. but it's also times like these when you see things working 100% in your favour, that it becomes glaringly obvious that deep inside, where it counts the most, it's still not enough...

1.09 am. my iphone is singing to me. random songs on a playlist that's too cluttered to be anything but random.

its the second day of a 5 day holiday. its the second day i've been working past midnight from home.

its getting harder to feel alive nowadays. there's a slight rush i get when i send off a particularly well-put together piece of work. other than that, and some squeezed in moments with loved ones, there's just not enough life in my life.

i dont know why i've been feeling so trapped these days. these are my choices, i'm staying put and waiting on my own accord. so why feel this cornered?

i'm still doing what i love, but things have changed somewhat. a part of me has figured out what's happened and it seems all there is to do is to come to terms with it and adjust until it gets easier.

"all we can do is keep breathing"

breathe. manage my time better. complain less.

easy.

in a hotel room. packed. showered. plane scheduled tomorrow morning. too many unsightly events in the past week. literally. don't judge me if i find myself indulging in some visual gratification.

i wrote earlier about wanting real things again. is real ugly or is it beautiful? not sure...

we are ugly. we are insecure. we are shapeless. we are evil. we disgust each other. yet. we all seek some kind of beauty. one way or another.

credit : tokyoundressed.blogspot.com

financial meltdowns, political maneuverings, a friend said on her facebook status that there's hardly any reason to watch anything other than the news on tv nowadays.

yet, that's all i've been doing during my stay here in mongolia- watching grey's anatomy series - in between battling one of the toughest projects of my short career.

financial meltdowns happen because of festering assets/non-assets. political maneuverings happen because of mismanaged governments. my grey's anatomy marathon happened because my other hard-drive - the one with all the good movies which i've queued on my to-watch list - is not speaking to my laptop. that's the hard-drve with an inconvenient truth, scoop, thank you for smoking, etc.

and i'm stuck with the hard-drive with grey's anatomy. the series can be quite riveting and even enlightening to some extent. but i'm sick of drama.

i need to get back to proper productivity. building real things, real relationships again, instead of being stuck at clients in a mongolian mining town. not everything is about work. i'm not an ambitious surgical intern. i'm actually not interested in watching all the investment banks crumble because of their own greed. i'm not interested in watching power hungry politicians wrestle each other. somehow, none of this is real. yet. this is all that i'm surrounded with right now.

48 hours to go. i just want a hug. a real one.

1pm in my shorts i hit facebook before i brush my teeth mouth dry but water is too far away i'll make it someday what's more important is i compile these moments place them on an online photo/note album like the altar of my own existence before time and corporate jargon swallow them in infinity i'm listening to unfamiliar music in the form of an mgmt cd exchanged to my hands in the smoky strobelit indie night that really seemed like morning 12 hours and 4 chicken wings ago perhaps this is what living really feels like...

... is over," he realised, floating near the edge of the pool.

beer can, girlfriend, bro-friends nearby, a perfect shade of sunshower, water that felt just the right caress of cool.

rohan's leaving on thurs. the last of the abrahams of summer - off to face london's rat race. it's hard to understand why we didn't do more pool afternoons on the sundays he was here.

redang's come and gone. next week it's mongolia and krabi in rapid succession. (perhaps seoul or beijing in between - depending on layover lengths)

i can't say this summer's been all fun and games. the only off-days i took were for company trips to macau and redang. yet weekend after precious weekend i've managed to interlace a weird successive mix of alternate madness/drunkedness and work.

this weekend, was neither. futsal, swimming, kitten evenings and a really good night last night spent watching John Mayer's "where the light is" concert dvd - can i have more of this please?

for some strange reason, the stereophonic's "dakota" is playing in on one of the websites open in my window tray. the song seems to follow me around. making its presence felt most on the last days of summer...

read on for an entry to the beat of dakota written 4 summers ago...

Continue reading "the summer of 8" »

it feels as if i've been living in time warps. time slowing down, then speeding up, then failing to move at all.

i'm in the midst of wrapping up a major project i've been working on sporadically since the beginning of the year. late nights, forgotten weekends and amazing support from some of my favourite colleagues and it'll all be over soon.

finished work late and couldnt get a suitable dinner buddy so i had a nice dinner date with my mom instead. nasi kandar for me and ice kacang for her. i try to eat with my parents at least twice a week, seeing they're my house mates. but i rarely get to eat with them "alone". tonight was nice. my mom will always stick out like a sore thumb in a mamak. but somehow, tonight with a ridiculously huge bowl of ice kacang she seemed to fit in. more so than her tired haggard looking son, in crumpled cotton workwear.

it's really too late and i'm much too tired to blog. but i'm letting my life fleet past too fast. i remind myself its important to sit still for awhile and capture moments.

i'll be heading off to a beach getaway. it's a company trip but i'm determined to get a suitable amount of "me" time or at least get wasted in the process.

looking forward to it. i'm already planning on my pack list :

• sunglasses
• beer money
• sunblock
• loose shirts to wear unbuttoned
• journal (finally found the perfect one in hongkong)
• iphone+music+headphones (need to bring this back from the dead - it's brickd on me)
• underwater camera (courtesy of pohsi)
• guitar (gotta get a new bag for it)

its only a weekend holiday but god knows i need it.

(dear god, please let us survive the bus rides)

took off early from work today for a change, got home and slept from 6.30-9.30pm. i had spent the weekend sick and working, whilst most of last week was spent working and preparing for a colleague's farewell do.

declared a mini holiday and veged out in front of the idiot box til 2am. had dinner at midnight. and here i am. a.w.a.k.e. for a change.

upon coming back from a trip i realise :
it takes 2 weeks to finally clear out pictures from my camera/hard-drives
it takes 2 weeks (sometimes more) for me to unpack a suitcase
it takes 1 day to keep my passport in a secure place (most prized possession)
it takes 1 week to unwrap my newly acquired FHM magazine
it takes 2 weeks to realise someone has stolen my bolster from my bed

i'm enjoying this moment of clarity at 4am, listening to stina nordenstam's little star on repeat. i need a new laptop. i need a haircut soon. i need to get my sleep cycle back in sync with normal human time.

every now and then i come across snippets of stories online which i suddenly "connect" to.

i have a weird fascination with the oddities of life and a tendency to romanticise both the ultra mundane and the peculiar.

take this story for instance : Drunken Swede tries to row home from Denmark

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - A drunken 78-year-old Swede stole a dinghy after a night out in the Danish town of Helsingor and tried to row back to Sweden, but fell asleep halfway, Danish police said on Monday.

When the man discovered he lacked the necessary funds to pay for the ferry from Helsingor to Helsingborg in Sweden on Saturday, he decided to row the five km (three miles) across the strait of Oresund that separates the two.

He quickly grew tired and, trusting fortune and the currents to see him safely home, took a snooze at the bottom of the boat, where Danish police later found him out at sea, still asleep.

The strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Police said the owner of the dinghy had decided not to press charges.

i'm not sure what connected me. the drunken determination this old man had or his subsequent trust in fate that he would be drifted back home even after he grew tired of rowing.

---

i'm back from a pretty eventful trip to macau and hong kong. many firsts, and new experiences as well as the familiar exhaustion that follows days of hitting the road with just a map, water, camera, (no lonely planet!) friends and conversation to get you through the day.

if you couldn't already tell, i'm feeling melancholic too.

disgruntled with this life that seems to throw us all against each other. like random molecules in a random gravitational pull that makes no sense at all. we collide, impact each other's lives, hold on as tight as we can with the few limbs we have and let go of so many others.

if i can't hold on, i want to at least make sure i made an impact big enough to be really felt. in this universe, with it's rules of chemistry, physics, biology, economics and social science, that'll have to do for now. impact.