I have been in two minds about a decision I’ve made a while ago, but I think this is the time.
I will not be blogging in August 2009.
I have grown very dissatisfied with my writing over the year since I’ve started working. I am not proud with most of what I’ve written and I’ve lost the passion to blog here.
I never thought this day would happen. I thought I would be blogging for a long time more. But one never knows what life will bring.
I’m not spelling the death of sulz. I will be keeping in touch with you, checking your blogs and commenting when I have something to say. And when I say I won’t be blogging in August 2009, perhaps I might pick it back up in September. I don’t know. But for certain there will be no posts in the month of August.
I think Project Rediscovering Blogging is a failure. If anything, it only succeeded in accelerating my giving up in this endeavour. So, let’s do the opposite and see if maybe I miss blogging enough to want to come back to it.
Tomorrow, I will put up a protected post for those of you who are interested to keep in touch with me beyond the blog. If you don’t receive an e-mail with the password from me but would like to, just drop a comment here and I’ll send it.
ps. If you’ve been wondering why I am so cavalier about revealing my birth date and even showing a picture of me… this is why.
I just got unofficially confirmed at my job!
Officially I’m a confirmed full-time staff next month. A problem my bosses and I are encountering is this: what do I call my position??
The nearest is marketing executive. But you have read what I do at my job – I don’t think a conventional marketing executive does what I do. So what do I call myself? Help me out here!
(I’m thinking Creative Content Executive. A little bit pretentious but I love the Creative bit in the title. 
)
I have this dream that I would meet my blog buddies all around the world when I could visit their respective countries.
I’ve done that so far with Lovelyloey, though we met in Macau rather than in her country Singapore. But I have planned to visit Singapore by the end of this year to fulfill my New Year resolutions, so that’s one blog friend down…
Will I be able to fulfill this dream with other blog friends? Will I be able to keep in touch with them long enough while I save up and find the time?
I hope that even if we lose touch, we would remember each other… I hope when I visit your country, I will remember to visit you. I hope if you ever come to Malaysia, you will look me up as well.
By the end of this month I’d be working for two months at the bookshop on a full-time basis.
I like my job. I don’t think I could find a better job than this, at this point in life. I even told someone that while talking about this. I said that the only way I would quit this job is if I were to go back to college for a post-grad degree. Which is really just talk on my part mostly, but that’s the extent of how much I enjoy my job that I could (think of) only leave to go back to something even better.
What mars my best job thus far in my short career life is the office politics. Yes, I know I can’t escape it and this is obviously a lesson I should master. But as it stands, I am failing in this subject miserably as the situation is affecting the way I perform at work occasionally.
Previously when I was a part-timer, I don’t spend long hours with these people. Maybe that was the reason I enjoyed working with them. Now I see them almost every day. Add a couple of new colleagues and work relationships get more intricate.
One problem was a colleague who I’m supposed to work closely with. The colleague has a good disposition and seems easy to work with. When it comes to crunch time though, to cut a long story short, this colleague ends up delegating the work to me while leaving the easiest part of a task to himself. The first few times I let it slide. But I resented that.
Things escalated when he decided that he didn’t like what I did and got his own friend to help him do the task. He showed the bosses and me what his friend came up with and even specifically said I could comment on it. I gave him my two cents, which was that I didn’t think what his friend came up with was suitable for the bookshop, with valid reasons. He replied to me and said that since his friend couldn’t solve this one issue that I raised in my two cents, why don’t I solve that part myself? Except that it was really sarcastic in nature rather than challenging or matter-of-factly.
How do I know that? Because I refuse to reply to his barb and pretended like nothing was going on the next day. He, however, was evasive with me and kept interaction with me to a minimum. And it went on like that until today.
It’s difficult for me because I don’t like to feel like there are unresolved issues between me and people. I told my supervisor about these problems and was advised to have a heart-to-heart because I’m working so closely with this colleague that I should make things easier. I agreed and wanted to do it on the day before he was due to leave for a three-day break. On that day he claimed to be sick and couldn’t come for work.
But now I’m changing my mind about talking things out with him. I’m a bit tired of picking up his slack, which he makes to look as if it’s my responsibility in the first place. He goes out of the shop frequently but nobody knows why most of the time. He sometimes take two-hour lunch breaks, and refuses to do some duties on the operations side.
My bosses are aware of the situation, because they find his conduct a bit suspect. They have given him many tasks to do but he does not ever seem to complete them. He claims that it’s done but when the bosses request for an e-mail of the completed thing the e-mail never comes. And when the deadline approaches, I’m the one roped in to finish his unfinished business.
The freelance writing thing is another puzzler. The other day the publisher came to the bookshop to discuss about my two write-ups. She asked if I was interested to pursue it full time. That’s obviously out of the question. Her feedback on my writing is that the basics are there but I lack initiative. My writing was the run-of-the-mill sort, because it was merely done through armchair research without any quotes from relevant authorities on the subject matter. I thought she had a good point. She went on to ask me if I was serious in pursuing this.
In the first meeting I had with her, it was understood that the magazine would provide me with the contacts to interview for any article I’d be writing. Yet, here she was telling me that I am not proactive. So I replied that I couldn’t give the level of commitment that she’s asking of me. I thought that was the end of my very short writing career.
About a week later, her editor called me up and asked me if I could do the next write-up. (If you’re wondering, my first was about liver health, my second about eye care. She wants me to do one about constipation next. Mighty fascinating stuff.) I was surprised, since I kinda told the publisher that I won’t be doing it in not so many words… I told the editor about my meeting with the publisher and she said that why should I be expected to find contacts on my own when they clearly said they would be providing it for me during the first meeting? She said she was pretty happy with what I produced considering I’m a newbie.
So all that cleared up, looks like I’m going to continue writing for this magazine but they’ll be arranging me to attend interviews. I have yet to receive payment for my first two articles, hopefully by the end of this month.
Working life is complicated!
The beginning of a new month is something I look forward to not just because of my paycheck. As the end of the present month approaches, I would send a message on Facebook to my ex-college classmates to arrange for our monthly dinner.
When we do meet up, it’s not really something special every time. It’s not always stomach-bursting, cheek-hurting laughter. It’s not always value-for-money good food. Yet I always look forward to meeting up with them because I just can’t find anybody else who are on the same wavelength as me as well as these friends. We don’t necessarily have the same interests, but we come from similar backgrounds and have the same values. So I find it easy to relate to the topics we converse about during these dinners.
I also love to reminisce about our class days. We all thoroughly agree that college days were miles better than working life. We would talk about what other ex-classmates are doing now, from what we read on Facebook and stuff.
And then there are two other girls I try to meet up every month. Sometimes we go for a movie, sometimes it’s dinner or breakfast. I’m closer to one girl than the other, but we’ve been hanging out for so long as a trio. I like hanging out with them because of the familiarity.
The older I get, the more I realise the importance of old friends. Old in both senses of the word – friends who are wise in their years, and friends who have kept in touch with all through the years. Friendships like these have shown they pass the test of time. I hope to be friends with them for a long time more.
