looking back in retrospect

made some big purchases this year. new mobile phone, trip to bali, my sweet ride. (i call her pearl, by the way. pretty obvious reason if you think about it for, like, two seconds.)

added the car loan on top of the study loan. i’m making a vow now not to take on any other kind of loan until i settle one of them.

changed jobs, again – hopefully for the last time in a while. i’m into the seventh month with the current job but this time, no cold feet itching to run away again. with all the loans i have, that’s good to know! as in previous posts, i cannot say enough about how much there is to like about this job. i’ll recap: great hours, paid overtime, good colleagues, tonnes to learn, lots of benefits. it took me three jobs to land this one, so i’m definitely holding on tight to it.

lost some friends, gained some friends, kept some friends. the ones i’ve lost are like books which i’ve returned to the library, gone and were never mine to begin with, because if i really wanted them i’d have gone to the bookstore to get a copy, know what i mean? not that i’m relating friendship with books one can buy from a shop. the ones in my life now, i am glad for and will try my best to keep them in my shelf of friends.

lost a couple of old junks – the ten-year-old hand-me-down computer and the fifteen-year-old family car. because i used most of my savings to put a downpayment for the car, i decided a laptop is not on the list of priorities now so i pulled the plug off the broadband subscription. save for the mobile, i am internet-less at home and to compensate i’ve been watching lots of dvds. buffy the vampire slayer, angel, sex and the city, bones, ugly betty. as a result…

i’m packing on the pounds! an eight-to-ten-hour desk job plus dvds is the perfect recipe to weight gain. i never realised how much the bookshop job made me do physically until i left it. while i knew at the back of my mind that it was more exerting physically than the usual desk job, it never felt like it was keeping me fit because i still felt that i was fat! then again, i always feel fat and then when i look back at older pictures i realised i was thinner then (but not thin) and wish i was that ‘thin’ again! the evil cycle of fat.

i have not been reading as much as i would like of late, thanks to those darn addictive dvds. it’s getting hard for me to find good, gripping reads. when i reread some books from my bookshelves, i found them far less than enjoyable than i remembered. thankfully, there were a few which i loved reading as i did the first time and some even more.

had a fabulous trip to bali. though i wanted to go to hong kong, no regrets about visiting bali. well, okay, i had a lot of regrets – shopping wise! wished i bought more stuff and wished i had thought of starting my christmas shopping there. but travelling makes me realise how much of the world out there i have yet to see and this makes me motivated to earn more money so i can visit all those exotic spots. how did i ever survive on so little money before i joined the workforce? it’s almost incomprehensible.

what about me as a person? have i achieved anything the past year? i didn’t achieve inner peace, i didn’t find any new love (pearl an exception), much less the love of my life, i didn’t accept my fatty self, i didn’t improve on my temper… you get the drift. i don’t feel like i’ve changed.

and yet, i have changed. for the better or worse? a bit of both, perhaps.

Enjoying what i’ve got

Time for another monthly update.

Went on my vacation to bali, had a blast and some regrets (all of them shopping related), came back and had a good long rest and now back to the daily grind.

Except that it’s not really a grind to me. 🙂

my life these days is pretty simple. When working, i work and fulfil my computer needs there – facebook, e-mail, online shopping, reading subscribed feeds.

When not working, i read, watch a whole lot of dvds (now that i discovered a video rental store near my home), play with the kids, dinner or movie with close friends.

That’s all there is to my life at the moment. Before, my life was almost the same like this but i somehow never felt contented. I wished i had a boyfriend, i wished i had more money, i wished i had more friends…

Okay, not that i don’t want all those now – of course i do, it’s natural – but i don’t brood about how i don’t have them as much now. Last time, i felt like i wasn’t good enough a person to deserve such things. I don’t feel i am any better off now, but i think i am finally accepting my situation and that it’s okay if i don’t have all these.

I’m happy with a lot of things in my life now. I like my job. It doesn’t pay much now, but it will the longer i stay. Meanwhile i just need to be better at my budgeting. I like my colleagues, they can be pretty fun to be around with.

Since i don’t have that much money, my small circle of friends suits my budget just fine. Can you imagine how much more it could cost if i had a bigger social circle? And it makes me appreciate them more, since i have so few.

And now i am this close to selling my soul to the devil with my decision to purchase a new car. The thought of taking such a huge loan scares me! I’m not even finished with paying off my study loan. But i figured it out… I could afford the car loan but it will make saving for my next vacation a little bit harder.

Anyway, i am looking forward to the day i can stop worrying about driving through a traffic jam. And i like the idea of owning my own car. Think of all the stuff i could put there. I’m gonna put most of my shoes in the boot, have a couple of pillows. I love to nest!

It’s just rare that i feel contented like i do now, i feel i had to put this feeling down in words.

Sent from my Nokia 6760 slide

i’ve been bad with my blog.

and i’m sorry. well, i know i’m not obliged write anything if i don’t feel like it but if there’s anyone who is still checking bloggerdygook occasionally then i’d feel bad there’s nothing new for the past few weeks. don’t worry, i haven’t been kidnapped by the older friends haha. somehow don’t feel the need to share things in my life.

but i should. not so much for your curious eyes but for me to read this in the future, so that i remember what i was going through at this point in time. nothing bad has happened, though nothing particularly good has happened either. still enjoying my job, though there are some things i dislike about it but i just grit my teeth and get them over with. still enjoying hanging out with my colleagues – i feel comfortable enough to be my zany self but not to the point i would open up with really personal stuff. i think that kind of stuff is best told to people who aren’t working with you.

like ex-college mates. i keep in touch with the usual three. i also still hang out with two ex-school mates every now and then. and there’s the ex-colleagues from the bookshop, with whom i can have lunch anytime cos all i have to do is pop by the place. and every now and then i meet up with a friend who’s a book lover like i am, and i borrow books from this person. there’s also my former language teacher who i meet up every month or so because she lives near my former workplace.

so all in all, i am loving my social life. i have many small circle of friends and i hope it will stay like this for a long time more.

i don’t go out all that often though, that said. i need to save up because i’m going on a vacation to bali at the end of the year! if i’m not out, i’ll be at home devouring more books. i try to read half a dozen books every month.

what else, what else… i feel quite empty in my head. i loved that i use to write my innermost thoughts here. why did that have to change? these days i feel as if i have no opinion. and if i do i don’t feel like sharing them here. and even if i wanted to i’d have forgotten by the time i start typing and talk about drivel like the above. but hey, it’s my drivel so…

i guess i would like to be a better blogger but i just don’t have the passion anymore. usually, when i’m feeling like this in the past, i would announce a break in blogging or a ‘i quit’ kind of post. but i won’t do that now, not because i think i will get my mojo back some day but because i don’t have to be the blogger i used to be. i just need to figure out how to fit this blog into my life now in such a way that it fulfills a certain aspect of me and not just there because it has been there for so long. if you get what i mean. i’m not sure what nonsense i write about sometimes!

tearing down the wall

i find it ironic that i put up tweets of a rather personal nature, which are read by essentially people i do not truly know except in mind, while the people i have met and vetted through facebook, i could never divulge anything i feel is personal. so in facebook, i put up witty statuses, the kind i feel is safe for everyone in my list to read (safe meaning it does not put me in a vulnerable position, or what i feel is one). i try not to put anything vague, unlikely anything negative, and virtually nothing related to work. on the other hand, i practically bare my soul on twitter (and here on this blog too, but not much these days).

i guess my point is that i have no problems opening up to people i am almost sure i would never meet (and if i do they will be a one-off meeting) but i am absolutely unable to do the same with people i see in my everyday life.

is it that i can only trust people from a distance? maybe. i do not care if you, the reader, knows that i am an emotional mess, because i don’t know you are reading this and if you are reading this and you know me in person as well, you are not likely to tell me, "hey, i read the other day about how you are an emotional mess. tell me more!" but i do care that i do not reveal such information to a person in front of me, or in my facebook because i might see that person some other time, because i don’t want to know that you know.

there are times when i want to express the negativity i am feeling. before, this place used to be my outlet. i hardly feel like doing so here now, though. i don’t feel the urge to log into my blog – the only reason you are reading this is because this platform has a email-to-blog feature which makes it seem less like blogging (at least, in the eyes of my colleagues at work).

so twitter it is (thanks to mobile internet). and yet, i don’t find it satisfying.

the truth is, i long to be able to open up to someone, face-to-face, without feeling like the biggest idiot in the world for feeling the way i do.

learning every day

every now and then i get a longing for my old job because at there, i knew what i was doing most of the time. if i didn’t, very few others would know what to do anyway. i miss being in control and having juniors listening to me as if i knew what i was talking about.

at this job, i know nuts most of the time. sometimes it’s frustrating because the learning curve is steep and the lesson is difficult at the time. and then there are other kind of lessons – the kind i could only learn because i was there in the office and someone was willing to tell me what to do or what i did wrong or tell me something i never even gave a proper thought about before.

last weekend i was chatting with a senior who’s about to be transferred. i was giving her my best wishes when the conversation somehow turned to the goodies that reporters get simply because we’re in the media.

everybody knows that when journalists go to press conferences or launches, goodies and meals are always expected. it didn’t take me long to have the same expectations. there was once when i felt quite indignant when i thought the press were not going to be served food because they sat us in an area without tables, while the other guests were sat around tables. turned out i jumped to conclusions because the organisers took the journalists for a buffet lunch after the event.

anyway, the senior was telling me that whenever she receives a goodie bag she would give away the freebies to other journalists who wants them and only keep the written materials for her article. my first reaction was of surprise. you get something free, and most of the time it’s a pretty good thing, and you don’t want it? why??

a superior who happened to overhear our conversation chipped in and explained that my senior is correct in doing so, because to accept the goodie bag is in a way a form of bribery. she quickly added that she wasn’t saying that people who accept goodie bags are bribed, but it’s just a matter of ethics.

when she put it that way, it seems so simple. i’ve studied professional ethics, of course i should realise this. but i never really gave this a second thought until this conversation.

to me, the goodie bags are like gifts you receive from a friend. if a friend gives you a present, it would be rude to say no. so i accept it. but of course, if you get a goodie bag from an organisation, the underlying meaning is that they hope you would put a good word for their product when you write the article. and of course they also hope it will be published in the papers.

(when i worked in the bookshop, there was one occasion i was told to prepare goodie bags because we were expecting the media. it wasn’t so that they would write about the bookshop immediately but to build a relationship for in the future when they would like a write-up. the management would occasionally give away pretty good books to people in the media that they know have written about the bookshop recently.)

but they don’t realise that what goes into tomorrow’s papers are not decided by the people who accepts your goodie bag. they can write the best article for you but if something more exciting or sensational or catastrophic happen on the day, chances are your product is not considered news anymore. (i’m talking from the newsdesk perspective, not from features.)

the seniors raised a good point. i don’t know if accepting goodie bags are akin to bribery, but it’s definitely something for me to consider. thankfully my reporting days are coming to an end so that will not be a moral dilemma for me.

if i were to go back to reporting some day, would i be accepting goodie bags? to be honest, i think i probably will, but the difference is that i do it based on an informed decision. i learnt that my actions can say a lot about me whether i realise it or not. that’s something good for me to be reminded of every now and then.

that double-edged fire.

recently i lost my temper a few times. one incident happened on my penultimate day at my previous job. another happened yesterday.

i was angry about a financial situation that i tried to work my way around but couldn’t. it was frustrating for me because i’ve been waiting for my paycheck since i quit my job. because of the financial situation i am only able to withdraw my salary on the day i’m due to begin my new job. i much rather solve my money issues before then as i am planning to make an expensive purchase.

when things don’t go my way, i get upset. i guess we all do, the only difference being the way we react to the situation. i get angry when the chain of events do not make sense to me. i get angry when i feel unfairly treated. you could say i get worked up easily.

i know i have a bad temper and that it could be a downfall, a flaw in my character. when you get mad quickly, you get stressed easily and you may react irrationally due to the anger. i am aware of that and i do try to the best of my ability to control my temper in situations where i realise losing it will not help the situation.

i guess being angry doesn’t help much. for instance, if i’m stuck in a traffic jam, i might get worked up. but what’s the point? my anger does not make the traffic go away. yet, i find that as pointless as it may seem to be angry about a situation i may not be able to change at the moment in time, expressing that anger helps me in a therapeutic sense.

it’s like crying. i try not to cry, but if i can’t help it i just have to let the tears fall. i cry until i can’t anymore and then i try to move on. so like the tears, i release my anger so that i can get over my rage and move on.

people with well-meaning intentions have advised me to stay cool and try not to lose my temper. maybe i lose it more often than the average, even-tempered person. to me, i feel like anger is passion viewed negatively. anger is mostly not a nice emotion. but without anger, i don’t believe there is passion. that’s not to say people who do not get angry are not passionate people. i believe that if you have passion, you have anger too.

anger and passion, they are like two sides of a coin. they are both fueled by a motivation, except that anger has a negative motivation and passion a positive motivation.

so, even though it’s not good that i get angry over things that seem trivial after the anger is gone, i appreciate that i could feel and express anger. because if i could do that, i could feel and express its alter ego – passion.

maybe i should not just express my anger but also learn how to channel it positively. then my anger will be a good thing to possess!