Intermittently Beeping

Well, the internship's over and done with. And now it's the Tuesday after the internship ended...

The last day of interning was relatively fun, but a bit guilt-wracking since I had to hand over the remainder of one of my main projects (it's about 80% or so done) to the supervisor and hopefully he'll get the rest of it done. Other than that there was a lot of paperwork to run around and get signed and so on; it being a large company, there were things to sign off and things to turn back in and suchlike. At any rate I made it, along with all the other students; I wonder if I should have done what the other student in my department did and bought going-away gifts for people. Maybe it's one of those unwritten rules of etiquette; I certainly didn't think of it at least...

I did write a nice thank-you email to everybody I could think of, though.

...the days have passed quite relaxedly. I thought for awhile that I had lost the ability to sleep late, since I slept at around 3am on Saturday morning and woke 6 hours later, at around 9am; but yesterday and today have disproven that, as I woke very nearly at lunchtime on both days. Perhaps the habit of waking before seven is a habit easily broken. I've been reading, emailing, and generally being all by myself, with my only contact to the outside world being MSN and Facebook and suchlike; in fact the only time I have met with anybody was the weekends. I might go out tomorrow; I need a haircut, and an ear-digger. I haven't dug my ear in awhile.

I wonder how they determine when the little green traffic-light man is supposed to flash; on every road I cross, I make it a sort of self-imposed challenge to get to the other side before the little green man begins flashing. It's an easy challenge to meet in Malaysia, but not here in Spore; inevitably the flashing begins a few steps away from me hitting the other side of the road. It makes me wonder if the road-builders considered pedestrians at all, if you're not allowed to start to cross the road when the flashing has occurred. I walk at a relatively fast pace, so let us assume, charitably, that the green man shines unblinking for up to five seconds (it is probably actually more like six or seven); and if it is a three-lane T-junction that allow ten seconds for each direction, then the pedestrians can begin walking across the road for five seconds out of sixty; rather a bad ratio. Of course, 55 seconds isn't very long to wait, but that's assuming my estimates of time are correct. Perhaps I'll take a day to go and actually measure them; I certainly have the leisure.

I ran into a man--a labourer, I think, by his garb--on the way back to the hostel some weeks ago; he asked me for a dollar for food and to get back to his lodgings. I couldn't decide whether to give it to him, and while talking his face was seized by a tic (or it was a fleeting expression) where his eyebrows shot up and he grinned widely for just a second. It was very unnerving, and I was trying to decide where in Singapore you can possibly get a meal for just a dollar (he claimed to have no money) when he apparently decided to move on and so he did.

I've always wondered about people who stop you on the street and ask for money; on the one hand the act seems to show incredible desperation, as I think it is meant to. On the other hand, of course, there's always the off-chance that they simply haven't any care for their appearances and just want one's money... I never was good at spotting lies, which is why I'm no good at playing games like Bluff: either I trust everyone or I'm wary of everybody, and paranoia tires me out.

And of course, charitably speaking, it's better to be fooled than to have passed up the chance to help somebody in real need; but that's the dove, and where comes the serpent? It's possibly why I'd be much more comfortable going through established channels, instead of hoping that the random person approaching me is truly in need. In Malaysia such approachers haunt bus stops and terminals; I suspect I've been approached by the same person twice at different places.

...it's the holidays. Would you believe that this post has been typed up over the course of the past entire day--about 15 hours, possibly a bit more? It shows how lackadaisical my grasp of time has become, with no work to enforce an external time-keeping on me.