Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

It's raining again. I think that's appropriate, even if it's not terribly comfortable; I like rain more than I like the sun, but I'd rather have a little of each than a whole lot of just one. As it is, it's constantly cooling and sleep comes easy, but the laundry will probably never quite dry out and certainly will never have that particular smell that comes from having been in the sun all day. I actually don't know how that smell comes about; I think it'd be an easy experiment to conduct, but a quick Google search says that apparently the smell is ambient pollution. I'm not too sure on that. I'm a little... higgledy-piggledy inside, at the moment. There's not really a terrible lot of stuff to be done at work before the long Christmas weekend kicks in, but it'll be a welcome break; work's not proceeding terribly smoothly for me at the moment. I suppose one part of it is that I'm more trusting of people than I ought to be--which is to ...

Today is not a good day to be me. Admittedly neither was yesterday, nor was last Saturday or Friday or Thursday; we would save a fair bit of time by simply admitting outright that my days have not gone well for nearly a whole week, and it’s a mishmash of my fault and others’; but mostly mine. I suppose it’s a mercy I’ve had two uneventful months of steady slow peaceful working, and it’s only now (in the last month of my three-month probation period at this job) that these challenges are piling on and turning into a crisis; at the same time I wish there were no need for such events to occur. But let us go back and trace everything from its root cause. Work has been going quite swimmingly, apart from the odd worry or two about timings and things like that; perhaps those should have been an early warning system to me, because even odd worries become signs of danger when they pop up during a period when one’s hands are supposed to be being held by one’s senior officer while one acclimati...

I have finished my first month of work in my life--the latest of what seems like a string of firsts in this rather tumultous period of time--and along with this comes receiving my first payslip and a few other things. I've also taken my first (and second) leaves from work, both to attend weddings (which has gotten me the fisheye from colleagues and boss alike) and had a few disasters in the kitchen when experimenting with dubious recipes. I've had a couple close calls in driving, too; as it turns out I'm the kind of driver who pays more attention to potholes and the odometer than to the road and other vehicles, and so once I drove directly over a road divider (really, a little lump of concrete in the middle of the road to mark a junction) and once I had a passenger scream "BRAKE! BRAKE!" until I noticed the large truck about a metre ahead and barely skidded to a halt in time to not have actual contact between its back and my car's front. I'm alternating be...

It’s definitely been awhile since I last posted; considering I haven’t got any Internet up yet in the rented place, and I haven’t been online using the laptop in some weeks, it’s been at least—oh, let’s call it at least three weeks. But life goes on. I should bring you up to speed on what normalcy has newly begun to mean to me in my life here, so I will. My weekdays begin at 7am, every day; I set two alarms, one at 7 to wake me and one at 7.30 to bid me leave. After I wake up I turn the electric kettle on and then dress myself while the water is being brought to boil; I usually finish dressing before boiling occurs, and so I check the car’s engine oil and radiator water and pat it and tell it what a good lad it is. I often talk to inanimate things—the air, the car, my laptop, books—I have an urge to name the car, but haven’t any idea what to call it yet, and anyway it’s not my car to name. But by the time the engine oil is checked and the radiator refilled with water, the kettle ...

I’m typing this from inside the room I’ve rented to live in for the weekdays; there is no Internet, so my only available entertainment is playing games or listening to music or watching videos; I almost think I’ll revive my NaNoWriMo project one month early. Still, working is more enervating than I’d expected and so I’m taking my time acclimatising to the different living schedule. After all, I’ve got another twenty to thirty years, maybe even forty if I’m amazingly long-lived, of this sort of thing to go through. I suppose it’s safe to say life now is decidedly different from how it was in Singapore; oddly enough, I find myself even more dependent on other people now than I was. There I had very little preventing me from, say, going off to lunch at one end of Singapore and having dinner at the other end, having wandered my way through the intervening distance through the evening; now I find that if I want to go to lunch at all I need to ask for help. In fact I find myself less free ...

I see that I've neglected to post for nearly two weeks! I shall rectify this at once. My last post was the Sunday night immediately after my last return to Spore; the Saturday before that I had attended a farewell hike for one of the House of Bread people, and that Sunday itself was all farewells and goodbye speeches. As it turned out, though, my packing went a little slower than expected (mostly due to the time it took to scrounge for boxes and finish off administrative things like closing down accounts and informing the house-owner of my impending departure) and arranging for transport, in between meeting up with friends for farewells: I expect the house-owner was happier with me (as a tenant) in that week than ever before, since I was often out of the house for upwards of five hours a day every day to meet people for lunch or tea or dinner, and all that human contact tired me out (enjoyable though it was) and so I always fell asleep relatively early. (Though I should mention tha...

So it's now Sunday night and I'm a little bit depressed. Not that I don't have good reason to be: I've just three days left to do all my packing and say all my farewells and settle a few administrative niggles, though with a little planning and careful use of time I certainly should be able to do all of that. But it remains that I'm essentially saying goodbye to everything that has been familiar to me for the past four years (plus three months) and going somewhere that I've never actually lived in. Because you shouldn't get the wrong idea. For all that I talk about going back to So Hour, my experience of the place is extremely limited; I go there often, but I only know my extended family there, and of them I know maybe a handful well. I know nobody outside the family and I don't even know the geography of the place--I know the public transport but only as far as it concerns getting to/from the ancestral home (as I've started calling it)--so as far as...

I received word about four hours ago that the company I had an interview at on Tuesday has chosen to offer me the position I interviewed for. I've already written back to say thank you very much and I look forward to starting in October, and received an email in reply to welcome me to the company "family"--inverted commas not mine--and now I'm panicking in earnest. I know the implications of this decision, after all. It means my life in Singapore is over; no more swimming or listening to MRT jingles or convenient public transport. It also means that within two weeks I will need to be at least proficient enough at driving to get to and from the factory and wherever I live (either that or I'll need a place so near that I can just cycle instead), and given how frightening driving was to me when I first learned it, the second time 'round mightn't be any easier. But it is a good opportunity, and I'll have a good boss and the HR seems friendly and helpful en...

Let me start off by saying that Google is a magnificent company making some quite magnificent things, not least a magnificent amount of money. But there's one thing Google can't do when you type a keyword in, and that is to magically create a site that links together all the pertinent information you're looking for. When my grandfather died my father looked up "Septic shock" on Google and had to trawl through several sites (of which two or three were things like "Cure your Septic Shock today! ____ brand medicine") and now that I'm thinking of moving I'm trawling through the many, many sites advertising places to rent in Singapore, which obviously doesn't include the forums and agents and things like that. So here's a proposal from me to whomever is a website designer in Singapore who wants to make renting better. First off, of course, it should be free to join, post ads, etc. But ads should follow a certain format--enter address, descript...

It's come to my attention lately that the place I live in has a distinct sort of smell. I'm not sure exactly what the smell is due to, but I have my theories. After all the house-owner (to avoid being clubbed by ladies the world over for tarnishing their name, I shall no longer call her the landlady) has a unique way of keeping the place clean--she tosses a cloth in a pail of soapy water, wrings it out, then tosses it on the floor and steps on it and then proceeds to walk about, dragging the cloth around as she goes. It's a system that only works because nobody eats anything crumby or does anything likely to lead to messes. But I'm becoming, as anybody with me on Facebook knows, increasingly disenchanted with the place I live in. The new roommate is already thoroughly disenchanted--two days after he arrived (that was when I met him, having just returned from my grandfather's funeral) he announced to me that he planned to move out. But the place has a smell--it's...

I am writing this from my cousin’s computer in So Hour, because I didn’t bring my own laptop—I came in rather a rush and didn’t bring quite a bit of stuff that, in retrospect, I ought to have—and because I have a few spare hours with nothing terribly urgent to do. Really it’s more the case that the things that are urgent, I can’t do right now because I’m not in Spore and I haven’t got most of them. So it’s blogging for me. If you have me on Facebook, then you probably know that for the past slightly-more-than-a-week I’ve been conspicuously absent from it, owing to the recent death of my paternal grandfather. Really he was the only one of my grandfathers I’ve ever known, since the maternal one died some years before I was born and even if he were alive I probably wouldn’t like him very much, not from what I’ve heard of him. But at any rate my paternal grandfather is dead, and the past few days have been eventful… so I wrote them all down in my notebook, and now I’m transcribing them ...

YE GADS. It's AUGUST GAAAAAAAA AAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAhwow. So, how has my life been since the 18th of July (which is apparently my last post)? Very meh, is how it's been... but I'll do the show-not-tell thing that's apparently big in creative writing, and tell you all about it in customary mind-numbing detail. So I was in Patience, and then returned to So Hour with the parents for a day, and returned to Spore the next day--the, let's see, 20th? Yes, the 20th. So I returned to the house, having been away from it and the landlady for nearly half a month--if you remember, I had received the summons to So Hour to see my grandfather on the 7th--and so it was a little bit of familiarity as I settled back in to the place--got laundry going, went online, checked emails, that sort of thing. And then the next day it was up and running off again, as the reason the parents (and both younger brothers) were in Spore was that there was a leadership conference going on, and...