Unbustle My Life

It turns out that I’m quite capable of going a full day on quite little sleep. At least, I’ve managed to do it today, though it’s quite uncomfortable and I don’t plan on doing this often. But then it’s not quite been a normal couple of days. It’s not even been a normal week—although, I must admit, normalcy is not a quality often found in the time that I experience. Which is a good thing according to my GM, but then his views on a lot of things are alternative to put it mildly.

To put things simply most of this week has been rushing things out to prepare for audits next week; somehow every time I think we’re quite ready, I go explore a little bit and check or some issue comes up and then it turns out we overlooked something and now we have to start a whole new task. On the upside it does mean less things overlooked now than before, but the obvious downside is that I keep wondering what I’ve overlooked during the latest check. And Friday night there was a birthday celebration and then Saturday morning there was a bit of training because the SOPs have undergone a fair bit of revision and then just now I helped out with the church youth because they needed a big car and my Pajero counts as a big car and the whole upshot of it is that I fell asleep around 2am and woke at 7am, left the house at about 7.40am and only returned at 9.30pm. I didn’t even get my weekly swim—I hope to get that tomorrow, because my belly’s horribly large and flabby.

I attribute that mostly to my father’s presence; usually I would have a large lunch and no dinner, but now I have a large lunch and dinner, which of course sends the waistline rocketing upwards.

All the same I do wonder a bit if I’m rather too busy for my own good, sometimes; I spend more time in the lab than at home, at least on weekdays: in the entire almost-a-month after my transfer I’ve only left on time twice, I’ve had about four half-Saturdays including today, and in fact I have an entire book for a weekend reading assignment that I’m supposed to have a mind map of by Monday (but I probably won’t, because my reading speed may be that high but one takes time to assimilate information well enough to map it out). On the other hand, I’m single and free and all—though a crush on one of the people at work that I may be wishfully thinking is mutual is getting badly in the way of my thought processes—and so if I were ever to try being a workaholic now would be a good time.

I spent the Mothers’ Day weekend in the ancestral home with my grandmother, who seemed to appreciate it. There was unfortunately a bit of family drama, with people feeling underappreciated and other people feeling stepped-on and other people just wanting everybody to shut up and move on and so on, which I don’t think has been resolved yet because it blew up into a series of angry postings on each others’ Facebook Walls (and of course then there were the fights over who got more likes). It was all rather silly, I thought, and yet still…

I was offered bananas yesterday that had just been offered to a little shrine; I think I’ve somehow gotten into the good books of the aunty who runs a mixed-rice stall and so she offered me the bananas, saying the blessing of the gods would make them sweeter. I never thought I’d be living out a Bible verse; but since I was eating with two other Christians and a free-thinker I had to decline them. Though they did look like quite nice bananas and if the other people hadn’t looked so shocked at the whole thing I probably would have eaten them anyway.

A bit of a thought came to me just now about the whole foreign labour issue. Not that it’s very fresh but it’s still an issue, if one listens to the things that get posted sometimes… It seems to me that the whole problem about the foreign labour in Singapore is that they live cheaply (because their pay doesn’t get cuts for CPF and so on, and they don’t need to buy houses and cars and so on) and that they are taking up jobs that should be going to better-qualified locals for some reason or other. So it would seem that removing either issue would make things better: either that the cheap living is taken away somehow, by taxing the foreign workers or putting some kind of measure in place that makes them just as expensive as locals to hire. Although, assuming economics still actually works, jobs will probably just go wherever the newly-cheaper labour is and then people will still receive letters saying “We’re so glad you came for the interview but other people are just better than you”. I suppose it will warm their hearts to know that the other people were born in the same country as they, and hadn’t been born elsewhere and travelled over for whatever reason.

(It’s also a bit weird the way they seem to assume that people will travel hundreds of kilometres to be mean to people they’ve never met, but nobody ever said self-made victims were rational.)