Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

So the parents are back, or they soon will be. This has led to the usual things, I suppose. Let's see if we can't go over this in an organised way. Things That Happen When Parents Turn Up 1. Unexpected changes. This means things like coming home one day to find that the parents have decided to move house the next day, and consequently having to pack everything into boxes. It also means things like never being able to find anything because everything's been squirreled away for neatness. 2. Increased food intake. I've gotten used to going without dinner most of the week - usually I only take supper once, on Friday nights - and go all day on lunch. On the other hand, my parents insist on family dinners. 3. Reduced time. My schedule, previously, was a relatively uncomplicated thing - wake, work, return home for exercise/ laundry/ computer time. Now I have to add in family dinner time, which takes up at least an hour, and then on top of that there's whatever random ...

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It's been a bit of a weird time for me, I suppose. There's a lot of changes going on and maybe this is what it's like to have a quarter-life crisis. It's definitely something of an upheaval... So, let's start at the very beginning. Context and information are always priorities with me, aren't they? Perhaps it's because they're so important in my work - but then, I seem to have had these things from a very long time ago. And it's nearly three months since my last post... Well, let's begin. First off - I'm a secretive person, by nature or by nurture, I don't think I'll ever know. But I'm also honest - when confronted with difficult questions, I tend to evade, give confusing rephrases, ignore, or deliberately misunderstand them, unless I think the answer is so important to the questioner that any discomfort from the answer is outweighed by the gains from the answer. So if some parts of this are obscure to you, Dear Reader, it...

I am currently typing this from my house, where I have just spent the first night in almost a week. I do of course have a perfectly good excuse for this absence; after all, it's not every day that one's sister gets married. This is my record of the goings-on from my perspective. We shall, as is our usual habit, begin at the beginning - but not too far back. I think it will suffice to go over two years of meeting and courtship and emails about the various ups and downs in their relationship, and we can easily skip to the time some months back when they decided that they would tie the knot. So they made the announcement to family and friends, and that was when the planning began. It was all very nebulous up to about a month or so ago - from my viewpoint, of course. There was a lot of discussion about bookings and performances and speeches and dresses and things and so on and so forth and eventually most of the issues were resolved to, if not quite crystal clarity, at least ...

So it's the first Monday of June... how time does fly. I'm newly-returned to the house after having spent a long weekend in Singapore, but perhaps I am jumping too far too fast, so let us back up a little bit and go on to the main things. Well, let's see. My expenses in May were quite large - in fact I overspent my earnings by a rather large margin - which I ought to take under control this month, if possible. I think it ought to be possible, if I pare away at my habit of ordering large meals; a steady diet of boiled eggs and raw carrots ought to handle any cravings for late-night snacks that I might gain as a result of reducing lunch portions. On the other hand, I do have a new computer and it's given me great pleasure. The younger skink died; after not seeing it for a week, I had thought that it was in hiding (even the larger skink likes to conceal itself beneath the food dish), but then last week I found its head, separated entirely from its body, and in a state ...

My brain is currently too tired to do any work, so I'm typing this as a method of relaxation... I always get tired out when going through SOPs, I'm not sure why. But then maybe I'm easily tired, too. How's my life? So-so; I'm still collecting data on my spending habits, but they don't seem at all good. For one thing I spend an unexpectedly high sum on my day-to-day life - in April, for example, I spent RM422 on meals, RM200 on gas, RM350 on tithes, RM150 on Internet, and RM500 on my sister's allowance - taking that as pretty average, that's a fixed monthly expenditure of about RM1622. And then there were the one-off expenditures - groceries (RM212), movies, clothes, and an advanced allowance for my sister (another RM700!) and a few other things, and my total expenditure for April actually pretty nearly matches my income for that month as well. So I actually don't save up quite as much as I (or other people) think I do. It's not always so bad,...

More than a month! I should really begin making this a more habitual thing. Even a sentence or two a day - but that would make this more like Twitter or Tumblr than what it is, with the benefit of course of having a somewhat better and more consistent record of the days of my life. A quick gloss over the last month: shortly after the last post, there was a great falling-out between my then-manager and the GM, which ended in the then-manager leaving his post with immediate effect. This had a few effects; for one, my responsibilities immediately expanded to cover whatever he left behind, and for another, the command structure of the department shivered a bit and settled down into its current form - though, of course, at the moment it's changing a bit to accommodate the new manager. For some time during the in-between period I had a houseguest three days out of seven; the CEO has a son who was waiting to be drafted into the Singaporean National Service and so was drafted into the co...

I looked over my last post, and... oh dear. It seems I'm still in the same poor situation I was in then, except even worse. Well, let us begin where I left off. That incident with the car led to a bit of recrimination - I still haven't taken it in for a servicing of the front wheel, which is squeaking a bit, but nobody is worse for wear. The workload on the other hand is still there, and hasn't abated a bit - if anything it's only increased. It's having an effect on me, of course. People have started pointing out how I rarely if ever smile anymore - it's particularly evident because my scan-card photo was taken awhile ago and is all a-beam with happiness - and how I answer the phone as if it weighed a tonne, even when it's first thing in the morning. I mildly disagree: I do still smile, but only with the right half of my mouth. I suppose that makes it more a smirk than a smile. But then I don't really have anything to smile about when it comes to wor...

It's been awhile since my last post, of course it is. I don't have the time or willpower or energy on weekdays - I haven't had that for a long time -  to do anything other than quickly browse Facebook and play a short Flash game or two before sleep, and my weekends are just as tiring and full of things to do - errands to run, cleaning to be done -  and somehow I simply never get around to a few personal projects I've been putting off forever. But this week has been particularly bad, so I'm putting it down because getting the words out might help me fix a perspective on it and calm myself down. Well, not this week in particular. If I were pressed, I'd say it's been the entire past... two months or so, with the past couple of days as the cherry on top. That's how long I've been away, hasn't it? It's been an exhausting time... Well, we'll begin with November then. November itself wasn't so bad; I had NaNoWriMo going on, and I managed...