Month: July 2008

Questions for the audience

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Or at least, what’s left of it.

Reduced viewership

What do you think it means when a woman tells you she’s “not sure” if she’s single? Does it make a difference that she brought up the topic and volunteered this information to me? (We all know I’m too chicken to speak my mind on the matter.)

What am I then supposed to do?

  • Do I go, “OK, that’s uhh… good to know.” (Not how I feel.)
  • Do I probe for more information? (Scary, and the thought of what I’ll find out puts my tummy in knots.)
  • Should I speak my mind? (Potentially too forward.)
  • Must I sit back and wait until she figures things out for herself? (Might blow my opening while I wait.)

Life ought to come with some sort of instruction manual; one with really pretty and colourful pictures, so it has a prayer of being read.

Anti-routine

I have no better words to explain things than to say, “I’ve fallen into a sort of anti-routine.” Much of how my life goes on now seems to be entirely contrary to how things were when I was in grad school. For starters, I’m spending a lot more time outdoors—socialising, hiking, playing, shooting pictures.

A group of happy campers

Crazier still, much of my time at work also seems to be spent socialising and laying down plans for further fun after work and on the weekends! The only times I’ve seemed to have gotten any real work done are the few days I’ve forcibly isolated myself at home. And this has been necessary from time to time, for the world has gone entirely topsy-turvy: Work stuff isn’t trivial any more. Much of what I’m looking at right now I haven’t delved into before, requiring quite a bit of catching up.

Either way, what I guess I started off trying to say is that I’ve fallen into a routine here. And even if it the specifics of this routine starkly contrast how things were before, constancy is not the best inspiration for me to write—explaining the recent silence.

Lonely girl by a lake

May be I should just get irked enough about the ghetto neighbourhood I’m temporarily domiciled in, so I can entertain you better. Or at least, try to with greater frequency.

If you didn’t want it…

you wouldn’t dress like that.

I’ve been wanting to pen this for a while now, but I’ve been too busy… having fun!

I arrived here expecting things to be cold. And by that, I don’t mean the temperature outside (that I can handle, given my training over these past years)—I expected the people to be very cold. I thought I was going to be isolated and end up lonely and miserable. Truth be told, I almost wanted things to be that way, so that it would hasten my move to England.

But alas, it wasn’t to be.

I really like this place and it’s people. Everybody is warm and helpful, and they make it a point to drag you into whatever shenanigans they’re aiming to pull. Consequently, I too have begun leaving work early, and most of my evenings and all of my weekends have been packed with fun activities. In fact, I probably didn’t go to sleep at all last weekend, choosing instead to attend one party late Saturday, which sort of lasted until late Sunday… around which time the next one began!

There are definitely some perks to the sun not setting.

Well-oiled colleagues

(Not getting yelled at by the cops for disorderly conduct at 4 a.m. is not one of them.)

I need to get going now. I’m joining a group of people for the awesome does of fun that is frisbee golf; an ingenious sport that replaces the dullness of golf with the hilarity of athletically-challenged science dorks trying to throw things over long distances!