2007 in Review

Although procrastination has always been my favourite vice, it abuses me - forcing me to make a meaningful assessment of the past year and to outline my objectives for the next, in just one hour... But I have always worked best under pressure, expending the least efforts necessary to achieve desired results. I am after all an economist by training and a business school graduate by accident; yet born into a creed that observes relaxation, personal space and balance.

In the spirit of lean operations for best results, I will reduce my world in 2007 to the five key events that would shape my future. In chronological order, they are:

1. I got a new job.

By far the most significant turning point in my life since leaving business school. Suddenly I was motivated to wake up for work every morning and for the first time, considered it possible to survive six years of legal bondage to the government. The new job came with far more responsibilities and much heavier workload; but in return I get real opportunities to influence consequential decisions, and respect for my efforts and my principles (including an increasingly leftist political approach). Oh yeah and I got to go to Hamburg, Copenhagen, Oslo, London and Paris.

2. I kicked the D habit.

Well, really, the habit kicked me. Like a country imploding under the pressures of impasse en route to a change of leadership, I needed a violent upheaval to purge myself of a destructive past and to introduce a brighter future.

3. I got a cat and boob job!

I accepted the responsibility of another creature's life and irreversibly changed my own. Now I can do ANYTHING!

4. I went to Goa.

And everything material has seemed immaterial to me ever since.

5. I finished reading War and Peace.

The words "A Life Changing Novel" ensconced in a very authoritative red circle scream out from the book cover. I dare not challenge it. I also read: Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, the Queen of Spades and other Stories, My Name is Red, Industrial Society and its Future, Hegemony or Survival, and a history of Africa's independence since 1950. So those are probably the reasons why I may have seemed overbearingly broody in 2007.


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I'll work on my expectations for 2008 tomorrow. Meanwhile, I've decided to get a prowling cougar tattooed on my right thigh. I've been trawling the internet for appropriate designs, and it keeps telling me that cougars are signs of courage, loyalty and leadership. And here I was thinking it was a sign that I want to get naked with the Hot Young Intern from the 19th floor!

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL!!!