(PANIC)

Ever felt that you KNOW the shit is gonna hit the fan? It's like your heart is being sucked into the bottom of your stomach.

I'm getting very stressed about this thing I'm working on (which my predecessor initiated then dropped when she buggered off after getting knocked up). Let's just say that purely commercial projects that require quite an esoteric knowledge to fully understand, conceptualise and follow through, should ONLY ever be initiated by the private sector and not by some political whim or fancy.

The only thing I can be glad about is that there's a bunch of other people on this project as well so I can limit my liability when the crap starts to rain down on my arse.

Interim Post Part Trois

I love lunch hour. I found the following "article" in the archives of theOnion and thought I should share it.

You Can Be Anything You Want, Says Fictional Character

June 4, 2003 Issue 39•21

NEW YORK—If you work hard, believe in yourself, and never lose sight of your dreams, you can achieve anything you want, the make-believe children's-book character Chipper Chipmunk said Tuesday.

"No matter what, I've got to keep climbing!" Chipper said on page 11 of Chipper Chipmunk Climbs Straight To The Top, released Tuesday by Scholastic Books. "No matter how windy, no matter how lofty, I must never be scared to go high, says I!"

In the book, Chipper faces numerous challenges as he attempts to climb Majestic Mister Maple. The Blustery Westerly Wind blows this way and that, rocking Mr. Maple and slowing Chipper's progress. Scornful Squirrel tries to damage his morale, openly questioning whether Chipper can climb as far or as fast as he thinks he can. And Fearsome Fox utilizes direct, physical methods of obstruction to impede Chipper's ascent.

In the end, however, the fictional woodland creature triumphs over all adversity, including his own self-doubt.

"From down there, Mister Maple seemed tall as the sky, and it scared me so much I almost didn't try," Chipper mused from the tree top. "But now that I'm up at the tippity tip-top of the tree, there's nothing at all that's as high up as me!"

After reaching the top, the pretend rodent issued a challenge to all who witnessed his feat.

"I knew I could do it—it was hard, yes, it's true. But if chipmunks can climb to the sky, so can YOU!" Chipper said, punctuating his message with a thumbs-up sign and a wink.

According to Dr. Roland Gibson of the American Council For Literature & Ethics, Chipper's core message—that people can be or do anything they want—is a fallacy widely perpetuated in children's books.

"Chipper's unshakable faith in success through hard work and persistence isn't something we typically encounter in our daily lives," Gibson said. "This groundless assumption that an individual's capacity for achievement is limitless is a particular failing of children's literature."
Continued Gibson: "Chipper's success took place in the extremely narrow field of tree-climbing, and was achieved free of such real-world factors as class, wealth, religion, or race. To assume that we can apply these lessons to our infinitely knottier, more complicated real-world lives is a wild oversimplification."

Gibson said that, with the exception of certain celebrities and politicians, statements like Chipper's are almost always made by talking animals, superheroes, omniscient narrators, anthropomorphic trains, wandering magicians, friendly dragons, sentient heavenly bodies, Jesus, and other characters subject only to the rules of narrative causality.

In spite of Chipper's good intentions, his positive message has not had much of an impact on the non-imaginary public.

"So, this chipmunk wants us to believe that just because he climbed some stupid tree, anything is possible?" said Dawn Dressler, a Wichita, KS, single mother of three. "Chipper wouldn't be so sure of himself if he had to hold down two jobs, had no dental insurance, and lost half his pension to corporate corruption. Let's see him reach for his goddamn dreams then."

Interim Post Part Deux

I cannot believe that so much time, effort and money is going into a project which primary contribution to the industry is something as amorphous as "vibrancy".

Interim Post

It is fucking cold in my office.

Me transmitte sursum, Caledoni!*

I have finally sorted out my room.

* Beam me up, Scotty!

Shmee...

I’m back!

I feel the pressure to maintain my blog at a slightly more than decent standard as it is linked to a more readership-worthy (and recently critically acclaimed) peer. Although I suspect that my lettered friend’s decision to link my blog to hers had less to do with quality and more to do with having known each other for over 13 years…

I am in a pretty good mood right now as today I received:

1. approval for my very first day off work;
2. my FIFTH wedding invitation for 2006 so far (this one’s in Madras!);
3. a phone call from one of my favourite bars inviting me to a FREEFLOW BEER session this Thursday evening; and…
4. my membership card for a well-known skincare and cosmetics brand that persuades me to believe that buying its products will perform the miracle of making me look like a supermodel.

There is much excitement afoot!

^^^^^^^^

One of the downsides of working in a predominantly late 20s to early 30s environment is that lunchtime conversations tend to be dominated by the following topics:

1. wedding preparations;
2. being a newly-wed;
3. trying to have a baby;
4. being pregnant;
5. giving birth; and...
6. raising young children.

Occasionally though the spin-offs from these topics can be rather interesting.

For example, the discussion about whether babies are turned off by fake boobs led to a discussion about local celebrities who are rumoured to have had work done...

...A discussion about retroverted uteri* and the inherent difficulties of attaining conception turned into a discussion about the most uncomfortable and overhyped sexual positions tried and tested**...

...And more recently a discussion about how to influence the gender of the yet-to-be conceived foetus led me to realise that I come from a family of freaks.

I shall summarise. Thousands of years ago, someone(s) in the Middle Kingdom decided to devote a lot of time to figuring out if the gender of a child could be pre-determined by some artful pairing of the mother's age and date of conception.

It turns out that it can. (To a 90% accuracy which is not too shabby at all.)

It also turns out that I should have been a boy while both my brothers were meant to be girls. Meanwhile, the rest of my office (and possibly S___) were happily born into the prescribed gender. I even tried out the chart with a 1 year correction either side of my mom's age but the results didn't change much.

Oh well.

* This means that the uterus tilts backwards towards the spine (not normal) instead of forwards towards the navel (normal).

** Standing in the shower (the soap stings and you risk cracking your skull), in the bathtub (the soap stings and you feel like a water-balloon), and upside-down (just plain weird).

^^^^^^^^

Next post: "Me transmitte sursum, Caledoni!"...

Toenails and Boxes

Well I finally got down to clipping my toenails. It’s been something I’ve been telling myself to do since I lost one (right foot, middle toe) about a week ago. That’s the second time it’s happened. I’m not quite sure why it came off either time, but I suspect that the length of my toenail had given some other stationary object the leverage to pull it straight off the toe. I hadn’t realised it had come off until it began to hurt. A very confused younger brother found the missing toenail a couple of days later. I kept it for a while until my mum decided to throw it away herself because it was, admittedly, quite gross.

Since then I’d been telling myself to get the other 9 trimmed less history should repeat itself.

So where is today’s entry leading to?

I’m not quite sure myself. What I am sure of is that things are getting a bit boring around here. Don’t get me wrong, S____ is hardly the backwaters of the world. There’s plenty of shopping, dining, drinking and clubbing opportunities available and it’s a lot cheaper than most other cities so one can do lots of all four.

I’ve been back in S____ for about six weeks now and I’ve fallen into a comfortable routine of work, SDD&C. With any luck, tomorrow I’ll decide which gym will benefit from a large chunk of my pay. I’m signing on to take Japanese language classes twice a week (but that only starts next year). There’s also a variety of media out there that can entertain or educate or both. Given a few more months’ pay, I’ll be able to take a holiday somewhere nice.

But that’s not quite enough is it?

A good friend of mine has finally found a place and will be moving out of her parents’ next month. (Yes, I still live with mine. It’s a pretty common thing among the cultures in these parts.) We had actually planned to be housemates until I realised that I wouldn’t be able to afford it. (That’s a lie really. I currently pay my parents rent but it seems ok as the money stays within the family. So it’s like not paying rent at all.)

I guess the question is would I be having a lot more fun if I moved out?

It’s a tricky one. My parents haven’t put any restraints on me and they pretty much respect my space. There’s any number of people out there who don’t live with their parents but who aren’t leading lives any more exciting than mine. Despite that, I suspect they’re a lot better off that way. Maybe it’s not that they get to do more, maybe the satisfaction is inherent in the physical independence of the parental unit.

I’ll just keep an eye out for a good flatshare offer for now. It at least gives me a diversion when I’m bogged down by bureaucratic bullshit at work and need space to breathe.

I do like my work. It’s an industry I’ve (surprisingly) come to be fond of, and it’s gratifying to know that what I’ve studied isn’t going to waste, and that the Boss has enough confidence in me to entrust me with some pretty big responsibilities. My colleagues are young-ish and very nice people. The team’s almost like a family.

But I am starting to dislike my SM. It’s not hate, it’s just passive disapproval that’s getting stronger with each working day. My SM is really not the sort of person I’d want to be stuck with in a social situation, but I can deal with her on a professional level. It’s just that she tends to limit her liability at the expense of yours truly.

I’ll just attribute it to her really small brain. (My SM has peculiarly small head, hence the inability to think outside of the proverbial box is a particularly serious problem for her.)

Ah well.

I just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys”. I think I liked it. It definitely was nowhere as good as “Good Omens” or “Neverwhere”, or even “American Gods”. I’ll give it some time and read it again before I decide on how I feel about it.

I’m terribly sorry that this post hasn’t been half as interesting as its predecessors. I’ll come up with something better next time, promise.

Violent Surge of Activity

I have what my mother calls a "salty tongue" (the meaning of this phrase varies from culture to culture). According to my mother, this means that I have the power to shape future events by tempting fate. The office is active again and it's difficult to decide what I should be working on now when there's so many things on my plate.

I think I'm just gonna have a slow breakfast instead.

To give you a better idea of where I work, I've started compiling a list of phrases commonly used in my office. If you are from S____ , you are likely to recognise these phrases. So this is really for the benefit of non-S____.

1. to revert : to reply, typically in an e-mail or phonecall. The reason why this phrase has come to replace "to reply", which has for centuries satisfactorily fulfilled its role, is as yet unknown.
2. to tap on (usu. followed by "existing ___") : to not bother using one's brain and ride on somebody else's coattails instead. The person who "taps on" often suffers an inherent lack of creativity, is morbidly risk-averse, and frequently married with children
3. moving forward : Originally used to indicate a change in the direction of conversation towards the future, this phrase has now turned into a conversational pause in which the speaker thinks about what to say next, much like the French "euh".

to be continued...

Diversion 1

1. Go to www.google.com
2. In the search field, type in "french military victories"
3. Click on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" option.

The eagle has landed, it's all systems go...

Enough faffing about, it's time to get this blog off the ground. It will remain very basic (as I am technically-handicapped) with few links and no fancy photos for the first couple of months, but I imagine it won't look too shabby from then on.

So work has been a bit blah for the past couple of days, things are slowing down and and everybody's just waiting for the next violent surge of activity. Not that I'm complaining really, it means I have time to work on my blog and have a slow breakfast courtesy of S_____. Speaking of which, the barista's a lovely girl, but she's starting to creep me out. I think she's got a crush on me, I've never seen anybody so happy to see my face in the morning. (If you've seen your own face in the morning I'm sure you'd understand what I mean. Unless of course you happen to be Angelina Jolie or CZJ, which of course you're not, cos that would mean you'd have far better things to do than read my blog. Like adopting another kid from a third world country, or bothering old men.)

That should do for now.

2.0

Braaap.

My maiden post.

It appears that I must first make a posting before I may preview my blog.