Dead Hobbies

1. This isn't really related but I sometimes think about the hobbies that I used to have. One of them was Transformers. They were really a big thing during my time. I didn't have transformers toys but I liked Mask toys. Had quite a few. Zoids too. And then the miser genes I inherited from my old man kicked in and I said to myself, "why am I keeping all this junk in my house?" Some people never get rid of these hobbies, which is why you see grown up men still having Transformer toys in their cabinets. I'm different, and while I will still marvel at the ingenuity of these toys, they're done for good.

Also I still remember the time when I had the burning desire to be a playwright. I used to watch a lot of sitcoms and analyse the flow of the dramas and plots. I only paid attention at literature classes when they are talking about literary devices, because they are the working tools of a playwright. I usually don't give a shit about memorising essays and getting A1s for literature. My literature teacher bragged that one of her former students who was a good playwright didn't take her advice to write simple and uncontroversial essays, and he got an A2 instead of the A1 everybody expected him to get. I can see her point but if you asked me to get an A2 in lit instead of writing a school play, I would have taken the school play instead. (I got A2 for lit and I was happy with it because I used to get Bs all the time.)

But my playwriting career is over. It will take work and effort to get back the momentum I once had. I entered the 24 hour playwriting competition in 1999 (I won something) and in 2004 (I didn't) and I considered entering again in 2009 but I eventually didn't.

I still remember 6 months ago when I was still running 5-6 hours every week, in order to get myself ready for the marathon. Considering that I am a little reluctant to run half marathons in the future, this is another vanished hobby of mine.

Blogging? I used to blog a lot more often than I do now. I used to entertain thoughts of having a very well read blog until some unfortunate flame wars have put paid to that notion. Once a week, I can still maintain that momentum now. I still have something to write about. I'm blessed with a lot of creativity - it takes an extraordinarily long time for me to run out of ideas. But maybe one day I will.

So a lot of people call me a bookworm. Yes, but the mountain of books I used to have on my reading list is now a small pile and eventually it will go down to nothing. I don't know if it's coincidental. I used to look forward to the weekend because it would be time to myself to read what I want, and now I'm a little sick of reading, I have problems doing it for more than 1 hour at a go. And then I will have to find my next hobby to occupy myself.

I have another hobby - not really a hobby because I can't do it all the time. It's songwriting. I've been thinking about how to take it to the next phase, so that will occupy my free time for a while.

A new hobby of mine would be learning about computer science. I once considered that as a major but took Maths instead. Now I'm wondering. Of course this is reading, but it does mean that another subject that I really used to enjoy reading about would be slowly phased out - that's history. I now have a framework of world events and their significance, how we got to what we are today, so further study is no longer necessary.

2. As for work - I thought about how I looked at it. In around the 4th or 5th book, Harry Potter learnt that he was placed in the care of his aunt and treated like a Charles Dickens character for a reason - that whole place was magically protected against Voldemort. Unfortunately that's my attitude towards work at the moment. They're treating me better than Uncle Dursley is treating Harry Potter, but that's not saying much. If you want to think about how long you're going to stay in a place, think about how you'd feel if you were asked to take over your boss' job. Would you like the work? Or is it just a fatter paycheck in the end?

There are many worse places than my job, I know that. It protects me from idleness, having a completely purposeless existence. But are all thinking jobs like that eventually? Just sitting behind a desk, and churning away at data? Would I find some other job, and eventually, run into the same problems, getting tired of it all? That's the issue. I think this issue could be far deeper than something you could solve by switching lines.

I think that when you’re doing something – anything, actually, there are 3 stages – the beginning, the middle and the end. The beginning is usually quite rough, and you’re trying to learn the ropes, trying to be good at what you’re supposed to do. The middle is more comfortable, you’ve found a group of people you’re comfortable with, you’re getting by in your work. The end is not very comfortable, knowing that another new beginning is ahead of you, trying to make that new beginning happen, having to do a lot of things at work that you’ve been putting off because you were never comfortable doing them in the first place.

I’m getting old. I look at people at work who are 5 years younger than me and I think that I am looking at myself in a funny mirror, because that is the destiny that I could have taken, a road that I could have gone down, but instead I chose not to go down. And every time you go past a big big junction in life, you’re always wondering, could I have gone the other way?

They are articulate, polished. More conscious of their self image, and usually thinking about how other people are going to interpret what they say.

If people project a good self image, is that good for the company, or are they merely selfish people who are looking out for number one? I don’t know. What I do know is that this method of doing things was so foreign to me that I simply did not bother to try to take it up. I could have done that, but I wouldn’t be me. (Which may not be such a bad thing, considering the number of people who have come up to me and advised me to “stop being yourself”)

They believed fully in their careers, and the primacy of their careers. I gave up on it almost as soon as I had begun, in a fit of pique, when I was going through some difficult period. At that time I was totally sure that my future lay elsewhere.

But something strange happened. I developed a curious respect for the way that things were done at my workplace. Why do I use the words “curious respect”? When I was in secondary school my bio teacher took the whole class out on an excursion to a mangrove swamp. At first I thought that it was a very dreary place, and it is the epitomy of unproductive land. But later on he explained how things worked in the ecosystem, how the mangrove prevented the river from washing away the soil from under the rainforest, how it was a home to many animals like Kermit the frog. I wrote at the end of my report that I had developed a curious respect for the mangrove and he wrote back that he liked that comment. As with the mangrove swamp, so with my work place.

As for my workplace, it is the closest thing you get to a war zone. As a student in school I despised the military, and swore never to join the SAF, and how I got to join something that’s even more war-like than the SAF (let’s be honest here, the SAF doesn’t fight wars) is one of the big quirks of fate. But you always have to remember that all harsh words are said in the heat of the moment, all mistakes are made in the heat of the moment, it is so difficult to judge them because this is war, and all sorts of crap takes place when there is a war going on.

I look back at those guys, who developed the right attitude towards the place, and I wonder if it was possible to have a positive attitude win over the lazy cynical attitude that eventually took over me. For me it is a constant battleground between those two. Among my colleagues there are a few who have that positive attitude, a few whose lazy cynical attitudes have won, and the rest, for the most part, are battlegrounds. I think my bosses were not good enough psychologists to realise that I was a battleground, and at first only saw the lazy and cynical side. Eventually, though, they found out.

I also think about that one part in my life when I did try to overcome my snide and cynical attitude, and try to be nice to everybody at the same time. It was a happy, hopeful period in my life and not coincidently it was also the one time in my life I was going after a chick. Who knows how differently history would have turned out if I had won her over? (But I made the judgement call - probably a correct one - that she wasn’t worth the trouble.)

Well in a way all roads are connected and just because you turned this way on one junction, it doesn’t mean that you can’t turn back. And sometimes it might be fun to just wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t taken this particular turn.

So even at this late stage in my work, I still feel like I'm learning new stuff. I'm taking my time. Eventually the time will come when I feel that this is no longer the case, and after that... toodle loo....

3. There’s this mahjong game that I won’t forget. I played it on Bintan, with a few friends (Shingo may have been one of them, I can’t remember.) Now I’m a mahjong novice, and not that experienced, I take too long to think of my next move, people usually get a little irritated with me. Usually that’s what happens. My brain works better in parallel rather than in series. I excel at solving problems which require some unusual and novel solution, rather than doing something repetitive over and over again and doing it well. So making fast and good decisions in mahjong, I’m not good at it.

There was this incident where I already had what it takes to "hu" and I didn't even know it, it took Totoro's husband, looking over my shoulder to tell me.

But there was this game, I had basically a formation, and was just missing one more tile to complete it. After a few moves, I began to sense that the tile was never going to come, so I set about dismantling 1 section of that formation, and building something else, and I won that round.

Leonpix who was overlooking it was surprised, and he started off in his machine gun Mandarin about what I did (I roughly got the gist). It was probably something he wouldn’t have done, something that he perceived to be really risky.

As you might know, risk is all a matter of perception. Risk is about something that is unknown, and people have a different set of criteria when they are talking about risk.

The way I saw it, I had 2 of a kind and I was waiting for a third. It was possible that somebody else was also holding on to the other 2 tiles, in which case I would never be able to get it. The chance of success, in continuing on my current path, was approximately zero. Better for me to break that 2 of a kind (this is risky too, because it could allow somebody to game. But it was still a risk worth taking.) and then risk building up another formation. I would at least have around a 50% chance of success. In this calculation, what I was doing was not risky at all, but an oblique way of maximizing my chances of success.

But I suppose we all have this thing about holding on to what we have. We think that a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. But sometimes the bird in your hand is not the bird you want, and there are more than 2 on the bush.

What I have read about psychology is that people usually have a very distorted view of risk. People tend to over exaggerate the sensational ways of dying. For example, terrorism. If I were to take a cold hard look at terrorism, I would not believe that I would die like that. OK, maybe my not working in an office tower has something to do with that belief. But I commute to work, and I use one of the most crowded MRT stations, and every morning, there is a traffic jam. All it would take is 1 suicide bomber with a backpack, and he could take out approximately 200 people if he’s in the middle of a

In other things, we tend to underestimate our risk. Land travel is risky. The number of people who died as a result of the 9/11 attacks is 3000. In America that year, between 2-3000 people died in car crashes. So why does 9/11 “change everything”, whereas car crashes don’t change anything?