Cleaning up

Blog entries are harder to write this time around. It used to be more fun when I was just whiling time away. I never had to wonder what I was doing - just head out with a sackful of books, and then a trip to nowhere, a few hours in a cafe. Used to be so easy. How did I not realise that my decision making abilities were being impaired by this extremely predictable routine?

I could just read a book, and think about it. It's so much more fun thinking about other peoples' lives. You never have to make a difficult decision about them.

Last week I bought a book. Well I am supposed to have already given up books but this is no ordinary book, this was Eric Hobsbawm’s “Age of Capital” at less than $10. So I had to have it. It’s like, you may have given up sex, but if one day, some hot Japanese AV soft porn star / Korean race queen turns up at your door with only a towel, are you not going to make an exception?



As an aside, some of you are going to laugh, but a few nights ago I committed the cardinal sin. I surfed porn, and forgot to turn of the computer before turning in. Actually I was so tired that I thought, "I'm going to take a 5 mins nap". I woke up the next morning, and my father was already there. So he saw everything. He saw everything but said nothing. Ah well.

I got a gift from the gift exchange (conducted by the whole building, not the department). I only took part because it was a chance to get rid of one of the 200 books that need to get out of my room in order for me to have some decent living space. In exchange I got a picture frame. I said, "great! All I need to do is get a girlfriend, and I'll have a complete set."

This is not a good festive season for me. For the last 2 years, I had thrown caution to the wind, telling myself, "screw it all, I'm going to leave (current workplace) any time soon and I'm going to think about the future". Well the future hasn't happened yet, even though my days of stalling upon it are over. I am a great procrastinator but I have a limit - 1 year? 6 months? And then after that I will get off my ass and do something. But what the fuck is it going to be?

I remember something that Winston Churchill sarcastically said about the Americans: "you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing - after they have exhausted every other possibility". Am I like that as well?

And this festive season hasn't been very good for me. When at the office I'm rushing out work because I'm also clearing 1 day of leave every week. When I'm on leave, I can't do much other then sleep. I'm tired much of the time. I don't know why, maybe I'm just tired (I'm down with flu.) This is the time of the year you're most susceptible to the flu, and also the time of the year it's the most difficult to recover from it, because every where you go there's always a draft blowing.

I’ve cleaned up my desk. I’m working on my room as well. I suppose that cleaning up was long overdue. For too long I have turned up at work and looked around, and there’s a fog of despondency hanging over my cubicle because there’re papers everywhere.

I suppose this is part of the cycle of life. For every birth, there is a death. In stochastic processes, there is a birth and death process. In computer science, we call garbage collection. This concept is also prevalent in eastern mythology (in fact one of the computer science courses I attended at the uni used the yin-yang symbol as its logo.) The hindus have their god of creation, and another one for destruction. It's all supposed to be all neutral, nothing is better than the other, all part of life. (As opposed to the Christian view where birth is a good thing and death an extremely terrible thing.)

So I'll go through all the papers piled on my desks, the one at home and the one in the office. I'll sift through all that email that I have not filed away for years. (My home account. I normally am quite good about my office mail.) I'll read and throw away bills. Balance my accounts. Sell away my books. Give away my old clothes. My home was renovated while I was in the states - I had an almost empty room when I started work. I'm still wondering how on earth it got entirely filled up with junk over just a couple of years.

All the old files with useless stuff - I'm going to throw them out. I suppose all of this is a start - do something mindless for a while that actually makes my life better. Do it when the weather is cold enough that I won't automatically get drenched in sweat just by standing in my room for 5 minutes. Do it before Chinese New Year.

And then after that, on to the more difficult questions - how do I convince members of the opposite sex that I am not a boring person, how do I convince people that I'm a great songwriter, a great scientist, etc etc etc.