Bollywood cures all

An explanation for the title will follow...

Today was just one of the days.... everything just started to fall around me.

This is the lesson I learnt from the day: Never clear a bunch of work appraisals, project approvals and other assignments in the same session with your supervisor. The workload that arises, plus the mental workload that arises, is just too much.

Work appraisal was what I roughly expected. The rest of the work was something else.

Project had to be rewritten [as in, totally] due to lack of substantial activity, rubrics for assessment had to be revamped [as in, totally] because of lack of substantiality, lack of organization, other work that had been done and observed could have been better.

In the end, my supervisor looked at me and asked, "Just how interested are you in your job?" or something to that effect, anyway.

Hm. How to tell her that frankly I'd be happier taking a pay cut if I never had to do all this kind of work ever again? That my one burning ambition in life is to go on contract status and leave all the paperwork crap to someone else?

Sometimes, I don't think I like being promoted very much. Others see a rise in status and a rise in pay and material benefits.

Me, I see the game getting harder the longer I play it. It's as if at the moment that I got the hang of the game, and started to figure out the rules and methods of playing, I got bumped to another level and suddenly I'm running around trying to learn everything from scratch again.

It's as if, just as I got the hang of how to do the main part of the job, other things got bumped onto me and now, having settled one part, I'm now dashing forward again, because the finish line was moved forward before I managed to reach even one foot of it.

She asked me how I considered my abilities, and whether I considered myself 'competent'. I said I still don't understand what are the standards for 'competent'. I said I still considered myself 'developing' because although I was better at some things, I couldn't consider myself 'competent' just yet. 'Competent' implies that you are fully equipped with the abilities to tackle your tasks at hand. It does not mean that you somehow get things done while running around trying to hold everything in your hands at once.

Was it my imagination, or did she had a faint "Hm, I thought so" air as she signed the rest of my appraisal form?

Looking at the stuff I had on my to-do list, the stuff that I was supposedly 'competent' to perform by now, but yet could not perform competently yet, I had to wonder if there would ever be a time that I would be 'competent' to do all this. I wondered what was it about me, that seemed to be perpetually making mistakes in places where others less experienced than me were just breezing through. What am I doing wrong, that even after the experiences I had, I still could not do some things right, while others had no problem performing the same task?

Why was it that even after I made some attempts at efficiency, even then I was still behind everyone else in work performance? [well, perchance it's because my attempts at efficiency are too feebly... inefficient.]

And if I'm stuck in this line for now, then what the heck do I do to level myself up, as they say in gamespeak? What do I do to get myself up to everyone else's standards? What should I do to finally rank among the 'competent' instead of....well, you know.

And finally, what can I do to get myself out of the game? I've learned all that I'm interested in. I've learnt all that I want to ever know. I want to play a different game. I want out.

In the end, I knew I could not answer all these questions in one night. I also knew that I was probably one step closer to hypertension if I kept pondering things that I could not easily solve soon.

I could only think of one thing to do to make myself feel a bit better.

Go for Bollywood dance class at Amore.

Jai Ho!

blogged by Aki Tan @ 10:28 PM 1 people have made comments

A Manifesto to Glass Trombones

Why does it usually take a narrow and painful brush with death for society to give us the permission slip to pursue our dreams, no matter how unconventional? Why can't we do this for people who are surviving very well physically? Was just reading an article on another cancer survivor in Reader's Digest and thinking if she was not afflicted with cancer, if she had lost all her money, or if she had failed in her venture, her story would have never been printed.

Think about it: How many stories do you see of people who are young, energetic, who forgo a real job, who put all their energies into pursuing crazy passions for, I don't know, glass trombones, and who lose all their money, their girlfriends, and end up living with their parents but yet never regret what they have lived?

Because these people we regard as failures in our sense of the word. We don't want to read or know about people who dedicate their lives to making the most elaborately sculpted glass trombones, because we don't like glass trombones. We don't want to read or know about people who lose all their money and their girlfriends and their reputations for mental sanity because in our sense of the world, they have failed. They came into their lives and left with nothing in their hands. To us, they have wasted the precious resource that is life and have left with no tangible or intangible [at least to us] gains.

We want to read about people who beat the odds and survived and nyet, flourished in what they loved to do, because that is what we want for ourselves. We like the stories about cancer/leukaemia/heart disease survivors who nearly died and because of that, spent the rest of their lives fighting for other dying people/made loads of money because that ties in so nicely with what we believe our lives should be like. And the world readily fans that by feeding us more stories of the latest person who added 10 more years to his life, because he got diagnosed with a life-threatening syndrome, so he quit his job, and spent the rest of his life cycling around the world.

1. Life is not a zero-sum game. You don't have to always get something out of it.

2. Even to fail at something grand is to achieve something out of life. A grandiose failure or a mediocre life?

3. Stop waiting for the world to give you permission to do what you want to do.

I think I also know that I'm writing this kind of post today because this is something I have to remind myself of every now and then. How easily does life suck you up in its vacuum cleaner! Only when you get stuck in there do you realise that the 'blow' button is almost unreachable. When you get caught up in the everyday scrambling for the bus, for the next paycheck, or worrying about your hospitalisation plan, too easy to forget how, if you were about to die in the next 3 months, none of this would matter anymore to you.

So I have to remind myself, to live life, to pursue lofty ideals, instead of sober realities.

1. Skip work if you have to blog.

2. Even if you have to work, surround yourself with beauty and music.

3. In a matter of time, nothing you do at the office will matter anymore.

4. And if the world laughs at you, laugh back. After a while, they will worry if they are the ones that are the really mad ones. And then you can really laugh.

blogged by Aki Tan @ 5:03 PM 0 people have made comments

Photo Diary

Before I forget myself in the drudgery of work, here's some shots of my last 2 weeks of June:



1. Went to an art exhibition where I hardly understood anything that was there. -_-! Though I did think the wall decor stickers were cute... ( 8QSam museum )



2. Laid in a womb of polysthrene furniture and imagined my whole room being like this. ( Verner Panton exhibition at National Museum )



3. Put plastic bags on my feet to prevent spread of H1N1 + Hand Foot Mouth disease.



4. Drank a lot of lychee juice with girlfriends ( with maybe 2 obligatory drops of vodka )



5. Admired some flowers.

Its been a more relaxing holiday, that I have to admit. Managed to read more, blog more, and top at least one facebook game. (Heh) And still managed to go out to some places.

I only wish it could have been longer...... but that would have to go into the bin together with my wish for striking first prize in Toto and losing 10 kg in a month. -_-!!!!!

It sucks but....... we have to grow up eventually and accept the rest of real life.

Here I go then.

blogged by Aki Tan @ 11:18 AM 0 people have made comments