New Year New Hopes: To go for a vacation
It’s not like me to have nothing to say.
But I guess the last 3 months of psychological turmoil has finally taken its toll on my meditation of silence. Instead of engaging with intellectual discourse (including blogging here), I’ve become the walking dead, suppressing my huge emotional passion for life tentatively, so that I don’t upset more people. Though no rocket science, I’m entirely grateful that my wife took notice, and stood by my sometimes lifeless pursuit of middle age archers and trebuchets.
It’s the new year! And I’m sure a large number of people was like, **** the world didn’t end as planned and I forgot to plan for 2013, pushing back many 2013 activities.
How about just taking a break? Let’s all take 2013 off?
The idea of a sabbatical was planted in my head long before my current job. I originally thought the concept of a gap year between school and work was supposed to be like a sabbatical (many did that, e.g. cycling home from uni) but that didn’t happen as I jumped on work immediately. Then comes a 6 year period that everyone would rather it ended as soon as possible. Then comes this, year long sinking period where pieces of my passion is being torn away from me, bit by bit, by the land lords and soul lords.
It seemed to me that, now that a major life event is done (wedding), I can go take a breather. I do the equivalent of smoking breaks too much these days – farming coins and growing virtual population that live on handsets, grooming my identity online, search endlessly for the most wonderful youtube clip to be utilized in the next musical work etc. None of them has contributed positively to my well being, not even a barrage of those motivational posters and quotes that streams into my feed everyday.
Consequently, I started the year by planning holidays and travel.
Please don’t blame me for thinking about running away at the beginning of the year. I’m a product of both my own doing and my immediate surroundings too:
A job offer every week, a VC trying to link me to start-ups hiring every month, even other internal departments come pitch me interesting work.
Apple is reminding me to renew my S$128 subscription just to stay in their privilege circle.
Publishers are looking to publish my works with yet unknown market size and unknown additional efforts.
Government wants my time, Business Partners want my time, Family wants my time, Musicians want my time.
Even my web host (for this blog you’re reading) threatens to turn off PHP4 for PHP5 and leaves little time for upgrades.
When everyone wants your time, you can’t give the best to everyone. Ironically, it’s my boss who ask for none of my time these days – that sucks, that’s a blatant signal of defeat, and that saddens me every hour I spend toiling endlessly at my cube.
So, a holiday it is.
When that was finally decided (spiritually), things started to fall apart really quickly. People shunning away from my work and even my leave application. Confusion sets in. In the name of re-org and other corporate jumbo lingo they ensure I was out of harms way, and I obliged. It is now leading me to rather dedicate time for cleaning up the mess of daily work, more wife time and more meditation, than my usual start-a-new-project/business every week kind of mode.
Not sure if Onion or Urban Dictionary was first, but it’s vacationitis alright. And Hilton cannot solve it (yes I tried).
Just like how I was told to take 100 days to “think about” the transition thrust upon me, I’m now probably going to take 100 days to plan my vacation. In fact, I have only 80 days left if I were still to aim for the original date of April 8, no thanks to the end-of-the-world procrastination.
To summarize, let me borrow Emily’s work.
80/100 days starts now!
