Take Leave
The weird thing about not having flexible hours for your work means that you have to take leave even for the smallest things. Sometimes you just want to rest and meditate, to take a hindsight look, to take stock of your life. But you can’t, because your workplace is not conducive for that (with slanted eyes peering at you as you blog, nap etc.) or just because you care and you’re preoccupied with work, which is totally understandable.
So here I am, “clearing” my leave since I can only roll forward half of my annual leave. There’s not a lot to “clear” in the first place as I started in October, but it’s still a good 2 days (I took 3). It wasn’t planned – since this 3 days was initially supposed to be a trip to Bangkok with PhilYouth for an exchange with a university band there, which got cancel due to bird flu scare.
But it wasn’t all that bad. Look, I went for a jog in MacRitchie reservoir, which is just behind my house and found:
I need a bike/car/truck real soon… I also manage to figure out how to connect my phone to the laptop with the infrared port, a huge achievement (which means that the pictures on my phone can go online, like those). Either today or tomorrow I plan to cook, something I haven’t done in a while. And if I can figure out the login credentials to philwind’s site, there’s also lots of updates to be done.
More importantly, yesterday and today felt more like what I signed up for – to be able to do work at anytime I think appropriate, but doing just as much as expected. Yesterday night, I manage to compress something that would usually take me 4 hours to finish into 2 hours just because the breeze on my balcony is much better than the air-conditioning above my cubicle. I wonder why employers don’t realize that. A month before I arrived in SCS, I heard that one of the big shots in the board actually came to count the number of late comers, reinforcing the need to come to work on time. On time Gam Pui? Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m doing in the morning, struggling to make sense of the world with the meager cup of CoffeeMix + hot water, on top of heightening my adrenaline to the max, rushing for the train. I don’t need to describe this.
In fact, I might just ask for another day off; hey – I worked even though I’m on leave, at least half day of work yesterday you know. I even went back to meet a potential customer for the last 2 hours.
Btw, this is a very nicely written article: A Streetcar Called Perspire By Keith Butler. Haven’t read something so short and sweet in a while. I also found out that recycling in Singapore fetches a lot of money. just sold off newspaper half my height and got $5 out of it! Woohoo!
Let’s see, I’m quite ok on Fantasy Impromptu now, let’s try Liebestraume. Maybe when the sun sets I’ll go for a swim before dealing with some Q106 project plans. Papaya anyone?
