i miss spontaneous

In a rare moment of rumination, I reflected back on some of my fond memories of spontaneous, care-free school days. One particularly memorable time was my final year spring break.

I can't remember why I had no plans that year, but at the last minute I joined a group of schoolmates travelling down to Daytona Beach and the Florida Keys. My university friends are by far the craziest and most fun group, and we tried everything from exploring old towns, sampling delicious food, and even sampled the MTV spring break experience complete with beach parties and crazy sorority girls getting body-painted for the cameras. What lingers most is the taste of the exquisite Key Lime Pie at Key West.

After a week in Florida, we still had a weekend, so a friend and I drove out to the countryside to ride horses for a day. That was pretty random, and lots of fun. That night, having nothing to do (Masters students do not care about homework), I ended up chatting with a friend in Yale over ICQ. She was rushing to finish a paper due early the next morning. Since I had never been to Yale, and she had no plans for the weeked, I decided it was time to visit. So I left at 11pm and reached about 5am, and spent the weekend exploring New Haven.

Fast forward a few years to working life, I can't decide to stay in bed if I feel lazy, I seldom make appointments in the evening because I don't know when work will end, and between work, family and wedding commitments, my weekends are booked out a month in advance. Life is so crowded these days, I miss spontaneous.

fatty

Maybe this is why I'm getting fat.

Obesity Is Linked to Stress Hormone, Scientists Say
By Simeon Bennett

July 2 (Bloomberg) -- Scientists say they have found a link between
stress and obesity, which offers hope in treating the 1.6 billion adults who are
overweight worldwide.

The brain under stress releases a hormone that activates a gene in fat cells, causing them to grow in size and number, according to a study published today in the journal Nature Medicine. Scientists found stressed mice gained twice as much fat as those fed the same high-calorie diet. The stressed mice didn't gain weight when the gene was removed or blocked.

read more

I'd better stop working so hard.

the tyranny of CAT

Obviously I failed to learn the lesson from my GRE 5 years ago.

I went into the GMAT psched to ace the math section. After all, I can never seem to score on the verbal, so my best hope was to get full marks on math. This seemed reasonable, since my mistakes on the practise tests were all from careless mistakes, and always because I was too lazy to make sure my solutions were watertight. (If you are wondering what this statement means, you can try a sample GMAT exam youself. Just a free 26MB download from mba.com.) This is in sharp contrast to the verbal section, where I often have strong opinions different from the marking scheme. Obviously this means I don't do well, but I'm sure my English is better than the people who set the questions.

The tyranny of the Computer Adaptive Test (CAT) is that every question given is based on your performance in previous questions. If you get them right, you get harder questions. This supposedly allows the system to use a lesser number of questions to differentiate the ability of applicants. It also means you can never go back to a previous question and change the answer. So the typical 'O' and 'A' level strategy of breezing through once though and then going back to check the ones you are unsure of no longer applies ... you have to be damn sure before you click next. So to cut a long story short, I never did finish the math section, despite rushing through the last few questions on gut feel. Needless to say, I didn't do so hot.

The irony was that after that I breezed through the verbal and even ended in barely over half the allotted time. I had this bad feeling that I must be getting the questions wrong because they seemed to be getting easier and easier, but in the end I did so well that I still came up in the 99th percentile overall - i.e. my verbal even managed to pull up my math! That was totally not what I was expecting at all. So it was a happy story at the end of the day, now just pending the results from my essays which I have pretty high confidence in.

This is very similar to the mess I landed in for the GRE when I didn't manage to finish the logic section. Again, I was aiming for full marks and similarly, I took too long to ponder the earlier questions. So anyone else going for a CAT, you have been warned ...

In other news, I finally surfed into an ex-classmates blog, ever since he told me about it during a visit in Dec (yes I have been offline very long). If anyone wants to hear a foreigner's perspective on working in China, you can read this Microsoft employee's blog from Shenzhen. I find it very uplifting because it gives me some hope that Singapore will not lose all our business to China in the near term because their middle management is all incompetant. (Maybe this article explains why.)

packs and packs

Overheard at dinner:

Eat more, you still got six-pack;
Mine is a family pack.

It just cracked me up.

Needless to say, I don't have the six-pack. Sad to say, I'm closer to the family pack. That probably explains why I can no longer do 25 chin ups nor jump 2.75m. But thankfully I can still run my 2.4 in less that 9:45 and can still do 45 situps in 35s. So at least I don't have one of those KFC buckets yet.

the fat entry

About a year ago I bumped into an acquaintance at one of those boring industry conferences. We were gathered round the refreshments table and as usual I popped 3 cubes of sugar into my tea. He took one. I teased him, asking how 1 cube was going to keep him awake for the next 2 hours. He looked at me sadly and shook his head. Your metabolism is going to change when you hit 30, he warned me. Then you have to start watching what you eat.

He lied. My metabolism has slowed down a lot earlier than 30. "Huh, you mean you didn't know meh? Your metabolism changes when you hit 25!" That's what a group of unsympathetic friends told me last weekend when I related this unhappy incident, while casting a longing eye on dessert.

I should have seen the warning signs, ever since starting work. First, the six-pack disappeared. I became slow and feeble - suddenly I can't seem to break 10 minutes on my 2.4km run. (This has been effortless ever since Sec 4.) The girlfriend rolls her eyes and says, "I can't believe you're the one complaining about being fat all the time!" "Well you're not the one that has difficulty buckling up your pants," I retort. When I sit down after a heavy meal, my tummy rides up and spills over my belt. The button digs into my belly and it hurts.

I often ask myself what has changed since starting work. Sure, I don't run, but then I never did. I don't particularly think I'm eating more. Probably what is missing most is the exercise. The sports I used to play a few times a week in school. Or even the frisbee I used to play once a week when I first returned. Now mostly I play tennis, which doesn't help.

In badminton or squash, you have to put in every effort to lunge for the ball or shuttle, because there are no second chances. In frisbee, once the disc hits the ground, you've lost it. But for tennis, we have this infinite-bounce rule ... as long as you can dig it off the ground you're good. So there's very little incentive to run for lazy people like me.

Then again, maybe I can just blame it all on the metabolism and accept that life will just never be the same again. Maybe it's time to take up golf. Zynfandel, beware.

hitching a ride

I have a truly wonderful mother. In my younger days, whenever she came to pick me up to go home, she would never fail to ask if I had any friends who needed a ride. It used to annoy me back then, because it meant I got home a lot later. But many of my friends (and acquaintences) benefitted greatly from her generosity. So when I started driving, it was only natural for me to extend the same courtesy to the people around me. But sometimes, the lack of appreciation really makes me wonder if the effort is worth it, or if people realise what a sacrifice this can be.

I think especially late at night, it is quite natural to expect drivers to send their friends home, especially once the midnight surcharge kicks in. But this means that the drivers somestimes end up travelling cross-country to drop people off. It means they get home perhaps an hour later than they otherwise would. And the difference between 2 and 3 am can be very great, especially when you are tired. There has been more than one occasion I have taken a cab, or not gone out to avoid the situation of refusing to send people home simply because I am too tired to drive.

Most people are very appreciative of any offer of a ride that will shorten their journey. But it really irks me when people expect you to offer a ride (when they are perfectly capable of taking public transport), or when they actually ask you to change your route of dropping people off so you can send them to their doorstep (thereby delaying everybody else), instead of giving them a ride partway. This happened to me last week, in broad daylight, which got me thinking about this whole thing.

Perhaps people don't realise the cost of the car. I am spending about $1,800 a month on installments, insurance, road tax and petrol. I am not spending this kind of money so that I can be anyone's chauffer. Fuel costs about 6km/$, and it's going up faster than the taxi fares. So if a ride is offered, please take it in good spirit as an act of gentlemanly kindness or a gesture of goodwill and friendship. Consider all these before you ask for more of your driver friends ...

dysfunctional family

My parents are in Phuket. I don't know when they are coming back. It's really my Dad's fault; usually he emails us kids things like the flight details but apparently this time he forgot.

Thomas Friedman's book is on my lap. "The world is flat," he says. People are being connected across wide expanses of space, all thanks to the power of networking and telecommunications. All thanks to the internet. All thanks to the internet, I don't need to talk to my family anymore. With e-mail, instant messengers and smses, it's even more convenient to stay in touch despite our busy schedules. Especially when we're too lazy to walk next door, or even use the phone intercom.

E-mail is also great for bringing up taboo topics. The other day, I wrote my family a nice personal email. I said:

"In case anyone is wondering, X* and I just got together this week."

To which my sister replied:

Oh. This is how you do it is it?
Well in that case -- you should know that Y* and I are no longer together then.
(yes we did use to be together)

It's lovely how open we can be with each other when we can hide behind a computer. Another time X told me that her parents shared an email account. I was stunned. "How do they e-mail each other?" I asked. She looked at me like I was an idiot. I thought it was a pretty valid question :( Obviously her family still lives in the stone age.

Hmm ... I think it would be really romantic to propose over email. In the movies, the girls always love it when the guy bares his soul and puts his pride on the line by asking her to marry him in a public place with a crowd of onlookers. I bet it would bring tears to any girl's eyes if her man could make that declaration of love, with 200 ppl in the CC field. Maybe even add on a photo collage of their favourite photos as an attachment.

Well, if anyone decides to use my brilliant idea, please leave a comment to tell me how it goes.

*Names have been changed (duh)

back in time

A recent gathering with JC classmates rekindled many fond memories of our two years together. Sec Sch and Uni both had their happy times, but for sheer spontaneous craziness, JC was hard to beat. So I thought I would pen some down for posterity.

I remember how little regard we paid our tutors, and how cool they were with that. How one day the guys were huddled at the back of class, playing Collin Raye's Love, Me on my new Fender acoustic guitar. A few others in the second row were diligently doing the class exercise, while the tutor was explaining something to the two girls in front. My class only had 12 people. Two students from next door came over to borrow the OHP and our teacher casually waved them on. They had to walk the length of class and back, serenaded my our singing with the most disconcerted looks on their faces. Surely they were wondering what madhouse they had stepped into.

There was also the time the same tutor caught me with a pork cutlet hidden in the drawer of my desk during lab, and shouted "Why you never share?" Another classmate missed lab for the first half of the year, but when she chanced to find out that she had been marked 'present' the entire time, she was so touched she turned a new leaf.

I remember the time we all gathered at a classmates house to work on our computing FYPs. Midway through the night, we got bored and decided to make an expedition down to the nearby reservoir, armed with our laptops. One of them didn't know how to cycle, so he had to learn while balancing a Thinkpad slung over his shoulder. And so there we were, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the dam across the reservoir, programming until our batteries went flat.

And I could never forget the countless hours spent playing Quake and Starcraft. Our school was one of the first of MOE's pilot program to equip computers in every classroom. In those days before LAN shops were invented, we soon had the game installed on every PC. In the middle or prelims and 'A' levels, our study regime would begin with good intentions. Gathered around with our books on the tables, someone would turn on a computer to play music. Not long after, two people would take a 'study break'. And five hours later, we would be chased out of the classroom by the caretaker and adjourn to McDonalds to discuss tactics and strategy. Occasionally, we would also study too. It got better during the exams. We always entered an exam with trepedition because the seating plan would determine who was situated nearest the computers. As the bell rang and the scripts were collected, these people would surreptiously turn on the computers (monitors off of course) and they would be the first to enter the arena, ready to prey on the unfortunates who would have to scramble to find a terminal. Before the invigilator was halfway down the corridor with the exam scripts, the rockets were already flying.

I miss those days. Those days with nary a care in the world. Those days when friends were truly friends and the only politics were the shifting alliances formed on the battle field.

memories

I was always the kid that got smacked with the ruler for not remembering his times tables. I was also the kid who forgot when assignments were due, forgot to bring the right textbooks and always lost at those games that involved remembering which card was where. I never remember names or faces. When I ask people for directions, I usually follow through with the first three steps and then ask someone else. My memory is not very good. Things got better when I got a PDA, but perhaps it gets worse too because the device becomes a crutch. And sometimes I forget my PDA.

My memory is really not very good. It has something I have come to accept about myself.

But increasingly, I find that memory is perhaps one of the most important skills a person can have. Along with raw intelligence and good communication skills, a good memory is essential to success at work. Because if you forget to do stuff, you're not going to do a very good job. And when the boss says "I told you A" and you can't remember, you lose. And when the boss says "I told you A" and you remember he told you B, you don't trust yourself because you have poor recollection and so you still lose.

There's only so much you can write down or key in, and when it comes to following instructions it really helps to remember the instructions in as much detail as possible; which I do not. And so I have resolved that I should go read Mega Memory.

i am who i am

I find the new meme proliferated by MercerMachine (via Tomorrow.sg) really cool. Here's my single contribution, because I'm way too tired to come up with literary epiphanies at this hour.

I am the student who always brought an inflatable pillow to sleep in the front row. And neither the light of knowledge nor the wrath of instructors could penetrate the darkness once descended.

After scanning the trackbacks, the original on MercerMachine is still by far the best.

my take on talent

My next post was going to be my insightful and illuminating political-economic analysis of PM's NDP Rally Speech. Unfortunately, my attention has been sidetracked by some other blogs and IM conversations about talent and marriage, so I shall write my take on that first. And I'll analyse the speech some other time if I ever get down to reading it.

When I was a little primary school kid, I had this entire series of Chinese short story books. My mother used to pay incentivise me fifty cents for every book I read. So I read a fair number, but my Chinese is as crap as ever. Of all the numerous books I read, only one story remains in my mind to this day, 20 years later.

There was a little boy (I forget his name, let's call him Xiao Ming like all other boys in primary school) who was very bad at math. He wanted very much to be a good student. One day some aliens came by in a UFO and said they could help him. (If this narrative seems disjointed, I'm sorry - I don't remember the story that well.) He told them how he wanted to be good at Math, so using their incredibly advanced ET technology they performed an operation directly on his brain. And as promised, he became a great math student. Unfortunately he soon discovered that he had lost his skills at table tennis, because apparently you can't have everything.

So the moral of the story is that you shouldn't trade a useful skill like a sport for something useless like Math. I think I can relate to this because I'm good at table tennis and suck at math.

Lack of talent has always been a bugbear to me. I know I'm probably above average in most things I've tried in my life, but at the same time I've never ever risen to the pinnacle of anything. And most of all, much as I like music, I could never ever develop enough skill at any instrument to play for the enjoyment of others. Oh, and my singing is even worse. So even though I'm pretty good at other stuff like academics and sports, I've never been able to shake off the feeling of being a lousy jackofalltradesmasterofnone. Nevertheless, I've come to terms with my normality because seriously, would you rather be Joe Average or an autistic savant?

It's like that saying I always hear - "life is fair". Most of the time I hear it, it refers to girls. If she sounds good on the phone, she must be ugly. If she looks good from the back, she must be ugly from the front. If she has a good figure, she must be ugly. My, there must be a lot of ugly girls out there. With talent, it's a bit different. Everybody gets to make a personal choice what aspect of themselves they would like to develop and if you choose to play computer games instead of musical instruments or sports, or read comics instead of books, you have to live with your choices - even if they didn't seem like such a big deal back then. A good friend lamented to me once that he had wasted all his time playing computer games - imagine how good he could have become at the guitar or at something else, if he had spent his time more wisely? Of course, this same friend is still getting straight A's at a top engineering school. He also made more money from selling Everquest equipment on eBay than from his internship at Accenture. It's not exactly a sustainable career, but no sympathies there.

So everyone is talented in their own ways and there are usually tradeoffs to be made. There is no way your can measure one person's net worth against another - it's true that some people are worth more money, but is Mother Teresa any less a person than Bill Gates? This brings me to marriage and what I'm looking for in my ideal partner. Just like everyone else, it would be nice if I could find a partner who is good-looking, smart, sporty, rich and of course with a great personality thrown in. It would be nice to find someone with all that and more, but the most important thing is to find someone I can respect. And being a guy, the hardest thing is finding a person I can respect, while at the same time not feeling marginalised or inferior in comparison, because the male ego is fragile.

So it's wonderful that everyone has their own strengths, so I can probably find someone who is a talented musician worthy of my admiration and yet remain secure in the knowledge that I am still better at other more important skills like programming or foosball and hence worthy of reciprocation. That's when I can start a happy family.

Of course, every so often you run into someone special. Apart from playing four instruments, she went to the top US engineering school (so she is smarter and her programming is better), was head prefect and on the tennis team of a top girls school (so she is better both with people and sports) and she still manages to be pretty and have wonderful personality. That's when you realise that life is really not fair and you better try something else like cooking.

And here's my own take on the peanut thing: I can measure my self-worth in muah chee powder.

shits and giggles

Since life is boring, and I have not been reading the news, I'm going to do something different and post page 217 of the autobiography that I have been writing in my spare time.

Yet another one of my most memorable experiences from secondary school is an incident which my secondary three class have fondly come to term “The Cockroach Bottle”. It all began with a biology experiment involving the dissection of cockroaches. We “oohhed” and “aaahed” as Miss P deftly clipped back the cockroaches’ wings with drawing pins, calmly exposing the mysteries of its insides. We applauded loudly as she named even the most minute parts of its anatomy. But she was most disappointed when we all coyly declined her offer to decapitate the next specimen. As a result, we had a number of the pests left over, which my friends J1 and J2 collected and stowed away in a jam jar.

I next saw the bottle several days later. Inside, the cockroaches had breathed their last, but their final slumber was cruelly disturbed when J1 began to shake the bottle. He shook it very, very hard. Several days, and many hard shakes later, the bottle had already passed through the hands of every member of the class. Inside, a soggy white paste, not unlike mayonnaise, was splattered around the sides of the glass, and it was still possible to recognise a head, and several pairs of extremities. It was indeed a most ghastly sight, and not a few remarks were made about the appropriateness of using a jam jar.

One week later, J2 decided to open the jar. In ten seconds flat, the class was empty. Like the survivors of a war, we gathered along the corridor outside, still reeling from this massive assault on our olfactory organs. Even at the end of lunch, when Miss P came for her biology lesson, we were all still hanging around the corridor, and absolutely refused to return. With ingenuity which would have done credit to any scientist in a crisis, she decided to move that lesson outdoors. However, I hardly heard a word she said that day. For me, the true lesson in biology had already been firmly imprinted in my memory – I had seen first hand the rate of diffusion of molecules in the air, and the speed was incredible. I had also learned that though it takes the molecule of an unpleasant odour an infinitesimally small amount of time to fill a classroom, it takes at least a week for these same particles to exit through the open window. Fortunately for us, that was the last lesson in our classroom for the day, and our teachers were not forced to make any more unscheduled changes to the timetable. But for the next few days, the air was filled with a surprisingly strong smell of cologne.

On hindsight, it was really fortunate that J2 had had the presence of mind to close the bottle before he joined in the general retreat. Had he dropped the bottle, the consequences would have been unthinkable. Whatever the case, this little seemingly insignificant event has left an indelible mark in my mind. It showed me the lighter side to science; more importantly, it showed me that one should think before one opens a bottle full of decomposed cockroaches.

I'm kidding of course. There is no autobiography and I have no spare time. This was actually a university application essay that I dug out of my archive. Note the malaise that has inflicted my command of the English language in the years since. Last time England damn powderful can ... now like shit.

righteous indignation

I was surfind through Tomorrow.sg and came across this pretty interesting post on an unpleasant encounter with anti-social behaviour.

It brought to mind an unpleasant encounter of my own, more than a year ago. I'm pretty easy-going and forgetful, so the fact that I still remember this in vivid detail just goes to show how much impact it had on me.

I was in the (now-defunct) Chip Bee gardens carpark in Holland Village, waiting for a space. After about 15 minutes, a car directly in front of me left, and so of course I took up position to take his place. I stopped at the 45 degree angle just beyond the lot, but when I switch to reverse gear my reverse sensor went off immediate. Strange. There, directly behind me, a lady in a small SUV had purposefully pulled up right behind me, obstructing my way.

I wound down my window, she wound down hers. I started to ask her why she was snatching the lot, but she immediately began accusing me of cruising right by her and stealing her lot. Considering that I had been waiting there for at least 15 minutes, and the lot was right in front of me, this was absurd. Could it have been an honest mistake? I think she would have noticed me if I drove by, given the appearance of my car. I therefore concluded that she was a blatant liar.

Of course it took me sometime to process all the info to reach this conclusion, and in the meantime her ridiculous accusations left me speechless. I don't know if she took this for a sign of weakness, but when I protested that I had always been waiting there, she said, "Anyway I'm a lady, you should give up the lot to me." Whoa. I snapped. Well not really, but I told her in the most civil tone I could muster that she was a lady, and a most unreasonable one at that. And over my dead body would she take the lot. No I didn't really say that, but I meant it.

If she had tried any other approach, like appealing on behalf of her two kids in the back who were really hungry, maybe it might have worked. But first trying to muscle me out with blatant lies, then pulling a stupid female stunt, was not getting her anywhere near my good side. Even the female friend beside me, silent all this time, was appalled at this behaviour. What kind of example was she being for her kids.

Anyway, she finally left and I took the lot. I was half worried she'd come back and scratch my new car, but thankfully that was the end of the matter. Why do such pig-headed and selfish people exist in society. How on earth did she get married?

I have no stronger emotion that righteous indignation.

helping others

I was eating a quick meal in the hawker centre when an old lady appeared at my elbow, wanting to sell me a packet at tissues. Without a second thought, I brushed her off and finished my meal. No second thoughts then - but ever since I have been giving the matter considerable contemplation.

I have always been strongly against begging. It helps that the government has kept them off the streets of Singapore, such that we really come into contact with the less fortunate here. And I suppose as a kid/teen, I was not such an appealing target. Then when I first arrived in the US some years ago, one of the first talks I attended was given by the municipal police who told us not to give to beggers, because they would probably just use their gains for drink and drugs. This warning was reinforced by a friend who actually gave $10 to a bum, only to find him drinking a beer later.

It's not that I don't want to help them. I just try not to give money. If I meet a bum outside McDonald's I would even buy a burger for him sometimes. When a well-dressed man in a London subway asked me for money to call his family back in Africa, I even offered to let him use my calling card but he persisted on wanting only cash. A friend of mine was appalled when a begger in Delhi hit her child to make it cry before approaching them, bawling baby held aloft. I've also heard that they amputate the limbs of children to increase their pitifullness there. And even back home, I remember reading recently that the cripple outside Tangs for many years was found to be a fraud! And I in my last encounter with cripples selling plush toys at a hawker centre, I watched them board a van and depart, quickly and efficiently, probably heading for the next target like some organised syndicate.

I've held these cynical views for many years, despite the scant consideration I have given them. And reinforced by the general aparthy of my peers, I've continued this dispassionate view of the less privileged since my return to Singapore. But after much thought, I think it's about time I changed my ways. Because I do genuinely believe that many of these, especially those who busk or sell items, are trying to help themselves, and we should help them. And I won't let a few bad eggs and my own prejudice stop me from being more human.

So that next time I meet someone selling tissues for exhorbitant prices, I will think twice before I shrug them off.

the beginning of the rest of my life

It kind of sucks when you have a new blog and nothing to write about. So I am going to write about the book I read over the weekend: Mitch Albom's the five people you meet in heaven.

Synopsis (because I do not reinvent the wheel):
On his eighty-third birthday, Eddie, a lonely war veteran, dies in a tragic accident trying to save a litle girl from a falling cart. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.

Since I picked up the book from the self-enrichment section of Kinokuniya, I guess I shall list out the ways that it has helped me. Or rather the lessons it is trying to teach.
1) People (even strangers) change the course of your life in drastic ways
2) There is much unhappiness born out of misunderstanding
3) Take pleasure in the sacrifices you make for others
4) Life is short

I quite enjoyed the book, and I would definitely recommend it. The lessons are not profound, but they are conveyed in a very touching manner. It has some elements of Chicken Soup For The Soul, Tuesdays with Morrie and Speaker for the Dead all rolled into one.

I suppose the book was especially meaningful to me because I often ponder the first point above. I am definitely in a very privileged position now and it would be folly to think I made it on my own. There are so many of my friends, teachers and mentors who have helped me to where I am today, as well as one particular acquaintance (I could hardly even call him a friend) that shaped my life's path at crucial junctures not once, but twice. And he doesn't even know it; but I always remember, and someday I will thank him.

I was also reminded starkly of the brevity and fragility of life today when a tree almost fell on me. No wind, no rain; just the sudden rustle of leaves and the screaming of wood. It's amazing I heard anything at all, seeing as I was in the car with the music on and I was on the phone. I looked up and saw a wall of green bearing down on me, so I braked.

It was a really close shave. By close, I mean some of the peripheral branches actually took some paint off my bumper. My mind was a blank (certainly not flashing before my eyes) as the foliage came crashing down in slow motion, showering me with leaves and bits of bark. It was not really a tree, just a big branch; but it was a big branch that obstructed both lanes. A metre forward and I'd probably have lost my engine. Another metre and I might not be here blogging..

"It is because the human spirit know, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people dies instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a moment after you are gone, or a plane crashes that you might have been on. When a colleague falls ill and you do not. We thing such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.

As a good civic-minded citizen, once I was out of harm's way I decided I should report the matter to the relavent authorities since the branch was blocking the entire road. I don't really know who to call, so I called 999 - and after a few rings they hung me up. I've never called 999 before, but if I ever have to again, I guess this has somewhat dented my confidence in our mah dahs. I'm just glad I wasn't being mugged or robbed.

I actually went back to the scene to take pictures but through supreme clumsiness I managed to lose them. So I guess this entry will henceforth serve as my only record of a very memorable non-event.

I still remember another time 8 years ago in the Mandai forest when a big thorny branch also hit me on the head. Thankfully again, no injury. But if my life ever comes to a sudden end, I infer by linear regression that it will probably be a tree or a grand piano and not a bullet.

The book was getting me thinking about what meaningful things I would like to accomplish with the rest of my life. The tree kind of drove the point home.