Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2011:

1. 70 poems posted here
2. 79 essays/rants posted here
3. 6 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here

And thus the grand total here is 156 articles, down from the 214 articles in 2010.

That's an average of 0.43 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.59 last year. Again, we see a general downward trend in the amount of leisurely writing I do, partly because I have been writing so much daily for my work/studies. Every day I write anything from 400 to 1000 words about the research work that I am doing, and really, at the end of it all, I just don't feel the need nor energy to write even more things.

Compared to last year, I have almost no emotional roller coasters. Things that had happened in the past stay in the past without any further ramifications, and I have been so work-oriented that I have almost no time to mull about all those odd and interesting relationship issues.

I don't interact with a whole bunch of people any more; mostly interacting with the few who are actively involved in geocaching, aikido/jujitsu, and more recently, the NaNoWriMo crowd in Champaign-Urbana. 2011 is a bumper crop year for Geocaching for me, having gotten a grand total of 300 finds by the last day of 2011, which is quite cool, considering that I had never thought of going for more than a couple of caches every few months. I suppose one of the best things that I had done was to introduce YT to geocaching, and to get involved with a small local group of new-ish geocachers. So many adventures all over Singapore, and in the last few months, all over the cities of Champaign-Urbana, Normal-Bloomington and Peoria. I think geocaching is more therapeutic on my psyche than anything else that I had done, partly because it required me to go out there and take a walk/hike through interesting terrain.

2011 was also a rather tumultous time for me, when my general jadedness was starting to feature a little too strongly, almost completely masking what was essentially the me I fondly remembered before all the cynicism got to me back in 2009 and reduced me to a husk of ``dumb adult-hood''. I have been too disillusioned for a little too long that I have started to lose heart. Well, like all things in life, it will change, and in this case, the change is now. Hopefully this change from ``dumb adult-hood'' back to ``inventor fun!'' will be fast enough that nothing terrible will happen. I really don't want to lose this rather hard-earned fight that I have been doing for the last couple of years.

Something rather random though... over the last three days (including today), I had visited at least three different cemeteries in the day time. I've never really walked through a cemetery much, let alone three, but all in the name of geocaching I suppose. Anyway, those cemeteries invoked a strong sense of respect in me---there lay many of those who walked the earth ealier than I. I never knew how their lives were, but what I know is that the world today, for better or worse, was consequent of their actions, directly or not. It reminds me in some sense that whatever I do now will affect the world, for better or worse, directly or not. A very sombering thought. And of my own mortality---life is really short, can't really waste it over trivialities.

I think I've side tracked much from my original intent of this post. Maybe next time.

Anyway, onwards through 2012, a better year than the last.