A Rant on Tuesday

I have no idea why I am writing so often for the past few days. Could it be a side effect from having getting away from Facebook, where I once used to leave behind some nuggets of thoughts that I happened to have at the moment, with only a handful of unblocked people being interested enough to look at them to reply?

I was out sick yesterday with a nasty cold. It was something that probably had been in the making for a while, considering how many people in the office are getting sick from the change in the weather conditions. The way colds work for me is more or less the same -- I end up with heavy congestion to the point where my Eustachian tubes become all bunged up. When that happens, I know that I have been hit with a rather nasty version of the cold bug and have to see a doctor as soon as I can before things go out of control like that time, where it led to a middle-ear infection with pus so bitter and nauseating that---let's not continue that line of thought.

I rested at home, of course, after seeing the doctor and getting all kinds of medication that are necessary to keep the congestion symptoms down. The problem with the medication, of course, is that it does end up making me a little drowsier than usual, what with all the old generation anti-histamines and other fancy stuff that are used to handle the symptoms. I'm too lazy and tired at this point (after putting in a 13-hour day) to actually sit down and list down every single active component in the medication that I'm taking.

The social climate on the whole in SIN is not getting any better. The annual Star Awards is upon us, and with it come the natural celebration of the man-made glitzy (but shallow!) world of television. I don't really like the whole Star Awards thing, and come to think of it, I never really liked all these award ceremonies thing ever since I became old enough to get disillusioned by all these awards. To be given an award by the same group of people who are working with you day in and day out feels strangely out of place, as though it is some kind of artifice to ensure that everyone keeps on working with everyone else in the long run, that everyone will pat each others' back when the necessity arises. That is not my kind of thing, I think. I have my own small bed of coals to walk through for the ``promotion ceremony'' that is coming up, so we'll see how that goes.

I used to like winning awards and prizes. When I was in primary school, it was the one thing that I could consistently get. There was always a reason for me to appear on stage for one award or another. It wasn't so much that I was prolific, but that my primary school itself was not among the elite that even a poseur like me can do enough to be recognised. But when I started to get into secondary school, and later on into junior college, all these awards things start to get on my nerves, even though I still kept on getting them, partly as a trick to see how far I can go, and partly because there was nothing else to be done in the context of school. School work was boring, there was always something more interesting while still academic out of it, and these awards were the one thing that helped to motivate me towards working outside of the curricula. Eventually though, the phoneyness of it all got to me and I soon started to slow down and not give too much of a damn about all these awards thing.

That would also explain why after primary school I refused to join any of the school Chinese Orchestras. The school Chinese Orchestras seemed to be more interested in winning the biennial Singapore Youth Festival awards, with a lot of focus on achieving technical prowess at the expense of actual enjoyment of making music. But that's a rant for another day.

I have no real agenda here except to toss a few words out there to cool off. It is the end of the day, and I think that I have achieved some progress, despite not writing a single line of code for work. I know it's shocking, but sometimes, reading can give a lot of interesting things to think about. As I like to say these days, ``think, don't hack''.

Till the next update.