Well well well... what can I say? It's that time of the year again, where the confluence of all the natural (and semi-natural) markings of the passing of an integer increment of years has come.
It is right smack in the middle of Chinese New Year now. The situation this year is more dire than usual, because there is a new spread of a new viral disease that found itself starting from within Wuhan, China. While not directly affecting me personally, it has, in many ways, dampened down the over festivities by the Chinese nationals who are making their way back home for the holidays. Locally, while the scare isn't as strong as that of SARS back in 2003, it still casts a certain background dampener on things. I guess it also does not help that the Chinese New Year this year is happening so damn early, having shown up in the middle of the last third of January. Folks were barely recovering from the massive commercial festivities that is Christmas, and now they are scampering to mark time for the Chinese Lunar New Year.
But the main purpose of this post isn't to talk about the Chinese Lunar New Year---it is more to reference my own personal anniversary of living on this planet.
At this point in my life, I think I have officially transitioned from ``young adult'' to ``early middle age''. Seems like it was only yesterday that I was just happily graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with a sinking feeling in my stomach because my QPA did not meet the 3.8 quota that was demanded of by my funding organisation (it was slightly more than a decade ago). It's also nearly fifteen years since my first existential crisis in my early twenties, where I was wondering if I could even live past thirty given the odds that were stacked against me (I had bad skin, I was socially under-developed, and I always felt that I was never quite good enough at whatever I was doing). Naturally I had lived past all that by now, and oh boy, what a crazy ride it was over the last decade!
So many things came and went. Each time when I was confronted with something that seemed impossible, I somehow managed to make my way out of it, not damageless, but often with enough luck to get away with damage that I can [eventually] recover from. Each step of the way, I fell, I got up, I got bruised, I healed, and I tried again.
I think that's just how life works, and I am thankful that past me never did fall into the dangerous spiral where the only way onwards was just tapping out of life completely.
Now that I am in ``early middle age'', priorities have altered again. I am no longer filled with the wild abandon of positivity that youth has, and am instead armed with that kind of suspicious eye on overly-optimistic view on things in general. I can also feel that my mind is ``slowing down'' more in some sense, more so than the first detection of the ``slowing down'' back when I was around twenty-two or so. I cannot tell if this is part of the aging process, or is it part of the fact that the past decade has seen the air quality of Singapore going down woefully, from an old average of less than 30 PPM (PM-10/2.5) to less than 50 PPM (PM-10/2.5), for every friggin' day. Some scientific studies have shown that starving the brain of good air has a tendency of fouling up its processes, but to what extent that is a real effect on me versus my own nocebo effect is something that I do not know.
Anyway, I'm ranting again.
Well, for this year, I think that it is time to do a little regroup to plan for the future, more so than any of the other years that I have lived for. My living situation is starting to go on a different path than the ``happy-go-lucky single'', and with that comes more responsibilities, financial and otherwise. That I had to leave my old job with the old organisation due to the ever-increasing impossibility of being allowed to actually do my work is not helpful in the least, since it takes away a good anchor point in my life. The world, as a whole, is also getting more bonkers, and there are just so many things that could have gone wrong that have gone wrong. To what extent I can survive through that is something that I need to consider carefully. Of course this time, I am no longer travelling alone for the most part---I have an ally, a friend, a partner-in-crime, a fellow conspirator with which we can co-support each other through. This will definitely make things different in a good way, and is something that will make us stronger in the years to come.
That's about all the ranting I care to do here for now. There are other things that I could be writing about, but with my real-life dead-tree diary in existence, those things are relegated to the one physical copy that is kept in close possession.
After all, what's on the Internet stays there forever. With the type of media climate we have now, why should we keep things that are that ephemeral in a place that is basically a forever-archive?
Till the next update.
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