Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2025:

1. 2 poems posted here
2. 68 essays/rants posted here
3. 1 prose/stories posted here
4. 2 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 73 articles, up from the 45 articles in 2024.

That's an average of 0.200 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.123 last year.

Like before, there is no NaNoWriMo entry, and this time, it is because it had imploded completely in 2025-04. So there will never be any more NaNoWriMo, ever.

What's there to reflect on the year past?

Honestly, nothing that I haven't ranted on and on throughout the whole year. I hoped that 2025 wasn't going to be a too much of a shitstorm at the end of 2024, but it has turned out to be quite the shitstorm, and I don't even mean it in a vague-ish sort of way.

The world economy is finally showing its true colours of the malaise and decadence of a plutocratic hypercapitalism involving klepto-kakistocracy with shades of various levels of geronto-autocracy as a form of fig-leaf. And like always, the middle class (or what is left of it) is being crushed from above and below.

``MT, that's a lot of big words!''

If you're new here, it is best to find out what each of the terms I just used mean---I tend to choose my words very carefully in the attempt to bring out the specific nuance that I am going for, all without the use of Generative AI.

Not because Generative AI is bad, or that I am too curmudgeonly to use it, but that I find it much more effective and pleasurable to literally use my own words. After all, I did spend a long time reading and using them---it'd be a shame to allow myself to be waste away for the sake of a little convenience, however little that may actually be.

Also, all human parts have this weird ``use it or lose it'' energy-optimisation strategy built-in, and to ensure that my mind is not completely mush from laziness, I do need to exercise it just like how I never skip leg day [from having to run up and down the stairs, as well as to wherever I need to get my commute from].

The year 2026 is already here. I think this is going to be a major turning point for many people, just like how the original COVID-19 was one too. But unlike the global epidemic, I think that this turning point is wholly man-made, and therefore where we end up heading in history is still in the hands of the people who are making the decisions.

I have nothing inspiring to say---I just don't feel inspired. I just want to pass the upcoming year quietly, and without incident.

But I think that it might be too much to ask for.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2024:

1. 0 poems posted here
2. 44 essays/rants posted here
3. 0 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 piece of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 45 articles, down from the 55 articles in 2023.

That's an average of 0.123 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.151 last year.

Note immediately that there is no NaNoWriMo entry---that is deliberate. I decided to stop NaNoWriMo, no thanks to the implosion of the non-profit organisation that ran the event. So there won't be a NaNoWriMo entry in 2024, nor will there ever be any more entries in the foreseeable future.

Do I miss it? In a way, yes, but by now, the whole idea of ``losing'' bits and pieces of me shouldn't be considered anything new. Loss as a concept is something that will become predominant as I transition into true middle-age-hood towards old age.

Already I have received notice via Facebook that a guy whom I had met at reiki class back in 2008/2009 had passed on just in 2024-10, for reasons that were undisclosed. He was just 2 years older than me too. And there were the slowly but steadily increasing number of aged relatives of mine who have passed on, or are hit with some rather... terminal conditions.

I don't talk about them because I was never truly close to them for the most part. My cousins are a solid fifteen or so years older than me, and that's looking at the youngest of them. So to say that there's a generation gap is a mild understatement.

But I'm not here to talk about that for this post.

2024. I saw the loss of two more team members, with even replacements after quite a bit of searching and Providence nearer the end of the year. I don't know if the new folks will stay---only time will tell.

I don't really have much else to say for 2024 in retrospection---just read the ``in the moment'' responses that have been written to get a sense of what I think of 2024.

That's all for now.

May 2025 not be too much of a shitstorm. Amen.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2023:

1. 1 poem posted here
2. 52 essays/rants posted here
3. 0 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
5. 1 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 55 articles, down from the 77 articles in 2022.

That's an average of 0.151 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.211 last year.

2023 was a weird year. I lost a team member, gained a whole section's worth of subordinates, got a new team member, transited from solely being an engineer to a leader/manager-engineer (running appraisals and all the other crazy things asssociated with the managerial-class work), caught/recovered from COVID-19, completed my set of dizi, pulled the trigger to get Stella before the price increase (and before the master maker passed on due to age), started serving in the music ministry of PPCC with Aurelia/Stella, performed with the TGCO in a couple of performances with quite a few newbies, and a whole bunch of other things that I cannot remember precisely.

What else is there to say about 2023 in retrospect? Nothing much, surprisingly. I think I'm fast reaching the age/period of life where I just don't bother looking back any more, not because I'm some kind of visionary (I'm not), but more that the past is starting to become something that is just not worth looking back one. I mean, when we look back at the past, it is usually to reminisce about something that was from back then that made one feel all nice and fuzzy about.

But for me, I don't have much to look back into the past any more. The ``good times'' are long gone, and no thanks to the great time separation that has been humourously called ``before COVID'' and ``after COVID'', the ``good times'' feel even deeper in an era that bears almost not resemblence to who I am now.

The running theme that seems to be with me is that of isolation. Yes, I may be serving in the church, I may have a care group to work with, and yes I have may have made a couple of newer close friends as compared to before, but somehow I was always alone. Okay, Jesus is with me, but He doesn't talk back the way regular people do. It's kinda okay though; while I may be alone, but I'm never truly lonely, if you can understand the difference.

For those who cannot understand, I'm afraid that I have no other means of explaining it. It's like the crude but effective metaphor of ``I can teach you to take a dump, but in the end, you'll need to do it yourself to figure it out'' (a similar concept works for gaining enlightenment, no matter your predilection for beliefs).

``MT, are you then resigned to your fate of not having a significant other?''

Yeah, I suppose so, though I have not completely killed off the possibility by taking what I would call ``irreversible changes'', like reallocation of my budget that were originally set aside for prosaic things like the wedding ceremony, the joint spousal account and the like. Call me a hopeless romantic, but maybe a miracle may happen, though like all people who sort of understand miracles, I cannot see how one might occur if all I do during times when I'm not working, or at rehearsals, or serving in the music ministry, is to stay the hell at home and do whatever I want without leaving my room.

🤷‍♂️

Anyway, that's as much retrospection that I'm willing to allow myself for now. The year 2024 is upon us, and there is a lot to be done. Work-wise, we are starting to see some of the stuff that we need to deliver, and so there's that. Music-wise, we need to ramp up [a little] on our performances just so that we can rebuild the much decimated TGCO due to COVID and other life priorities of the members that got in the way.

As for my personal life side, may the Lord be merciful.

Amen.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2022:

1. 0 poems posted here
2. 76 essays/rants posted here
3. 0 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
5. 0 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 77 articles, down from the 414 articles in 2021.

That's an average of 0.211 pieces of writing a day, compared to 1.134 last year. 2021 was an anomaly, and so having 2022's rate at whatever it is falls in the ``back to normal'' category more than anything else.

As always, much happened in 2022. The world was still reeling from the whole nonsense that was COVID-19, but the second half of the year in SIN city started to become increasingly lax and almost to the point of returning to something that resembled normal. The only big things that would give things away were the mask mandate for public transport use, and for those who dealt with food and beverages. Those in the hospital were also required to wear masks beyond that of regular medical interventions, but they were less likely to be seen out in public that way anyway.

As for me, I'd been steadily getting back into the groove of working. It was almost as though the years between 2015 and 2021 never really existed. As the year went on, I felt almost as spry as when I returned from my studies in the US for the second time, though inexplicably armed with experience that seemingly came from nowhere.

The sourness from the abrupt end to what I thought was my ``forever'' relationship is at most a passing memory---there have been many days that nothing of that sort passed through my mind.

And almost like what happened back before 2015, my skin had started acting up again. It is a blessing in some ways---with shitty skin that cracked and felt extremely uncomfortable, the last thing I felt was being all sexy and confident in wanting to date and/or settle down with someone. So it helped me deal with the social isolation and other related weirdness in an off-beat sort of way.

In many ways, 2022 was like an extension to the personal break I took in 2021, except this time I was being paid by someone else instead of me. That said, it did not mean that I was grifting my way through---real work with real pain was done to justify getting paid. Unlike some people, I simply cannot just take money without actually doing anything---it feels wrong, and I do not like that.

2023 has already started, and with it comes yet another new season. Let's see what the future holds. I have not abandoned any of my writing, nor have I abandoned my life, but definitely things have gone on a completely different trajectory than what 2015 me would have thought/imagined.

As a parting shot to 2022, fuck you COVID-19, fuck you and the pestilential horse you came on. May the likes of you never return again in my life-time and other life-times to come, and may the lessons that you teach us to simultaneously curb our hubris and to celebrate our incredible good fortune in planting the seeds of your demise through decades of exploratory scientific work resonate throughout the generations as a counterbalance to the absolute shit-show of short-termism as modern-day capitalism demands.

Amen.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2021:

1. 15 poems posted here
2. 393 essays/rants posted here
3. 4 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
5. 1 piece of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 414 articles, up from the 49 articles in 2020.

That's an average of 1.134 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.134 last year. While seemingly dramatic in the increase, I would file it under ``understood anomaly'' due to it occurring during the year in which I was on sabbatical.

So much has happened in 2021. For starters, I have read a stupid amount of books/articles, with the last item completed being The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, and the first item completed being They Spent 12 Years Solving a Puzzle. It Yielded the First COVID-19 Vaccines.. It was to be expected: reading has always been one of my core activities when not doing anything else that involves other people (or sleeping, for that matter). I love reading because it allows me to live more lives than the one that I have, and it is a relatively cheap way of obtaining more experience in general.

And in the middle of yet another year of the COVID-19 nonsense, it is a great way to save money and be safe as well, while not going absolutely insane.

As noted also in an earlier retrospective, I have also rediscovered behaviours and habits that had kept me alive before I started falling into the delusion that I was going to be some kind of family man with a stable income, a spouse, children, and all the other trappings that would make any government/capitalist salivate at the amount of labour capture. After all, the more debt a person has, the more that person is motivated to keep on working, and will continue to keep on working even if the environment is absolutely toxic to work in, because all that toxicity is apparently preferable to failing the dependents that one has? Such a nonsensical statement...

Now that all said, I still have not committed myself to a spouse-less life just yet---I don't think nor do I feel that I have enough information to make a decision. Childlessness is definitely high on the list---I cannot, in good conscience, bring in another life who never asked to be born into a world that is heading towards ruin. Let the more worthy/ignorant be the ones who take on this fecundity requirement---if I had more ambition, I would follow them considering that my history is considered unencumbered no thanks to things that had happened in the generation before me. Alas, I'm no ambitious fellow---I just want to contribute my bit to society to avoid being a bum, and then call it when the time comes.

But still, I don't think I'm ready to start another relationship with anyone just yet. Unrich and unattractive middle aged men like me are among the lowest priorities for people seeking a spouse, so I've got that going for me, which is fine.

Enough of looking backwards---I've done lots of that throughout my 2021 blog entries.

What I have not done much is looking ahead, and for good reason: the crystal ball is murky as hell here. SIN city as a whole has no obvious forward trajectory---there is nothing inspirational, nothing aspirational, and nothing good to look forward to, especially for the low/middle socio-economic class folks. COVID-19 is one major factor (it's a global pandemic for crying out loud), but it is what I would say merely the straw that breaks the camel's back. It unearthed the insecurities of SIN city in ways that are harder to keep under wraps, and exposes the many ugly hacks that are being used to prop things up that used to have a thriving-ish economy as a fig leaf cover. Tactical errors were definitely being made, but I will not go as far as to claim that strategic errors are made for the simple reason that I don't have enough information. The power play of the superpowers at the global scale are messing up the international order in ways that make keeping to an obvious strategy hard---I don't believe that it is in SIN city's interest to be seen as taking anyone's side other than our own, though that is often easier said than done given the massive partisanship that was developed over the past decade as personality cults start to become in vogue again.

It is almost as though everyone is trying to compete to see who can best distract their population away from the really tough problems that need decades to concerted effort to truly resolve them.

At a personal level, I'd like to take things a little simpler---just a day at a time. In many ways, I've already made that choice a decade ago when I decided to return to SIN city to serve out my bond instead of making a break for it to carve out my own path through the fabled Silicon Valley. Spite is a very powerful motivator to push oneself outside of one's comfort zone to achieve great and crazy things. But spite is not sustainable---I would end up killing myself. Inasmuch as I had all those weird suicide ideation stuff (and how I still find that life really isn't all that meaningful), killing myself because of unsustainable spite towards external factors feels a little... dumb.

And so I've told myself quietly that I would treat myself a little better and do things in a sustainable way so that when I die, it's not on other's terms but on my own. I don't need to get the latest luxury just to feel good about myself---the mere fact of existence should be its own reward, with everything else as a bonus.

That's probably the closest thing to a ``new year's resolution'' that I will write, I think.

2022 is probably going to still be a year of large amounts of personal introspection as I start to mull what kind of old age life I would live, assuming that I haven't tapped out before then.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2020:

1. 7 poems posted here
2. 35 essays/rants posted here
3. 3 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
5. 3 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 49 articles, up from the 14 articles in 2019.

That's an average of 0.134 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.038 last year. Considering all that had happened to me, I would call this a rather dramatic increase. That natural progression that I talked about as life started to fall into a discernible pattern had been badly disrupted.

In stark contrast to 2019, after hitting the new high with what I can do on my 笛子 and concert flute, and the increased closeness that Chara and I had after she had rebased herself in Singapore, I found myself unable to perform with my instruments for most of the year, and my heart shattered into a thousand pieces when she broke up with me. If there was anything to blame, it would be that of the winds of change from COVID-19 that robbed almost everyone of their sense of normality, a little like the random restarts that one would perform on an optimisation problem after applying the Monte Carlo Markov Chain algorithm.

After about sixteen months of working at the medium enterprise, I have decided to call it quits to re-centre myself and to work through what is meaningful for me.

The emergent health issue that I had referred to at the start of 2020 had been resolved---thank God for that. And coincidentally, I became the trailblazer to assist in handling other emergent health issues in the family; the experience that I gained through my own ordeal served as a good source of information for the rest of my family who ended up taking turns with their own emergent health issues.

As I am writing this summary, I found my past self rather prescient. Here is the relevant chunk:

2020 is going to be a tough year. ... Apart from that, at a personal level, there are many other things that are happening that I do not necessarily have control over. I cannot even see past the March 2020 horizon for some reason---that is how myopic I feel at times.

Only God knew that I would prophesy for myself like that.

And I suppose that is the one good thing that came out of the dumpster fire that was 2020, and that is I have found salvation by acknowledging that Jesus Christ is my personal saviour, and that the Bible is the inerrant word of God Himself. When everything changes, God Himself does not. Which brings me back to the last big thing that I was talking about in an earlier paragraph---I had quit my job. Everyone that had learnt about it expressed confusion, and they all asked the same question: why did I do so?

The answer is the same: it is time for me to go. Specifically, God has laid it upon my heart to know that it is time for me to leave this job. It was not a decision that was made in haste, nor was it made in anger. It was one that was conceived in faith, supported with hard rational evidence, and calculated to happen when it did with a little serendipity from the Lord. While there were obviously going to be systematic issues that contributed to ``pushing'' me out, there was also an overall sense that there was still a mission that I needed to do that could not be done where I was. There are some who think me as being foolhardy for leaving without having a job lined up, but I begged to differ---there was no point staying for the money if the heart was no longer into it. The things that I was doing at work felt increasingly meaningless, both in terms of my training/interest, and in terms of matching the actual vision/impact.

In short, I was not doing something that would glorify God. And it is a no-no. Let whoever reads what I had written here draw their own conclusions---it is a retrospective, not an argumentative essay meant to sway any views.

With the ending of that long relationship with Chara, I no longer feel comfortable with beginning another one---I don't know if this will change, and if it will, when it will change. My meaning of life prior to 2020 was to raise a family and live in bliss with my spouse; now that is over, and with it, the meaning is lost. Work never had any meaning more than just putting food on the table.

So what is next for me? I honestly do not know, and that's why I had to quit when I did. To take time off to re-think about things, to pray to God to show a path that He would want me to follow, so that I can follow it, achieving glory for God through the talents and opportunities that He has set me up for.

2021 will be a pivot point for my life. Years on, I would look back upon this year and either stroke my chin meaningfully, or slap my forehead in exasperation. I cannot see anything beyond the March 2021 horizon again, so I suppose there is something large that will be happening then. I don't know what it will be, but I know that God is there, and that my life is in His hands. He is my rock and anchor, and my faith is built upon that rock.

He will not deny me of the ultimate salvation, but He may still allow me to suffer if it is of His will to do so.

Amen.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2019:

1. 2 poems posted here
2. 8 essays/rants posted here
3. 0 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
5. 3 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 14 articles, up from the 12 articles in 2018.

That's an average of 0.038 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.033 last year. It's horrifically low, but it is, as I mentioned before, a natural progression as life starts to fall into a discernible pattern.

2019 was a mixed bag. On the one hand, I think I've hit a new high with what I can do on my 笛子 and concert flute, and Chara and I have never been closer than where we were at in 2019 when she has finally rebased herself in Singapore. On the other hand, anti-work management at my old work place forced me to make the hard decision to leave it and head out to the great unknown, where I am now working for a medium enterprise, in the middle of a project that was started on a wrong foot and that we are trying to salvage as best as we can. It is a difficult position, to say the least, because I'm used to starting on a good foot, winning the initiative and then just running ahead with it, and never allowing myself to fall behind. This project is the very anti-thesis of how I would normally be running it, and there are many times where I feel that perhaps I am not doing good enough.

An emergent issue came up in my health that can hopefully be resolved with a minor surgery, and that has finally moved along, after getting stalled at the Polyclinic referral stage due to weirdness in their processes in reaching out to patients.

2020 is going to be a tough year. Geo-politically, things are likely to get even weirder with all the big players starting to flex their muscles really hard. Apart from that, at a personal level, there are many other things that are happening that I do not necessarily have control over. I cannot even see past the March 2020 horizon for some reason---that is how myopic I feel at times.

Ah well. As I keep saying to myself, life goes on.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2018:

1. 1 poem posted here
2. 6 essays/rants posted here
3. 0 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
5. 4 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 12 articles, down from the 16 articles in 2017.

That's an average of 0.033 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.044 last year. It's horrifically low, but it is, as I mentioned before, a natural progression as life starts to fall into a discernible pattern.

2018 was more of an amplified version of 2017 in many ways. But among it came a few bright rays of sunshine that made the year a bearable one. I think that I have levelled up on my concert flute playing at a much greater rate than before, and that my general 笛子 playing skills have also improved quite a bit from the cross-training that came about from playing on the concert flute. I spent less time working on writing new music, mostly because the situation at my Chinese Orchestra isn't as dire as before due to having a ``full-time'' conductor being present, but used that time that was released to understand more on musical acoustics of instruments, particularly of the flute/笛子 family.

This post is likely to be the latest quick summary type post that I have put up, and I feel a little bad. The truth here really is that it is no longer as fun to write on Blogger than before, with the mostly unalterable width of the text area of the post body itself, and the massive number of hoops to leap through just to write something on it. My meat-space diary has seen more action than here, and I have little doubts that it will continue to be the case in time to come.

2019 is a year that is likely to see big changes in my life, so here's to dealing with it all and emerging at the end of it a more improved version of myself.

This blog is by no means an abandoned one!

Edit: True to form, when I hit ``publish'', Blogger fucked up the paragraphing of this post, thus necessitating an edit to unfuck it. Good grief!

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2017:

1. 1 poem posted here
2. 8 essays/rants posted here
3. 0 prose/story posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
5. 6 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 16 articles, down from the 29 articles in 2016. That’s an average of 0.044 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.079 last year. This number is grossly low because of two reasons:

1. There is a large chunk of writing that I am working on that isn't ready for release yet---it is a rewrite of the existing 笛箫 Materials (if link is dead use this one when it is live).
2. There's a substantial chunk of phone-written literature put together when I was in Seattle that I had not gotten around to putting it onto my prose/story blog.

2017 was a year where many unsolicited for changes came about. It was routine punctured with random high drama followed by a steady erosion of what made working at where I am fun. But like a boiling frog in a pot of water over the fire, the pain doesn't really come until either the fire goes away, or if it gets too much and the frog dies.

Other than that, nothing much to report really. It's just another year at this point.

Onward to the next one...

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2016:

1. 6 poems posted here
2. 18 essays/rants posted here
3. 0 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
5. 4 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 29 articles, down from the 65 articles in 2015.

That's an average of 0.079 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.18 last year. It's horrifically low, but it is, as I mentioned before, a natural progression as life starts to fall into a discernible pattern.

2016 is, in some sense, the year that I start my pivot towards emphasising more on my musical development. Music writing is no different from regular writing, in many ways it can be seen as a more intense version of a regular piece of writing. It takes time---lots of it at times---and so that's why I've started tracking it from now on.

On other aspects of life, let's just say that personally, things are really looking up, and I am eager to see what 2017 brings to me personally.

On a more public note, 2016 was a crapshoot. The very worst of what ignorance has to offer has basically thrown the existing world order back to the era of World Wars, where strongmen ruled and people were too afraid to think for themselves and stand up against the injustices until it is too late. Lots of well-loved celebrities have seemed to choose the same general period to pass away, and there were just so much random upheavals that there are other folks who took the time to sit down and write them all out .

But it's over now.

2017 is already here, and change, more than ever, is afoot. Uncertainty is always present, but I am confident and eager to see what's coming.

To the future!

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2015:

1. 22 poems posted here
2. 39 essays/rants posted here
3. 3 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here

And thus the grand total here is 65 articles, down from the 280 articles in 2014.

That's an average of 0.18 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.77 last year. It's a little low, but I think that it is representative of the new normal for me, where I no longer have the steady supply of stimulating events (both good and bad) that come from intensive social interactions that come from being in a pure academic environment.

The past year itself passed by with very little lows, much to my satisfaction. I now have a steady companion who will be transferring her base of operations back into Singapore, and she has reminded me of a life that I had once denied myself of because I had been hurt quite badly due to my naïveté in thinking that people can and will change, not to mention the whole loss of trust in people due to... let's not talk about it here since it is already in the past.

Last year saw the whole marketing hubbub that was ``SG50'', the year-long government-supported marketing blitz to celebrate Singapore's 50 years of independence. Despite my interpretation of just how tacky that sounded, I was probably involved in more events relating to SG50 than I would care to admit. My interest in my music has heightened and levelled up, partly because of the co-influence of my companion and partner, partly from an exposure to the ``real'' world of professional music through a collaboration or two, and partly from a candid realisation of the trials and tribulations to pursue an ideal. I reaffirmed my love of music not as a means of bragging about my prowess, but as a means of expression, which goes as far as standing up for my own thoughts and views against the establishment.

No regrets there.

I am starting to enjoy the new-found feeling of assertion. Unlike the past where I was subjugated in one form or another and always having to play toady to ensure survival, being older now and a working adult has given me more leeway and conviction to assert myself, that I can think and am willing to think, and am unwilling to let anyone cow me to follow their own perspective of rightness and wrongness without having a convincing argument. I find that I am clearer in my values, and am more willing to assert my values in the face of opposition, mostly because I am now less beholden to many external parties.

In short, I am fast learning how to be my own man.

The value of a good mentor is often understated, and my interaction with an elder is the reason why there is sudden clarity in many things. There is no shame to ask for help and advice when one needs it---it is when one has doubts and yet refuse to seek advice despite spending time thinking through that one is the fool.

Much of my free time not spent on practising on my 笛子 or piccolo/flute was spent on reading. My martial arts training had been slackening from the haze and general laziness, and I will be bringing them back on track this year. Like my companion says, there will be some big and wonderful things happening in the year ahead, and like her, I am looking forward to them as well.

To the future and beyond!

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2014:

1. 9 poems posted here
2. 36 essays/rants posted here
3. 234 prose/story posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here

And thus the grand total here is 280 articles, up from the 27 articles in 2013.

That’s an average of 0.77 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.074 last year. That isn't too bad, all things considered---at least it is a way of showing that I have picked up a bit of my writing. It's not a lot, for sure, and I broke my promise to write a story item a day at the beginning of the year just past. It turns out that trying to write a small piece a day isn't as easy as it sounds, and I will bear that in mind for the upcoming year.

The past year itself seemed to pass rather uneventfully, for the most part. Things that ought to remain buried have been buried, and new things and experiences that have come about, I have embraced. There are interesting signs coming in the horizon as I am about to complete the third decade of revolving around the sun. I am more comfortable in the skin I'm in, and are slowly finding the strength to face some of the demons that had caught up with me just a year-and-a-half ago. I am more than two-thirds through the KJV, and am nearly three-quarters through the 1001 Nights. I have read many books, experienced many different lives, and in many ways, have changed much more than before. Perhaps I am an improved person, but it is hard to tell.

2015 will be an interesting year. Changes are afoot, I can smell it in the air. In many ways, it is the time of consolidating the juvenile lessons that I have learnt over the past three decades and to make myself into the image of the man that I want to become. As the poet saith, 三十而立, and therefore this new-found sense of direction is not altogether unwelcome nor unexpected. Work is taking on a new character, and I cannot wait to tackle the new challenges that have been sent my way. My physical injuries have mend themselves most remarkably, and therefore it is time to retool my body once again to chisel out the man within. My psychological injuries have taken the time to heal, and the psyche itself is feeling much stronger than before. Where there was once bleakness and blight, I see small rays of light signifying hope.

With the good that come, there will be the limits that surface. As I progress through my current trajectory, old opportunities will slowly fade away as I walk farther down the path I am on, with new ones lurking on the sides if I choose to slow down to have a look. Some rays of hope may turn out to be illusive delusions; that is an eventuality that I will need to take into account. I look not at the path that I had gone---there is no sense in dwelling on the past---and look eagerly instead at the paths that lie before me.

The world's my oyster, and I will reap my pearls.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2013:

1. 3 poems posted here
2. 22 essays/rants posted here
3. 1 prose/story posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry that I have censored because it was dreadful in the choice of content

And thus the grand total here is 27 articles, down from the 127 articles in 2013.

That’s an average of 0.074 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.34 last year. I'll be frank, it's an atrocious number of writing, at least, if you compare only the publicly available stuff. I have reverted to writing diary entries these days instead of using my own blogs to publish my thoughts on issues around us, partly because it is just more handy (grab book, grab fountain pen, go!) compared to using Blogger (log in, click new post, realise I can't gauge how much I'm writing from the lousy back-end text entry area, load up Q10 to scribble, copy and then paste into text area before publishing). The other part to the reason is that my thoughts on many things have started to stray more and more into the not-so-good-for-public-consumption realm.

What this means is that I have decided that certain thoughts that I have are to be kept relatively private, and are not meant for world consumption. Is it because they are seditious? No, they are just private thoughts. It's tricky that way. Sort of like a religious conviction---you have them, but you can't exactly explain or even talk about it that makes sense to anyone but yourself.

Besides, now that I've turned more or less into one of the millions of corporate drones in the world, what kind of care-free frivolous whimsical writing am I supposed to do? I don't really have much good news to write about, and I've been on cold turkey from writing verse because I think my verse is just terrible, and not to mention that I am less inspired these days due to corporate drone-hood.

The last six to seven months of being back in Singapore have been very sobering. The environment that I was used to is no longer existent. Everywhere I look, I see new and strange sights that I would not have dreamed of just two years ago. Everyone seems to be rushing around in circles, and those who seem smart enough to escape the cycle of busy work have done so by just leaving it behind and disappearing elsewhere. It's a bleak outlook, my fellow reader, a very bleak one. And it's getting to the cynic in me.

This year though, I have rekindled my old hobby---reading, and I don't mean reading scientific papers from conference proceedings or journals, I mean fiction, or at the very least, classics. Already I have put up a reading list on my own web site to track the books that I am reading, will read, and have read. Perhaps this is my way of escaping the cycle of busy work, to embed myself in alternate worlds that were created by writers past and present, to see things from their perspective, to live more lives than I can physically do so vicariously.

I think I'll boost the writing output for this year. I can't let it slide away like that. Of all the things that I do that are not work-related, writing comes in as the first thing, followed by music, followed by my martial arts and running, of which I had not been doing much of late due to over-use injuries. So, as a part of the plan, I will write a short story fragment every day, using the venerable WriteThis 2, my steady companion throughout all these years to help me keep my ``blitz'' style of writing going. At the same time, I'm doing a rewrite/retelling of the fantasy story I wrote last year. Having read the Ender series, I think I have a gimmick that I can explore a little more fully than that horrible draft I had written earlier and make it into something a little more substantial, but infused with a little more local flavour. I refuse to sound like a typical American or British writer---I think that the interesting Singaporean style of talking and phrasing will be a more refreshing feel than what has already been said out there. It won't be a best seller (because I'm not going to get a publisher for it), but it should be quite fun. I'll probably work on it a little each weekend for the rest of this year as a means of getting something useful out. Can't do it more frequent than that because it will start to eat into my Aikido, running and reading time. I value my reading time of the Economist a lot---that periodical contains way more content and punch than the average person that I converse with these days. How sad can that be?

To the few loyal followers of my blog(s), I apologise deeply for the relative lack of updates. Let us make a deal. No matter what kind of crap I have, I will try to write something here at least once every fortnight. It's one of the few tenuous connections that we have left between you, the reader, and I, considering that I am almost on the verge of shunning that abominable social network known as Facebook. No matter how inane the post may be, no matter how short it may be, I will write something here every fortnight at the very least. Perhaps such a schedule will allow this blog to not fall into oblivion like all the other blogs in existence.

And with that, I conclude the oddball year that was 2013 and look forward to a better one in 2014, where it will be the official last year of being twenty-something.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2012:

1. 57 poems posted here
2. 66 essays/rants posted here
3. 3 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here

And thus the grand total here is 127 articles, down from the 156 articles in 2011.

That's an average of 0.34 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.43 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.

Last year was quite a major turning point in my life---I started struggling even harder through my PhD programme in UIUC. It dominated most of my life to the point that I just had to give it up. Doing so meant that I had to deal with the aftermath of that. Will I regret this in the future? Perhaps not, but only time will tell if this is the best decision to make.

Other than that, 2012 was really quite uneventful. I wrote a fantasy story for my NaNoWriMo entry, something that I had never done before. I'm not particularly pleased with the ending as it felt rushed, so perhaps I might actually fix that during this year before November comes by again.

Well, that's all I have. Onward to a better tomorrow, I suppose.

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.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2010:

1. 113 poems posted here
2. 90 essays/rants posted here
3. 10 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here

And thus the grand total here is 214 articles, down from the 286 articles in 2009.

That's an average of 0.59 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.78 last year. The general lack of writing is not really due to tardiness about my part, but that there are a lot of things that I cannot write about because it involves things related to work. And since I spend most of my time at work, that in itself is a large omission that leads to the general reduction in the amount of writing I do.

I have fixed the URLs to be more reflective of the sites that they are linked to, and have resurrected the old non-specific link to act as a direction board for all the material that I have just in case folks were still using the old URL in their hyperlinking system.

Compared to last year, there were much fewer emotional roller coasters. Ida is starting to become a passing memory, and my short stint with Mint is starting to get into the phase of being faded away into oblivion as time goes by. I have more or less not bothered myself too much about the whole relationship issue, and from that, have discovered a whole new avenue of inner peace. Work has picked up suddenly over the course of the last few months, with the intensity so high that I hardly can tell which day of the week I am in---time just passes ever so quickly.

I have more or less successfully excised myself from a few of the social groups that have been causing me more grief than happiness, a sort of tribute to one of Regina Brett's rules. That said, I highly encourage readers to look for the 45 rules that Regina came up with when she turned 45 (not 90, which was what the chain email said when I first received it)---those rules make a really good guideline on how best to live life.

In many ways, I found that 2010 was a year where I grew even more, being enlightened on more than one occasion about how the world works. Though the path ahead can be rather annoying, at least I have a better peace of mind, and can more or less sleep soundly should I actually have the chance to. These couple of weeks have been quite trying, what with the general festive occasions juxtaposed with the heavy theories that I need to read, understand and resynthesize as a part of some of the work that I am doing. Now that the end of year is officially gone and a new one has begun, it is almost as though a second wind were blowing through my very self and giving me the much needed impetus to forge on ahead.

But of course, in the process of aging and gradual enlightenment, one does start to realise that there are many uncertainties in life that needs to be looked into at some point, not necessarily in the present. Quoting somewhat indiscriminately from one of the films of the Matrix series, one truly ``cannot see beyond a decision that one does not truly understand''. The lack of understanding of a decision prevents the ability to at the ramifications and consequences of the choice that was taken---this is not cyberpunk bullshit but something that is rather rooted in reality. In AI terms, this can even be thought of as the horizon problem, where the particular AI algorithm is unable to provide a good solution because it is lying beyond the level in which it is allowed to search.

People seem to feature strongly in 2010. Folks who made my blood boil are having fewer occasions of doing so due to the above-mentioned excision, while I have also strengthened some of the bonds that I had with some of my oldest friends. Everyone seems to be suffering from various problems---sometimes when I empathise with them, I feel indignant about them having to deal with all the nonsense. But I suppose these are just issues that everyone have to deal with at some point in life.

So 2010 is over, and 2011 is now. There are still a few rough edges that need dealing with, but I do have a good feeling for this year, no matter how small it is.

Towards a better future!

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2009:

1. 136 poems posted here
2. 138 essays/rants posted here
3. 11 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here

And thus the grand total here is 286 articles, down from the 331 articles in 2008.

That's an average of about 0.78 pieces of writing a day, compared to the 0.91 last year. Once again, I can't say that I have written any less than last year, because that NaNoWriMo entry consumed what is equivalent to roughly 76 essays/rants due to its length (and that the mean length of an essay/rant that I post here is about 800 words or so). I don't seem to write that much often these days, either from writer's fatigue or just from the general discomfort about life in general. Of particular note is the closing of the blog that Ida and I co-authored; it occurred at roughly the same time that she broke up with me last year. Nevertheless, the twothree stories that were there have been transplanted to my own prose/stories blog as republished entries, in case anyone wants to read them.

To date, I have written about 1385 pieces of writing over the last 5 years. 5 years! I can't believe that I have been writing on such a public platform for such an amount of time. And all I could remember then was that I started my first blog to record some of the poems that I was writing which I used to emote and talk about the parts of life that seemed to be going all wrong for me. 2009 has been simultaneously the most eventful and the most heart-breaking of all the years that I have lived through thus far. It is almost exactly half-a-year ago that Ida broke up with me, leaving me without a soul for a few good months, which inadvertently led to my first and ever binge drinking with my colleagues almost a month after that, which caused my first and last drunken hangover. Of course, prior to that, happiness was all abound, when I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and was looking forward to a decent future.

And now, after that event six months prior, it seems that time and luck has both run out for me. All things that could go wrong, went wrong indeed, and I'm not even sure how I am holding on together right now. Needless to say, the past is catching up with me, and once more the future is clouded with doubt as I attempt to figure the best way to navigate through the obstacles that keep getting thrown in my way. Not an auspicious start to a new year, but we take what we can get.

So, goals! I think I've awakened something even deeper inside me after NaNoWriMo; I seem to have a stronger interest in literature once more, and am starting to have grandiose ideas that need to be put down on the metaphorical paper so that I can express the ideas that I have. And so, here's to more writing ahead.

And may 2010 be a much better year than 2009 ever was.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written for 2008:

1. 126 poems posted here
2. 186 essays/rants posted here
3. 17 prose/stories posted here
4. 2 stories posted here

And thus the grand total here is 331 articles, down from the 447 in 2007.

That's an average of 0.91 pieces of writing a day, compared to the 1.2 last year. I can't say that I wrote less than last year per se, because all these numbers do not take into account the number of words that were actively typed. There's the possibility that I'm writing more by word count, since the gross total of non-poetry writing is actually 205, which is marginally more than the 191 in 2007. And since essays/prose/rants tend to outnumber poems by sheer word count (the mean number of words per non-poem writing has an infimum of 400), it is most likely that I have written a whole lot more.

I have done several fixes the blogs. First off is the use of labels to highlight specific attributes of posts. Initially I wanted to use the labels to tag the contents, but realised that it was probably more futile than expected. Second is the switching to my own custom script to fix the formatting to aid in reading. I didn't like the way in which web browsers discard the end-of-sentence double spaces, and the staid quotes, and the fact that I had to memorise many useless entity numbers to type common punctuations like the ellipsis and the dash. I liked the readability of the text under edit mode, and thus created the script. Lastly, I've managed to bring myself to fix all the numbering problems in the archive of old poems, and the haikus, and even the stanza rambles.

2008 also marked the year in which I created my own information portal as a general-purpose website to store things that cannot be stored on the blogs. In fact, most of the writing for the year was channelled to that website, and the various term papers that I had to write, including the final report for my research project.

The upcoming goals for my writing would be to write more short stories and poems, and reduce the number of rants I have. Hopefully this time around, I am able to meet these goals.

Alright, that's all I want to say for 2008. Onward to 2009 we go!

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written for 2007:

1. 256 poems written & published here
2. 191 rants/prose written & published here

And thus, the grand total of writing is about 447 articles, up from the 152 from 2006.

That is an average of about 1.2 pieces of writing a day. I think that if I don't actually have any improvements in writing, then something must have gone really wrong somewhere. 2007 was definitely one year where I had many issues which required me to vent out on via writing.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to further stream the writing that is occurring in this particular blog. Originally conceived as both a prose-and-rant type of blog, I am now going to specialise this blog to a rant-only blog, while this will serve as the new prose-only blog.

Other modifications include the shifting of the flagship from the poetry one to rant one. Honestly, I've done my book-keeping, and I realise that most folks are still as gossipy as before and would rather spend time reading rants than pieces of poetry, hence the shift. Other notable changes include the consolidation of friends' links to one place instead of maintaining one on each blog.

A rather minor fix was to edit the setting of the archive of old poems on the old forums to better gel in with the rest of the blogs, as well as to put in some links to the more modern incarnations of the blogs in case folks [accidentally] stumble upon it and actually want to see what I've been up to recently.

Most of the fixes are internal, so everything should be going well. Meanwhile, my target for this year will be to spend more time writing fictional episodes, spend less time on rants, and spend roughly the same amount of time on my poems.

Who knows? Maybe I can start compiling what I've written into a more tangible form. Meanwhile, this bears repeating:

Disclaimer: All views expressed in this blog are #1 mine and mine alone unless otherwise indicated and #2 are consistent only at the time of publication of the particular entry. Specifically, do not take my views as the views of the general populace, and do not attempt to chastise me for taking a different stance from before.

Again, what I'm trying to say is that all views are temporal in nature, and should be taken in context.

Alright, it's already 6 am in the morning, and I am still awake. Damn I need to get some sleep, otherwise I'm probably not going to be getting any at all.

Until next time.