The trouble with new year's resolutions.

I met someone. Well we didnt actually meet and in the end, it may not have been as significant as i intially thought it was, but i guess i should i start from the beginning.

New Year's Eve 2006: i had managed to squirm my way out of spending New Year's with my family. It's not because i dont love them which i do. But every holiday is the same sequence of events: "we're not going to do anything", " i wish we could do something no matter how small", "we're doing a small thing but invivting just family members","... and close firends", "...and not so close friends", "...and generally anyone who's not doing anything else", "...plus some of those who already had plans but who we'll now ask to cancel those plans so they can attend our shindig." You get the idea. What follows is a mosaic of awkward unpleasentness and neverending boredom smothered in desperate anguish topped off with persistent irritation. Fortuantely for me, i dont celebrate any of the major holidays for one reason or the other. But New Year's is mine, my one day to let myself get lost in the public euphoria.

Anyway, this year i got away from my family and was over at a slow moving party helping an "uncle" of mine dj. Really i was just watching him; all i did was lift the speakers and endless trunks of music, he carries about 5,000 cds to each gig he plays. It was a fun night, a few interesting people, or people that seemed interesting. I hardly talked to anyone there (surprise, surprise) but still managed to have a good time.Great food, open bar for the djs ( that included me). Got to dj abit at the end, about 5.30 am when only the people that were too drunk to leave were still there. And i made my new year's resolution as i do ever year. It's not a very sensible ritual as you really shouldnt wait till the turn of the year to improve your life but there you go, i still do that. So my vow this year was to pick my life up out of the gutter i'd abandoned it in. Very simple.

For the most part, i've stuck to that resolution. I usually do cos i make my resolutions pretty general and easy to stick to. Last year it was "keep it real." I've had atleast one paying job this year, even though it was for a month, and i'm restarting my classes in a while, slowly getting myself onto some kind of path to somewhere. I think the long break i took off from being part of the living world has done me alot of good in that i have a better understanding of what's important to me and what really isnt. I've learned to prioritise and compromise. I cant think of 2 greater tools for getting by. You'd be surprised how much you can get accomplisehd by implementing these 2 keys into your life. Try it.

I realise now this has almost nothing to do with the person i met. Like i said, we didnt actually meet but we bumped into each other on the net. The only reason it's worth talking about is that for the first time in a while, i actually looked forward to talking to someone. I found myself waking up in the middle of the night to check if she was online cos she's in a different time zone cos i really enjoy talking to her. There's alotta people that open their mouths and make alot of noise but dont say anything. I like the fact that She actually has something to say, something that's not quite been said before.

Perhaps one of the saddest thing i ever head was this guy on TV that was trying to demonstrate the death of originality. He said that in Germany or some place, they have a competition where you're asked to prepare 16 bars of original music and that in all it's years, no one has ever managed to produce a combination of 16 bars that's never been played and recorded. I might have the figures wrong or the story, but the gist of it was that everything that is, already has been. It got me wondering if i could muster up an original thought, something that no one in the history of time has ever thought about and eventually i succeeded. I wont share it cos it doenst matter what i thought about but that i did think abut something no one ever had. how can i be sure? It's just one of those things you know, you know?

So talking to this girl, i felt kinda alive, a little bit happier than usual. It was as if we'd known each other for ages and we shared things i'm pretty sure neither of us had shared with anyone else. That kind of thing is easier with strangers that are not directly attached to your daily life. It felt great waking up looking forward to an offline message or something to that effect. I dont know, maybe it's died down now that we know each other abit better. I still look forward to running into her, i'm just not losing sleep over the fact that we didnt talk today.

And that's alright. I dont mind feeling dead inside most of the time; it's enough to know that its still possibe for me to feel alive every once in a while.

The trouble with being an accountant.

I hate that everyone around me thinks they know what they want to do for the rest of their lives. I hate that i'm the only one who knows for sure that i dont know what i want to do or how i'm going to do it. The difference is, they've convinced themsleves that they've figured it out and are thus pursuing their respective illusions whereas i, in my profound knowledge of being ignorant, have put my life on hold until i figure things out and am thus confined to self stagnance.

Ofcourse they are much better off than i am for atleast they'll have their shattered illusons to fall back on when they realise it's too late to pursue what they actually wanted all along. Better to be an unhappy accountant than an ambitious bum which is where i am surely headed if i dont have a life altering epiphany one of these days. It's just that i'd hate to be an accountant. Even for the maffia, which is about as exciting as that job can get.

When i finished 'O' level, we had a long 9 month break from school during which i hoped desperately to get a job because i knew the idleness would kill me. My dad's "friend" offered me a job at his company. Really it was to grease relations with my father whose approval this smart businessman needed desperately for a government related contract. On the day i was meant to go in for an interview for the job, i got dressed real serious looking, the one time i can remember not feeling awkward tucking my shirt in. I wanted to impress the dude which would in turn make my dad happy which i felt he deserved for putting up with me. I get to the guy's office and he's this short South Korean gentleman, dressed in all black and looking like he was straight out of a James Bond movie. But he was really nice; we talked about ice cream ( he owned an ice cream producing company among other things) and eventually he asked me what i wanted to do. I'll tell you now i was thrown by this question. Completely blindsided. I really should have expected it and it had occurred to me that he would ask something to this effect but all the talk about ice cream and the different flavours just sent me off track. I couldn't respond.

It didnt sem to bother him; he musta needed that contract real bad. So he walks me around one of his plants asking me if i could see myself doing any of these jobs for him: everything from working in what was essentially a large freezer filled with several vats of milk to driving one of his delivery vans and every process in between. I liked the driving gig but i didnt have a license yet so i couldnt take him up on that. I found myself rejecting one position after another until at last, the guy seeming increasingly desperate, made a job up for me on the spot. He said he'd set up an office for me to count money all day. That's it. Just sit there, count and bundle money all day. I thought about it for a fraction of a second and politely turned him down saying i probably wasnt cut out for the ice cream industry, being lactose intolerant and all. He was disappointed but was decidedly more relieved that i wouldnt be working in his plant.

At the time, i had my eye on a job working in an internet cafe an auntie of mine was setting up at the time when there was only a handful of them in our city. My dad was obviously disappointed least because i didnt even get that internet cafe job and ended up sitting around the house all 9 month of that never-ending vacation but i figured there'd be plenty more oportunities to buy his love with equally self-serving gestures.

The point is, sometimes it's not about knowing what you want to do; it's about refusing to do what you know you dont want to. And that's why i pick bum over accountant in a heartbeat.