18 years of homelessness

I celebrated this miserable day simply this year with only a bag of cassava chips and a cup of bubble tea. Normally I would go for something more extravagant like expensive restaurant or ice cream but I decided to just settle with bubble tea this year since I really do not want to go beyond 60kg.

Honestly, I feel quite different this year. I do not think I am as emo as in other years. Perhaps I am slowly accepting to this life. It does not matter whether it is in a positive sense (i.e. God's way) or in a negative sense (i.e. I am tired of fighting anymore). Another reason could be the aftermath of the eRetreat over the weekend and the end of Landings run yesterday. In fact, my group had an online rosary just now. My past self would just come up with an excuse so that we would have it on another day as I just would like to drown myself in sorrows on 28 October. Anyway, I did not really feel good with a group rosary and I prefer to have a private time when I am praying.

Yesterday was the conclusion of the Landings run and the concluding sharing reminded me that I am not a junk. I should not be too harsh with myself and learn to look at things from God's perspective. I am meant to have this current life, with all the goods and the bads. I just come to realise that the message in my perpetual calendar for 27 October reads: May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith. What an apt message since I always associate 28 October as a day when my life turned to shit 18 years ago. I only realised about this coincidence now since in previous years, I am not diligent in reading the perpetual calendar daily.

One interesting thing was after my visual rosary, some of my group members thought I was very good with prayers or leading prayers. Ooops... Leading prayer is my big weakness since I am never really taught on how to pray. Sometimes I also think in my native language when I pray so saying a proper prayer in English is very awkward for me. Well it was good to clear the misunderstanding as it meant to give credits to the deserving Ones. The credits obviously go to God and Mother Mary. With tonnes of rosary videos in Youtube, it is divine providence that I could find the one that I used in the end and others found the images and music in that video powerful.

Currently what makes me emo is my right back pain. Huhuhu... I did swings for the very first time on Monday and I was worried if I did something wrong as my back and the back of my thighs felt more sore than usual. Today what I feel with my back is pain. Bleah.. It reminds me of the back pain that required physiotherapy previously. Maybe something is indeed injured there since a few years ago and now it happens again at the same spot. I hope it gets better tonight and I am already prepared to skip gym tomorrow if the pain still persists.

Anyway looking back at my old posts, I am quite surprised to realise that I actually did not post emo stuff on 28 October every year. I thought it would be like end of year review or birthday post that I will remember not to skip. Haha.. Maybe it is true that I am getting numb and already sort of accept this life as it is.

Relationshits

Politicking at work is normal and expected. But at least if you want to do it, do it with more class instead of some gutter politics. I was very pissed last week with one of my colleagues from another team. Firstly, the issue is not really something within the control of my team and secondly I am not in charge. The bitch was just using my name just because she did not dare to use my boss' name. What irritated me even more that she usually complains about how her subordinates are lazy and like to taichi stuff and yet now she is doing the same thing. What a hypocrite.

Instead of retaliating in the same way, moving forward I will show her how to play politics with class. Previously she would use me as a bridge if she needed something from my boss but she did not dare to approach directly. I would not entertain her anymore when she has such issues. I usually try to settle things 'behind the screen' as much as possible, especially when there is a problem, so as not to embarrass the culprits. Next time if it involves her or her team, I will just skip that and go directly to the group email which includes her boss. After all, in our common tasks, usually her team is the one causing the problem. So in all, it is her loss since usually her tasks and teams are the one having more problems and then will require help or input from my team.

Leaving this bitch aside, something interesting from my old place poped out again last year. My godma forwarded me a screenshot of my old photo (taken for World Pharmacists Day a few years ago) in a recruitment advertisement. I was not even aware that the photo was used for this purpose as I only knew that the photo is still being used in the 'About' page of the corporate Facebook page. I find the tagline very hilarious: Make a positive move. The word positive and me do not go hand in hand. Haha.. I joke with my friends that this screenshot is a perfect meme material to beware of scam because the positive move is actually moving out of that company. Lol.

Something related to my previous post that I did not write then is another factor that sort of spoiled my mood for the weekend retreat. I decided to block my mum on Whatsapp on Saturday morning. I have been ignoring her for the past one month with the hope that she would speak to my sisters when there are issues at home instead of running away from the problems and texting me while there is nothing I can do. Unfortunately, things do not change and I am just fed up with her repeating words about my dad (Mum, please, dad is gone. Thinking of him is not going to help with anything) and 'Do you love me? Do you care?' (Excuse me, do you even love/care for me? You are the one leaving me homeless for so long.) I know this is so un-Christ-like but I am just running out of the capacity to love and care about others.

It suddenly dawns upon me that it is end October and it is not a surprise that my mood is getting worse recently. In fact, tomorrow will be the 18th year of my homelessness. Bleah.. Clearly I have not gotten over it :'(

Hectic, disastrous, tiring weeks

The past two weeks have been hectic and irritating for me. Two weeks ago was the week that I had to return to office and I found it very tiring because of the need to wake up very early. The commuting time is really a waste of time. Surprisingly that was also the week that I went to gym for 5 sessions. Something that never happened for so long. The Friday of that week was particularly spoiling my mood. Firstly, I received an email from my Thai mail forwarder that the box set I pre-ordered since March was finally ready for shipping. I was pissed because they did not do a proper bookkeeping and initially wanted to charge me for shipping fee and service fee again. Although it was finally settled after a few emails, the experience got me quite worked up. Anyway I will not be using them anymore since I just found out a few weeks ago that vPost also has a service in Thailand now.

My photobooks from photobook worldwide also arrived and I was initially very excited. Sadly they arrived in a trashed condition. I have not really scrutinised if the quality of the print is much better now as I was so pissed that that they 'saved' on shipping which was the cause of the damaged condition by forcing two books into one shipping envelope. I asked for a refund but they said they would reprint and resend. The replacements should arrive sometime next week and I shall see how before giving an updated review as compared to the last time I ordered from them few years ago.

The inability to hold my tongue made me suffer for half of this week. Every time I buy the kakiage from Teppei Shokudo, I will get gastric and yet I always cannot resist. I had it for lunch on last Sunday and despite taking omeprazole before bed, the pain woke me up at around 3am for me to take antacid. I think my hernia thingy also contributed because otherwise the pain would not last until 3 days despite medicines. Bleah.. As a result, I skipped gym for 3 days and I also Grabbed on Tuesday.

Wednesday was another overeating days as my Landings group asked for a meet up before the retreat. Ironically, we ended up eating at the Grumpy Bear which I am quite bored of. Haha.. That was one of my frequently ordered Deliveroo at the peak of the circuit breaker. Honestly without the 30% off, the original prices are too expensive. Even in the restaurant, we ordered the bundled for 5 and that kind of thing.

I had the first ever eRetreat experience this weekend which I think was quite disastrous too. I was so tired on Friday night that I just KO-ed before 11pm. As a result I woke up at 5+ on Saturday morning. I did not want to sleep again as I was scared that I would overslept. I was so hungry too and that was how I ended up Grabbing McD breakfast. Sigh.. All the overeating this week cost me almost $100 and I already gained 3kg since the week I had to return to office. I feel so shitty since all the effort to lose weight and cut down on food for so long just got busted that way.

Anyway back to the eRetreat, I kept feeling distracted. There was even someone knocking for survey and despite saying that I was in the middle of a meeting, he still tried to small talk. He even asked if I had any drinks. Gosh.. I happened not to have any since I just finished the stock in my fridge. Suddenly I remembered the Dasani from my McD breakfast and he did not mind water so that went to him.

The eRetreat was the best that it could be since it was a virtual. It was no fault of the organisers of the distractions I faced. It is just that over all, I did not feel that I really retreated from my normal life to be able to focus. It did not help that I felt irritated with myself. I failed my promise of daily rosary yesterday. I was chionging a drama and I was left to pray at 1115pm. I fell asleep after 2 decades and I woke up past midnight. I was like: fuck it and went to sleep already. I know that there is nothing wrong and it is not a sin or what but I just feel angry and irritated with myself to break my own promise. I hope it is a lesson for me to prioritise my daily rosary in order not to break my own promise as when I am busy, I tend to leave it until past 11pm as the last thing I do before the day ends.

I kinda like series which have inter-connected characters and split to few parts with each part focusing on few characters. This approach feels better than combining everything into one part with all the characters.  The series I was chiong-ing yesterday was quite special for me. I finished the first part last week and that was the part with the high school students. This next part is more mature as the characters are not studying anymore. I am very surprised that I think this part is better since usually I am a sucker for high school stories. Not to mention that there are touching parts that made me cry. Now I am quite excited to watch the third part which will focus on a married couple. Although I read the reviews that this part is quite boring, I will give it a chance.

That's all for tonight. I actually still want to rant about work with what happened last week but perhaps that will be for another post on another day.

Affirmation

Resting too long for gym will eventually turns into laziness. I had to drag my feet yesterday to return to gym because I had been resting since Sunday. That turned to be a blessing in disguise as I unexpectedly bumped into my ex-staff when I was shopping at FairPrice after gym. It was nice that we still recognised each other just from the eyes and forehead since we were still wearing mask. We ended up having around 15 minutes of catching up in the instant noodles alley. I actually told myself after last Sunday that I would stop eating instant noodles. Normally that means I would not even go to the instant noodles section but somehow yesterday I decided to do so.

I honestly cannot bother and am not interested with my old workplace already. However, I got snippets which made me very happy with where I am now while my ex-colleagues are still dealing with the same old shit. Huehehe... What really struck me was when she said that she hoped I would be back as time might just be as bad as when I was still around but at least she found it more enjoyable. For me, that was an affirmation that regardless of what shit my bosses were saying about me, at least my decision that welfare of my staff came first was appreciated by them. After all, that was my priority back then instead of bootlicking just to win favour from bosses (which would not happen anyway) and pushing things top down to the ground staff.

I messaged my ex-student who then became my ex-colleague about my unexpected encounter and I was rewarded with another snippet. She was sharing how a new trainee would be leaving for a greener pasture and another trainee who CMI. I never recruited CMI people and the staff I hired back then were all good catches. People were criticising me back then why I was so slow in recruiting and now they should learn that my QC was good.

With that, I hope the assholes who were complaining that I was strict back then now are enjoying their shit. At least I was strict for the things that mattered instead of being strict just to push agendas from the top.

This is a reminder for me to be patient when things do not go my way and to trust in God's timing. Yes I still have some bitterness but at least now things are better for me and I should be grateful for that.

Visual Rosary

Leading prayer is something I am terrible and terribly scared at. Thus, I sort of 'cheated' to volunteer to lead prayer tonight since tomorrow is the Feast of the Our Lady of the Rosary, it is apt and just nice to pray a decade of rosary for my Landings group.

I expected that it would be a walk in the park to just find a Youtube video to play. I was so wrong. There are so many videos on praying the rosary but I find most of them have the people reciting the prayers so fast. Perhaps that is normal speed of how the Angmohs speak but I find it even faster than my usual auto pilot praying mode. In the end, I had to view quite a lot of videos to find something at reasonable pace, a soothing voice and not boring, nice visuals, preferably with nice background music too. The good news is that I was able to find one. I think the pace is still quite fast but this one meets all the other requirements.

The bonus is my effort is not only to be used once as I think this can be something I use for my daily rosary after trying it today. Initially I thought the images would be distracting. I think some are quite distracting, especially for the Sorrowful Mystery, but overall I think the images help to focus. The song at the end of each deacde allows me to have my own prayer and meditation. I normally do this at the start of the decade but it is fine to do it at the end too.

Now I just have to download the other mysteries from this channel since watching directly from Youtube will be interrupted by the advertisement. Thank God and Mother Mary for allowing me to find this gem to help me more to pray the Rosary.

In addition, now I know how to embed Youtube video again as I tried to share this video with this post. Previously I thought this function was gone as blogger was updated and I had to use insert video function. Apparently now I just have to switch to 'HTML view' and paste the embed link/code. In the past, I could simply paste the code to the 'Compose view' but doing that now will just result in the embed code being displayed as text. It is still not as convenient as last time but at least I finally find the getaround.

Devil's work

Why am I so unlucky this week? After the demise of the custom clay figure of myself, my home internet connection was dead on Tuesday. I was still awake until 2am and the internet was fine. Not sure what happened in the morning but because of that I had to sacrifice a day of annual leave since with all the restrictions, I could not suka-suka want to report to office. It was really a waste since without internet, there was really nothing to do at home. That was one of the reason why I spent the morning to dust my Tsume statues and I was done by around 2pm. I continued with refining my faith story until it was time for my afternoon nap.

To make it worse, it was my turn to share my faith story for Landings. I had no choice but to download Zoom and use my phone. I really think the devil does not like me to be a good boy and shit kept coming to me since the past week when I was starting to prepare my faith story. Trying to see a silver lining, at least this gave me the experience of using Zoom through phone. I also got to know the data consumption. Around 2.5 hours of Zoom call used up around 1 GB of data and zapped my phone battery to 30%.

I had no choice but to go to office on Wednesday T_T The reason was not so much about taking another leave but because there was a meeting that I needed to complete before October. I really had office adjustment syndrome. I was supposed to be happier with 2 screens but I had to get used to the screen brightness as well as office is more well lit than my room. There were only around 5 people in the office and I kept being distracted whether I should put on or remove my mask. Sianz.. why did these people come? When I told my boss to register for office attendance, she told me it would just be me and someone from HR who would be in the HR room anyway. So I thought I could remove my mask.

Majority is still working from home as the MRT crowd as well as the traffic around my office was like CNY eve. When I reached, I was shocked to see only 1 lift was operating. I thought they were saving electricity haha.. I was just being too early since later on all the lifts were working. Lunch was also not stressful as there was no need to fight over seats. However, lunch hit me with another adjustment syndrome as I felt anything above $4-5 for lunch was expensive. I decided to walk over to MBC to get the Taiwanese fried chicken. At least that would be something I enjoy. Sadly the stall was gone. Bleah... Some stall were not open so I ended up walking back to get a pathetic $6 for rice and chicken at one of the newer stalls near my office.

Another distraction in the office was taking selfie. Lol. I usually hate taking selfies but I just had to immortalise this pathetic occasion of having to work in the office when there were very few people. My first (and best try) had my company logo as mirror image. Yep, I never did selfie so I did not know that the selfie camera had mirror or no mirror mode. I was okay with taking selfie since I had to put on my mask so that covered half of my ugly face.

Thank goodness the internet was fixed on Wednesday. Alas, after I logged off, the bummer email came. From next week, my office reverts back to staggered work schedule. Knnccb! I know the inevitable will eventually come but I was not expecting it to be so early. The thing that I hate the most is still having to wear mask. If there is no need to mask up anymore, then it is not a problem to be back in office. On the bright side, at least now the staggering is into 3 teams so that means 1 week in every 3 weeks to be in office. It is still better than alternate. The best part is thanks to my seat position in the center of where my team is sitting, I will not see the bitches around HAHAHA.

No more TGIF since now it is counting down to end of WFH huhuhu T_T