You gotta sleep when you gotta sleep

Mid Day Break
Originally uploaded by Christiane B

I don't know how and what and why but I am running in circles like a mad rabbit. Need to start with the mid day naps.

In the meantime, fancy and I are double eloping so to speak. He is running us away somewhere for the weekend in honor of our ship wreckage one year ago. I just don't know where we are going and so far this is the only surprise he has been able to keep from me (duh, obviously as far as I know) .

My money is on Shanghai. Or maybe Tokyo. What do you think?

Asian Trust?

When we moved yonder east, fancy and I took the opportunity to finally get a joint bank account because that is what one does. Apparently it shows one's commitment and the general we are in this mess together-ness.

However, apparently Asian families don't dig being controlled by their significant other because upon finally checking my bank balance yesterday I realized that I could only see 2X worth of transactions, however my bank account has been reduced by something more around the value of 67X. Funny. Where did all that money go. Before accusing them of theft I realized, well, yes, half the transactions from IKEA are not on there I know that I left what feels like millions at IKEA (despite the fact that everything is so damn cheap! How does that happen?), so I knew something was wrong.

It turns out anything fancy purchases I cannot see on my statement and vice versa. It would have been funnier if he, as an Asian man, could see what I spent but I could not see what he spent. My favorite would be however if the total balance would only reflect my purchases, thus giving me the illusion of a double salary and only half the expenditures. Sadly this is not the case.

Do all joint bank accounts hide this stuff from you or is it just a testament to Asian family trust?

Voyerism

From the exact spot where I spend most of my days, the upper corner of the wood dining room table, I can observe two other people's lives, which by the way seem just as varied as mine.

Bare chested man across the parking lot hovers in a seated position by the window. I only see the pillows he leans against. Hopefully the glass is reasonably solid. Maybe he is a home-working professional or else he counts his drug money all day long. Then to my right, in very close proximity, is expat lady as I call her. I think she is English or maybe Australian and she spends most her days outside the scope of my prying eyes, but in the afternoons she flops herself onto some balcony chairs, adjusts her bathing suit to minimize tan lines and then gets up every two seconds to take care of something inside the house, only to come back out a minute later. She then readjusts her bathing suit and pretends to relax again.

I kind of want to meet my new friends. I hope they think I am either a lady preparing for her evening cooking show, a PhD student researching sexual abnormalities in primates or an astronaut.

The World Out There

Today I am taking my laptop and I am leaving Parc Emily, yessssir.

In the confines of kitchen (imported cafe Bustello), pool (Do I need to say more) and balcony (View of sleazy men carrying heavy things) I have everything to make the day go by.

Better even, wearing a beach sarong counts as being dressed, taking a break can include a nap and the snack selection is decent, but lacking are the hilarious things that happen when OTHER human beings actually interact with you, like not on the intenet. Maybe they will spill coffee all over you or cut you off at the light or maybe they will even swear at you when you spill coffee on them. I can't wait! Starbucks here I come.

Academia or Art

It's 7 am, the residents across the pool are sitting outside in their wicker chairs drinking sweet tea with milk or whatever it is that Singaporeans treat themselves to for rising early and I am trying to get in a little review of polynomials before work.

Will wait with the cat but will charge ahead with project "Just Do It" or as my friend just quoted her friend saying "Fucking Just Do It". The way I see it there are two options: Academia or Art. Thankfully they are not mutually exclusive and I might even believe that doing badly at one might increase my chances with the other. So with three weeks to the application deadlines for PhD programs in Singapore I finally got enough adrenaline going to decided to go for it. This is precisely the perfect time span that I can go into and remain in overdrive. I have had too much time to think and ponder for the past five years and as a result I have been to many pretty islands and have had many pretty wine induced conversations about finding my passion, but I have not done a whole lot.

Thankfully there are exactly two universities in Singapore worth applying to, so I am spared the pondering of 15 backup choices vs. reach schools and so on. A bit silly not to go to grad school in either the US or Europe you might say, especially given that those are the best schools and incidentally I have lived most my life in either place. Yes indeed, but what to do? The positive part is that it makes the process easy: either I get in and I accept or I don't. Filling out fun electronic forms, chasing down profs from almost a decade back and google-ing up some research ideas is not difficult. Difficult is trying to get a date to take the GMAT or GRE within the next three weeks in a part of the world where everyone is currently trying to get into grad school it appears and then not freaking out about well, having to take the test which means preparing for the test while working full time.

So the next three weeks, until November 11th, it is all about academia. After that it will be all about art. 11/11 is the magic day. I am shortlisting models (mentally) from the people I have met here so far and sharpening my photo lenses and come 2009 I should be well on my way towards academia or art. Or both.

How many islands...?

There is something inherently difficult for me to commit to one place, one thing. I think it's all about having options and as many as possible. The thought of shutting the door on anything at all seems ludicrous. As I result I may have adopted a bit of a short term mentality when it comes to life. The same way I would choose my classes in college never to commence before 10:30 am no matter how brilliant the subject matter, I also make sure nothing I commit to now ties me down for more than a year. Fancy is portable so that part luckily works out.

This strategy has worked out fine and dandy until now, but I am starting to feel that this attachment phobia is making me miss out. Some things seem to demand giving up the "off I go at the drop of a hat" mentality but they also promise something more than transient happiness.

I like where I am at in life in terms of achievements and my career but not too much. And that is the point. Liking it too much would have meant a lot of investment and thus maybe, God forbid, a reluctance to up and leave. If our past trip has taught me one thing it is that man do I love sitting on the beach, but if it has taught me two things, then the second one is that shit, these things always end, invariably washing you onto shore somewhere. You are a bit more broke, a bit more tan and in dire need to take a liking to your daily life because else there is not all that much to look forward to other than the next trip.

Most options that offer the possibility of maybe liking life in one single place involve either more school or some serious entrepreneurial effort that might have to stretch over more than one year and sure as hell will ruin some perfectly good vacation opportunities. It frightens me but I think it might be time to consider those options. At the moment the idea of housing a cat is cramping my style because what if I want to go to KL for a week to work from there, just because, and then to Brunei for a weekend, I mean holy crap, my life would be positively bogged down if I did not have the knowledge that I can do those things. Now imagine giving a shit about the work I do and I might and up sitting somewhere holed up with my cat too busy and possibly too involved with something to think about how many Indonesian islands one could hit on one season.

La Casa

Picture fancy peeking out behind IKEA boxes somewhere on the 7th floor around a bay window, while I am perched on our 4th floor friend's doorstep stealing the wireless.

So far working from home has been made interesting by construction workers flooding, then fixing, then breaking, then re-fixing our apartment. All day I am busy giving home-making kinds of orders to men in dirty overalls. It's exciting. So is the discovery of a Starbucks next door and our Belgium neighbor who boasts both wireless and a seeming endless supply of bubbly water along with an intense hatred of the Dutch to which he makes only one exception. ECONOMISTA has been incorporated and now all I need is a frilly art school or the courage to carry my impressively heavy Porsche camera around in this heat in order to get my fix of feeling creative.