Flat is Good

First it was Rico. Now comes Tony!!! Wahhh Why are they all leaving?!!! 10 Downing Street will never be the same without his charisma and flair for words.

It has been a hectic three weeks. After a hurried trip back home (Had to fight again with that airline!) to see my family and friends and ship important stuff (costly but I had no choice...to compound things I had excess baggage of 7 kilos which amounted to US$49!), I had a good friend from Taiwan who came over for a week. So I felt like a real tourist, going around the city with her and scouring for the best food (Mandarin rice at Chatterbox, Chili crab at Jumbo Seafood, Bak Kut Teh, the Laksa in Chinatown, Mochi balls, etc etc) and deals this side of the planet. I finally had the time to visit Sentosa and do the walking tours of Orchard Road, Clarke Quay, Chinatown, Little India and Kampong Glam. We also got to drink the original Singapore Sling at the Raffles Hotel.

So after being stuck in the ranks of the unemployed for so long (around 21 months), I finally re-joined the "worker bees" in their hives and discovered that my "sleeping sickness" also returned with a vengeance (much to my horror!!). It is such a strain to keep my eyes wide open especially after they have been accustomed to being shut most of the day. Good thing there are 3 malls just beside my office. More places to window shop during office hours!...NOT!! (used to do that when I was working in the government...I daresay I was one of the worst civil servants around.) The people in the department are quite the productive lot. But they also know how to have fun. So I'm thinking I'm gonna enjoy my stint there.

My home is finally growing on me. I actually like the convenience of just being 15 minutes away from the office. Plus with all the food courts and shops around, I can never go hungry or bored. With cable and DSL already set up, I can now watch and surf to my heart's content! (Yey for MTV Mandarin and Heroes). And I have my own den! (Others may call it a meditation/yoga room with all the aromatherapy around).

I just finished reading Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century." A follow-up to his previous masterpiece on globalization, The Lexus and Olive Tree, it proved to be an easy and engrossing read.

Friedman has this to say:

"I cannot tell any other society or culture what to say to its own children, but I can tell you what to say to my own: The world is being flattened. I didn't start it and you can't stop it, except at a great cost to human development and your own future. But we can manage it, for better or for worse. If it is to be for better, not for worse, then you and your generation must not live in fear of either the terrorists or of tomorrow, of either al-Qaeda or of Infosys. You can flourish in this flat world, but it does take the right imagination and the right motivation. While your lives have been powerfully shaped by 9/11, the world needs you to be forever the generation of 11/9 - the generation of strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than memories, the generation that wakes up each morning and not only imagines that things can be better but also acts on that imagination every day."