5th

My neighbour, who's staying a block just beside me on a random Wednesday.

The cigarette smell still lingers in my mouth.

where to holiday

That's a huge headache now: where to go for my 16-day core leave, which is in 2 months time and where to go for my 7 other days of leave. And I need to decide quickly or else it will end up like my other planned but never happened trips because of expensive flights.

I have no friends to go with because they either do not have enough leave or they can't confirm their schedule or they are not interested in the places I want to go. Economics of scale, I can save more if I travel with at least 1 more person in terms of sharing transport or hotels and stuff. Places I have been looking at includes Israel (because of old Jaffa), Iceland (but need somebody to share car), West Coast (car), Europe? (not very sure), stockholm ( little expensive).

And I just bought some tanks to prepare for a beach holiday like Phuket, Krabi or Bali, so at least one beach holiday will be set for this year, and another larger one.

My Dec Japan snow trip is almost confirmed, I just need to confirm the dates and ready to go.

optimistic

I also came back from the hospital after visiting my aunt, who has been diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer, just like that. She looked fine, just that she has no strength and can't really talk. Her throat hurts when she eats. Her condition was so bad that she didn't have strength to go for my grandmother's funeral. I guess we can only hope for the best but at least she had lived a wonderful life.

anxiety

Yesterday after I drove back at night, I was parking beside a blue car. Usually I'm very confident of my parking skills when I use the side mirror to mark. So this time, I knew I was too close to the blue car so I did another round. When I entered the lot, I saw there were very obvious scratch marks beside the car. I went down, observed the marks, went to the back of my car to see if it had marks too. There were also a line mark, but it wasn't level with the marks on the blue car. I went to see if there was a camera in front of the blue car recording everything and then I drove off to another parking lot.

In my mind I was thinking shit shit shit shit shit and I began to analyse.

1. I'm not sure if I made the marks because the marks wasn't level and I didn't hear anything. The day before I heard my dad asking my sis why there are marks on our car, so it might not be me.

2. There were no camera in the blue car but there might be another camera in the car opposite and if the owner finds out about the marks he might ask the other car owner for the footage and they'll know it's me and what will I do? Tell the truth? Act blur?

3. Even if there's another camera the blue owner might not know about the marks or too lazy to ask the camera owner to help (if there's a camera). He might not even notice the marks. Given that it's a blue car, it has a high possibility of belonging to a certain race.

4. Worse case scenario: I'll just pay for the repairs. I even considered putting a note to contact me.
I mean honesty counts right?

I hate this kind of accidents. I couldn't sleep the whole night and I even dream of going back to the carpark to find the cars are already driven off. I was sooooo worried. It has been a day and there's no news. I hope it stays the same or else I'll get into real deep shit.

My Motivation

It has been almost 2 weeks since Ah Ma passed away.

The past week I was out of sorts. I am unsure of my motivation in life. Why am I doing this? Why do I need to work so hard? Why do I need to push myself to earn money?

She had always been my motivation to push myself and out-do myself in all other ways. All I wanted is to make her happy, make her proud that she had such a grandson that she can tell or show off to other people, because I was the only grandson who bore the family name who had made it to University and I knew I had limited time with her. The motivation and pressure on me.

Whenever I tell her my achievements she would smile, chin up, nod her head a few times and say "guai lo".

It was during university when I was really stressed out. There were so many times I wanted to give up while studying for exams. The pressure of doing well became my motivation and vice versa. I truly wanted to make her happy with my achievements.

Many times I had major decisions to make, like going overseas to study or for internship or for work, she was always my main concern. I had always made a point to visit before I'm gone for a long period of time.

There was once she wasn't feeling very well, a pain somewhere, so I sat beside her bed and just chat with her. She told me about her brothers and sisters taking the boat to Singapore, 7 days and they ate sweet potato on the boat. She had never contacted them much after she settled down with my grandfather. We talked about many things that afternoon. After talking she just felt better and the pain was gone. I was glad I had this effect on her.

She always told me she loved the ah balling in peanut soup that I bought but the shop in Clementi but it had closed down.

I don't want the memories to fade when I get older that's why I'm blogging them down to remind myself.