A Working Monday In The Life of Me

5:40a.m.
My handphone sings & wakes me up. Since I have to report to the office on the other end of the country on Mondays & Thursdays & it's a freaking Monday morning, it's self-explanatory why I have to get up at this damned hour.

I cannot help being jolted into consciousness while observing myself sliding into Cranky Mode. Oh, the horror.

I hate mornings

Something in me always dies everytime the sun slowly manifests itself in the great blue here in the bloody tropics.

6:56a.m.
Sprinted out of the house & making my way to the train station. Yeah, it takes me that long to prepare for the day, mostly in front of the mirror. I didn't even eat breakfast. I also spent some time talking to my Lioness (a.k.a. my Little Rabbit). Talking to her cheers me up since she can be so funny.

Since I'm in the sales line & am the face representing my company as I have to come face to face with our customers, I have to metro myself up a bit & look modern. That eats up some time in the mornings. Even if I was in another trade, I'd still do the same. Just so happens that I find making myself look good a little to be really fun.

You try to have a bit of fun to cheer yourself up on a dreary Monday morning during the hour when you should still be in bed. Early bird gets the dark rings.

You know what irks me? This place I'm living in is a leading modern Asian country but lots of guys (not all, but lots) don't give a hoot about their appearances or level of modernity. Go figure.

7:22a.m.
I'm in the train right now at Boon Lay and my transit point is Paya Lebar station where I'll be switching to the Circle Line for another train to another station nearest to my office.

But instead of heading straight east, I'm taking the Boon Lay train in the other direction towards the remote Joo Koon station, which is 2 stops away and the final station of the western line. All this merry-go-round just so that I can guarantee a seat for myself on this long journey to the east.

And I do a need a seat today. Usually when I'm in the train or bus, I'd listen to music, play games or read iBooks on my phone. But it's freaking Monday, remember? On Mondays, I'll just listen to music & nap in the train.

"What? I thought you just woke up earlier?", you might say, dear reader, but my weekends are so precious to me that I squeeze every available second out of them for my loved ones, personal hobbies & activities. Last night, I was editing the 3rd part of our Japan trip's video, after which I practiced guitar & some music theory until some time past 2a.m.

And I went to bed with a satisfied smile on my face. Better to go to bed later with a satisfied sense of fulfillment than go to bed early with nothing accomplished.

So the time spent in the train on Monday mornings like this one is used for napping to make up for the previous weekend late night. Besides, this place has become so overpopulated the crowded condition of the morning traffic is a fucking misery, so I might as well nap & shut my eyes from this tragedy.

I fucking hate mornings

So good night. Later...

8:50a.m.
Arrival at the office. Good thing I managed to have coffee at one of the coffeeshops nearby just now. As a result, I'm now feeling more awake & better. On days when I don't wake up early enough, I won't have the time for coffee before coming in & such mornings suck.

No morning caffeine = Corporate Zombie

That's just one of the formulas for dealing with a zombie outbreak: besides shooting them square in the head, you make them drink coffee.

10:13a.m.
So after I've completed my paperwork, checked my work emails, finished some discussions or meetings & stocked up on my order forms for my customers & other nitty gritty stuffs, I'm now leaving the office to head out to the big bad world.

This Monday morning is different:
A number of my fellow colleagues from the Sales division didn't come to the office, which is a rarity. Angela has started her maternity leave, Jace is on sick leave, Dino might be coming in later & I'm not sure about Lily & Eileen. Only Ken, me & Zell made it. Hey, I just realized that all the guys are in & the girls are not.

Anyway, without the rest of them around, the office has become sombre & boring. Every working adult knows that the Sales division is the life of the party. It's an undisputed law of the Universe. But when I reached the train station, Dino WhatsApped me & we chatted while I made my way to my customers. I even get to hear some of her voice recordings she sent me via WhatsApp. How cute.

4:19a.m.
I woke up & realized 2 things:

1) My intended little nap when I reached home from work snowballed into full-blown sleep.

2) I haven't had my dinner.

But I'm not surprised. Usually on Mondays when I reach home from work, I'll shower & then crash for awhile, but often, I'll wake up in the middle of the night instead. I can get really tired on Mondays sometimes.

I love the night

Now stop calling me a child of darkness because I'm not into any of that satanic shit. I hate mornings & love the night because the night is cooler / colder & it's more romantic. It's also the time when your mind calms down from all the fast-paced poison accumulated during the day.

Stress ought to be officially classified medically as a slow, painful death, so you need to unwind & purge the poison from your system. This process has a name: Night.

Yes, yes, I also know about Beer.

Anyway, because I was attending to my customers throughout the afternoon, I chose to continue writing this blog after I get home since I'm so horribly longwinded & didn't want myself to get into the way of myself.

So here I am, lying in bed writing this. (Later, my Lioness got up to reheat my dinner for me, God bless my good woman).

Anyhoos, there are 2 highlights of the previous day:

I visited the Pharmacist who is also a dear friend to me after all these years of working with her and our conversations about official work matters were interspersed with iPhone discussions as well as her sharing her personal life matters with me.

We had a long & deep conversation. Because I care about her situation, I did my best to help her think about possible solutions to certain things & situations. I appreciate it when my customers place trust in me regarding their situations.

2nd highlight of the day was when a friend told me about an offer. To cut a long story short, one of the reasons she told me to take on that challenging offer was because I'm a guy.

Now I appreciate an offer coming from a friend, but when the offer is challenging & Risky & the justification for taking it on is just because I'm a guy and that particular offer has nothing to do with gender as a prerequisite, it just serves to remind me about how some girls here try to play with the machismo of guys in order to get them to do their bidding.

It works this way: the girl places the guy in a position that reminds the guy about his primal need to prove his manliness to the girl. If he says no to the girl, thus displaying the lack of manly guts or incapability to the girl, he ends up feeling inadequate about himself. So Mr Caveman ends up forcing himself to do her bidding.

Screw machismo, just because I'm a guy doesn't mean that I shouldn't take calculated risks & just behave with brainless brawn. If she was trying to use this oldest girly trick in the book on me, she ought to be disappointed by now because I have no shame when it comes to my alarm bell ringing about the possibility of girls trying to manipulate me.

I'll only do things for girls gladly when they can treat me with the principle of not doing things to others that you yourself do not wish others to do to you.

But then again, there would be no policemen without criminals. On a similar vein, if there were no stupid men who value the need to prove how macho they can be over their own common sense and allowing women to manipulate them as a result, there wouldn't be women who are 'smart' enough to take advantage of men.

Some dead heroes also happen to be dead foolish heroes.

Seems like I'll need to help my friend understand me better so that she will not be disappointed again by trying to use her girly tricks & watching them rebound off my back into her face. But then again, why bother?

So this is how my Monday went. To summarize the whole day just in one sentence:

This tired Monday was quite a typical one: while working as I travel about visiting my customers, quirky things can just happen along the way.

I hope your Monday was a wonderful one & not too Blue.

- De Lion Speaks

When Time Becomes An Issue, You Do It On The Go

So I used to blog using this free but powerful web server at 50webs. Free because I do not believe in paying a single cent just to write about my life story, server maintenance issues notwithstanding; that's the Internet's problem, not mine

Powerful because I could insert my own Flash animations with audio & music I made which, coupled with Dreamweaver, was almost a blogging control freak's wet dream come true of controlling in the most freakish manner, everything down to the very last pixel. And I could create direct download links to the game mod files I created & stored in my blog's server. Now that kicked ass.

Add all these up & you get a Blogger's high that transcends that of the almightiness of Doodle God.

BUT, with great power comes great hassle. Sure, you could create the flashiest Flash of the time period for every single blog entry, but unless you are retired, you will find yourself up against the wall in terms of energy & time spent (more like a lack thereof).

..Especially if you are a non-single full-time working adult like me. I mean, I love recording the occurrences of every single day of my life for memory's sake, but trying to get fancy even with prepared visual candy-coated templates can get tiresome. Hardcore bloggers have their moments of disillusionment too. Who says the thousand-yard-stare was invented by Vietnam War veterans? Cavemen already started blogging on cave walls when wars were fought with sticks & stones that could break my bones.

I'm not saying the blogging of my everyday life on its own is a tiresome affair. It's just that during those blogging years without the advancement in mobile phone technology, one is limited to only having the capacity to blog when one is in front of a computer.

Which sucks because firstly, as things happen, you just wish that you could have a device on hand that follows you everywhere you go just like your shadow and record things down as they occur. Then later in the day, when something else happens, you could continue recording from where you left off previously.

C.O.N.V.E.N.I.E.N.C.E.

A blog is simply the accumulated recordings of daily occurrences or thoughts or ideas & convenience ought to be everybody's friend in this area.

Sure, there's always the pen & paper to jot things down first, but if you have to write down & then retype on the keyboard what you have written, that's double work and double work is stupid & such inefficient stupidity is meant only for MNCs.

Sure, you can manually write things down in point form & then type them out in detail in front of the computer later but you risk not remembering correctly certain details or the proper order of things. Besides, the lesser use of paper helps save more trees.

Go Green

So, the ability to record things on the go has an invaluable advantage: the fresher the memory at the time of recording, the more accurate & correct the details & information will be. Just so happens that we all have a finite amount of grey matter that depreciates with the passage of time.

So yeah, memories; the building blocks of blogs, are like beer. The longer you leave them untouched, the flatter & staler they become. Sip them quickly & they taste their absolute best, hic.

So I have decided to switch from my fancier computer-generated blog to this much much simpler blog. Why? Because of my iPhone and the BlogPress app. So my phone has taken on the role of that missing shadow I wish I had which could follow me everywhere I go, facilitating the ease of recording things or thoughts as they occur while keeping my beer, er, memories fresh as they get translated into blog entries, no matter where I may happen to be.

Only exception would be while I'm in the shower, I suppose. Get your iPhone sporting the wet look & Apple will suddenly deny you as a paying customer, even if you waved that warranty card in their faces.

So, I guess that with such mobility made possible by the current mobile technology, the advanced flashy eye candies such as animated Flash which can only be crafted properly on computers will have to be sacrificed if I choose this mobile platform. Oh, the Cynic in me just told me just as well, since I've already forgotten most of what I've learned about Flash & Dreamweaver after all these years of grey matter depreciation anyway. How timely.

But hey, when it comes to blogging, it's the thought that counts.. Above everything else, even though everything else would be nice to have.

Mobile blogging on the go

- De Lion Speaks