I have been sitting on a bunch of work for quite a while now. It’s been a busy couple of months to be honest, and this coming week wraps up a portion of it. I still have tons of work to do, and I have more to plan for in the year ahead.
As much as I recognize the work I do is important, I also know it is something I have to do. It’s not that I want to stop it, its just that I want to take a break. It’s as if I’m on a buffet and they have all the things I want, and I’m not being wise. I’m stuffing myself full, but I need to take my breaks to enjoy it more completely.
My overwork becomes a problem when I forget to game, or when I read to destress, only to realise I was reading related work materials. But thankfully I’ve gotten back to some exercise. The trouble being how much I want to get back to work, and then I stare at the screen paralyzed by the amount of work and mentally sorting the priority of it all.
I actually went on quite an intense shopping spree the past month, being my birthday month and all that. I told myself “its my birthday present to myself” and I’ve treated myself a few too many things this month. I’ve got a pile of books, a new pen, a new pair of shoes, and clothes. Don’t need them, pure wants, and I got them all. Ok, there was some indecision about the shoes, but Tom Sachs released the Demerits, and I didn’t need to think hard and choose anymore.
I’ve also gotten stressed up about my driving, because I bumped my parents’ car a couple of times at the parking lots. Thankfully, I did not bump into people, and only into the building structures. And most of the bumps were very surface level. My parents sorted it out the past week, and just before you assume I’m a big baby relying on my parents, I did all the research and was about to make the call to fix it up on my own here in Singapore. But because the car isn’t under my name, and out of respect to my parents, I let them make the call on it. I did warn them that I might bump it a little bit still, but they were cool. So the car’s all fixed up.
Babel by R F Kuang is a book I’m still reading. She goes through hot topics like colonization, and giving a take on it with the characters and what they go through back in England in the 1800’s. I’ve been enjoying the story, but I got distracted with a Keigo Higashino mystery and I finished that instead.
What are my thoughts on being an English speaking Singaporean? I do think there is such importance understanding my own culture, but because Singapore in itself is a hodgepodge of a country, we end up being extremely fluid in culture. In actuality, the Gen Z and Gen Alphas are pushing the cultural change as part of their generational change, and the rest of Singapore society is actually coming along with it. Translation is a huge part of the Babel story, and it makes me realise how necessary translators are between cultures. How does one carry the right technical word and the right culturally appropriate word to match the original meaning? Just a ton of well understood and well read references.
I hope to update more, but I just have so much to do. I am writing now with the hopes of offloading my brain by writing. All the text has spilled out of me, but I am still thinking hard about work. Now the thought slipping into my head is “what makes an essay an essay, and what makes a blogpost an essay?” Am I writing essays here? I don’t think so.
Back to work. or maybe I should really just sleep.
Leave a Reply