So many things in my mind right now, pending projects, project plans for next year, year-end projection budget (which I just found out that there’s a huge miss in it! Gosh!), and many other job-related things you can think of. Not that I’m an important person or what, but plainly because I’m so lazy this week. Or in my defense, I feel so weak in this last two weeks. I even skip one day for work last week because of a sudden headache followed with minor diarrhea (Did I already make it sound like a complicated disease?). Thanks to my wife I got through all of that in no time. We spent a whole day in our room by playing Burnout3 on XBOX and watching Friends together that day! What an enjoyable sick-day ever! :)

Right now, I should really attend to my tasks again but instead I’m writing this blog! So here I am surfing the internet, wasting the ‘service’ time intended for the client. Well… a bit of break won’t hurt I think. Kinda need it, though. After a late night work I did yesterday for a project that should be done last year! Yes, the ‘legacy’ works, that’s what we call them. Some projects or plans that should be done years ago but for some reasons got delayed, forgotten, and suddenly they start coming back now one by one. Guess I’m the lucky one here.

So I decided to ease my mind a bit. Ask one of my colleagues to play a song. And somehow I already knew he was going to play oldies! Hahaha! Not that I have something against it, I do love old songs. But I don’t think my mood suits it right now. I’m looking for a more instrumental play. I think more like a piano, violin, or even sax tune would be nice. And I know one place to find it quick! My friend’s blog! So I pick a piece from “Spirited Away” and keep it playing again and again and again and again until it stops by itself.

Funny thing with music is that it can change your mood instantly. Do you know that people have tried to combine music with medicine? And there have been researches of ‘music medicine’ to make effective use of music to reduce fear and anxiety in surgical and pain patients. Experiments show that hearing music affects the biochemistry of the blood, which in turn may cause effective changes.

Talking about music, my late grandfather was once a viola player -it’s like a violin but slightly bigger-, and although I have his blood in me and spent almost 7 years in my childhood learning to play violin, I still couldn’t make a  decent tune out of it. Silly me!

Have you ever thought about death? Why are we afraid to talk about death? Isn’t it one of the most sure things will happen to anyone of us? If you see it on the news nowadays, almost every month, if not week, there’s a disaster involving so many people. From drought into flood, from tsunami into storms named after women -how silly is that? I mean, common! Why didn’t they name it like: bloodlust or hellhound, or anything creepy instead of a woman’s name? Were they kidding themselves? Did they think naming a force of nature to a beautiful woman will make them loved by the storm? And don’t you think naming the storm to creepy ones instead will make them psychologically more ready to face them? I don’t know. I’m not a shrink and Thank God I’m not the one who named the storms.-

And if you think of it again, that’s ‘just’ the forces of nature. The one thing you cannot control no matter how advance your technology is. And there are still some other sources of death like human-error, machine failure, or even terrorist attacks! You can think of other billions silly ways the death will get you. Gosh… just to think of it already gives me shivers.

And why did I even think of writing about this in the first place?? I guess because lately I saw too many news about disasters and mass destruction. And if you want to be fair, actually it’s good to remember that one day we’re all going to die. If you believe in the Afterlife, it makes you want to be better prepared and look at yourself on what were the things you have done in your life. Was it mostly good or bad?

Pardon my English, but there’s an old saying that goes like this: “Work for your world like you’re going to live a thousand years, and work for your afterlife as if you’re going to die tomorrow.”

Then again, that’s of course if you believe in the life after.

I’m supposed to do a lot of things today. There are so many pending jobs I need to get it done by say… yesterday. But right now, I’m feeling too lazy to do anything work-related. I think because lately I wake up always late, and it affects my mood and of course: fitness. I need to go out and do some sport or workout. “Gosh… how lazy can you be?” My wife use to ask me that and my answer is always: “This lazy”.

I need to start waking up very early in the morning nowadays if I don’t want it to worsen my mood. I noticed that there’s really a strong correlation between waking up early and having a good mood all day long. Guess the proverb ‘early birds get the worm’ is true then. So let’s do it! Tomorrow I’ll try to wake up early and play some Xbox before going to the office. =)

I’m quite in a good mood now. Having a 20 days vacation -21 actually- really tuned my mood good enough to go back facing life again in Yangon. I wanted to update my blog several times, but afraid by seeing so many red words, swearing, and exclamation marks will affect my mood, I cancel it right away.

Funny if I see my own writing, those previous months passed as if I didn’t appreciate a single day of it. All I did was cursing and complaining about all things I can complain about. I’m feeling of deleting all of my previous posts and start a new, nice and happy story about my life. Then again, that wasn’t the case. You cannot delete your past just like that. But if you see me doing that, forgive me, that’s just me being myself.  I tend to keep my past and all of the experiences in it just for me, in what others see as ‘forgetting’. And sometimes people see me as a cold heartless person, which I don’t’ blame them, and I accept it unquestioningly. (Is there such a word ‘unquestioningly’?)

Ok, back to my surprisingly good mood which I don’t know when it will last (probably until 5.30 pm today). All I can think before we went on vacation was planning to go here and there, longing for the sight of the famous M-curve of McDonald’s fast food restaurants, and visiting my family and friends. And we wanted to make sure we’re going to make use of this and have a really good time back in Jakarta. And then we did, we really did have a good time in Jakarta!

But believe it or not, after staying in the hectic Jakarta for awhile, surprisingly to us, we both missed Yangon and wanted to go back here. We felt something's missing while we’re in Jakarta, suddenly the M-curve was not that intriguing anymore, the floor of shopping malls wasn’t that glittering, and movies? What movies?? (I can say that now because we bought approximately 60 DVD titles! Hahaha!!)

So where’s that urge to get out from Yangon gone to? Maybe it's because of the traffic (even on vacation half of your time spent on the road everyday), or maybe because we're staying at my in-law’s (very different experience in staying just the two of us in Myanmar). =)

It really caught us unguarded. Especially when you had experience something like this: From Yangon, we stayed for 3 days in Singapore. And right after we’re in the taxi on the way to the hotel, while seeing the buildings I said to myself, “Have I recovered from color-blinded? What are those colors I’ve never seen in Yangon??”

Surely I realize now that it was really an understatement. It’s true that in Yangon you cannot see all the wonderful colors on its surroundings like in Singapore or Jakarta. But now, only in Yangon, I can see more clearly the colors of my life.

Hope I don’t get ‘color-blinded’ anymore, at least not soon.

I'm thinking of resigning from this company...

Well actually the thought already occurred to me for this last two years. It’s kinda weird though, why I still even think of that in here? It’s everything I wanted before: bigger responsibilities, overseas exposure, and of course, bigger bucks (not THAT big actually). Although frankly I’m feeling a bit like that cow transferred to Algeria -mistakenly alleged for a horse-, but that’s ok, I’m not going to die of a heart attack (insya Allah)  and my retire day is not due in near future. So why is it then? Is it because I don’t love my job? Don’t you have to find what you love? Is it because other things which have nothing to do at all with my job? Or is it because ‘a little bit of this and a little bit of that’?

One cannot answer all the questions in the world, can we?

Today is a very ineffective day… I caught flu and it’s getting worse by hours, the thought of 2 holidays in a row (two days ahead are national holidays for Burmese), and feeling too weak to do anything right now. make it even worse...

But I still can find strength to write a blog I guess... =)

Thanks to my wife, I got hooked with this writing thing. And for the return, I got her hooked with golf as well! Hahaha! I’m very glad I did that. It’s fun to see her interested with it. Especially when she practices her swing in our room! Tell you guys, she’s going with me to the fairways in no time!