http://www.flickr.com/photos/leonnie_sun/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I found myself driving through Shenton Way late this morning, after a traffic cop redirected my car away from the ECP entrance towards the East and into the one going the other way. I drove past three towers balancing a surfboard, and exited right into the heart of the Central Business District, hoping to drive to get home via Nicoll Highway.

For some inexplicable reason, the CBD was jam-packed with cars, on Sunday, of all days. Soon enough, I found myself stuck in a jam along with tons of irate drivers trying to cut me left and right. Having nothing better to do, I took a good look at the towering skyscrapers and corporate buildings that house a substantial proportion of banks and what-not that drive the Singapore economy.

And I felt a pang of fear. An extremely irrational pang that I decided to blog about it. Despite the amount of cars on the road, the CBD itself was devoid of people and movement. Darkened offices, stationary elevators and sandwich shops that were closed for the day lined the streets where my car was stuck on. But it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine how the place would look like on a normal weekday.

The maze of concrete and steel looked like some kind of prison to me. From Monday to Friday, executives commute here from home, get sucked into their corporate offices where they labour and toil to churn out money. Sure, there’s life and vibrancy and activity, I suppose, but it’s not the kind I would enjoy. And my dear school, SMU, trains me to some extent for life in this (to use a rather cliched term) concrete jungle. But I don’t want to be here in the future, I don’t want to make my second home here, in one of these glassed-up units, dressed up in formal attire doing things that simply make an accountant’s profit numbers in his Excel spreadsheet tick upwards. At the end of my life, I don’t want to look back at realise that I spent the past 30, 40 years pushing pen or keyboard, interacting with a monitor, almost every day of my life.

I want to enthrall. I want to delight. I want to touch hearts and bring visible joy to the faces of people. Maybe that’s why I’ve always wanted to learn more music, learn piano. I want to develop the giftings God has placed in me. I want to use them for his glory, and make people happy.

And not think about money, not think about survivability. Let the money come in, somehow. God, you let me live a fruitful, happening life, and you hold me up, and let me thrive. Let me taste the sweetness of life, even in this rat-race Singapore, where I have to fight even to board the bus to the MRT station.

Because I am forever your beloved.

And then I logged on to Facebook to handle some admin stuff for the Just So group I was making. I don’t go on Facebook that much nowadays due to Twitter, and I saw the activities of my amehmeh Econs Camp OG listed in my timeline, also stuff from my Kendo friends, training for yo-dan and go-dan now. And the same feelings came up again, feelings of nostalgia, and a bit of regret.

My life has been characterised by moments of brief but intense encounters with groups of people. Being in Philippines with twenty of them for three weeks, my life revolved around them, and what an experience it was. I developed great friendships with some of the Project Touch people, but it’s not as close and intimate as it was back then already. If not for things like Twitter, I would have probably lost touch with the few most precious of them.

Right after Project Touch there was FTB, again another brief (about two months?) but very intense encounter with those people. We stayed over in school together, had fun, overcame challenges, took opportunities to love people, and felt so belonged as all of us in the FTB exco worked hard to make the camp a success. And I knew that after FTB was over, I would again miss these intense moments of friendship and belonging, and that some other group would eventually take its place.

Then there were my Econs camp freshies, and Suting, very brief, yet I treated them and looked upon them and loved them as family. When school started, it was Adeline and Jerome, to a much lesser extent since we were more classmate-friends rather than pursuing-a-common-goal-friends.

If I had my way, I would love to increase the number of hours in a day and spend as much time as before, with these people who came into my life one time or another. If I had my way, I would want to hold on to each and every high moment, savour and cherish them with these people who have made a difference in my life. But I don’t have my way. Time will pass, experiences and feelings fade with age, and new things will take their place.

And I’m feeling a bit sad this December because school is out, and where is my extended social family? Oh the futility of life – it really is like wind, you can’t grasp and hold it in your hand. So, God, how? I don’t even know what the question is, but there’s something unanswered, something about life, something You only can satisfy me with.

So daddy God, set me free.

Dear Town Council, I live on the 6th floor, and my room has recently been infested with ants coming in to search for food every morning. I would have liked to spray them all to death, but it appears that the ant colony is somewhere under the ledge outside my window on the 6th floor, so they are safely out of reach of my Shieldtox, and yet they continue to torment me every morning. The only way I can stop the ants from coming in is to close all my windows. I look forward to your quickest reply on how this pest problem can be solved, as it’s driving me nuts. Thank you.

I have a crush on this girl in my SOCG001 class. She’s a friend of a friend from Econs as well, my year. OH JESUS. She’s not the gorgeous kind, but she’s pretty enough. She did her presentation today (unfortunately it wasn’t very good because the exchange student in her group rambled on and on and on) and she has a really nice voice. No high-pitched squeal, no auntie characteristics, relatively self-confident, sigh.

When she smiles, her eyes crinkle up and her face just becomes oh-so-cute. When she’s deep in thought, she frowns and I find myself beholding at her face. She’s pretty even when she frowns, sigh.

I’m too shy to go and talk to her directly. Hopefully something happens next term and I get to know her better, sigh.

So I was running my usual 4.5km this evening, and was thinking about making these runs of mine a daily affair. How cool would it be to enjoy the nice evening breeze, feel the adrenaline pumping and shed kilos at the same time?

But then I also realised that I’ve made these “resolutions” multiple times, and they actually work rather well for a period of time. However, once there is a “shock” to my daily schedule, the running regime always stops. And why is that so? I look back at my previous failed attempts to understand why.

I started running religiously (again) after I weighed 73kilos, my double chin started showing, and nasty relatives commented on the circumference of my waistline. Add that to the fact I was living a sedentary lifestyle during the summer holidays doing FTB and staring at line after line of PHP code. So I downloaded the excellent Runkeeper app for iPhone, and started to run at least 5km every day. And it started working! My weight started dropping slowly but surely, and I no longer felt as lethargic as before.

Until school started. The fact that school started means the reintroduction of the daily commute, attending classes, doing projects and homework. And although I still desired to keep running and keep losing weight, somehow the runs just kept getting less and less and less and less frequent.

So here I was, trying to make sense out of this. It turns out, according to my theory, that doing any activity, such as running, requires transaction costs. Even though the cost/benefit thing for running everyday generally remained the same, starting to run required quite substantial transaction costs. For example, if I were to run in school, I probably only could run in the gym. To go to the gym, I had to remember to bring my shoes, bring an extra change of clothes and a towel, and ensure that my toiletries kit I keep in my locker is in good condition so I can bathe after the run. Also, when I come back home from school, I have to contend with soaking my now-stinky clothes for a while before throwing them into the washing machine, and hearing my parents complain why their clothes smell of fermented sweat even after three rounds in the washing machine.

Of course, running on a treadmill is a lot more boring and carries with it less utility than actually running outside, but those aren’t transaction costs per se.

During the holidays, whenever I needed to run, I could just strap on my shoes, go downstairs, and start running. When I’m at home, I’m already in running attire (singlet and shorts) most of the time, so the time difference from deciding in my head to run, to actually starting to run, is probably within 10 minutes. This constitutes very minimal transaction costs, as compared to the amount of planning and logistical issues I have to deal with should I decide to run in school.

Besides transaction costs, the opportunity costs of running also go up during term time. When you have to deal with homework, readings and projects, going to run doesn’t mean you simply waste 40 minutes of your time. The cool-downs, the bathing, the general I-feel-so-shagged-but-shiok-after-my-run is not exactly very conducive for getting back into your books and journal articles. And when school is in session, GPA is important! (Sorry Owen).

So there. Transaction costs and opportunity costs while running. I hope I tickled your intellectual faculties a little bit (no, not you, Googlebot). Now, back to studying Macroeconomics!

But even though I don’t really have anything noteworthy to blog about, and my level of English is getting from bad to worse, I still start blogs, in the hope of keeping them alive. Don’t let the flame and passion for writing burn out! or so they say. And Lizzy, my longtime friend and online companion, has a post on her own blog about blogging to stay creative. Heck, I don’t want to become a dull, boring person, even though I have no idea what creative faculties I have been blessed with. Does Java count? hurhur.

In any case, since I don’t really have a set topic for this post, I shall entertain the two of you reading this (myself and the Google bot coming by to index my page – to the Google bot: Don’t waste Google’s disk space. You can skip this one.) with a not-so-pretty picture of my room.

Hur. My camera sucks. I know.

Yes, at least one of you would be very interested to know what my room looks like, right? Granted, it’s not exactly IKEA-catalogue material, but I like my two IKEA lamps! How they cast their diffused light and generally imbue a sleepy, woozy atmosphere in the room. Which is not conducive for studying, but I don’t care.

And anyway, I can’t get my room into the IKEA catalogue because I’ve noticed that all their room layouts assume that you are leaving the air conditioner on 24/7. So much for their “environmentally-friendly” clarion call to consumers. Bleah. Talk to me again when you feature room decors that do away with this foolish assumption. And if you use their ideas in rooms like mine where the window is open more than the air conditioner is, you get dust on the stuff faster than Hamilton on the bumpy Singapore F1 street circuit.

Now, if you would excuse me, I have to work on my Understanding Societies project. I just had the very first group meeting this afternoon, and I want to finish in true-blue SMU kiasu mugger fashion so I have the rest of the recess week to mug. Well done. Of course, I’m not exactly the Mr Kiasmu poster boy, there are many people I know who probably have done all the problem sets in the Macroeconomics textbook, ready for the Midterm in two weeks time. Those are the same people who’ll be finding the optimal line height for their resume the rest of the week.