the entry of miniscule festivities

of late, i've been running down memory lane watching re-runs of mean girls with various friends so many a times that i could almost recite the entire transcript it's crazy! i know, right? it's like i've got a fifth sense or espn or something. someone spell me x-y-l-o-c-a-r-p.

anyhows, i must be really down in luck. i made another trip to the hospital yet again. apparently, a cyst-like lump on my wrist, which has been there for almost a year, is mushrooming to the size of a small quail egg. i've decided, for the benefit of those who indulge in quail congee delights, to not have any pictures taken. so here's how it went down:

i traipsed back to the same clinic, but consulted another doctor, who was a specialist in hand and wrist-related malaise. he gingerly poked at my lump (risque much), shone a torch at it (for whatever reason), moved the lump around to assess its mobility, and concluded it to either a case of ganglion or fibroma, both of which required a two-cm saucerization across the locale to extract said lumpy. in laymen's term, it just meant i need to fork out another $3,500 for the operation. fantastic.

on a brighter note, the last day of october, i.e. halloween, brought about some long-awaited fun. the gin gang decided to dress up in acjc outfits. i tried squeezing into my old school pants, and found it to be literally breathtakingly tight. in the end, i went as a flight attendant. hark back to the days, deja vu. meanwhile... photos!

chen liping and the whole gin gang

gary and me

colleen, the cool chick from cathay

shuhuei

power of the manly muscly dykes

the entry about coming back, et al

my dad is full of worldly wisdoms like flossing and recycling newspaper as table-mats for our supper, and bathing during mid-day when the sun is hottest (thus eschewing the use of heaters and saving on electricity). just being in his presence, i am starting to assimilate his daily habits and stylistic preferences; it's not surprising to see me assuming the "sleeping buddha" position when watching the google box these days (courtesy of cookiedough senior).

anyways, i digress, yet again. i have sat too long on composing this entry. it has been since the longest hiatus i've embarked on since my last post, and the question that most folks have been berating me with is, what the hell have i been up to?

so, being in prudential has really whipped me up to be this workhorse that i never knew i could be. i could be spotted sailing through the office cubicles at nine in the morning almost every day, sometimes, during the weekends as well. clubbing with my friends, which has always been the cornerstone of my social life, has taken a backseat, if not being cast off as being totally dormant.

of course, this wouldn't be the ideal situation which i could envision myself to be in. as much as this turned me around for the better, the old adage "all work and no play makes des a dull boy" still lives on. i haven't made a single trip to the gymnasium hitherto, and i don't surmise that makes any good either to be simply working constantly.

so, even though this might sound like a turnabout, i need to juggle my time before i burn out and fizzle like a candle that is lit on both ends. and speaking of sound, i learnt from a friend that a sound is also a metal rod that is shoved up the slit of a male weiner that is nine to eleven inches long. man, how it would burn!

my first paycheck from prudential.

the entry about taking it off

so tomorrow is going to be the moment of truth. after three hundred and eighteen hours of confined rest, chugging tons of brands chicken essence and chicken tonic, and noshing fish for almost every other meal (apparently, this white meat is good for recovery of wounds), the sixteen stitches as a consequence of my unbridled stupidity would be removed.

even now, as i gingerly brush my fingers across the contusion, i could still feel crusts of dried-up blood tied up in knots with the stitches, not to mention a dose of marked pain along the bump still. i am a little iffy about my wounds having fully recovered, and if not so, the agony tomorrow would be abso-fucking-lutely excruciating. i am totally not looking forward to it.

nevertheless, i'm praying with clasped hands, that in twenty-fours' time, i'll be up and dandy, and ready to trudge myself and my lazy ass back to work after this hiatus. meanwhile, i am kicking at the ladder ferociously which caused my downfall, literally. damn you, ladder!

the entry about the race-spectating insurgent

in light of what has happened recently, one would have expected yours truly to stay indoors, employ prophylactic measures and rest the week away. but as much as i have been chastised by my family and friends alike for a bad judgement call which resulted in a minor head trauma, stitches and all, i am all up and dandy the day after to attend the annual f1 singapore grand prix.

sop's for the race in question

i balked when i arrived at the scene. the entire atmosphere was buzzing with excitement, though the photos i took showed otherwise. there was a chattering buzz from the onlookers, a gig performing at a nearby stage, and vendors of the relative race teams hawking their paraphernalia to dizzying walker-bys. i saw one too many pot-bellied caucasians guzzling down ice-cold beer, and could only stare in hideous envy; i was instructed not to touch alcohol in the midst of my recovery.

anyhows, the bleachers we (ray and i) were allocated to gave us a grand view of the automobiles approaching us from a sharp bend and straight through right in front of us. surely there could be no better of a spectacle than this, i thought to myself.

bleachers of yellow and red

apparently, the race turned out to be nothing more than seeing the automobiles zip past us from right under our noses and disappear into the distant the very next micro-second. this happened for a couple of times and then, the race was over. i gnashed my teeth and swore, pumping my fists in the air. that gesture somehow made people look at me, as though i knew a thing or two about the entire state of affairs. in honest fact, i couldn't comprehend a single bit the intrinsics of the race and was absolutely clueless what was going on. i couldn't tell one car apart from the next. all i knew was that i experienced the fleeting reverberations throughout my body every time the race cars bolted past us it felt like a pulsating vibrator.

some other interesting pictures like the one below: this fellow homo-sapien doesn't seem to understand the concept of velvet ropes. he plumped himself comfortably onto the couch next to all the mannequins and was visibly nonchalant to everyone else staring at him.

looks like he's gonna keel over any minute

someone give him a wedgie already!

at the end of the day, lewis hamilton won. i made it out alive, with my throbbing wound carefully concealed in a cap slanted at a precise angle, but none the wiser about the workings of a grand prix race. i couldn't wait to get back home. viva la hovel!

the following are snippets i caught on tv, the irrepressible lindsay lohan hosting the f1's, beyonce and no doubt upping the chic factor with their concerts.

gwen shows who's the queen

the entry about a mishap that shouldn't have been

drats! it seems like my momentum for work and gym couldn't have been more short-lived, only if it hadn't been impeded by some external force of drunken stupor and bad judgement. i arrived home a little past midnight, slightly inebriated after two pints of the better german erdinger.

by the usual routine, i would wheel around to the back of the house, rap on the window of my maid's room, and gently rouse her with my imploring pleas of "can you open the backdoor please?". incidentally, she wasn't in her room; she'd stayed the night over at my brother's.

key-less, i resorted to calling my folks' mobile phones a couple times. when it was to no avail, i dialed the home phone a number of times, in the hopes of them waking up by the deafening ring tones. when i was still lumbering outside after numerous tries, i attempted yelling their names in a hushed whisper, but after a while, i knew it wasn't going to work either.

road-weary and eager to collapse into my bed after a hard day's work, an implausible idea struck me. i reached for the ladder and positioned it under my room's toilet's window, which was on the second floor. i grabbed a wiry-looking receptacle i found in the store room, climbed to the top landing of the ladder, and attempted to hook the device over the window's handle. once having done that, i mustered all the strength i had in me, beer-goggled and all, and pulled myself upwards with the hook, in hopes of sidling along the window ledge and sliding through the window. that plan flopped, and the back of my head struck the wall, as i slipped and fell seven feet from the ground. fast forward a couple minutes later, i am in the hospital wing with a reported eight-cm laceration which required immediate attention.

sulking after realizing my jeans were stained with my blood

a drip was needed because i suffered huge loss of blood.

i was wondering why it wasn't blood transfusion instead?

still blood-soaked after changing the pillow for the third time.

here's pictures of the bloodied scene at ground zero when i got back home the following day, coupled with sixteen fresh stitches. ironically, in the franticness of trying to get inside the house the night before, i am home-bound for the next week.

the entry about work, work, you'd betta work

i've been in dormant blogging for way too long that it's practically a chore to whip up something juicy or interesting about my life. the prolonged hiatus in between the blog entries could only be whittled down to one sole reason, combined with my ongoing weekly church visits that has my soul incandescing with a myriad of ways for repentance. and of course, the daily gym routines that has me stretching out for the analgesic muscle rub every fifteen minutes whilst sprawled on my bed. it's hard! but at least i'm back on track. and the world suddenly seems a nicer place, life is sweet, and my disposition this day is chirpy.

i received a call from my new company: "desmond, you've been officially contracted. we're waiting for you to get your ass down here, thanks." and so it is to be, as it was written, that on the 16th sep 2009, i would henceforth uphold the title of a business development officer with prudential, singapore.

being the ever enthusiast, i arrived at the office half-hour early and bombarded the two secretaries with every possible permutations of questions i could conjure up with regards to work whilst they curtly thrust the necessary documents and miscellaneous paraphernalia into my hands. i guess i might have startled them a tad too much with my frenzied fervor that i swore them glance at each other for just an instant, but long enough for them each to flex a bitchy, sympathetic eyebrow.

so, here i am, despite being buried under tons of work and a newfound sense of ginormous pressure, keeping you guys posted with this cameo entry. i guess that's all. i'm done for now.

p.s. it's my one-hundredth entry!!! make some noise people.

the entry that i will be good from henceforth

bugger, you never know how it hurts till the needle pricks you real hard in the ass.

i was in bangkok earlier, and throwing caution to the wind, i had frivolously availed myself of my i-phone for the most trivial purposes: i surfed the net, then googled about almost anything that came across my mind, checked my e-mails, and even found time to tweet, on top of logging onto msn. in the process, i also made a couple calls back home and locally as well. considering my respite was truncated to a four-day, three-night stay, i had half-expected the auxiliary charges to be minimal. but it was like "holy, mother-f***ing hell of a dungbomb" when i received my phone bill for this month. and i had thought i was bleary-eyed for a moment, until i looked carefully and the damage read S$1,037.26!

i'm so stowing my phone away in the safe-box whenever i am overseas from now onwards.

then entry of spontaniety

shoudn't it be anal-vend?

the entry of dream job torn asunder

i've been sleeping on it for far too long on this entry. i have been furiously involved in my new company's spiel of activities: attending courses and whatnots, coaching my eager-beaver agents, meeting with prospective clients, recruitment of potential new agents, and to top it all, adjusting myself to a work culture that is breathtakingly met with dubiousness, on my side.

the problem with a huge organization, like most others, is that red tape takes an indefinitely large amount of time for things to be done. i guess i had too high of an expectation when i came in; most of their processes were arcane, if not slow. in fact, i had to call them up to find out i was finally contracted to the agency of the company i have signed up with, instead of the other way around, because i had been waiting on the god-damned contract to be processed for two whole weeks.

whatever the agency promised initially didn't really go hand-in-hand with the contract they shelled out at me, and for most of the part, there wasn't any proper black-and-white to fortify the auxiliary clauses agreed. for example, i was initially informed that i was appointed the role of an associate manager, but then last-minute changes were done and i am now just the equivalent of a senior financial planner. imagine getting that rug of a carpet tugged right off under your feet!

nevertheless, i am still up-and-about and doing the best i can, in an environment cluttered with ill-dispensed misgivings. i haven't and won't throw in the towel that easily, and perhaps, it's just the initial adaptations to a new agency in a new company that are giving me these redundant heart palpitations and sweaty palms. i solemnly swear to do my best because i believe, at the end of it all, if i could surpass working against adversity, i could surpass anything. well, almost anything.

meanwhile, i'm back on track with the rituals of sunday church-goings and reciting the litany. hopefully, this time round, my life will be on the right track after a long hiatus.

the entry about a sporadic entry

you know one of those days when you seriously need a retail therapy when your days are dour and despondent. well, i found mine and here's the spoils. these are only the shoes division. more apparel remedy to come. watch this space!