I'm beginning to loathe shopping and has developed a desire to seek solitude with my very being. I probably want to plan a noble vacation, travelling alone and absorb new cultures. I am lucky to have most of my friends who are frequent travellers, however, some would always put off the idea of even travelling within Asia. Why's that? Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way to get out for as long as you do not leap out of your comfort zone. Travel for me, has a chance for me to make rash decisions, to take wild risks, to lose everything knowing I'd still have plenty of time to earn it all back. Of course, even foreign places grow familiar given enough time; even novelty grows old. Some would argue that this is what makes travel pointless. And in a sense, it's true--childhoods never last. But everyone deserves one. Even if they have to wait till 23 yrs old.

Blogging so far has cultivated in me the skill to describe my life and daily happenings on the typepad, but it has its limitations. This is because life is a complex event, full of contradictions and inconsistencies, but literature requires a thesis and so a writer is forced to pick out the patterns, making sense of a seemingly random series of events and, in effect, oversimplifying what actually happened. As the monthes tickled by and I feel myself getting stronger and happier, but the agony of absence of my good friends hasn't subside.

In Cardiff there are so many things that were out of my control. The bus you were expecting might come in an hour, or it might not come at all - which meant you could stand at the bus stop freaking out, checking your watch, and asking people where the bus was, or you could set your bags down and start up an impromptu party with the people around you. Either way, the bus was either going to come or it wouldn't. There was nothing worrying would do to make it come any faster. This attitude was the only way to survive here and it had taken a lot of time to make it finally sink in, After all, I had been trained from birth that everything was within my control. I had to be accountable, be responsible, make things happen. But now I understood that responsibility was only part of the equation - life was the process of finding the balance between responsibility and spontaneity, adulthood and innocence, duty and joy.

In SG, we place so much on responsibility because we were disillusioned to the notion that we are in control of our lives. Any bad event was an aberration, an act that needed to be remedied. We believed in order: The ATM machine was expected to work, cheques are banked in after 2pm the next day, hp lines re-connected in the next hr etc. And if anything goes wrong, Singaporeans would complain. Make a huge Hoo Ha and blow the matter up, making headlines the very next day. Transparency is what we want to see everywhere but face it, it doesn't happen. However, life in SG is not wierd as many misconceptions about the government sheltering the people, that we have No crimes (we do have low crimes only) and other myths about we're constantly watched by the police on the streets etc. For my life to get any weirder, I'd have to start hanging out with circus people. As much as i miss the comfort of being sheltered, taken care of, immediate response from the sales departments, I am glad i've learnt (and still learning) to develop independence and balance in life. However I grow and develop as an adult should not intefere with my inner child-like innocence (liking for Emily the Strange, Miffy and all sorts of pathetic kiddish animation) because I'd like simplicity to stain with sweet aroma of nanny's fragrant afterwash powder.