And finally he gets to the obligatory quarterlifing

Although, really, it hasn't been quite as bad lately, due to greater excitement (read: stress, but closer to eustress than distress, most days, anyway) at work. After all, who would have time to worry about such vague fluffy things like a sneaking sense of directionlessness, or a lack of perceived agency, or the feeling that the past twenty-three years of existence haven't - on the balance - amounted to much, or, in short perhaps, a fear of just "not getting" something terribly important (and terribly obvious to everyone else), when (whew) there are much more clear-cut concerns to deal with, like bug reports and deadlines and task lists?

Still, well, ahem, I guess I would have to admit here that I would. I would always have time to worry, it's just the way I'm wired, and the way I've comported myself for most of my life, though it never really showed to people who never got to know me. To most, I was and am just that quiet harmless dude with a reputation for being smart and aloof, and some have even called me carefree, oy, little do they know.

Don't worry though, gentle reader, I'm not about to launch into that practiced, desperate roll call of everything that, over the years, I've determined to be wrong with myself and my life. We've had just about enough of that over my blogging lifetime, haven't we, and now it's time to grow up and move on. Instead of dwelling on the negatives and on feelings of helplessness and doom, why not look forward and ponder solutions? 

I once believed with all my heart and mind (such as they were and are) that enlightenment would eventually come if I just continued mentally chewing the cud. The act itself also held a strange, masochistic allure, or maybe it just became more comfortable to worry about the same things over and over than to actually act and do something about them. I didn't think I knew what to do, I couldn't get out of the cycle of thinking, and so I bemoaned many ruts and periods of depression. (Clinical sufferers may scoff at my use of the term; I've never had myself diagnosed, but I can say those times were no walks in parks.)

Bit by bit I think I'm making progress. Right now, I do still feel as if I have no idea whatsoever what I want to or should do with my life, but it hasn't got me quite as down, and I feel as if I've also grown much less tolerant of stupid wallowing in that years-fermenting muck of useless self-recrimination. I'm grateful to be where I am now, despite still not being able to shake the feeling that it's all just been a series of lucky stumbles. I mean, if I've just been lucky so far, I should be in for even better times now that I'm beginning to actually pay attention, right?

Making lists helps, and writing thoughts and hypotheses down, anything to concretize the vagueness and thus make it manageable, even for instance this little exercise of acknowledgment and making light. Maybe it's a false sense of accomplishment that such items arouse, but at the same time it can't be denied that doing anything is better than doing nothing. (Well, in most cases, and if you keep from doing stupid things.) Move, make mistakes if you must, but just keep moving.

I promise, if I ever figure anything out, I'll tell you all about it. (Or did that come off more like a threat of more stories from a boring uncle?)

Typical workday at 25A

I open my eyes. It’s already light outside, but the blinds do a pretty good job of keeping our room dark enough for sleep. My back begins its usual waking-up complaints, but they barely register anymore and are usually taken care of by a few glorious twisting stretches. I slide the blanket off my body, take a deep breath, close my eyes for a moment, and, resisting the mighty “just a few more minutes” urge, get up and out of my single bed.

I walk out the bedroom door, through our small, narrow kitchen, past the dining table, and on to my desk at the far end of the office area. I either make myself a cup of coffee or have our office assistant (I’m not sure what her actual job title is, but she takes care of all the ancillary household and office chores) do it, if she happens to already be in the kitchen anyway. I open a notebook and write for about forty-five minutes to nearly an hour, filling up my six allotted morning pages.

By the end of the session, I’ll usually be feeling more than a little guilty about not checking on and catching up with work yet, but I’ll still hold out for around thirty minutes of checking my own personal news feeds and other online sources, letting the caffeine circulate and wake me up fully. (Here’s a part of my daily routine that could use tightening.)

The office and our entire unit in general is a very quiet place, which is just how we like it. All day long it’s just the low hum of the airconditioning, people typing and clicking, and, sometimes but more often lately, work-related conversation. The television in the living room slash guest room behind me is rarely turned on, even in the weekends, and I can’t even remember the last time anyone touched the Xbox! We don’t often have visitors, and when we do, they’re usually here just to crash on the couch, and are out touristing or taking care of business in the day.

In the afternoon after finishing a few pieces of work, I usually find myself in need of a short break to refresh myself for some more hours of work in the evening. So I’d take my Kindle out to the nearby kopitiam for some coffee (kopi o kosong - black, no sugar), toast, and sometimes two soft-boiled eggs and an hour or so of leisure reading. Most of the people there have little English, but being a regular (he says with a weird sort of pride), I’ve picked up their accents, they’ve probably picked up mine, and we understand each other well enough.

Then it’s back to my desk with (ideally) renewed energy to knock off some more to-do items and build or fix more parts of the Insync client. Productivity usually comes in bursts that sometimes (have to) continue on until late in the night. That’s one thing that’s awesome about working from home -- no need to worry about pesky things like it getting too late to commute back home easily. (Although I suspect it’d still be quite easy to get home here, even late at night, but I digress.)

The day ends whenever I run out of energy and find myself needing to get some sleep. Sometimes I take a second break and have tea or coffee (or occasionally a beer or two and peanuts or satay) at the kopitiam, unwinding a bit before going to bed. I close my eyes, and the cycle repeats in eight hours or so.

***

This has been my routine for the past few weeks, and as far as daily routines go, it’s not a bad one, although there is one glaring omission that’s been bugging me to no end: gym time. Perhaps a month or two previously, I would usually make sure to take about an hour and a half off in the afternoon to work out, either spending about an hour on the treadmill or elliptical while listening to a Pimsleur Japanese lesson, or doing a mixed dumbbell-machine routine with ChannelNews Asia in the background.

(Apart from exercise, I also intend to add an afternoon writing session for working on essays, blog entries like this one, among other creative-writerly items. Thirty minutes or so should be enough, if I prepare materials and draft ideas sufficiently beforehand.)

Done with the brokerage billing forms!

Finally got around to making two simple spreadsheet billing forms for the family brokerage (as requested by my brother).

They actually only involved subtotals, percentage deductions and additions, and so on. The tricky part was figuring out how to mimic the alignment of the original forms - their client wants the forms on specially-printed form paper which already has some labels and divisions and so on.

I didn't have a ruler, so I ended up holding the sample form to the screen (with Excel zoomed to as close to life size as possible) and estimating distances with the onscreen ruler.

Positioning the different fields was made easier by a trick I learned from seeing it used at work: turning all the cells in the sheet into tiny squares, and simply merging cells into the right size where they are needed. (Adjusting field positions was a pain, though!)

So, in summary, I suppose there could've been better/more efficient ways of doing what I just did, but I think I did well enough for an intermediate spreadsheet user.