Frazzled mind...

It's been a while since I journalled about my life. The past few entries had been figments of my aspirations to be a voice to certain issues close to my heart. And it has been a while since I really slowed down to reflect on my own thoughts. Largely due to the wearing and hectic life I've been leading recently I guess. Especially so for these past two days which have been exhaustingly eventful...but still not as so as my cognitive world...

Thursday, 16 Aug 07
Yesterday, I missed the office retreat so I'm kinda clueless what transpired. Good thing or bad thing I don't know. But anyway, while everyone was enjoying the day out of office and playing their captain's ball, I was stuck in an unfamiliar building doing the gruelling and ponderous GRE test for 4 hours! My mind frazzled...it was fried. As I did the first math test, I started to realise I had insufficient time and I started to tikam. It was then that I felt a deluge of anguish just come over me. I knew it was a goner! In that state of distress, I forced myself to sit through three more tests (one verbal and one more math), even though there was this intense inner voice telling me to run out of the examination room. After that four-hour torture I braced myself to face the uneluctable truth. And as expected, I didn't do well enough on my math (surprisingly my verbal did pretty good even though I tikamed for quite a few...haha...maybe if I did it seriously I would have gotten them wrong...). So that means that I have to endure the whole process again be getting another re-rest. Sighs...all this for the sake of grad school. Pay money, go back to mugging, plead with people to write referee letter for me...all to pursue a dream that would expend five more years of my youth on studying! Hmmm....worthwhile? I really don't know whether I would ever make it to the States next year but I keeping the faith and believing that God will lead the way---for better or worse to me but definitely the best in God's plan for me. No matter how tough and minute the chance may be, I think it's worth a fight, to try and overcome all odds and make it to grad school in US.

Friday, 17 August 07
After that tedious task, I went to chalet to meet the gals from work. Just a nice cool clique that was comfortable to be with. After bantering for a while, we went to bed like all sensible working adults do (can you believe that, we were at a chalet....go chalet supposed to stay up late and have fun rite...) cos' the next morn we had to conduct the retreat activties for everyone else. Most of us ended up with poor sleep. Some of us were wide awake in our beds not knowing that we were all going thru that same battle with sleeplessness...and the warm temperature in the room cos' the air-con was on fan mode! We woke up to a rainy morning, which was the prelude to the dismal weather that dampened our moods, and almost disrupted our BBQ plans in the evening. Anyway, we got through the day's events but me and the gals were super exhausted from the execution of the retreat programme. Conducting the games was especially tiring cos' we had to constantly ra-ra everyone, but thank God it was a spontaneous and lively group that we were working with. Fortunately, the rain didn't spoil the fun! There were so many hillarious moments and people were sporting enough to perform their forfeits and buffoon around with their weird antics. Put a group of people with the forensic mind together in a room and what do you think will brew?

The BBQ went on despite the rain. Kudos to the guys who braved the rain to start the fire. The beng kan team went forth to barbeque the food under my umbrellas which smell very strongly of BBQ food now. Some of us were microwaving the uncooked food to reduce the amount of barbequeing time at the pit. Everything went on fine in spite of the hiccups in the poor weather. Phew! We all managed to eat our fill and there were some leftovers.

But I guess to me, the most memorable and heartening thing was being able to bond and have some close chats with several people during the retreat. Some were just touch-and-go, but I felt the ingenuity and sincerity in those conversations. Not just the usual office PR that we all engage in at work five days a week. I mean, we don't have the luxury of time to share facets of our lives with each other at work. But it was just nice being able to do that out of office, at a chalet.

Though we sometimes complain about work, and sometimes I do admit that I wish I were doing more psych-related work elsewhere, it's hard to imagine life without ever having to step back into office and seeing these faces that have become so familiar to me and have formed such a huge part of my life. And now as some people are leaving, office life is going to change and it's going to become an unfamiliarity again that needs some time for us to warm up to....to the fact that we're not going to be hearing the "anybody there?" ringtone for some time...to the fact that there's going to be an empty room...no one herding us to go for lunch and keeping a lookout for us at that critical hour where people are jioing everyone else...to the fact that we have fewer people to bitch about our problems to...the familiar mugs and office stuff that are going to be packed in boxes and brought away...sighs....need I say more?

Well, even then, I'm glad for these changes. I'm joyful for these people cos' great things are in store for them. It's always with a sweet bitterness that you bid farewell, but you also know that somewhere, somehow, when you meet, that nostalgia will just gush in and you'll find tremendous thrill in speaking about the good ole days! These are facts of life that we deal with. And as we grow older, we encounter more and more of such happenings. Life as a teenager was much simpler...not jaded by the real world, freshly loaded with aspirations and zest for life cos' you think that you can accomplish everything you want, and your youth is your strongest currency. As you age, you learn to appreciate friendships cos' it gets harder and harder to even meet up at Starbuck's for a latte together on a Saturday afternoon, unlike in a classroom where you die die must meet up everyday for school.

Enough musing for now...getting poigant liao. My frazzled mind needs some restful sleep. Pray that God will send amazing things into our lives and bless these friendships that have been divinely formed. God has great plans for all of us. We just need to trust and obey for there's no other way. Amen!