Category: photography

Had to take tests for the HIV and consumption to finalize my Singapore residence application. This is me, on the inside, sans consumption. :)

Been a bit depressed lately. Mostly work related, I’m fed up, not enjoying work anymore and I don’t know how to fix it. Work is 8 to 9 hours a day; a third of my week (not counting the weekend) and if it’s not fun for a long time that starts to affect my whole attitude.

I can’t work at a job I’m not emotionally involved with. I’ve worked with people who can come to work in the morning, work for 9 hours with no expenditure of emotion at all and go home as if nothing has happened. It’s amazing to me. I get angry, happy, upset, irritated, fascinated, worried and intrigued at work. That’s not to say that I don’t leave work at work (at least most of the time.) I try to keep a healthy separation between professional and personal life. I’m friends with people at work; some of them I am friends with outside work others not so much, but work is work and then there is everything else.

Problem is if work is only filled with the bad emotions; anger, disbelief, irritation and upset then it starts erode the emotional attachment to the job. And once the emotional attachment is gone it’s time to find a new job…

So long Mosque Street. I will miss the beauty of this apartment. The wonderful shophouse windows and the high ceilings with the beams exposed. I will miss the muted sounds of the call to prayer from the mosque down the street. And I will miss being in the middle of it all… the Chinese New Year celebrations, the Indian festivals, the endless tourist hordes and the many places to just be.

I will not miss the noise; the trash truck that comes every night sometime between 11PM and 2AM and wakes everyone up for 10 minutes. The old Chinese guy who can’t pick his flip-flops off the ground as he walk… slowly… down the middle of the street. At 3AM. Every night! I won’t miss him waking me up every night.

We’ve been in the new place now for just over a week. It’s nice. Far from the crowded streets of the downtown area and surrounded by green. Much cooler (relatively; it’s still Singapore, one degree from the equator—at sea level—it’s just hot, nothing to do about it, c’est la vie.) Still a lot of boxes and a few minor things left to finish. I really miss the windows from Mosque Street they added a level of character to the place that can’t be duplicated. (They were replicas of the original window shutters that were on the building when it was built as the first public housing in Singapore in the 1920’s!)

It’s nice to have a place that is really ours. Nice to know that when we bring our firstborn home from the hospital for the first time it will be to our house, not to a rented house but to our house.

Now if only I could get the boxes to empty themselves.