Reality Check

So yeah, I've done a couple of errands and (still have a few more to go) and I'm sitting cross-legged on my unbedsheeted bed, thinking about life, the universe and everything and I decided I should like to write a post for this blog. Basically because it's been a while and all I've been doing is excerpting stuff from other people.

Which is all right, I suppose, but for this to remain "my" blog, sometimes, I've got to write something myself. I'm munching on the last of the Toblerone that was a present from this professor I interviewed not too long ago. He went off to Australia before the article was published, came back with a present of a lot of chocolate and a little koala bear.

Nice.

I distributed a bit of the chocolate and kept the rest for myself. It's lasted two weeks which is some record.

I've taken to watching endless episodes of Dharma & Greg on youtube to catch up on all I missed. Firstly, because I found an excerpt on Happy Moonmoon's site (one of my favourite blogs) and I really enjoyed it. I couldn't believe that I had simply dismissed it for all those years. Secondly, because it's produced by Chuck Lorre who's also responsible for Big Bang Theory (nuff said).

My fingers are covered in dried glue right now, because I attempted to mend my Birkenstocks, my black Clarks court shoes (my favourite pair) and my sunglasses. I don't know if I was very successful, but hey, if anything's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. If I still had my book Plain Talk I would excerpt the whole "everything that's worth doing is worth doing badly" bit from that book.

Funny story. I went off to my boss's room and rooted through a box of books that had been sent for review. We would get RM100 for each review. Unfortunately all the books were business-related, but so what? I needed the money.

I really really did.

We were in the midst of the Asian financial crisis. The bosses had cancelled all overtime. So we were working for our basic pay and that was it. I had just started to rent an apartment and the rent kind of ate up most of my salary. I was depending on the overtime.

Mostly I just got depressed and lived on peanut butter sandwiches (cos Mark Victor Hansen had done that when he had no money and hit rock bottom and doing the same thing as the Chicken Soup guy sort of romanticised my misery). About the only productive thing I did about my situation was to write a few book reviews.

So there we have me (again) rooting through that box. I selected three books. Buffettology by the ex-daughter-in-law, Plain Talk by Ken Iverson and another book I can't remember. Anyway, I skimmed through all three and wrote the reviews.

I loved Plain Talk best of all. So much so that I remembered his words and lessons long, long after.

A few years later, when I was no longer paying rent and feeling miserable, when we were well out of the financial crisis and I was interviewing a whole lot of young entrepreneurs who were bootstrapping their way up from nothing, one of them told me he had started a library in the office. I liked this company for so many reasons so I decided to donate my book to them.

Imagine my horror when I found out a few years later that the entrepreneur had ditched building his extremely high-tech, next-big-thing company to sell salt lamps for a multi-level marketing company with his wife. One of the first things I wanted to do was to take back my book. But I couldn't. And now it's out of print. And Ken Iverson is dead.

Anyway, that very long "aside" sort of explains my willingness to do things badly. Like this bookshelf I put up last week. It took me three tries. Maybe four. To get it right. But now the bookshelf is up and full of books.

Arnold is seated nearby scratching himself. I'm wondering whether to put back his cone. He got himself injured in a fight with another dog and the vet had to cut off the flap of skin from the dog bite. It's healing, but still looks red and raw and I have to clean it every day, rub it with his antibiotic cream and stuff a pill down his throat.

The good news is, he's run out of pills. The bad news is it's not as healed as I hoped it would be by now. I've scrubbed him today (he feels all nice and clean) and cleaned his little bed. I've washed the three cushion covers that Maggot turned black by rubbing against them.

Later on I will be going out for a birthday dinner with a friend.

All around me in my room, there are differently coloured mandalas. The room needs to be cleaned somewhat, but it isn't as disgusting as it normally becomes because slowly, slowly, I've been introducing order to this chaos.

Slowly, slowly, to-do lists are shrinking. Yesterday I received a new laptop battery which solves a really irritating problem. (To-do lists are good, to-do lists are my friend).

So anyway, I just wanted to say hey.

Hey!