corrosive distraction

Mindless reading is my greatest weakness. Others succumb to the lure of cigarettes or alcohol. I do a lot of pop-up reading I'm not entirely certain whether it's useful or necessary as we journey through this lifetime. I use my phone (type random names on google) or the newspapers and magazines handed out for free at Tube stations. At the weekend I grabbed a copy of Time magazine ( should I buy when it's available online?). There was a chronology on popular boy bands in one of the pages. I haven't deciphered every single article yet. But it reminds me to read more on Margaret O'Brien.

Reading is good. But I read the gossip pages instead of washing up or ironing or hoovering. Or baking ( I bake now. Hurray!). So I'm writing this amid clutter and wreckage. I should remember to post and wrap mails and parcels and start the lay-out on my little girl's album. Going through my list of chores is not exactly fun or exciting.

But I'll be more moribund if I will not move my ass at this point of touching letters on screen. I'll start in the kitchen. Nibble a cheesecake before midnight? I might as well, read.

awaiting the blue sky

Aside from being cold, the relentless rain has overwhelmed my senses since September. It's harder to manoeuvre when it's colder, now that we limit our radiator use. I wear thick clothes indoors instead. Energy companies and their love of profits push us to live in dire straits making it easy to wallow in misery.

The weather extremes are the facts of life. There's drought in California whilst parts of England are flooded. The night before and this morning, I was struggling to walk against the trajectory of the wind. Would I rather have the snow and fall flat in the mud? Winter is far from perky but we all know that the sun is shining brightly soon.

The upside to the chill is that there are less people in the streets. Our communal garden is devoid of noisy, shrieking kids as well as noisy, shrieking adults. But my little girl is thriving in the cold. She has a few minutes running around in the cold almost daily, having the space all to herself, doing her usual headless chicken bits.

I would surely miss the silence once the sun shines. Alas, three blocks are also going to get occupied in this new year, three blocks of new neighbours. One thing's certain in life, the world's getting smaller for tons amount of people.

old talk

If only RP could provide jobs for all its people, there wouldn't be a diaspora. Part of the population wouldn't seek greener pastures within and beyond the Asian continent and there wouldn't be a necessity to literally kowtow to citizens of developed economies. Channeling our patience towards our stereotype professions in foreign land, sometimes in a hostile environment, contributes to our motherland's coffers in addition to providing financial support to our families. It's these contributions from very intrepid individuals that is propelling us to the top of financial hierarchy.

There is still a long way to go in eradicating poverty and hunger. There is the unequal distribution of wealth. There should be strong government programs providing income generating projects to the deprived members of society. A few should not be in a hurry to populate the earth. These were the heavily-debated topics during my adolescent years, more than two decades later, the pictures still show tearful scenes of deprivation. These days it's more high-tech, the debates are being argued and deliberated online.

But talk is merely, talk. It all boils down to good governance and a majority imbibing the virtues of good foresight.