According to my wife Cynthia, she has used this very photograph taken during our recent trip to France as her profile photo in one of her company’s websites. Needless to say, that has made an impression among her colleagues; forever known as the croissant girl or the girl who likes French café. OK. I have made the last bit up. But you see where I am coming from. That radiance of happiness for the love of croissant and coffee. Now, how does this photo relate to this blog entry? Stay on. You will see.
Left home early for work, because I needed to drop the car at a workshop near the city for its 140,000 km servicing. Travelling more than 70 km a day does age the car pretty fast. Instead of working in the office at the east, I have decided to work in town, taking the opportunity to meet up with the business folks. Every time I visit town, I often call up my friend Shauna to see if she is up for lunch. The challenge of being relocated out of the city is that it is hard to keep up with my friends whom I get to know from previous workplaces. Shauna happens to be one of my few dear friends who is willing to meet up, even when we are like 25 km apart (that is halfway across the country!).
Over lunch, she asked if I still paint. I then replied to her that not only I do not have the energy to paint, but also anything else really. Like writing or creating music. Not even playing music. Since April, I have not had a decent sleep. She nearly jumped out of the chair – we were dinning by the Singapore river by the way – and said, “Me too!”.
It turns out that she too has a similar issue. She would sleep for four hours and then for no reason, become awake. Most of the time she would not be able to fall asleep again. No matter how much exercise she does, the cycle continues. I too suffer the same sleeping problem. The good news (all relative really) is that after months of sleep deprivation, I am more likely to be able to drift back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night. But my sleep is pretty disturbed nonetheless.
There is little the both of us can do. She exercises regularly while I stay out of caffeine all this while. We barely able to pull through the day. And somewhere in our conversation today, she mentioned that she is losing her memory too due to prolonged lack of sleep. I have not done a memory check. However, I would not be surprised that I may be affected in a similar way. So today, I have started to resume my blogging. Even if I – touch wood – lose some memory here and there, so long as I remember the URL of my website, I can always refer to what I have written.
After lunch, I took a walk around Shauna’s new office building – Ocean Financial Centre – and took some pictures. In the past, it was used to be Ocean Building before that was torn down for this new building. I have worked in that old Ocean Building too. A consultant in an accounting firm. Those were the weirdest days of my life. Now, my past has been obliterated together with the disappearance of Ocean Building. I am sure I have written quite a bit of my good-old-days-in-Ocean-Building somewhere in this website, if I care to dig deep through the pile of posts that is.
Before Shauna said goodbye, she told me that the tart from the new sandwich shop near her office is delicious. In actual fact, I have passed by the new underpass just before meeting her and I vaguely remember such a store named Paul. I was attracted by the sandwich filled with brie. It looked so yummy. When I mentioned Paul to my wife Cynthia this evening, immediately she told me that we have visited Paul before, but not in Singapore.
Now, look closer to the picture in this post, do you see Paul? I love to document my life here, be it as in words or in pictures.