Insights

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Last week, I was in Thailand for a three-day firm retreat. One of the training sessions we had was to receive the results of a personality test we’d taken a few weeks back. The personality test is based on the four “Psychological Types” by Carl Gustav Jung. The test was only 10 questions, so most of us were skeptical of how much it could tell us about ourselves, but the results surprised us all. Everyone had to admit that the unique booklet generated for everyone described, nay, embodied them almost to a T. Below, I have copied out the overview that was written about me. I have underlined the things I identify strongly with and crossed out things I do not identify with (also italicised things I’m not sure about). We’ve been asked to share some of these insights with people who know us, and I thought, who better than the people I share my uninhibited thoughts with via my blog?

Legend:
Underlined Identify very strongly with (agree completely)
Crossed out Do not identify/agree with or doubtful about
Italicised Questionable (like, really?)

Personal Style
Quick to see the possibilities of new ideas and projects, SG is outstanding at initiating these and persuading people to support her. She is convinced of her own abilities and is constantly seeking environments where people will appreciate her. Ingenious, enthusiastic and outgoing, SG has great personal charm and can be successful in a variety of roles. She is inventive, independent and can be extremely perceptive of the potential contained within the views of others. She usually has a theory that will explain everything. She may not necessarily prefer innovative solutions over established ones but is adept at seeing situations from an unusual perspective.

Writing important facts or steps down on paper helps her keep from getting side-tracked, but she may lack the discipline necessary to do this well. Her speed of articulation may generate a few rough edges in conversation. She is an imaginative and creative visionary who is a source of inspiration to most. SG is a resourceful action-oriented person who lives for the future by making every moment count. She is motivated more by the big picture and goals than by regulations and procedures, and is content with established structures only if she can abandon them when they don’t serve the intended purpose.

SG may generate more ideas, possibilities and plans in one day than others might manage in a month! She can be funny and outspoken but is inevitably concerned with others’ opinions. She constantly opens up new avenues of thought or action and can keep them open against all comers. She has started many interesting projects in her time, but has finished considerably fewer. She enjoys projects where she can be seen to bring out improvements.

SG enjoys working with complex problems and is unceasing in her pursuit of mastering anything she finds intriguing. She values the gifts of inspiration and intuition above almost everyone else in all that she does. Only when a strongly held value is at risk will she willingly attend to important facts and details. She needs to learn to see things through to completion or get other people to finsih what she has started. She has an urge for lifelong learning and can shake off depression by simply finding projects that fascinate her. She possesses a natural gift for presentation.

Gifted in natural marketing and selling, SG needs work that challenges her and holds her attention. Work that is purely practical or work that leaves her on her own for long periods can make her irritable. SG is a curious and keen student of all that is going on around her. She will lose interest quickly and lack the self-discipline necesary to complete what she has started unless the project can continue to excite her vision. SG can combine social expertise within her normally assertive behaviour.

Interacting with Others
People see SG as enthusiastic, ingenious, imaginative and dynamic , with highly developed interpersonal skills. Bringing enthusiasm and energy to most activities, she can turn a dull managerial task into a game by using her persuasiveness and creativity to maintain the interest and commitment of others. SG is both charming and popular, constantly enthusing through her gift of ready articulation. Unconventional in approach and enjoying motivating others to exceed what is accepted and expected, she likes to live freely, looking for variety every day. She may become rather over-emotional when stressed.

She is a particularly good communicator and uses her gift of verbal expression often and effectively. She usually finds working with another person, even on a less interesting phase of a project, preferable to working by herself. When SG is in charge of a project she offers the team long-term vision and the ability to inspire and communicate that vision to others. She can be very vocal about social or people issues that concern her and can often be seen as the underdog’s “champion”. She may become rebellious or sulk if people try to railroad her or interfere in her plans.

Because she is so interested in possibilities, SG sees significance in everything while preferring to keep lots of options open. Having a high need to be affirming of others and to receive affirmation from others, she exhibits an infectious enthusiasm for living. She is noted for her innate ability to inspire and encourage others around her and exhibits excellent interpersonal skills. She is enthusiastic in helping people make the best of themselves and she is proficient in making lots of contacts. She is rather indifferent to authority, preferring a flattened structure where everyone is equally capable of advancing.

Decision Making
Open-minded, curious and insightful, SG has excellent long-range vision. She may have so many ideas on the go that she has difficulty in making up her mind on the best course of action. She has a tendency towards making higher risk decisions. She should take care not to take on too many commitments, and be sure to take time to see to the complention of current work before starting a new project. Sometimes she makes poor choices by getting involved with too many things at once.

She will not allow systems and procedure to stand in the way of what she believes is right. The best of a part of a project for her is the initial problem-solving element and the creation of something new. Thereafter the interest in completion begins to wane. She has the ability to appear to listen to other people’s viewpoints but may not necessarily be hearing or intending to action them. A tendency to take rejection and conflict personally may lead to her not taking early notice of the opinions of key members of the team. She enjoys the executive role and usually rises to challenges although she needs someone around with enough common sense to bring up overlooked facts and take care of important details.

Optimstic, spontaneous, creative and confident, she has an original mind and a strong sense of the possible. She is constantly full of enthusiasm for new ideas. Others may see her decisions as unrealistic in certain circumstances. Through her intuitive feeling personality, she may have difficult in limiting herself to a single project and usually prefers to keep many balls in the air. She is likely to exercise her intuition constantly on the most important and challenging parts of a problem. Her direct, sometimes erratic approach tends to work against her being totally consistent on a day-to-day basis.

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The test places your position on a colour wheel with each colour representing a different persona. The test gives two results/positions, your conscious position and your personal or “less conscious” position. I think of the “less conscious” persona as something like how I “really am” and not how I portray myself to society. Overall, my conscious persona is an “Inspiring Motivator” and my less conscious persona is a “Directing Motivator”.
I think what this really means is that my less conscious persona is actually quite assertive (euphemism for bossy) but I tone it down because I know that being “directing” does not make you many friends, so my conscious persona is shifted towards the softer version of being bossy (“inspiring”, “encouraging”, etc.).

My manager said that most (North) American-grown consultants tend to get results on the extroverted side of the wheel (yellow and red) whereas most Asian-grown consultents tend to get results on the introverted side of the wheel (blue and green). This cultural explanation makes me really notice how much of the American culture I have bought into, especially adopting the “motivating” leadership style, as opposed to the directive style I had as a kid (and hence my “less conscious” persona).

Keep in mind that this was generated by a computer, not written by someone who has ever met me. Needless to say, I’m impressed by how spot-on it is about the most defining aspects of my character.

That girl

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There was once a little girl, who wasn’t so different from other little girls. She was smart, funny, and pretty enough. When she was fourteen, she met a boy. They became best friends, and then they fell in love. It was everything that she thought it would be. If there was such a thing as soul mates, they were each others. They understood each other as fully as two people could; they finished each others’ sentences, they couldn’t spend enough time together, and they had eyes for no one but each other. And this was not just a three-month high.
A few years later, for reasons she still can’t quite understand (or maybe there was no reason), they broke up. Although she accepted the break-up, she started to question her views on love. She had found her soul mate, they had fallen in love, and yet, it wasn’t the be-all, end-all that she had thought it would be. It wasn’t the happily-ever-after she had been promised.

In the years following her break-up, she dated a few boys here and there, but mostly, she met boys who were not interested in love at all. Next to them, her naivety and hopefulness seemed foolish. She had thought that finding another love would come as easily as the first, but it didn’t. She became disillusioned and cynical.
Eventually, she decided she wasn’t going to rely on a boy to find her happiness, and instead, she was going to find happiness for herself. She worked hard in school and landed a very coveted job when she graduated. She grew into a confident, successful, witty young woman. And yes, she came with a side of cynicism and self-deprecating humour. She started to think that she did not need boys, or men, in her life at all. Eventually, she stopped believing in love.

If I were a character in a movie or a book, this would probably be how my character’s life would be summarized. Now you might think that this story is a sad one, but is it?

This third-person reflection was brought on by two big questions that I suddenly wondered to myself today: 1) when did I grow up, and 2) when had I become so cynical?
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A weekend in Hong Kong

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This weekend, I met some old friends and a new friend in Hong Kong.

A few weeks ago, frugirl of Fabulously fru-girl, a fellow Canadian, emailed me to say she was going to Hong Kong for two weeks on a family vacation, and did I want to meet up at some point? Although I am in Taipei these days, Hong Kong was but an hour flight away ((Although with the transport to/from the airport, and waiting in line at immigration, total travel time is closer to 5 hours.)). Never to miss an opportunity to meet bloggers in real life, I decided to schedule a weekend trip. By sheer chance, a week later, a classmate of mine from The Business School, who is now living in Vancouver, said he was coming to Hong Kong during this time as well. Since I couldn’t find a place to crash this weekend, I ended up splitting accommodation with him.

So on Friday, I flew to Hong Kong. My classmate, LBB, met me at the airport and we headed to the two-bedroom we’d rented in Sheung Wan together. Our first meal in Hong Kong was a pizzeria near Wan Chai and a side of bubble tea. Then we walked around LKF. Neither of us wanted to drink, so we ended up having some Haagen Daz while watching the club-goers of Hong Kong do their thing.

On Saturday morning, we took the ferry to Macau. He had suggested it on a whim, and I, never having been to Macau, jumped at the suggestion. Since we weren’t interested in gambling, we were mostly going for the Portuguese egg tarts. When we arrived in Macau, the immigration queue was an unmoving sea of people, and I started to doubt our decision to come (especially considering that I’d never been a big fan of egg tarts). It turned out the Grand Prix was on this weekend in Macau, which explained the sea of people but did not explain why the line was not moving. We did eventually make it through immigration though, after which we headed straight for the egg tarts shop. And finally, our decision to come to Macau with the single-minded purpose of trying Portuguese egg tarts was validated. They were totally delicious, and totally worth it.
We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering near the central square, admiring the European architecture, and looking for more food. We found the infamous food street but all the shops were closed (maybe they only open at night?). My feet were starting to hurt, so we ended up chilling in a Starbucks away from the hustle and bustle of the central square. We did check out the casinos before we headed back to the ferry, and while the gambling held no appeal to me, I was pretty impressed by the flashy interiors. Every hall or atrium we entered seemed to be made of pure marble with gold and mirrors and chandeliers here and there.

After we came back to Hong Kong, we met NB and his girlfriend for dinner. If you recall from my university days, NB was a classmate who had flirted with me endlessly and sent many ambiguous signals. Memories that particularly stand out to me, usually following nights of drinking, were him resting his head on my shoulder at karaoke when everyone else had left the room, and piggy-backing me through the streets of University Town when I insisted I could walk on my own. Although I stopped questioning his flirtations after I found out he had a girlfriend, they did not stop. After we both graduated and moved to Asia, I’d meet up with him every time I came to Hong Kong. The last time I saw him, he had taken me home in a taxi after a night at LKF, and I’m pretty sure I passed out in his lap on the taxi home. He had asked me if I wanted to stay with him instead of going back to my coworker’s apartment (because hers was much farther than his and I had to wake her up to let me in since I had no key) and I had wondered whether he was simply suggesting it out of convenience for me or because he wanted to take advantage of my state of drunkenness. On the whole though, he has never overtly made a move on me, which is why we can still be friends.
So this dinner was interesting not because his girlfriend was there, whom I’ve met on several occasions in Canada, but because they seemed distinctly unhappy. This was strange for two reasons: 1) she had just moved to Hong Kong a month ago after having graduated from university in Canada, so they’re finally reunited after doing long-distance for over a year, and 2) she had just finished writing a financial certification exam a few hours before the dinner. If I were her, I’d be in varying degrees of ecstasy but instead, she was making jabs at him about everything, and not in a very cute/teasing/funny way. At one point in the night, I unwisely brought up the dating life of a mutual friend of ours, who had been a complete nobody in school but now had more than one girlfriend (his “steady” girlfriend in Beijing had no idea about all the dates he’s had lined up since he started work as an investment banker in Hong Kong). When the boys took a washroom break, NB‘s girlfriend continued to confide her feelings of injustice to me, saying “It’s not about how far he goes with the other girls ((Our mutual friend had never slept with the girls he dated other than his girlfriend, to our knowledge.)), it’s about the sense of commitment.” I secretly wondered whether we were still talking about our mutual friend or if she was really talking about NB. Did she finally notice his indiscretions after reuniting in Hong Kong? Maybe she knew them all along and was now starting to question them since they were clearly destined for marriage?

We went to an arcade after dinner, and it turned out LBB and I made a great pair shooting hoops, killing mutants, drumming, and fighting. In fact, our chemistry seemed to be a hundred times better than the real couple we were with. They ended up going home early and LBB and I continued playing until the arcade closed.

On Sunday, I met frugirl for dim sum at Maxim’s Palace. We chatted about our blogging experiences, work, and even entered a discussion on the cultural differences in the East and West. It’s always interesting to meet up with a Canadian in Asia, even more interesting to meet up with a Canadian blogger for the first time in Asia. After dim sum, I took her shopping, as she was looking for a suit and I was looking for a wallet. After several fruitless hours, we ended up buying make-up at SaSa, having some Hui Lau Shan ((We had the aloe jelly with mango and coconut juice, which I’ve never had before and was quite good. I recommend it!)), and calling it a day. My legs were starting to feel like jelly after walking so much (still not recovered from Macau the day before), so I went to the airport a little early and collapsed into a seat in the lounge, vowing never to move again.

All in all, a very satisfying weekend!

Loving life

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Although it’s not yet December, for some reason I feel like 2011 is coming to a close exceedingly quickly. And when I look back on my year, some great memories immediately jump out at me.

  • Relaxing on a junk in Halong Bay, Vietnam
  • Flying to Hong Kong on a whim for a weekend of shopping
  • People-watching in a cafe in Seoul all afternoon, with no Blackberry, no book, just a cup of hot latte and a very good view of the street
  • White-water rafting in Bali
  • Sipping oolong tea in a 100-year-old teahouse in the mountains of Jiufen, on the north coast of Taiwan
  • Hearty Italian dinners in Singapore
  • Sushi at midnight in Tokyo
  • Trying every single street food in Taipei night markets
  • Re-reading Hunger Games with a cup of genmaicha (brown rice tea) and Ritter Sport chocolate with whole hazelnuts
  • Doing a 1000-piece puzzle on a rainy Sunday afternoon
  • Ordering dukbokki in broken Korean on the streets of Seoul
  • Spontaneous trip to Beijing for some quality bonding time with best friend in company, and binge-ing on coconut juice
  • Fabulous hotel buffets
  • Picking my own live seafood in Sai Kung, Hong Kong
  • Playing drinking games in Qingdao’s version of Oktoberfest
  • Running into Matt Damon on Grouse Mountain in Vancouver
  • Sneaking onto a secluded beach after midnight with a cute boy
  • Taiwanese bubble tea
  • Lots of KFC eaten in hotel rooms
  • Spontaneous peanut-eating contests
  • Baking chocolate chip oatmeal cookies and having pancakes with maple syrup at midnight on Canada Day
  • VIP karaoke in Singapore x 100
  • Cycling through rice paddies in Bali

Most of these are from the last two months because they’re the first to come to mind, but even from this fraction of my 2011 memories, it’s clear to me that this year has been fantastic, from the exciting to the mundane. Sure, there have been some lows (like being homeless for five months) but overall my life has never been better.
And the year is not over yet!
I still have all of December to look forward to.

  • Company retreat in a resort in Thailand
  • Moving into my new apartment with two brand-spanking-new flatmates
  • Going back to Toronto and seeing my dog, my parents, and my friends (in that order)
  • High school five-year graduation reunion (not formally organized by the school, my grade has just decided that we want to get together)
  • Annual shopping trip with PHB
  • Starbucks holiday drinks (peppermint mocha!)
  • All-You-Can-Eat Japanese/sushi
  • Holiday get-together of business school friends: ice-skating in downtown Toronto followed by potluck
  • A proper (Canadian) winter: wearing coats and boots and scarves!
  • Going to the spa on New-Year’s-Eve Day with BI, then going out with her and her boy-du-jour to bring in the new year in style
  • New Year’s Day champagne brunch

I love my life.

If you love me

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If you are going to fall in love with me, it’s only fair that you know what you are falling in love with.

You are falling in love with my stubbornness, my constant need to be right. You are falling in love with my pride, my front to act aloof and unemotional. You are falling in love with my obsessive planning and my disdain for inefficiency. You are falling in love with my forgetfulness, my clumsiness, my inability to sew and my knack for destroying every single shirt I’ve ever tried to iron. You are falling in love with my arrogance and impatience for stupidity. You are falling in love with my ambition, my need to prove that I can be successful, by whatever society defines as success. You are falling in love with my high expectations for everyone around me and my even higher expectations for myself.

But you are also falling in love with my laughter, my awkwardness when I receive compliments, my unfailing sense of humour. You are falling in love with the way my hand fits into yours, the way I smile at you, the way I feel in your arms. You are falling in love with my passion for food, for travel, for adventure. You are falling in love with my courage, come what may. You are falling in love with the way I look when I’m asleep, a kind of peace and calm you never see when I’m awake. You are falling in love with the way I never let my guard down except around you.

But for me, the most important thing will be that you are falling in love with me, despite my thinking that it is impossible.

Inspired by this.

Boys in Hanoi

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Last Friday was one of our firm’s “Big Friday” training days, so we were technically supposed to return to our home offices. Instead, I flew in to the Hong Kong office on Friday morning and flew to Hanoi, Vietnam in the afternoon. In my few hours spent in the Hong Kong office, I attended some training sessions, finished the presentation deck I’d promised my manager, and caught up with some of my same-batch coworkers in Hong Kong.

Hanoi was only a one-hour flight from Hong Kong, but I was dead tired since I’d been up at 4:30 AM to catch the first flight to Hong Kong. The hotel had sent a driver to pick me up from the airport, which was about 45 minutes from the city. My driver turned out to be a young and extremely good-looking Vietnamese boy, who couldn’t hide his glee that his pick-up turned out to be me. His English was rudimentary, but he found every excuse to talk to me. He asked me about my background, including whether I had any Vietnamese parentage (he seemed disappointed when I said no, but that didn’t stop him from questioning me further). He asked me how old I was. I didn’t ask him the question in return, although I guessed that he couldn’t have been much older than I was, maybe even one or two years younger. Halfway through the ride, he turned his rear-view mirror to point directly at me (I guess he was tired of turning his head every time to look at me), which made me blush with embarrassment. He was actually quite sweet as opposed to creepy (did I mention how cute he was?), but I was not used to nor expecting this much attention.

When I arrived at the hotel, I was almost relieved to be leaving his gaze. I did feel a little bit guilty afterward for barely having said two words to him when I was leaving his car. I should have at least thanked him, but I could feel myself blushing already and I couldn’t even look at him.

SKB had a later flight from Singapore so he arrived a few hours after I did. I had passed out almost as soon as I got to our room, so it took him a few knocks to wake me and let him in. We ended up chatting about work for a few hours before drifting off to sleep.

The next day we had planned a full-day Halong Bay tour, so our tour guide arrived at the hotel bright and early to pick us up. As we were leaving, the hotel manager, a well-dressed, attractive man who could actually speak decent English (and was actually quite young-looking), bade us well. Later, our tour guide would ask me whether I had a husband or boyfriend. I was starting to notice that I got a lot of attention from boys in Vietnam.

After a bumpy three-hour drive, we finally arrived at our destination and boarded the junk boat that we would spend the rest of the day on. The chefs on the boat cooked us a Vietnamese meal for lunch, and we sunbathed on the upper deck.

Halong Bay was quite a sight, particularly on a sunny day. We made two stops. One was at a cave that was quite big and had strange rock formations formed from dripping water carving limestone chandeliers from the ceiling and creating limestone deposits on the cave floor. They had strategically placed different coloured lights to light up the rock formations in the cave and it looked absolutely stunning.
The second stop was among what looked like a floating neighbourhood on the water. There were houses floating a few meters from each other. Some were quite shabby but some were quite nice, with hammocks hanging in front. There was also a large floating platform, which seemed like a marketplace of some sort. We docked against the large floating platform. After disembarking, we had the choice to hire a local in a banana boat to take us through the “water tunnels” of the nearby mountain-islands or to rent a kayak. Since I was wearing a dress, we joined a group in a banana boat. The water was a beautiful aquamarine, with almost no current at all, and after going through one tunnel we found ourselves surrounded by mountains rising out of the water on all four sides. We could shout and hear our own echo, but other than the ruckus we were making, all was silent. It was quite an experience.

I was flying out the next day, so SKB and I had a long breakfast on the hotel’s rooftop patio, overlooking the bustling city of Hanoi below. As I was leaving, the young hotel manager eagerly came to walk me out. He shook my hand twice, the second time he held on a tad longer than was customary. The entire hotel had assumed that SKB and I were a couple (as many of them kept asking me, “Where is your husband/boyfriend?”), but the hotel manager now took this opportunity to ask me to email him and let him know if I should ever return to Vietnam, alone.
If I thought this was strange, what SKB told me later was even more bizarre. He was staying an extra night, and apparently after he returned to the hotel on Sunday evening, the hotel receptionist (the same guy who had received me when I arrived on my first night) told SKB that he thought his “girlfriend” was quite pretty. When SKB was checking out the next morning, the same guy gave SKB his email and asked him to pass it to me. “You’ve really made an impression on these guys!” SKB told me via BBM, “If they thought we were a couple, he was quite bold to do that!”
I had no explanation.
Apparently my brand of good looks is irresistible to Vietnamese boys. Good to know! If ever I have trouble finding a husband, I can always go to Vietnam as a back-up plan.

A weekend of relaxation

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Note: This is another “day in the life of a consultant” type entry, because I feel like it. There is nothing particularly exciting about this entry, but maybe if you live vicariously through blogs you’ll find this interesting. However, there is no such thing as a “typical” day/week/month for a consultant, so this is just one slice of a very big and varied pie.

At 5AM, I awoke to an annoying ringing next to my ear. I had been sleeping for four hours and almost forgot why my alarm clock was going off at 5AM until I remembered I had a flight in a few hours. I quickly cleaned myself up, finished packing, and before I knew it, my driver had arrived and was waiting for me downstairs ((One thing I love about working in Taipei is that I have a driver to pick me up and drop me off every time I need to go to the airport. Every time I return from somewhere, my driver is waiting in the arrivals hall with my name on a placard, and then taking my bags and ushering me into a black limo. It kind of makes me feel like a celebrity.)).

It was a peaceful hour-long drive to Taoyuan International Airport. I put some Kpop on and watched the dull industrial buildings pass by outside the window while I reminisced about my trip to Seoul, wondering whether I’d be able to fit in another weekend trip to Seoul in November.

After I’d gone through security at the airport, I bought a box of Taiwanese delicacies to bring back for my colleagues in my Singapore office. Then I had breakfast in an airport cafe, a set meal of dan dan noodles that came with three side dishes and a delicious coconut sago pumpkin dessert. I was reminded of how lucky the Taiwanese are in terms of food, even their airport food is delicious.

While I had my breakfast, I was messaging back and forth with PLB. It had been at least two weeks since we’d spoke. In general, I felt like the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” applied to both of us respectively. I told him that I had decided to go back to Toronto for the Christmas holidays, which basically meant I had decided not to go to Vancouver to see him. He seemed disappointed, so I said maybe we could meet up in Toronto. His home is two hours outside of Toronto, and he was also going to be in Toronto for a full day before flying back to Vancouver, but he said he might not have time to see me.
I had been willing to fly 20,000 miles just to see him, and he couldn’t drive two hours to see me (or make time when he was actually in the same city)? At this moment, he confirmed what I suspected all along. How foolish it would have been, and what a huge waste of my time, money, and energy, if I had actually decided to spend a week in Vancouver just for him. I am glad I see that now rather than later, because I would feel like a huge sucker if I had picked him over my family and friends, only to realize he was not worth it. At all.

After I courteously let him know I was no longer planning to go to Vancouver, I boarded my flight and turned off my phone. He could take it however he wanted.

Four and a half hours, a glass of chardonnay, and several naps later, I landed in Singapore. I have no ties to Singapore, nor any fond memories or strong bond with the place, and yet I did feel a little bit like I was returning home. I guess I do think of Singapore as home, maybe for lack of another place to call home.

As usual, I had no checked-in baggage and could scan my passport, so I breezed through customs and was in a taxi in fifteen minutes flat. As usual, I headed straight to the office.

As soon as I arrived at the office, my two favourite support staff ambushed me. Our trio sneaked off to the pantry for some coffee and a catch-up session. The three of us made unlikely friends, one of them is just over 30 and nursing an infant, the other is over 40 and has a 17 year-old daughter. And yet, for whatever reason, we were our own little group within the office. We always had lunch together and I always brought them little gifts from the different places I’ve traveled to.

Afterward, I quickly got to work as I still had to finish a presentation and send it to my manager before the end of the day. I had a dinner engagement at 7pm so I wouldn’t be able to work into the night (not that I wanted to), and I couldn’t skip dinner, as it was the reason I came back to Singapore. This dinner was no ordinary dinner. My first project had won a company-wide intellectual capital award, and our reward was $1000 USD to spend on dinner. Thus, I had booked the best restaurant in Singapore, and one of the top 50 restaurants in the world, Iggy’s. At $250 SGD a head, our prize money was just enough for the four of us, and the exchange rate gave us a bit of headroom for alcohol. Continue reading →

Falling in love through my stomach in Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul

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The past few weeks have been very busy for me. I’ve started my project in Taipei, and I will be here until early December. The project is entirely in Chinese, which presents some interesting challenges for me since I’m not really fluent in Chinese, especially not reading/writing Traditional Chinese characters. My project manager knew this even before the project started, but they had to staff me because I was the only Mandarin-speaking consultant who could work in Taiwan (who wasn’t already on project during this period). So the only person I can blame is myself, for having a Canadian passport.

I wasn’t terribly excited to do this project, nor was I very impressed with Taipei the first time I visited. However, I must say that Taipei has grown on me. It’s a very convenient place to live if you’ve got a little disposable income ((For example, things like public transport are not as efficient as Singapore/Hong Kong/etc. but taxis are not terribly expensive and plentiful.)) and the food options are varied and delicious. Or it could simply be the fact that I’d been living out of a suitcase for the past four months with no permanent residence, it’s nice to finally have a place to call my own (at least until December). The first thing I did when I settled into my apartment was take every single thing out of my suitcase and hang it up into the closets. I can’t tell you how good that felt.

I have also been busy traveling. Aside from my very first weekend, I haven’t spent a single weekend in Taipei. Two weekends ago I was in Tokyo, last weekend it was Seoul, next weekend it will be Singapore, and the weekend after I’ll be in Vietnam.
Continue reading →

The courage to be foolish

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After PLB and I decided not to be in a relationship, I took it pretty hard. Our conversation was on a Friday, so for the next 10 hours, I got myself drunk. He texted me at 3am (my time).

PLB: Are you still up?
Me: Yep.
PLB: What are you doing?
Me: Drinking.

And then I couldn’t bear to continue the conversation because I was drunk and it took every fiber of my being not to tell him how much I missed him.

So I passed out.

When I woke up on Saturday, the first thing I did was delete the app that he and I used for texting ((He has an iPhone and I have a Blackberry so we can’t use BBM.)). I tried to keep myself busy the rest of the weekend, and when I wasn’t doing something, I slept. I was sleeping a lot, and I am normally someone who cannot sleep more than 8 hours. But the only place I could see him and be with him was in my dreams, which made me want to sleep forever. It sounds like a corny line from a love song, but I realized for the first time how true it can be.

I don’t know if he knew that I uninstalled the app, if it would notify him or something that the person he was texting was no longer in the conversation. It wasn’t until I reinstalled the app a few days ago (in a moment of weakness) that I realized he didn’t know. And he had still sent me messages in the last two weeks, even though I wasn’t receiving them. When I read them, I couldn’t ignore him anymore. Fueled by alcohol, I sent my first text to him in weeks. And he responded immediately, unabashedly admitting that he’d been thinking about me all this time. And then he said something that stopped me in my tracks. “I’m saving up for my trip to Asia next February,” he said.
Now, the trip isn’t necessarily about me, but who are we kidding? He wants to see me. He’s not just saying it, he is actually planning to come to Asia to find me.

We ended up talking on the phone three times that day ((We had two very short calls because he was at work, and then a longer call when he got home.)). I asked him if he still wanted me to go see him for New Years (which we had talked about before we “broke up”), because he alluded to it but I was confused – I mean, if we weren’t in a relationship, why would I go see him for a week? Wouldn’t it put us back where we started?

Me: If I come to Vancouver for New Year’s, wouldn’t we be back where we were?
PLB: You’re right. Of course I’d love to see you for New Year’s. And I know we’re going to have an amazing time together. But then you’ll leave and we’ll be faced with reality again. So… it depends if you can handle that…
Me: If I can handle that? What about you?
PLB: Well I’m a guy, I obviously don’t have feelings.

He said the last line jokingly, which at first made me a bit miffed, like “Oh, so this is just a very expensive booty call on my part?” but then I realized he was using the joke to cover up the fact that he did have feelings. If anything, he has stronger feelings than I do, but as my friend put it, “He doesn’t want to appear to be a sucker. He’s been beaten by SassyGirl cynicism.”

I had been operating under the assumption that his affections for me were driven by lust, by the fact that we’d slept together, by some hormonal imbalance in his brain (a.k.a. the honeymoon phase). So even though he has said a lot of wonderful things to me (which I’ve largely pretended not to hear), I haven’t really believed him. But it’s been well over a month since our two-night stand and judging by our phone call, nothing seems to have changed.
I had been worried that if I committed to seeing him for New Year’s, wouldn’t I be the sucker if he met someone between now and then? He even admitted that he’s met other girls, but it only frustrated him that I was still the one on his mind. Then he asked me about the men situation in Singapore, and I realized he’s just as worried that I will start dating someone here. It seems like despite what we said about giving up trying to have a relationship, neither of us are on the market looking for someone else.

So I have decided to go see him in Vancouver for New Years. I will probably only go for a week ((Yuck, another horrible jet lag experience coming up.)), but that’s better than nothing. It will be fun, and we are both looking forward to seeing each other again. Even if we’re not in a relationship, I am not ready to walk away from him yet, I need to see him one more time. This may not be the smartest thing I have ever done, but I am tired of making sensible decisions ((Even he was surprised by my decision. He said that I didn’t seem like the type to fly halfway around the world for a one-week fling. He’s right, I’m not. I’m breaking all the rules for him.)). I am still young, I have the liberty to have fun, be foolish, and make mistakes, a liberty I don’t take advantage of nearly enough.

Anyway, aren’t we all fools in love?

I miss everything about you

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I miss your lips.
I miss wrapping my arms around the back of your neck.
I miss the way you lift me up when we kiss.
I miss your smile.
I miss the way you can’t let go of my hand. You hold my hand when we’re walking, you hold my hand on the table when we’re eating, you hold my hand when you’re driving, even though I tell you to drive with both hands.
I miss how you kiss me 10 times when we’re saying goodbye, because one is never enough.
I miss the crook under your arm, the one you named after me, because that’s my spot. You told me that’s where I belong and you were right.

I hate that you think you know me even though we barely know each other. I hate it even more when you’re right.
I hate that you call me princess even though I am not a princess and I hate the name.
I hate that you are so egotistical and confident.
I hate that you are stubborn. I hate that you think you need to defy me because I am used to always being in control.
I hate that you fell in love with me so quickly, and I hate that you think you can make me believe in love.
I hate that you think you’re the exception.
I hate that I miss everything about you.
I hate that we don’t talk anymore. I hate that I told you to stop calling me and I hate that you listened.
I hate that I have to always be so sensible. I hate that I broke us up.

I hate that I can’t forget about you.

How can it be this hard to move on from you when we were never really together?