Starting a blog has always been my one of my many resolutions, but there's something masochistic about laying bare one's inner thoughts and emotions. This is why this blog took such a long time to gestate, although some would attribute it to good-old-fashioned procrastination. Truth be told, I've always known that I would've a blog - it was just a matter of time. But there's been so many false starts that it felt for a while that this was not meant to be. Now that I'm going to write down my thoughts, I feel obliged to say why I started this blog. For as long as I can remember, I've always loved the written and spoken word. I'm amazed at how words can evoke the most loving or terrifying response, and how it controls our lives more than we care to admit. Words are vessels of power that can build up or destroy one's lives. They are the medium through which our thoughts and feelings impact those around us, be it good or bad. They can galvanise people to ...
It’s been a while since my last blog entry in late 2014. Since then, I’ve changed jobs and things have been rather hectic at work. But it’s also because I seem to be losing momentum in recent years. I can’t quite pin it down, but it could be that I’m getting old or lazy, or both. Murakami said that while some writers seem to have an endless well of ideas to draw upon, it’s not the case for him. To him, writing is something that he has to work on, and it can be tough depending on whether the creative juices flow. I’ve read his first few and later novels, and I never felt that he had to labor over his work. Somehow, he has a way of putting across his ideas in simple but impactful ways. True, his earlier works can seem plotless but he more than made up for it through his punchy writing. And some of his work are very complicated and hard to understand, such as Kafka on the Shore which I didn’t quite grasp. I’m not comparin...
I recently moved house after imposing on my brother and my sister-in-law for slightly more than a year. I put off buying a new place initially because I had read about how the property market usually lagged the stock market, and it was supposed to tank in the later part of 2009. But I forgot that economic conditions are dynamic and every recession is different. The one that we just came out of, which threatened to be worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, elicited unprecedented responses from governments around the world. Over here in our island state, the government introduced the Jobs Credit System, which subsidised companies so that they need not retrench as many workers. This also meant that people can continue to service their housing loans and even buy more properties. So instead of tanking, the market actually went up in tandem with the recovery of the stock market. So I had to decide in Sep 09 whether I should use some of my savings to buy a new place. This was tricky b...
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