Starting out , good luck!

Before I returned home, my GRAND plan was something like the following:
1. Apply for jobs at local universities
2. Hope they need me to start sometime after July 2011
3. Teach in CHKL starting January 2011 ....OR
3. Travel to south India or Mongolia sometime before June 2011
4. Learn a long list of things...like R, Inkscape, Tamil, Bharatanatyam
5. Complete a sewing project I have in mind
6. Read that excellent book on parasites, since parasite-host ecology is one of my latent (and strong) interests
7. Read Jim Collin's Built to Last and Michael Porter's On Competition
8. Train myself to think in 'business-mode'

BUT most of all, I thought that I owe myself a break.
A break from research, from anything that I have been doing in the past eight years.
No ecology, no science.
I wanted to take a break, and use the break to explore other dimensions that I have ignored.
Like art, business, traveling.

YET the reality is that my time is limited, and I #1-#8 are often conflicting among themselves.
Money and time. Always money and time, the limiting factors?
Or, are they?

Perhaps it's not money or time.
It's just me and my incapability to prioritize 'exploration of other dimensions' before the expected path of 'graduate-job-get steady-bla bla bla'.
I realise that there is a certain amount of courage and wisdom needed to cast aside the urge to jump straight onto the career wagon.
Have I this courage and wisdom?

I keep on telling myself (literally every night before I sleep) that I should relax and give myself the chance to backpack for months, or to at least forget about jobs first. I try to convince myself that not working for a few months isn't such a terrible thing, that it's okay for me to stop working and just learn new and very different things that are apparently career-unrelated.

And then I wake up every day to check emails from recruiters, to check property listings (hahaha), to check if the pandi kuti is doing fine, if there are other job opportunities out there that I have missed...

What I haven't done is to do tourism research on south India, on Mongolia.
What I haven't done is to call  up the Temple of Fine Arts and enquire about their Bharatanatyam classes.
I feel sorry for the adventurous me.

I guess I am after all, not a spontaneous person.
I calculate, I plan, I forecast and I act.
Want me to go backpacking without first securing a job down the line?
Almost impossible.
Sigh.
Very boring ar me, my character I mean.
Decreasing my market value on the 'singles' market.

Eh...then again...no woh.
I went skydiving alone. but tandem lah.
LOL.
I borrowed my friend's car, drove to the airfield alone, and jumped.
My backpacking trips also I planned to go alone one.
Macam tu kalau spontaneous pun (and I am sure I will...actually I get very spontaneous once I am traveling), I don't have to consider my travel mates.

I can't even tell if this is a rant or a reminder to myself.

Anyway, life is a series of pictures. Today's pictures reflect my current stage in life too.

 This madam was crawling on the window pane beside my desk. I looked at her and asked "oi, you know you are in the wrong place?"

 She's off to a new and challenging start, just like me. Her wings have dropped, that means she's mated and ready to build a new ant colony.

It's going to be very tough for her, starting out alone and having to care for her brood with just her six legs and a pair of mandibles (hahaha). So I helped her by transporting her from the window pane to our garden.

I hope she does well.
I hope I do well too.


Oh, she's an ant by the way. Very fierce one too...when I picked her up she flared her mandibles at my fingers :).