Welcoming Aidil Fitri 1433H

After a full month of staving off hunger, thirst; for smokers, the need to placate the brain's reward systems with the input of nicotine and various other desires of the fleshly kind, all Muslims in the world are geared to celebrate their victory on dominating these aspects of their lives while at the same time acquiring an improved level of self-control. The day in which Adil-Fitri or Eidul Fitri, depending on which nationality you ask is celebrated differs simply due to the different time zones in which the world is segregated into. Which also pretty much means that it would be celebrated for each respective zone of when the sun sets on the last day of Ramadhan, creating a continuous series of celebrations across the globe till when the sun begins to set on the first day of Syawal.

Far from my usual overtures of how such events have been cannibalized by consumerism via capitalists' desire in turning such spiritual, self-reflecting periods within all if not most religions into a profit machine, Aidil Fitri this year has brought about a more inward, retrospective as well as prospective take on my life as a whole. It represents, at least to me, a chance for a new start, devoid of the superfluous baggage in previous moments in my existence that has done nothing but impede my progress in attempting to be the best possible human that I can be.

That is in essence what religion, be it practised spiritually, doctrinally or haphazardly is about anyway. And this is regardless of whatever religion you might have been born into or adopted. Meandering and conflicting between the various belief systems though one of the main side effects of using such means to uphold the religion itself without the improvement of oneself.

This seemingly sudden need to dispose or reduce undesired traits within myself and improve is not due to any epiphany of a self-serving nature but more for the benefit of the next generation.

You see, I'm going to be a father soon, somewhere within the next 4 weeks to be exact without having the capacity to be all that accurate. And in order for my child to be able to receive the best possible options at being successful in life, I have to be one of those options. This coupled with the scare of my life in the last 24 hours that would have involved such a thing not having the possibility of occurring at all, I am now both grateful and gearing myself up for this role that has been entrusted upon me.

And so it is with a deep sense of humility, gratefulness, purpose, responsibility and a general sense of being blessed that I recite the takbir for this Aidil Fitri:

Stability from Sacrifice

I guess there will always come a time in a person's life when things appear on the verge of falling to pieces. A great number of songs have been composed to reflect such times of which none of their titles come to mind at this current point in time. Yet all of them carry the same familiar theme of a reality on the brink of utter destruction with its only hope being the sacrifice of things that one would hold most dear. And for me, that time had come once more.

Ebb, like the waves' impact on shoreline rocks

My writing, my family, my career, my studies ... my life. It all spun out of control in the past two weeks. The sudden realization that the slow impending ebb on the structures of my life had taken hold. And I needed to do something about it and fast.

Such an occurrence brings about the crucial need to identify between the needs and wants and more specifically to prioritize between factors in those structures that make up the whole of my life and to shed those that have made its integrity unsound. at least for the foreseeable present span in time. Also to ensure the survival of this thing known as sanity, or what's left of it.

The loss would no doubt be great, financially, emotionally and spiritually but alas it is definitely something that I would need to do to keep the reality that I'm in at least somewhat coherent and comprehensible. There would also be a future time when I would be able to reintegrate these factors carefully back into my life, albeit at a loss in terms of time but the opportunity exists nonetheless.

There's nobody else to blame for this but myself. And nobody else I owe an explanation to other than myself. Nor room for apologies. I guess the most frustrating part in all this is that I haven't been fast enough, enduring enough, smart enough, strong enough, malleable enough to bring all these components together; force them together rather.

There is this great desire to make things work, to prepare the structures of this reality in expectation of a new life; thus sacrifices have to be made, at least for now.

Of Now and 75 days hence

Honestly, I am as much fatigued with what has happened in recent weeks as I am both anxious and excited with what is to come in about two months or so.

What I wished I was able to do on my bus rides now

Firstly though, more on the fatigue part. As most may or may not know by now, I've since moved from the vicinity of the southern Central Business District to the northern part of this island nation. As a result I have also swapped a 20 min bus ride to work in south eastern Singapore with a jarring 1 hour and 45 min to 2 hour triple bus hopping journey to work. Needless to say this isn't the type of travel times that I'm used to. Double that up with the return trip and it eats up around 4 hours of my waking day, a time constraint with which I also had issues adapting to. Time that I would've used either to relax or catch up on my literature reading. How precious those minutes felt in these last three weeks and would be for some time to come.

In addition to that, the next module of my advanced diploma course had started again. And it is a Statistics module of which I was totally unprepared for which means that I have a whole lot of catching up to do, especially with the literature reviews and creation of a questionnaire before I am able to gather the required data for my assignment submission.

Not my uncle but probably what the face in his heart
and mind was making when I tried to convince him

A target that I could not quite meet this weekend as both me and my wife had to coax my single late 60 year old uncle into moving out of his apartment where he was staying alone and back to my mum's place. This wasn't something that was preplanned. We, as in me, my mom, my other uncle and my dad had just got wind of his inability to move about his community all that well a few days ago due to a sharp pain he felt on his thigh. Add that to the fact that he had his left leg amputated due to gangrene, one can imagine our sense of urgency and distress in getting him to move back to my mum's place. What with the fasting month coming soon, him being diabetic and there being nobody else staying with him, it would seem prudent and safer for him to shift. I did a piss poor job of convincing him though but thankfully my wife much more diplomatically inclined, at least when it came to dealing with the elderly, than I was and she managed to convince him that the move would be in his best interest. Yay wife! With that said, this was after a near 5 hour Mexican standoff-ish kind of moment where neither he nor us were going to budge.  But thank goodness it did. All that made us both reach home around 11 pm last night and were tired as tired gets. Add the outing today before the start of the fasting month next weekend and it would be safe to say that I did not get the time of rest that I was so accustomed to in weekends before. And I hope too to be forgiven for pushing back on work or study stuff that should be done now. My mind and body is aching for some down time.

On a somewhat higher note though, 2 months or so from now will be the due date of when my baby son (at least according to the scans) would be born. Needless to say I'm undoubtedly excited but nervous and anxious at the same time. My primary worries are what current fathers or even psychologists would label as being 'normal' during the period of when their wives are going to be due. Financial concerns, health concerns (for my wife that is), concerns of whether I'll be good enough of a dad. 'Normal' though they may be given the situation but it doesn't make them any less valid or real. And it scares the hell out of me too. Which can be a good thing, I guess as I don't quite get scared that easily.

Of all those emotions that are clamouring for my attention, I guess at the tip of it all, I feel more hopeful than anything else. Hopeful that my wife would deliver in the safest way possible, hopeful that my son would be healthy and hopeful that I'll be the best dad he'll ever have.

As for the financial side of things, anyone out there got a truckload of cash they don't need? Heh. But yeah, I'm hopeful that things would be on the up with regards to that too.

Why not WiFi?

Was fiddling around with my phone's network settings and couldn't help but wonder why this whole island can't be hooked up through Wifi. This opposed to the cellular network which most would agree is rather unpredictable at times, especially when there's too many users latching on to it. I mean this only makes sense seeing as whether you're a mobile, tablet, netbook or laptop user, you are going to be searching for a Wifi connection anyway rather than choose a cellular one.

The cost of setting up a Wifi system would also be significantly cheaper than the infrastructure of the mobile network system what with the cellular picocell would cost around USD$7,500 to USD$12,000 compared to a Wifi access point which costs around USD$2,000 to get up and running. Added to this the cost of a Wifi chipset for a consumer device only costing around USD$5 compared to the USD$30 price for a similar mobile chipset, which would drive prices down by a whole lot one the whole. The arrival of the 'super Wifi' technology, which can not only cover a greater distance but a significantly reduced cost compared to normal Wifi would certainly swing the most every user's vote in Wifi's favour. And the infrastructure is somewhat in place in this island nations with the Wireless@SG programme. An endeavour which has stalled somewhat since its inception in 2006 with only 2 of the 3 major telcos partaking in it.


Still, the main obstacles may possibly be the telcos themselves who would no doubt earn more lucratively from subscriptions, data plans, mobile call usage and SMSes. The latter two of which has somewhat dropped significantly with the introduction of popular apps such as What'sApp, Viber and Tango. Perhaps an option would be to let them run the Wifi network; which is what I felt Wireless@SG was meant to do, allow them to charge a nominal monthly fee for usage (though I doubt it would be anywhere near as exorbitant as what they are charging for mobile data now) so that they use it to maintain the network and turn a tidy profit.


I mean, seriously, with all the VOIP apps and Messaging apps on the majority of smartphones nowadays there is really no real need to make the standard phone call or sms as we have come to know of them.


Then again, having a devices hooked up to Wifi networks rather than the usually laggy, unpredictable, expensive, cumbersome and battery draining mobile network may be too idealistic of a vision for me to be harbouring. 

Just a Quick Update

A couple of things; well to be honest a whole host of things has occurred since I last posted anything on here those 4 months ago. With a number of things that I was sure wasn't included in any of the posts prior to this.

Firstly to clarify what I actually do for a living now, which isn't that much different from what I've done before though I can somewhat understand how my forays into some 'projects' and declarations of future endeavors may add further to the fires of such confusion. I am, to put it as simply as possible, employed as a Teacher Assistant in an organization focused in the education of children with autism. Now, I know what you might be thinking - 'Isn't that something that you worked as before?' or 'So you're still working there?' - Well, yes and no. I'm no longer working at Pathlight School as most of my former colleagues there can attest to and I am also no longer under the employ of one AWWA School, as my former colleagues there would attest to as well. And though the title of the vocation is somewhat similar to those positions that used to hold, the scope of the task is somewhat different. Where in Pathlight I've had to prepare SOWs, LPs, etc (I'm sure most of my mainstream teacher friends would know what I'm talking about) in accordance with mainstream expectations of excelling in national exams along with whatever committees that I was tasked with doing along with managing behavior, in AWWA I had the opportunity of simply acting as the copying/printing/laminating guy who also manages behaviour. Now my job scope consists of an amalgamation of some parts of both; a quarter of two parts making the whole so to speak. And in case you were wondering where that is, its at St. Andrews Autism Centre at Elliot Road, which is one of those small lanes off Upper East Coast Road in Singapore. And just in case you still have no idea where that is a brief search on Google Maps would bring up this result; did I mention how much I love Google products? But I digress. Place is nice and the people are, for the most part as great as humans can be. I would like to think that I've adapted to the demands and expectations there but these are dynamic things that would evolve over time, especially considering how new this educational institution is.

A slightly outdated aerial view of my workplace

I'm still plodding on with my studies at Raffles College of Higher Education. Hoping to clear my final module of the Specialist Diploma program come October this year which just happens to be Stats II, something which I'm quite excited by but do also admit of its rather troublesome nature, of which I'm sure most students who had encountered it would also agree. And after that onwards and hopefully immediately onto the Bachelors in Applied Psychology program along with the dissertation. Just as a heads up to all my friends who are currently or will be employed as Special Needs Teachers, the focus of my Stats II assignment as well as my final year thesis would have you guys as the focal point of it, somewhat.

As far as October 2012 is concerned, it is also the time in which my baby boy would be due. Yes, that's right, I said it. It's going to be a boy. At least that is what that sophisticated scanning machine operated by a very experienced sonographer appeared to be indicating, backed up by a thorough reading by one Prof. Biswas of National University Hospital's Women's Clinic. And yes, I'm most eagerly anticipating his arrival. Even got a name picked out but one that shall not be divulged here, at least not till he's born. Want to be keeping the thrill and suspense of it all. We count ourselves blessed to be having very supportive families, friends and colleagues with some even going out of their way to already purchase items or even provide hand-me-downs for our precious little one. For that, we give our thanks from the deepest reaches of our heart.

Also of note to update all my friends and followers (like I have any) is of where I'm residing now. A topic which has also sown much confusion lately. While it is true that I had spent the majority of my life in Hougang and had but a year ago shifted to Selegie, I'm currently now residing with my in-laws in Woodlands. Marsiling Rise to be exact, with Google Maps again providing the more exact location in case anyone should decide to want to pop by for a cuppa and all that.

A much outdated picture of the area; Where I stay is somewhere behind the temple on the right

So yeah it's been somewhat of a minor hassle with regards to the travel to and from work. More with the travel back home from work than anything else. Something which I would discuss in another post at another time.

But yeah, that's about it on the major updates for now. Wishing all of you good health till the next time I get a chance to write here.