girlfriend vs boyfriend

a quick reflection after hearing what a course facilitator said (she who spoke freely about going out with her girlfriend and their experiences)...

when a girl says i went out for dinner with my girlfriend, it sounds less salah (wrong) than when a guy says i went out for dinner with my boyfriend. a guy that says that would have attracted a lot of awkward stares and be subjected to teasing and/ or bullying. at worst, he could even be ostracized by people around him. it boils down to homophobia, social attitudes towards and expectations of different gender, culture...

it's not about whether it is fair or not. it just is.

and on a side note, and similarly related to the above:

amongst gay men, there is a higher tendency to want to stereotype or identify oneself as top, bottom or flex. terms like gurlfriend, sistar, gurls are commonly used to depict the feminine side (although it also commonly reference to the individual's role in bed) amongst gay men. this is in contrast to lesbians who tend to be less hung up over such role-related terms.

resume writing

went through another resume and rewrote it. this time round, it was my niece's resume. she texted me and told me she failed to land any interviews despite sending out her resume to many different companies. so i told her to forward me her resume to take a look. and... yup, rather amateurish.

she did not give a summary of herself and her professional experience came across as trying too hard as she listed a-z of everything she did. i thought it was not necessary and just needed to write something concise yet captures the gist of what she did. the rest could be elaborated during the interview. so, i rewrote the whole resume for her. her's was interesting cos it was the first time i see a resume that listed key achievements by themes instead of employment (career history). i supposed it made sense for her, she's in the legal field...

learned something new.

sword art online - ordinal scale

augmented reality vs virtual reality games... or really? evil plot behind the games... the synopsis went something like that. and i thought it was interesting and booked the tickets for it. it didn't occur to me until after the show that this story was released in 2009 and there was even a 25-episode anime series after that. and to think that this story was written in 2009 suggests that japan is really ahead of time in technology! i wasn't disappointed. despite the slow start, the pace of the show picked up very fast. the toggling between current, augmented and virtual reality didn't confuse me after awhile. 

very nice!

helping someone in distress

this week, i learned from an ex-colleague that one of the senior cabin crew from my previous company would be demoted and that her allowances would be taken away from her. and as allowances formed a huge part of their salary structure, this senior crew would likely end up with a drastic pay cut. she was in a state of shock and had been crying for several days. i also learned that she had gone on to simply apply for any jobs that came by, even superbly junior ones. i could only conclude she was desperate to get out of the company and that she was simply grabbing anything that came by. very rash, not good for her career.

anyway, this development was, to a large extend, the aftermath of the merger that the company went through last year. you see, before merger, crew administration and discipline management was undertaken by ground management staff. cabin crews were mainly executing the operations, namely providing inflight services and ensuring passenger safety and senior cabin crews' responsibilities focused on coaching and getting their team to deliver performance. but after the merger, the responsibilities of crew administration and discipline management was transferred to senior crews. this was on top of the responsibilities that they previously had. well, this change was done in an effort to standardise the practices of the both entities. but this alignment created a lot of stress on the senior crews as they were not trained for it, nor do they have the aptitude for it. nonetheless, all of them took on the roles (they have no choice) and i could see many working very hard to learn the ropes. 

what happened was that one of the senior crew who had been with the company for close to 12-years was called up and told that her performance in crew management didn't meet up to their expectations. as such, she would be removed and that she would be demoted to the grade no different from that of a junior crew. this was a huge blow to her, considering she had been performing very well as a senior cabin crew before the merger. sensing distress, i asked for her contact and whatsapped her. when i finally got to her, she told me she was just a lowly crew in the company hierarchy and could not really do anything about it. advised her not to degrade herself and that what had happened was simply a case of job mismatch following the merger and if that was the case, she should just move on. the company didn't deserve her, frankly. that managed to cheer her up a bit. 

and i promised i'll help her with her career transition but for now, she should just accept whatever decision and just do what is expected. never leave your job before you found a new one and never be rash to make decision that she might regret in future. i have since asked her to send me her resume so that i could help make it sound more professional. and when i read her resume, i must say it was really bad. then again, i had expected so cos she had been with the company for close to 12 years and looking for jobs was something foreign to her. for that matter, even her email name sound terribly inappropriate for a resume! had to advice her to apply for a new email account and to adopt a more neutral sounding name. and so, i spend the whole of today re-writing her resume. had to correct her resume structure, sentence structure, grammar, etc. and also, rewrote her cover letter for her.

let's hope her job search goes smoothly.

karaoke

my ex-colleagues organised a dinner and a karaoke session last evening to celebrate a birthday for one of them. it had been such a long time since we went to the karaoke and everyone were really spontaneous and crazy through the night. it was such a great way to end the work week! 

speaking to my nephew

i called my maid to arrange for her to pick her luggage. it so happened that when i called, she had just picked my nephew up from his school and she passed the phone to him. he was crying when i spoke with him but was able to address me and answered some of my questions. he refused to talk further after a while and passed the phone back to the maid.

in the conversation, i thought he sounded far away and that the connection i had with him had been lost. it saddens me. then again, when the maid took over the phone, she explained that he was not in a good mood and was crying due to some activities in school that he didn't like but had to participate (didn't catch what she said but i think it was something to do with cleaning). whatever the case, i reminded myself that over time he will forget about me and that i should just move on.

while i thanked the maid for letting me talk to him, i was also scared that she might get into trouble if my nephew will talk about it. she had done something that she knew would get her into trouble. but i supposed it was because she was going home that she took the risk. anyway, i have not heard anything from her os far and i assumed everything went well.

maid last day

my maid had informed me that she will collect the luggage bag during tuesday this week. but in the end, she couldn't as my brother kept changing his mind about when he could drive her to my place. sensing uneasiness on the part of the maid, i decided to just send the luggage to her after work. when i arrived closed to 9.30pm monday, my brother and his wife was not home. i waited for the maid at the car park and asked her to collect it from me.

today is her last day. i supposed she knew it would be the last time i will be getting any news about my nephew and niece (she's my main source of info all these months) for she whatsapped me many photos and videos of the children. i simply thanked her for it. she leaves tomorrow at 7.20am and i will not be sending her off as my brother will be driving her there. i simply texted her to wish her well and to thank her again for taking very good care of my late-mum and my brother's children.

plans approved

the department finally got the plans for the coming year approved. all the handwork and preparations over the past 2 months has finally paid off. the comments from the top management, to my understanding, was rather positive. with the approval, this is where the hard part comes in - to be able to work out in specific details all the tasks and the budget and to set the key performance indicators for everyone. this is the hard part in my opinion cos it will require the whole team to come in to align shared kpis. anyway, lets take a step at a time. 

it was interesting that my boss emailed me and told me that i needed to pace myself. and this was when i told her i will head back to office to deliver an opening address for a course that will be conducted this coming monday (when both of us have applied for leave). reading between the lines, i think she is afraid that i might burn myself out. thats very nice of her i thought.

50 days

today is the 50th day of my new employment. actually, i wouldn't have realised it if not for the fact that during lunch, my staff joked and asked if i had reached my 100th day. heh...

time flies.

maid returning

my maid came to visit me for the last time today.

she will be returning to myanmar for good next sunday. i hired her to look after my mum and she joined the family on 19 dec 2013. she went through 2 hellish year with me looking after mum. and i renewed her contract just a month before it expired. mum passed away two weeks after her contract renewal was approved. following mum's passing, she went on to work for my brother. i continued paying her her salary all these while. it had been more than a year since. i recalled the long period i took to convince mum to get a maid. and i remembered vividly the first day when i went to pick her up form the agency. we brought her out to bedok market for her first meal - chicken rice. haha... on her second day with us, we met with an accident when i drove mum to parkway... all these memories are still fresh in my mind. we laughed when we talked about it earlier.

she departs this sunday morning. and i gave her my large luggage bag to pack her things. today is her payday and she had withdrawn the monies from the bank. managed to close her bank account this afternoon. thankfully, i remembered to give her her one additional week of salary given her additional work week (her last day will be this saturday). she had earlier refused this week's pay as she said she felt bad taking my monies all these while while working for my brother. told her it wasn't for her to worry. i had all along taken it as a contribution to my niece and nephew's upbringing. anyway, before she left, she walked over to the urn containing sapphie's ashes and bade it farewell. it was a little funny (and touching too) when she said "sapphie, bye bye". her eyes welled up with tears as she did so.

i drove her to the train station, and i gave her a $200 ang pow. all things being equal, she did a very good job looking after mum. and for that, i will always be grateful to her. i reminded her to let go of all misforgivings that she might have and to always look forward and be happy. i wish her well. her departure brings to a close another chapter of my life. 

niece & nephew

my maid visited me today and shared quite a bit about my niece and nephew. they still remember me! it's been almost a year since i last contacted them and they both remembered the times we played together and would at times reminisce those moments!

but sadly, for my niece, she has learned to keep quiet and not talk about me. this was so becos whenever she mentioned about me, she'd get a scolding from my brother. other than that, she has grown up well and is now in primary one. as for my nephew, he still talks about me and when his father chide him for that, he would defend me. so funny right? haha... but whenever he did so, my brother would threaten to chase him out of the house and tell him to come live with me. this would send him crying. to a 4-year old kid, being thrown out of the house would be terribly traumatic. and i wondered why the hell my brother would resort to such threats.

my maid also shared a couple of other things with me. my brother continues to constantly demonise me in front of his kids. he would blame me for every thing bad that happened in the family while at the same time attribute all good things to himself. and he always complained that nobody in the family bother to visit the columbarium to pay respects to my parents. i just simply shook my head and kept quiet. those are his opinions and he is entitled to it. it didn't matter to me.

i also learned one interesting thing - that my brother and his wife also feared that one day, my nephew would leave home and come to stay with me (weird right? considering he always threaten my nephew to throw him out of the house). and the fear arose from the many habits they are seeing of my nephew and traits that reminded my brother of me. for example, my nephew would be very nice and greet people (strangers) when he meets them in the lift. he would also bid them good bye when he walks out of the lift... top of it all, my nephew looks more and more like me with time. 

lol!

ps: but seriously, i hope my brother doesn't transfer his negative feelings about me towards his son. i think it is unlikely but i cannot predict my brothers' behaviour once he gets angry. 

nude tanning

recently, i found a place that is very conducive to nude tanning. nice quiet and very isolated. beautiful place. reminds me so much of the good old fort road beach days.

:-)

dinner with relatives

i had a good dinner with my paternal-side relatives last week after the close of the chinese new year celebrations.  

about 15-16 of them turned up and the youngest was no more than 6 years old - my cousins' grandson. it was so rare to have such a dinner than spanned 4 generations. and if i recalled correctly, the last time we met up was 2 years ago. there were lotsa catching up. and this time round, what was most interesting was the fact that amidst all the complaints (about this or that person, etc), most acknowledged that each family has their own issues to deal with and that we should just accept such things happen, not judge and move on. this was so different from previous times where everyone would offer their own judgments and at times turned such dinners a little toxic. i guessed many of us (myself included) have matured with age.

but what's sad for me this time round was that one of my aunts, who's now in her 70s has started showing signs of mental illness. i suspect it was the onset of dementia although her husband and son (my uncle and cousin respectively) believed it to be worst than that. from their description, it seemed like she's showing signs of delusion and paranoia. last year, she accused my cousin's wife of stealing things in the house. it got to the point where my cousin's wife feared going home. and this year, her condition has deteriorated to the point where she daily screams and hurls abusive words towards their neighbours, accusing them of all sorts of unpleasant things. she even went all over the estate to tell her friends about the neighbours' "misdeeds". this behaviour has caused much stress to my uncle. he has been going around apologising and explaining to people about her medical condition and that many of the things she said were not real (untrue). 

i can understand the stress they are facing. i shared with them that some of those behaviours were similar to what my mum displayed in her latter years. it was good to share with my cousins tips of how to take care of elderly with such mental issues. interestingly, it dawned upon them (my uncle and my cousins) that many of the things they heard about me were untrue. and my uncle even commented that he now knew how much i went through when i looked after my mum. i had not expected such conclusions from them but well, i was glad they did nonetheless. 

new bedding set

finally committed to a new set of mattress protector, quilt, quilt covers, pillow cases, bolster case etc. and it felt good on the body. but i have not gotten used to it. although the material is silky to touch, it was a little warm and made me wake up a couple of times through the night... then again, this wasn't the main reasons why i woke up in the middle of the night. i had lots of interesting dreams too...

:-)

homosexuality: it's about survival - not sex

never fail to learn something new from ted series. some phrases that caught my attention:

• homosexuality is not about sex, it's about survival
• survival of the fittest family and not survival of the fittest individuals
• snuggle for existence & not struggle for existence
• homosexuality is about altruism
• a society that discriminates homosexuality harms itself
• tend to be intelligent, particularly about emotional intelligence
• gay male tend to be more compassionate
• diversity is nature's secret problem
• etc 

too many...

the lego batman movie

it was a hilarious movie. didn't expect too much when i booked the show. frankly, i was feeling very pissed when i went to book the movie ticket. never mind the reasons for feeling pissed but it didn't do me good for the fact that i was not feeling too well too and had to struggle to keep awake during parts of the show. but yeah, i walked into the cinema and i had a good time. there were lotsa corny jokes and whacky lines. i especially like the way the show dealt with the emo side of batman and how it successfully brought out the very personal (and often childish) side of batman.

:-)

ps: the super inflated ego of batman kinda remind me of the current potus.

floooo...

i feel a flu coming. and it's been dragging for many days. and with each passing day, the whole body seemed to feel slightly worst but the flu is still not full blown. totally dislike this feeling. had been coughing rather violently for the last 2-3 weeks. last week, my mouth started showing sighs of mouth ulcers. then the body aches are appearing and my throat started hurting. and 2 days ago, i have hay fever... yet, i don't have full blown flu...

it's very uncomfortable. went to the company doctor who gave me some medication to ease the symptoms. you know these medicine cannot cure you right? she said. errrr... ok. i answered, half wondering what the hell was she there for. woke up today with a totally bad throat and almost lost my voice. so i went to my family gp and he gave me a course of antibiotics. i'll give you a days' medical rest tomorrow. use it if you need to, he said. and here i am, half-dead and resting in bed after taking the medicine. 

let's hope i recover well enough to chair a meeting tomorrow. might just come home after lunch to rest. let's see how things go.

exercise routine (the lack of it)

it is already coming to mid-feb and i have not come to a comfortable daily exercise routine. you see, my daily routine would be something like going to work at 7-ish in the morning and coming back feeling all exhausted late evening. and by the time i come back, it would usually be 9-ish or 10-ish. and i would be so exhausted i'd just shower and then collapse in bed. i need to find a way to do my exercise. otherwise, i'm just gonna get bigger and bigger around my waist. 

arghhh...

hectic week (again)

looks like the title of my blog is gonna look the same every week. but hey, it's hectic in different sense. this week was a little more productive. productive in that i got my hands dirty and took control of some issues. but this cannot go on indefinitely or i'll get totally burned out. here're some of my thoughts.

i have a very hardworking team. but alas, when it comes to planning, there was a lot left to be desired. previously, i attended several meetings and during those meetings, i got other hods telling my staff off in front of me that they were useless and that they (the hods themselves or their staff) were doing their (my staff) work for them. it didn't feel good to have people scold my staff like that. and this week, a meeting was convened to discuss some manpower build-up plan to support a project that has a 3-5 year timeline. in anticipation of something like this happening again, i decided to deep dive and get my hands dirty. i instructed my staff to work out a plan and to discuss it with me. but when she came back with the plan, i flipped. she simply called the line to get the numbers they need to the next 1 year and presented these numbers to me. this was not acceptable! i wondered if she really understood the requirement! anyway, i got into my coaching mode and explained how things should be done but she stared at me with a blank face and insisted that what she did was what was required as that was what the line gave her. i decided i will do the framing after a few failed attempts to explain to her about the requirements. i concluded it would be too much for her in the end. 

and that was when i realised what the other hods meant. quite a few of my staff are incapable of doing future planning. they could only collate data for the immediate one year and execute it. what this also meant is that their thought processes are very short term. and as a result, they were highly reactive to demands. to me, this is very scary, considering these people are senior managers! i do expect senior managers to be able to do strategic planning and to develop future plans easily. i personally do not think this is difficult. all one needs to do is to adopt a project management approach to manpower planning, state the assumptions and then project the needs according to the business plan timeline. looks like there's a lot to be done moving ahead. my colleagues came to me and told me that some of my people have been like that for many years. it got me wondering why the management had not done anything about it. if they are really incompetent, they should have been managed out early. but well, since i've inherited such a team, i'll just give everyone a chance. coach as much as i can, and if they really cannot deliver, i'll just have to manage them out in time to come.

arghhh...

end of ns obligations

i've finally received a letter from the ministry of defence informing me that i have completed my national service liability and that i will no longer be liable to be called back for in-camp training. this new status took effect when i reached my 50th birthday last year. moving ahead, i will no longer be required to apply for any exit permit if i were to go out of country for an extended period of time.

congratulations?

:-)

cny visit to boss's place

i don't celebrate cny and i don't do any house visits. but i need to be pragmatic about things. my current big boss invited all management staff to her place today and rather than tell all the long stories, i decided to just drop in. not too nice not to show face and be too stubborn about me not celebrating cny, especially when i have just joined the company. so... and as to be expected, there were many many people. i didn't feel comfortable as i didn't know almost all of them. but i played along and just smiled and say my hellos, had some food and left once people started leaving. didn't like such gatherings, especially when there are people i don't know. but yeah, just need to get it over and done with. 

journey to the west 2: the demon strikes back

watched this in cantonese when i was in hk over the chinese new year weekend and again over this weekend, except that it was in chinese. i personally find the cantonese version funnier. thought it was an interesting movie that makes one laugh through all the very corny jokes - very stephen chow. but beneath the jokes, there were a lot of buddhist lessons - about human nature, about greed, about attachments, etc. enjoyed it lots.

very good effects too.

bravo!

wifi down

i didn't blog over the whole of last week. i couldn't. my home wifi was down and i didn't realise until two days ago. managed to call the telco and a technician came down to fix the issue this evening. apparently, there was malfunction of the modem adaptor that caused the loss of the connection to the network. they managed to replace it and it is running fine now.

hectic week

my schedule for the (last) week was supposed to be relatively light week. there were no more than 1-2 meetings a day and mostly, these meetings were scheduled in the early parts of the afternoon. but alas, that was not to be so...

it turned out i had to work late almost for the whole of the week. on one of the days, i had to even work up to about 9.30pm! and this was "unplanned" for. and all these happened because there was a  meeting called in the evening to run through and amend some presentation slides. i personally felt  it was rather unproductive. but i guess this was the culture. quite adhoc. taking things in stride. still learning.

anyway, i've completed one full month with this new company.

:-)