just a brief rant that i will probably regret regurgitating come the following morning. i am in a place where i no longer recognize 1) the people around me, and 2) who i really want to be.

the past week has been a very loud culmination of various leadership and friendship issues, mostly separate but with enough intersections. i’ve always loved working with friends, but what happens when you engage in a project with friends only to realize that all of you have very different goals, and in order to win, none are too shy to whip out arsenals that have been stealthily built over the years? how do you deal with friends who don’t pull their own weight but help out the team just by being there as a good friend with moral support? and then what happens when factions form and every well-meaning thing you say and do is used by the factions against each other, and ultimately against you too?

i am learning more and more that to be a good leader, one needs to be firmly grounded in his or her values and goals with unwavering and adamantine integrity. without integrity, a leader is nothing but a crafty but misguided and self-centered dictator who doesn’t understand that his job travels far beyond himself into a realm that involves bigger ideas and other people. but i am also learning more and more that in order to be popular and to be friends with everyone, it seems that integrity is the last thing you need. all you need to do is just be damned two-face and make sure you don’t get caught. which is sad. it’s fucking sad. you might ask, who needs to be friends with everyone? just a handful of good, true friends will do. but that is not the point. the point is that two-faced people are still getting away with what they are doing because they know what other people want, and know how to use charisma to dangle these promises in front of others. you know what really bothers me– it bothers me when i recognize who two-faced people are and what they do to other people, but won’t say anything about it because my stupid integrity nags at me and reminds me that i shouldn’t say bad things about people. very often i slip, and i start ranting angrily, and then i hate myself after my tirade for being so weak of will — especially if there is a paper trail, which ‘friends’ are fond of using against others. but the rest of the time, when i do successfully bite my tongue, i still get increasingly angry about the injustice i see unfolding before me that i can’t or won’t do anything about. it’s a very confusing state to be in. i understand that there is no black or white in this world, and that i don’t always have to have a fixed policy, but it’s still bloody confusing. at the end of it all i have no idea who i am, what i want to be, or what kind of ethics i stand for.

i used to have this silly concept of friends that i jokingly called a circle of immunity. they aren’t necessarily my closest friends, but they are the friends whom i would still love despite us having directly conflicting principles or even if they did things to me or to others that would ordinarily really upset me. they’re just that special. but i recently folded that circle because i realized that everyone in there couldn’t be trusted. it’s a very stunning thing to realize about the people you’ve allowed to be very close to you. it’s funny but more often than not, it’s not that they had cruel intentions or premeditated motives — but rather, the uniform pattern is that everyone just likes themselves a whole lot more than anything else in their world. it could be any number of things: people like to sound smart, people like to seem plugged in, people like to feel as if they’re everyone’s confidante, people like to appear to others as if they have these piercing insights into human nature, and sadly, things that you once entrusted them with become collateral damage in the process.

it’s so awful. basically i have no idea who to talk to anymore. i sometimes wonder if this is the reason why i always fall into such deeply close relationships with my boyfriends– i need someone to love me so that i can hate the rest of the world; at least at the end of the day no matter what happens i still have that one someone.

or maybe i’m just really paranoid.

at some point i think i’ll say something but for now there’s just more to do than talking

and so i’m back home, lovingly wrapped in the familiar mid-year haze and the sounds of the tau foo far man trundling through the suburban afternoon. i’ve been home for a little less than a week now, and my activity spent so far can be summarized as a heady mix of slothful and irresponsible. four days of unadulterated sleep, eat and play have done much for my soul! i would gladly extend this hedonism, but alas, work knocks on my door.

i love my new job! actually, it’s probably too early to assert that, because it’s only my third day on the internship. can’t talk much about the job as usual (at least this time there wasn’t a discretion contract to sign), but it’s been all sorts of fantastic so far. well-defined hours, a wide spectrum of tasks, flexibility to choose what i want to be involved in, exciting and meaningful work, and a great boss — he took me out with some other colleagues yesterday for a bak kut teh lunch at a secret spot in old klang road. bak kut teh!!! i dont see how lunchtime gets any better than this! plus i get my own room at the office, and my colleagues keep feeding me various snacks. best! :D

also, there has been a new addition to my household:

2 month old male pomeranian, nameless as of now, belongs to Tall Brother and his girlfriend. this comes after many years of me begging my parents to let me keep a dog, which for as long as i can remember has been met with dismissive and unreasonable rejection. and they thought it fine to mention the new puppy to me only mere hours before i was to fly back. so, being the green-eyed monster that i am, i was feeling quite resentful throughout the flight, and vowed to not talk to the dog when i see it at home. BUT THEN they brought it with them to the airport, all swaddled in soft cloth, looking absolutely angelic – and it was love at first sight. how does one not love something that looks like that! i mean, look at it:

sigh. defeated by cuteness. now i have to play with it every day or i can’t sleep. i also have to excuse myself early from my appointments so that i can go home and see it. even the fact that it has no name is quite cute.

in other news, i just picked up a Blackberry yesterday. i havent played with it too much yet, but some preliminary comparisons with the iPhone 4 are that the BB’s OS is more robust and takes functional to a new level. but being a fairly new user on both phones, i have to say that the iPhone is much more new user friendly. i didnt once have to look at the manual when i got the iPhone, but there was a lot of fiddling around with the BB before i knew what went where (eg how do i close all apps simultaneously??). the BB reminds me of using a PC after spending some time on a Macbook — too many clicks needed and a lot of clutter when i’m trying to do something simple. i do think that once you go touch screen, you can’t ever go back (or at least that’s the case for me), and customizable touch screens are going to be a bare necessity for smartphones in time to come. but then again i’m quite n00b when it comes to this stuff :) so i’m going to play around with the BB for a little bit more before i verbalize any further opinions. but if someone could tell me how i can quickly and painlessly transfer my contacts from the phone memory (inbuilt memory, not SIM or SD card memory) of my former Nokia N82 to the BB, i would be very grateful. currently i have all the contacts copied to the SD card as well, and sending via bluetooth seems to not work for some reason. i’d like to avoid going to a store, but if i must then i guess i must…

oh before i forget! dear folks, are there any new eats in the Klang Valley that are absolute must-tries? i’ve been hitting up all my old favourites in the past week, but i hear the dining and hawker scene has sprouted some new limbs lately with places like solaris, brickfields and hartamas undergoing some metamorphoses. i actually haven’t been to cristang yet, so i suppose that’s my next to-do. i’d muchly appreciate more suggestions of places that have just opened, or even old places that have revamped themselves!

also, just one last time:

Saya sebuah kereta Proton. Saya dilahir …

does one do on days like these?