Picked up this quote yesterday in the papers which caught my eye:

''Leadership is the ability to think for yourself, to believe in what you have finally figured out to be the truth for yourself, and to act on it''  - Ho Kwon Ping

And another quote I read in a John Cage book I picked up in office:

''There is only one content, which all great men wish to express: the longing of mankind for its future form, for an immortal soul, for dissolution into the universe - the longing of this soul for its God. This alone, though reached by many different roads and detours and expressed by many different means, is the content of the works of the great; and with all their will they yearn for it so long and desire it so intensely until it is accomplished.''                                                              

- Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea (1950)

Phil told me today that apparently at the new Italian cafe in Raffles City, the bar can concoct up a scroppino for you if you ask for it - it's not on the menu - and it'll cost you $15. Go try it if you can, it's nice...prosecco with lemon sorbet....tried it only once in Venice and have not found it anywhere else in Singapore since.

Our team of three left the office about 6.15 this evening, together with another colleague, and headed down to Crazy Elephant for beer. Beer by the river....it's been a while. After a day of grants processing anyway, it was well-deserved. Exchanged tales of our ex-colleagues...talked about ourselves as well..found out that my colleague actually knows Spanish. Along the way, travelogue tales were traded too...my boss shared his experience crossing the Jordanian border...and said that the best thing to carry along at border passes would actually be the guys' 11B pass...no questions asked apparently. So the lesson here....if you're crossing the border, make sure you're travelling with a guy who still has his pass.

When you look back sometimes, you wonder at all the things you did and experienced, the people you travelled with...America, Germany, Melbourne, Ho Chi Minh, Hong Kong, Nottingham, London, Costa Brava, Girona, Venice, Basel, Germany again. Youth is so fleeting.... 

It was a good summer this year. Changes headed our way, personal paths that we're about to embark on....it's just a matter of time.

And so we've moved back to HQ, back to where I was formerly but now in a different wing, in a different cubicle (much smaller!) - trying to get used to the open concept where the dividers are much lower, hence less storage space as well, and less privacy. But after having moved some of the bookcases to our cubicles, there seems to be a bit more of the latter. Still, it's about re-integrating one department's culture with the rest of the organisation and I'm possibly one of the few who (having come from HQ) seems to be reintegrating better....given that some of them have never worked closely with the rest of the organisation here. I think it's good that we've moved back, more opportunities for interaction with the rest, less running around and delays due to physical distance between buildings. But there's a lot of cynicism at the moment, some of which is beginning to grate on my nerves.

My cube is cosier now, I've put up the old pictures (of travels with friends) so the familiarity is there...I'm slowly getting used to a smaller space, it's a good thing in a way, learning to live with less things around - less for us to pack when we move in a year's time again to Goodman Road! 

Halloween and All Saints

 The last time I celebrated Halloween or the Eve of All Hallows was in 2003 in America, when the UNC community dressed up and partied on Franklin Street. Yesterday, our choir celebrated Halloween for the first time, dressed to kill....while not as outrageous as the American version - from witches, wizards, vampires, draculas, royalty to Harry Potter, animals, dark angels and what have you.....dressing up was half the fun, the other half was thanks to the games that all of us had thought of beforehand.

Someone said this yesterday and today...celebrate Life....it takes different forms, and applies in multi-faceted ways across our lives....We're not dead, neither might we be saints yet but in the meantime, enjoy what we can do and our gifts, not deny them, enjoy fellowship...

Some of the night's photos:

The Wizard and The Musketeer

With the Dark Angel and a Victorian Lady

Giving the Horns a hard time...

Politics of Perfection or the Pursuit of Happiness