Working Woes and Wonders.

So it's been about a month since I started work at my old place, the finance department at NTUC. It took me a while, okay, perhaps more than a while, but I'm finally starting to get the hang of work again. It was not without trepidation that I first applied for the job which I quit last year when uni started, because being back in the place where I had so many good (and equally as bad) memories, the nostalgia might be too overwhelming.

And it was. In the first few days, there were unsettling, disturbing levels of loneliness and unhappiness. I resented the place for the memories it contained and I refused to let the past memories be replaced with anything new. To me, that place was where I met one of my best guy friends, where I went through the worst (and hopefully the last) experience between work colleagues. It didn't matter to me if my new colleagues were trying to be friendly or not- I blocked them out with sad smiles and spoke as little to them as I could.

However, I guess things did take a turn for the better. It took a lot of effort, but I finally let myself open up and be open to the fact that there are new colleagues here who might potentially be good friends as well. I tried to stop being a sad, moody girl and eventually tried to laugh and even joke with my colleagues and supervisor and it worked. They opened up to me as well. Where they weren't overly friendly, at least now they smile around me a lot more. I'm starting to be included in their jokes and strangely enough, this makes my working experience a whole lot better. Even my supervisor is opening up, and in doing so, I guess it warms me up and gives me a sense of hope that maybe, just maybe, I'd eventually let the memories of these wonderful people live alongside last year's, with Zul, Nigel, Daniel and Raj. Add that to the fact that Daniel came back to work too, though under a different department, but I now at least have someone my age.

But it's not all that happy though. Sometimes, I'm still a little sad by the language barrier. My Chinese is of subpar standard, and sometimes I find it hard to communicate with them because of it. I must learn how to speak slower, especially when I get excited. I have a feeling that I was probably flawing my supervisor with my words this afternoon when I sat with him for lunch. Maybe I really shouldn't have done that. Another thing- I'd give the age gap between my colleagues and I about 8-11 years difference, maybe. Which technically isn't a lot, in my opinion. But when they talk to me, sometimes I seem to sense some forms of distancing, perhaps because of my age, and perhaps because they think I'm too young. I'm the temp staff after all, so I can't blame them, but I wished that they'd treat me as their equal. Rather than, as my supervisor said today (hence this sad musing), " In my time..." to which I thought, "in your time? I'm not that young.. :( " but I didn't mention this, of course. Things like that help me remember that as much as I want to be friends with them, I will never succeed if all they see me as is a temp staff, a young girl, a uni student, rather than as their equal.

I guess there are always going to be pros and cons to working in such an environment. I've only been in there for 3 months, so maybe my opinions will change by the time I resign. Perhaps.Cest la vie.

Existential ramblings.

Couple of nights ago, I actually decided to go star gazing. Not as romantic as it sounds though. The stars in Singapore aren't brilliant, and those that we see are the feeble few that shine through the layers of haze and air particles that clog the night sky. Neither was I in a romantic place, watching what I could of the stars from the balcony window where, if I looked down, I could see my neighbour's lone Golden wandering around the road, perking its ears up to the occasional slam of the dustbin lid as someone out there tosses out the trash.

Yet this sight of the stars never fails to ignite, in me, a form of existential crisis. Suddenly it seems like all my problems are insignificant, because truthfully, they are transient problems. They are things that are limited by time. So much so that in fact, as existential as that moment might be, I'm actually happy, because it puts into perspective how I should be thankful that my issues are merely a drop in the vast ocean of nothingness.

And so is everyone else's, apparently. If each star reflects within in it a single individual's problems and turmoils, then we would need more than 6 billion stars, which might seem like a substantial number until we look beyond that star, and we realise that that star and all the stars which represent mankind are literally, specks amongst the entire galaxy. Even beyond that, there are millions of galaxies, each holding millions of stars... suddenly, the human race's status is utterly diminished. In fact, such a thought is often quite frightening. Who are we to think of saving the earth, venturing into neighbouring planets in the hope of finding extraterrestial creatures, when we are but such a tiny speck? Such attempts are, to me, an utter mockery of mankind- man who think we are so important as to host a meeting with beings we have completely no idea about? Speaking of which, I was recently reading an article about the Fermi principle- the idea that if, mathematically, there were a million different galaxies, then technically, wouldn't at least one have some form of intelligent life on a planet, just like we do? That article generated so many different responses from so many different scientists that perhaps such a question just isn't meant to be answered. Maybe what mankind is assuming as intelligent life isn't even intelligent to begin with, maybe our forms of intelligence is merely the infant stage of an even greater intelligence that we have yet to even begin discovering. Maybe we have been searching for signals from extraterrestrial beings in the wrong place to begin with. Maybe our technology is, like our intelligence, in far too primitive a stage to even begin picking up non-human signals. Maybe such beings do not even communicate via signals, maybe they have discovered a whole new method of communication that signals are archaic to them. You get the idea. Either way, as I once read, whether or not there are beings out there or not, both thoughts are equally frightening.

Right now, its odd how the mere sight of stars is able to ignite such thoughts. Or perhaps, a more human approach to it would be, What-am-I-doing-with-my-life now that I've realised the minority which we are? Perhaps this was just what the human race was meant to be, that in the larger scheme of things, we are no more than the animals that roam this planet, this ability to plan for the future that human so excitedly claim is a sign of 'intelligent thought' isn't actually a sign of true intelligence, that we are but a product in the process of evolution which is meant to eventually produce a form of true, pure intelligence that we are far from attaining. Humans have animalistic instincts- we rage, we kill when in a frenzy, we desire happiness, we love, we fight, alongside our supposedly more logical ones. The true intelligence which lies perhaps millions of years from now may never possess any of these animalistic desires, because they perhaps have learnt or evolved to live completely on rational and logic, and would perhaps no longer need to fulfill the human, animal instinct that we humans still need to fulfill today. Because perhaps we are , really, nothing. Nothing significant. Perhaps just possibly, that we are just like the millions of stars in the night sky that our naked human eyes today fail to see, because just like the stars,the human race is indeed a feeble one which would die out even before it has a chance to shine.