A few days ago, my dad bought a gps tracker for the car. he's not terrible with directions, but my mom sometimes could use some help, so i thought "fair enough". well obviously that wasnt the end of that, cos otherwise i wouldnt be dedicating this post to talking about it, would i? just to test/show off the gps, my dad thought it would be a good idea to search for a restaurant in johor bahru, drive there for dinner (with the help of his spankin' new gps of course) and then drive home again. so, this afternoon he googled a restaurant, and the very same evening he decided to seek the family's opinion (whether he followed it is another thing altogether) and drive to a hong kong-style restaurant in JB called New Hong Kong (let's not eat malay food in malaysia, let's eat chinese food!). well, in singapore the gps worked fine, but then again my dad knows his way around singapore so it's quite unnecessary in this case. at woodlands checkpoint the queues were insanely long and we spent so much time simply waiting that it was a full 45 minutes before we even touched malaysian soil. and once we did, the gps became obselete as traffic was chaotic as hell and just about every road was being detoured or diverted somewhere else; most of the time the gps indicated that we were not even on a road, and it even tried to direct us back into singapore at one point of time (scheming little LCD display, i'll bet it's working with the machine revolution). so finally we made it to the restaurant, but here's the most epic fail: it turns out that the restaurant actually has a branch in singapore. so we spent about 90min waiting and inching forward and sitting in the car and rotting when we could have eaten basically the same thing in singapore.
for some reason i just havent been able to get myself back up to the same level of fitness since before i fell sick. just as well the tomorrow is self-training; maybe then i'll be able to adjust myself accordingly.
2009 is coming to a close, isnt it? it just hit me, which is kind of dumb, because i was just talking about christmas in the previous post and i didnt even make the connection that christmas is nearly the end of the year anyway. soon will come all the celebrations and traditions associated with the new year. i just realised how meaningless the new year is, in that in any case the year is just an arbitrary amount of time set by the earth's rotation about the sun (and even then it's an approximation - a year is closer to 365.25 days, hence the leap day once every 4 years). if so, why do we attach so little significance to 364 days, and yet so much sentimentality to 365 days? perhaps humans just need to break up their lives into manageable goals which are a standard length of time apart; after all, it's less depressing to think of life as a series of milestones rather than a barren road leading to infinity, because at the end of the day the harsh reality is that life is never done until it's over, and by then it's too late to celebrate.
