Addicted to Tardiness

I am always fucking late for anything, especially for things in the mornings. Yes, for work, for class, for anything. So much that I don't even know whether I have a reason for being late these days when I think I might have one.

Most times, I just find it difficult to wake up in the mornings. But these days, I can't get to sleep at night a lot  because of anxiety. Anxiety over (not) getting work in the U.S. and my longer term future is giving me sleepless nights. When that happens, I can't sleep until 5 in the morning, and I have to get up to get to where I need to be by 9/10 in the morning. It's just a disaster.

But I am also late generally because of my tendency to keep late nights, sometimes doing nothing, but others doing more researching and reporting for stories I am working on. There is just no one reason why I am always late in the mornings. It's usually a matrix and it has become too much of a habit. I am addicted to tardiness.

And I fucking hate it. 

A Note to Self

The new ABC sci-fi drama, Flash Forward, is premised on a simultaneous global blackout that transported people into their futures. This short 137 second glimpse six months into their future causes mass hysteria for some, and brings a renewed sense of purpose for others. It was kindda sobering for me. While I am so impatient for my immediate short-term future to be sorted out, I am not sure if I could handle what I see (or don't see, indicating I wouldn't be alive?) in that vision.

xxx

At our first meeting a few months ago, the super-big-shot writer whom I've been assisting, told me with a knowing, reassuring smile that everything I've been through in the last year or so, sounds like a natural path for all young, aspiring journalists. He has become my mentor of sorts in the last few months I've been at the magazine, pretty apt since he's just about my only American journalistic hero -- so his words mean a lot to me.

What I told him: It's ironic how my desire to be a better journalist and my almost-free-press-activist convictions brought me to America, but after Journalism School, journalism may not be the thing I may end up doing after all. After working through the "falsehoods" of my youthful idealism -- what with me being the liberator of Singapore's press and what not -- I've come to realized that I need to be doing what makes me happy professionally.

"Falsehoods" not because they are universally false, but while they have sustained and brought me to where I am today, they aren't sufficient to bring me to my next step -- which requires a careful examining of my interests and what would engage me professionally. "What's worse than worrying whether you would lose your job, is being in a job that doesn't use your talents." Yes, not having a job is the worst, but look, I don't exactly have one right now.

The unfortunate thing about this realization is that it is coming at a time when the American news business is in a chronic funk and I might have to get a non-journalistic job to learn what I need to learn, in order to get my first job as a journalist. The reality of the American news business is this: they want and need expertise, but they also want and need it now.

They have neither time nor money to cultivate talent right now. They don't really care about how big picture concerns of how this would impact the shape of journalism in the future. How could they do that when they don't even know they will survive the double whammy of the moment -- the news business meltdown and the recession.

In spite of that, it would seem that staying in Washington or moving to New York in a job -- journalistic or non-partisan, independent think tank -- in either foreign policy or environment and energy policy, is probably best for me at this point. I am hesitant in being conclusive about it because I've learnt my lesson regarding the chasm between the idea and the reality of doing something. At the same time, my other options in America (political risk consultancy) does not seem feasible given my (yet insufficient) level of expertise. 

So it's a waiting game. I've sent out a few applications and will send out another round in the next few days. There are potentially a few game-changing decisions I still have to make in the next few weeks, but I would still have to wait and wait and wait. It's not very fun because money is going to run very tight in a bit and I am bloody impatient for things to start happening and for some form of professional stability (i.e. a job with a salary, benefits and a sponsored work visa that would let me stay in America beyond July 2010) to come by soon.

I am sorry if I sound like a spoilt Ivy-League brat with an overwhelming sense of entitlement, but all I am asking is for a decent wage that can let me repay my student debts asap and be financially independent. I've had enough of being free labor and drafting rounds after rounds of cover letters, resumes and writing clips. There is a limit to how many angles you can invent to shape your own personal narrative because after a while, you just lose your sense of who you are.

I guess working for free the last 3 months have at least helped me distill the things I want in a career and at the same time, get to know a lot of the big-name editors and learn how they conceive those kind of stories I hope to write myself one fine day. I can only hope the big-shot writer is not just being nice and encouraging. I really hope he's right, that something right for me would come along real soon.

Journalism might be a mere vehicle/medium for me to do what I want to pursue and I am prepared to get out of it if I need to, but for now, I am still hoping to get one in it. Because life in a constant state of siege, just simply ain't something I can sustain for any much longer. There are bills to pay at the end of the day.

Losing my religion, (re)gaining my faith?

Reading Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul, I realized this tension between the orthodoxy of Christianity I've been brought up to know and its logical discontents will never go away. My skepticism has been unleashed some time ago and it can't be retracted. Any aspiration towards a state of being as an end in itself should just stop immediately, but the process of learning to live with this tension should commence immediately. Not everything can and should be reconciled. I should just stop hoping for a perfect state of being before I act, because that will never happen.

Also, this job hunt is inexplicably wearing me down. I have just under 10 weeks of this unpaid internship left and 10 weeks to make sure I get something paid to do. Gah, I am running out of things to say on this blog already!

Making Singapore look really good

Singapore Lights Timelapse from Weehan Yeo on Vimeo.

Bowing to the howling winds of change

More than six years after the inception of this blog, it's time for a change of name to reflect the changes in the time since. It's no longer Thinking Aloud: Reconciling My Faith, My Character and the Reality. It's now Facets: Life, Living and Everything in Between.

This started mainly as an outlet for me to practise writing and journalism, but ironically, in the last few years, when I started practising journalism formally, entries here have become few and far in between. It's mainly because I've been writing so much, for school and for journalism, that I don't usually have any desire to write out of my work time.

Also, although I have always resisted the dichotomy between my public, professional self and my private, personal space, I have relented in the last year, when I was at Columbia. So that means another website for you to visit: come here for personal essays, go there for my journalism.