SIX months in Virtual Comatose

Six months. That's how long the online silence has lasted. The brainjuice persona lives, yes, but she's in a comatose state right now, and I'm trying hard to resuscitate her. Trying.

Wasn't till now, when the year starts winding down and people around me start valuing friends over work a bit more that I, too, am forcing myself to sit down and write.

In the meantime, what's happened?
- Lee Hsien Loong becomes Prime Minister of Singapore.
- Read and hear about the review of Chinese Language teaching over and over and over again
- Get myself married
- Get a haircut
- Have ourselves a wonderful honeymoon in Bali, while George Bush gets re-elected much to everyone's surprise, and many a consternation
- Watch Yasser Arafat die, and then not, and then die again on TV.
- Write a good 16 speeches for the political heads.
- Learn how to call another set of parents "Mom" and "Dad".
- Spend three weeks in Timor Leste, sleeping on the floor, diving, eating, reading, thinking, watching innocence and poverty
- Experience my first tremor after earthquake strikes Alor, just 100km east of Atauro island
- Wake up to a beautiful sunrise at 5.30 every morning and have dolphins swim next to us.
- Learn not to miss my pill (still learning)
- Almost get swept away by the current
- Pray for a friend seriously injured in a car crash
- Hear about the Tidal Wave post-West Sumatra quake that measured 8.9 on the Richter Scale

So six month's later, my identity undergoes a change, at least in nomenclature, and I'm a Mrs instead of a Miss.
And we're busy planning and saving for the home. Cursing and swearing as the developers take their time to complete rectification works because we can't start furnishing it and moving in proper until they do. I'm still getting used to the idea that I no longer attend the same church, see my parents every night. And the idea that I will need extra effort and good reasons to go home just to see my parents age.

I wonder what the new year will bring with it too.

We're both attending a Financial Planning course now. W realised that we had better start saving and investing and building a nice little nest egg for ourselves NOW, if we don't want to die poor and hungry, because somebody did a study and said that our generation cannot expect our kids to feed us. We're also planning for Hubby to go off to do an MBA in 2006, and pondering over whether I should stay and work and pay for the home or go with him.

Yup... life as a married woman is a sure change from being just by myself. To be perfectly honest, it's all a little daunting too.

Most of all, it's realising that as the year comes and goes and another year draws near and knowing that it too will be over. It's the way TIME just inexorably goes on and on, as Sylvia Plath metaphorised, like a runaway train unable to control its momentum nor put a brake on itself.... and dragging us all - its passengers - into oblivion. That's what frightens me most.

It's strangely ironic that in the week after we begin the course on Financial Planning, a friend would linger close at death's door, a mere 34 year-old, her life hanging in the balance after a horrific crash that we only heard about in the papers because someone famous died in it.

I will always remember her saying that whenever someone asks her why she's never sad, always gregarious, always full of life - her answer would be "Because Life's too short".

Which begs the question - why save? why plan? why go through the painful process of stingeing on our PRESENT just so we can have a secure FUTURE? When we don't know when we'll pop off the surface of the earth?

Strange that I should entertain such questions at the cusp of my new life as a MRS too. But I guess where I am, at my vantage point, where with a sweep of my eyes I so easily behold the greatest of joys and sweetest of experiences, is also the place where there is so much to lose, and consequently so much to fear for.