As everyone probably knows, I’ve stop Coffee since 5 October and I’m on a self-imposed 100-day ban (finalized after being unsure of how long I want to stop coffee for). Everything is fine except now my default drink changes from coffee to tea/milo. The problem with tea/milo is that there’s only a few kinds of tea for me, Teh-Si (English Breakfast with Evaporate Milk) and Teh-O (English Breakfast without milk). I don’t quite enjoy Teh (English Breakfast with Condensed Milk) or the typical Ceylon tea I get to drink at classy restaurants. And there’s just one type of Milo (Milo-C doesn’t taste much different to me).
Coffee is wonderfully varied; you could order a Cappuccino, Mocha, Latte or get yourself a 3-In-1 type of coffee, brew a cup from the Vietnam Coffee Brewer yourself and many more. So I’m probably going to make a list of hot drinks I could explore to stop myself from thinking too much about coffee every time I need to order a drink.
So besides Tea and Milo, yesterday I went to Starbucks and got myself the Signature Hot Chocolate. I’ll soon be sipping Himalayan Milk Tea at McCafe and here’s a list of other drinks I’m considering when I get to go out:
Tea Latte Chai from The Coffee Bean
Green Tea from any Japanese place
Hot Lemon Tea from some Hong Kong Cafe
Iced Milo from some Roti Prata stall [Oops, maybe I should get the hot one]
Hot Milk wherever they sell that
Hot Miso as a drink, if they sell it in a cup
Hot Chrysanthemum Tea
Horlicks, though I hate it
Pu-er Chinese Tea at some Dim Sum Restaurant
Tie-Guan Yin at a Chinese Banquet (hopefully Vegetarian one)
Can someone think of more?
After finishing with Practical Intelligence, I decided that I’m going to hold back library book borrowing for a long time – at least long enough to finish up with what I’ve got back at home. A couple of weeks back, I bought a couple of ‘old magazines’ (Harvard Business Review, The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine; those published at the beginning of 2009) and I haven’t got to read them; then I found myself having to catch up with issues of Fortune and The Economist that I’ve been subscribing. It is only this experience that got me thinking about how much of my reading attention gets into magazines.
I used to think that magazines are non-intensive reads (maybe I was thinking along the lines of Seventeen, Men’s Health and 8 Days) that were mainly for bite-sized information of world affairs and commentary. Unfortunately for me, the magazines I read apparently were not. I were reading pretty academic stuff though they are not exactly the sort of magazines that our JCs told us to read. I avoided the typical GP staples of Singapore, Newsweek and TIME because they were always getting dramatic about Iran, Iraq, the Middle East and Campaigns in America; The Economist provided me with a great deal of continental content I’ll probably need when I pursue my undergraduates at London School of Economics. Recently my endeavour into Business Economics led me to read Fortune Magazine and my sudden interest in literary stuff led me to New Yorker (though I almost always end up reading James Surowiecki, who writes their Financial Page).
And if magazines are taking up so much of my time, where in my reading schedule can I allocate the books? I’ve done fine reading books on long journeys around the country but if there’s little traveling I usually stop with magazines and online journals (which means more magazines). I’ve thus decided to spend some time reading just books at home. I started Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan (finally!) today and I’m determined to finish it at home. When I’m done with that, I’ll be left with 2 books by Avinash Dixitt and Barry Nalebuff: The Art of Strategy and Thinking Strategically; both of them are heavy books I should expect to read alongside pen and paper (which means it’s good for me to do it at home).
The ‘old magazines’ will have to wait though I’m almost done with 20% of them by now. Meanwhile, I’ll be writing a entry with the same title on ERPZ about something different.
I’m just putting down some rules to keep my class in order, just to remind myself:
Write Neatly and Present all your answers Neatly all the time.
Ask Kevin if you’re unsure about anything.
It’s okay to make mistakes (especially for the first time)
There is more than a way to solve problems – there is no one right answer.
Stay on your seat unless you need to go somewhere.
I took off my sandals outside the room and went in; the nurse told me to put down the stuff in my pocket and she placed them in a little plastic box. Another nurse got me to lie down on the operation table, I was a little too tall and I had to bend my knees a little to fit into the position where my head is in the depression on a cushioned headrest. The nurse talked amongst themselves while the doctor came to administer anesthetic and went away. I was practically waiting for the surgery to start but nobody seem to be paying attention to me so I just slept.
The doctor woke me up with a greeting again and the nurse brought a cloth with only a hole in the center for my mouth to cover my face and chest. I can feel them placing instruments on that same piece of cloth including something mechanical and spinning since I could feel the vibration of the motor beside my right cheek. The target of the day: my upper and lower wisdom tooth on my right cheek.
The numbness has set in and when the doctor started I could feel nothing except the pressure she was exerting on my jaws. It amounted to quite a lot and my entire face was literally being pushed and pulled in the process. Then came the drill which didn’t hurt at all (anesthetic is the greatest invention in medical treatment) but the squealing of the mechanical device was positively threatening. I couldn’t exactly feel what is happening within my mouth so I was imagining how my wisdom tooth was being twisted and how blood was gushing out as the tug-of-war started between the dentist and my jaws. The drill apparently conferred the dentist an unfair advantage and the entire affair ended pretty quickly. Soon the dentist was asking me to hold the mirror and showing me the wound she afflicted under my upper lips unintentionally because an equipment she was using leaned too close to my skin there. She apologized and told me she’ll prescribe a cream for that and eventually it should develop into an ulcer and heal. She told me to open wide, stuff a piece of pressure gauze into the back of my mouth and said, “Bite. We’re done”.
I retrieve my stuff from the desk with the plastic box and came out of the surgical room as if nothing happened. I lost my ability to smile for the moment but I was still talkative and pretty happy (told you anesthetic is the greatest invention ever in medicine), “So I get to keep this?” I asked when the nurse passed me the bloody teeth in a little plastic zip-lock bag which was stapled to a packet of sterilized gauze. I took a break in the adjacent room before being discharged minutes later.
The pain came soon later. Argh!
Finally APEC 2009 is over and it just kind of hit me how close my ORD is. While I missed the days as a civilian for now, I trust I’d soon take the freedoms I enjoy for granted and start thinking of the days where I might be more disciplined and lead a rather healthy lifestyle of fixed meal times and sleeping hours infused with physical training regimes. I welcome the uncertainty that I’m about the embrace though, I hope I’ll be making full use of the possibilities that will chance upon me as I venture out.
