Awaiting take off


If God had meant us to fly from Singapore to Seattle, He would have made sure the flights were scheduled to depart at a reasonable hour, and not make it so that you had to be out of bed at four in the morning and in a blind panic about missing your plane.

I’m not sure if that should lead us to a Nietzschean denial of God’s existence, in a harsh universe devoid of decent night’s sleep, or if instead it should be an article of faith that man should not cross the Pacific by starting in South Eaat Asia. (The ghastly schedule inflicted on Singaporeans is nothing like the much more agreeable eight a.m. flight you can catch from Hong Kong. Or perhaps God just doesn’t want us to go via Japan, and the long way round via Europe is proof of his eternal benevolence. And air miles.)

But in either case, the theological considerations are largely irrelevant. I’m in bed and it’s not even ten o’clock and still I’ll be knackered tomorrow. At least I get to arrive at eight in the morning the same day; isn’t it great how a sixteen hour journey concertinas into just two?

Today was uneventful for me. I had to wait seven hours for my database to do something, which made me sad and frustrated, until I made a tiny tweak and now the same task takes five minutes. It is a simple exercise to deduce whether that means I’m super smart or skimming across the incompetence line. But please don’t tell me the answer, either way.

We peered at our baby again on an ultrasound. While on the one hand this sort of technology is amazing, and it’s near unthinkable that in my parents’ day, this was just not available at all, it’s maddening that even with all these scientific advances, the images still look like a bunch of splodges the doctor is required to interpret as an arm, or a stomach, or a kidney. Our child didn’t turn to face the camera, as it were, so we didn’t get that terrifying rictus grin that has haunted me on previous visits. Ah, the wonders of technology.

Finally, this evening I went to Daiso, a shoo in Singapore where everything is Japanese, and everything costs $2. It is a sign of my age, mental enfeeblement or plain exhaustion that I was still surprised to only pay $20 for ten items. Daiso is clearly God’s way of telling me to go to bed.


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