26

It’s been the most eventful year of my reasonably long life, and a great many wonderful things have happened to me since my last birthday. Here are twenty-five things I learned about myself and the world in my twenty-fifth year.

1. It’s not worth being in a miserable job in a miserable organization. They’ll scare the living daylights out of you if you try to quit, but you need to stick to your guns. Don’t work for people you don’t respect.
2. Setting up your own house with your family’s help is setting up a satellite house for the family. They’ll live their fantasies through you, and if they can all live their fantasies in one house, why can’t you, as a family, do it in your own home? It’s most amusing.
3. Having lunch alone at work saves you a lot of time for surfing the net and playing word games online.
4. When you live alone, you become heavily dependent on friends. And this can be good, or very bad. However, hour-long telephone calls to compare architecture and poetry at 12 in the night are possible only when you live alone.
5. When you sign a cheque to pay the rent for your flat, it is the wonderful feeling of being a self-sufficient unit that gives you a major kick!
6. I need 24-hour water supply to retain my sanity. Don’t ask me why. I’m still trying to figure out this one. Maybe it’s because of the hot baths I need many times a day.
7. You can’t fall in love by wanting to. And when you do, you know why.
8. It is important and impossible to hold your own against oversmart Bong ladies who live next door.
9. Being a pillion rider on a motorcycle at five in the morning on the superhighway is my closest brush with adventure, and a wonderful one that I will remember for the rest of my life.
10. Music is important.
11. I cannot listen to music and work seriously at the same time.
12. Work is also important.
13. Fortunately, I can strike a balance.
14. Working for a boss who knows your strengths and uses them can be a most rewarding experience. Fancy offices and fun colleagues do not make a wonderful work environment. The stuff in your MS Word window does.
15. Labels matter. People look up to you immediately if you can drop names. That’s life.
16. Poets and writers are self-obsessed specimens who are too much in love with themselves and their opinions.
17. I am a self-obsessed specimen who is too much in love with herself and her opinions.
18. Five days after knowing me, people find out I am a clown. And almost everyone considers it their fundamental right to pull my cheeks. It is not funny.
19. Hurting someone you care for hurts more than hurting yourself. Doing something just to avoid hurting people is also wrong. Dunno what is right.
20. I can rtoe without lookinf art the keoboard. No. I tale that baxck.
21. I cry too much at the movies. Way too much.
22. I get hassled by paperwork and I need a level-headed person to guide me through it. Sis is a good resource and I should keep in her good books.
23. I have double standards. One for me, one for Sis.
24. I am many different people, and I don’t like many of them.
25. I can make long lists if I want to.

Am expecting life-altering adventures this year. Wish me luck!