I went to collect my new passport today. I had renewed it online, and it took less than 5 minutes from the moment I stepped into the ICA building, take a queue number, collect my passport and leave. The efficiency of ICA.
Flipping through my old passport, which had a validity of 10 years, looking at all the customs chop in it, it is like a travel log of all the places I have been to in the last 10 years. My first Europe trip, my frequent trips to Australia, my numerous work trips to countries in the region, and more, are all recorded into the red book.
Much has happened to me in the last 10 years, mostly unhappy and unpleasant events. And this old passport of mine has been with me throughout them all. The good trips, the bad trips, but most importantly, every single overseas trip was a memorable one for me.
There will be new custom chops on my new red travel log, new places to go, new people to meet, new food to be tasted and new memories will be created. And hopefully, what is going to happen in the next 5 years will be better than what had happened in the last 10 years.
So I went to the SEA Aquarium in Resort World Sentosa during one of my leave days. It was big, taking around 2 hours to complete the tour. It was pretty good, except for the fact that they had dolphins. Dolphins that were captured in the wild. While the tank holding the dolphins were pretty big, dolphins are meant to be in the wild. It was heartbreaking for me to see the wild dolphins swimming in the confined space, especially since I have seen wild dolphins in Monkey Mia in Western Australia. They could remove the dolphins from the place and it will not affect anything. I really do not understand the logic of having dolphins in there.
Anyway, the place was not that crowded, just tourists who are more bothered to take pictures instead of trying to find out the marine life behind the glass. I tried to read and discovered many interesting information. For example, the deep sea male angler fish are much smaller and bite on to the larger females, like parasites. The male’s bloodstream fuses with the female’s allowing the transfer of sperm from the male to the female. Several males may live co-joined to the same female, losing every part of their body except their reproductive organs, and may be totally dependent on the female for nourishment. Pretty neat eh?
It’s like raiding in World of Warcraft. You pot your flasks, you have the best gems and enchants for your gear, you prepare your raiding food and potions, you spend hours going through theory craft of your class and practising your rotation on the training dummy. During the boss encounter, you end up one of the top few in DPS/healing meters, the boss finally goes down, and then the system gives the boss’s loot you want to the player who does not really care, hardly logins, and is at the bottom of the DPS/healing meters.
You comfort yourself, telling yourself that there is always the next week. The next week when you down the boss, you didn’t get the loot. And it happened again the week after, and after, and after. And you start asking if the random number generator has anything against you.
It is the same with life. The person who does not deserve it, tends to get the things you wanted, the things you worked hard for. And gets it again, and again, and again. And you ask if life has anything against you, if life is biased, if life is blind.
You have doubts, questioning what is the point of working so hard when those scumbags get things that you worked so hard for, without even trying.
I first wrote about life being a game way back in Jan 2008, and it seems recently the world is buzzing with this now. It is called ‘gamification‘, “where it is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context in order to engage users and solve problems.”
Since the beginning of this year, I have started to add a little gamification to my life, starting with my finances. Based on my years as a gamer, games programmer and knowing exactly what motivates and drives me, I have devised a gamification tool for my finances. The ultimate goal (or end game, in the terminology of games), of course, is to achieve financial freedom so I can quit this worst game ever called ‘LIFE’.
Since end of last year, I decided that I want to be healthy. After years of neglect, I decided to do something about it. After a few months of running, I decided to put it down in words my journey on running so far.
Nike+ SportBand
When I first started running, I know motivation was the main component. As such, I kept a record of all my runs faithfully using the Nike+. I used the Nike+ SportBand initially as all my runs were on the treadmill in the gym. Nike+ uses graphs a lot, which works for me as I need visual motivation. The downside of Nike+ is that I could never login from my home PC due to some problems that many people in the world encountered. I used the Nike+ app for iPhone/iPad instead.
The other tool for motivation was getting a weighing machine, to keep track of my weight.
Initially it was tough. I could only manage 2km on the treadmill before I gave up. After faithfully going to the gym for 3 months, I could manage 5km on the treadmill.
The problem was, my weight was not going down.
So I thought it was due to running on the treadmill. I mean treadmill is indoors, with air-conditioning, no humidity, no heat. Besides I have always wanted to take part in a race, and no race are held indoors. So after 3 months, I decided to run outdoors.
I chose a quiet stretch of East Coast to run after work, firstly, it was not crowded, and secondly, the parking was free. I will go home after work, change, drive down and run.
It was very different from running indoors. The heat, the humidity, the hard ground. It was like running starting from level zero again. However, I actually enjoyed it more than running indoors. The sea, the sky, it was just wonderful to be able to enjoy the view when I was running. Gradually, I increased the distance from 2km+ to hitting 5-6km each run. And I was doing 3 to 4 runs per week. I also realised that if I run early in the morning on weekends, I actually struggle. I am definitely not a morning person.
However, the problem with my weight not going down still persists. This was something that bother me quite a fair bit. I decided to read on it.
The likely problem I decided after reading up on it, was my diet. I had figured that since I was running so often, I needed the energy to keep me going, and as such, I ate more than usual. I was also not watching what I eat, fast food, soda, sweets, anything goes. I decided to do something about my diet.
Initially, I went quite extreme on what I ate. I removed a lot of carbo from my diet, no rice, no noodles, no bread. It was mostly fish and vegetables. It was terrible. I was hungry all the time, and on top of that, I have no energy throughout the day. When I went for my run, I almost died every single run. I was definitely doing something wrongly.
So it was back to the drawing board. I read up on it and suspected my body went into ‘starving-mode‘ . The body literally shut down in order to conserve energy, which explains why I was tired throughout the day. Effectively, I was going from one extreme where I ate everything, to the other extreme, which caused my body to shut down. So I have to tweak the food I ate. The beauty of all this was that whatever I ate, it had an almost direct effect on my body state, and I could see the results. After tweaking a fair bit, my current diet includes having museli/granola with cottage cheese/yoghurt and fresh fruits for breakfast, rice with meat and vegetables or soup for lunch, and mainly fish for dinner. I have dried fruits and nuts for snacks throughout the day, and lots of plain water to hydrate myself.
With this diet, and my running, I am finally seeing some results. My running times have improved, and my weight has finally started to go down. I am no longer tired throughout the day. I sleep better at night, my mind thinks better and I am more focused. Of course, nothing is set in stone, and I will continue to tweak what I eat accordingly. Eating the same food daily is not good either.
That is the whole beauty of it. There are a lot of schools of thought, opinion on healthy food out there. What I understand now is that there is no one diet that is for everyone. One must read up extensively, filter out the harmful ones (for e.g. diet pills), and decide which one to try. After deciding what to eat, one must also see if it is working for him. If it is not working, why not, and what can be done to improve. It is pretty fascinating actually.
While it was going pretty well, I was hit with yet another obstacle, an injury. This caused me to change my opinion that running was fuss-free. I always thought running was as simple as putting on a pair of running shoes, putting 1 leg in front of my other leg, and just run. The injury led me to realise that running is not that simple. I will document on the injury in another post some other day.
