Two Years Since

#257: Fringe Blogger

Oh hello, blog. I'm surprised you are still alive. Very much unlike my Friendster account that folded up and gave me back all my rubbish in what feels like one of those scenes from an Italian movie where the girl flings all her lover's belongings from a low balcony and unto the street. This one feels like coming home after a long stint overseas and finding things intact - familiar but distant. In place but in an inexplicably awkward way.

I am only here because my conference call with Brazil was cancelled. I work at nights now, trying to chase the sun in Sao Paulo or New York. I sometimes do early mornings too - which I hate, but which I think gives everyone a feeling of fairness at having to suffer through at least an evening work call to give their colleagues on the other side of the world a morning call every now and again.

I am now living somewhere else, having moved from the big red rock to a little green island. Not the lazy kind of island where the faint strains of reggae play in your imagination. The kind that thinks it is hyper-productive by buzzing a lot in cycles of work and confusion and re-work and clarification and more re-work and what is generally believed as optimisation. I personally think it is a waste of energy sometimes - how some people approach work.

My daughter, the one I shared as a blurry black and white scan, is now a full-fledged little girl - with her ruby red glittery bag and glass slippers. Today she read the word, "BABY" to my amazement. I haven't told my husband that. Maybe later, when I finish reliving my blogging days. My daughter's hair is long at the back and with a drastically short fringe. Thanks to her mummy who one day fancied herself a hair stylist and chopped off a couple of centimeters too much. The fringe has since been sent to the hair hospital for a corrective procedure. It is in recovery and the child is happy enough. But the guilty mother feels it is all taking too long.

But then again, that didn't feel like 2 years that just flew by. Surely the fringe will grow.