A couple of days ago, I met a old friend whom I had lost contact during my school days by chance on a MRT platform. I'll name this friend as the Indecisive M60 because she comes across to me as a very indecisive person who considers her options in things, reconsiders those options 30 minutes later, re-reconsiders those options 1 hour later and starts all over again in another two hours. And she speaks fast with a quick temper, just like a General-Purpose Machine Gun (one of which is known as an M60).
Still, the Indecisive M60 is my friend and I believe in fate, believe that our chance meeting has a purpose because she was in trouble then - needing a job to tide her over as she was dependent on her parents on and off for quite a number of years ever since we last parted. Apparently, her character seemed to have a disconcerting effect on many of her colleagues and workplaces and she could not fit into any of those jobs thus far. The Indecisive M60 made a couple of calls to me after our chance meeting and she mentioned about going to the Career and Education Fair 2009 at Suntec City on last Friday to see if she could find some direction for her life there. Being the only friend who was available on Friday to accompany her, I said yes and off we went to Suntec on that day.
The Career and Education Fair 2009 was not that crowded on a Friday morning at 11am because most of the more enthusiastic and eager 120-000 strong crowd came in on Thursday itself. The Indecisive M60 and I began touring the place and she went on speaking to the various exhibitors and recruitment executives of a number of booths there. While she was busying herself, I was observing the rest of the crowd doing their work - Economy seems to be worser than what the news reported because I could see the tinge of desperation in many of their eyes - hellbent on getting jobs, sitting anywhere on the floor to fill in whatever forms they could lay their hands on and listening extremely intently to the various speakers there giving mini-speeches about their recruitment drives' expectations.
Two hours later, we were driven out of the Fair by our hunger pangs and we settled at New York New York for lunch. As she was jobless for the past three months, lunch was on me and the Indecisive M60 was so happy that she ordered her favourite foods there - some salmon tuna sandwich, orange crepes dessert and green tea while I had the recommended cranberry turkey sandwich and some blueberry float drink. A nice relaxing lunch later, we roamed Orchard Road in the afternoon where she related how she had spent miserable months in her house with nothing to do and how lonely she felt after graduating from school as so many of her friends parted ways due to the diverging responsibilities of life.
I advised her the following: Do what we humanly can and leave the rest of life to work things out themselves because the more we try to grapple with life, the more struggled we are and thus we will never be as happy as we wanted ourselves to be. The indecisive M60 finally made her decision at 4.30pm at a Long John Silver's restaurant where we stopped for a drink (her treat this time because I wanted her to still remember the pride to pay for oneself and the joy to pay for others - and gladly she understood my purpose). We parted ways at 6pm on Friday and I wished her all the best in her new direction in life.
Ta-da! The title board outside Career and Education Fair 2009 at Suntec City. The sun just came up inside the exhibition hall.
The Marina Bay Sands Resort recruitment booth was packed with people trying to fill in forms to go for interesting jobs like croupiers, theme park managers and event management executives. I took zero photos of people because I thought it was not the right place to have people's faces in such places - most of them seemed with their belts tightened already.
The Blueberry Bling Bling Drink at New York New York - I was jokingly teasing the waiter "How come it's blackish and not bluish in colour?" And the waiter was smiling away as he left without answering.
This is the Cranberry Turkey sandwich with Foccacia bread which I ordered. Pardoned the blurred shot because I was really hungry by then so I could not wait to get started. Believe it - it's absolutely delicious but I did not manage to finish both halves (sobs) because the Indecisive M60 grabbed one half of it and shoved one half of her Salmon Tuna Sandwich on my plate instead. Boohoohoo...Mall Exploration at Kallang Leisure Park:
Yesterday was a study appointment with The Busy Bee because she had wanted to study for some finance course but could never bring herself to do so given the kind of distractions she always surrounded herself with - sleep, tv, food, movies. Hahaha. And as I was one of those few friends she had who could sit still for hours on end to study (well, I had my game design to think about at least) so we went to try and study at Kalland Leisure Park because there were Coffee Bean and Starbucks Coffee outlets there.
We met at Kallang Indoor Stadium at around 12.30 pm and lunch was the first item on the agenda. Having a good, non-foodcourt meal was important to both of us because we made the effort to travel all the way to the fairly-deserted Kalland sports area to study, we chosed Mushroom Pot to have our meal. We ordered a Deluxe Set Meal for Two which had quite a spread of food (I did not take photos of the food because I wanted to have a day off from photographing my outings) - there was two small bowls of rice, two bowls of herbal-tasting mushroom soup, a plate of beansprouts fried with mushrooms, a plate of deep-fried sotong with wasabi sauce dip, a plate of chilli fried chicken pieces, a plate of beancurd steamed with mushrooms and we topped those off with tea and orange juice. It was one good meal over a quiet restaurant and when we had our fill, we hopped over to Kallang Leisure Park which was just across the road.
It was my first time there because it was not one of my favourite mall haunts but I liked the place - medium-sized with spacious interiors and there were actually very interesting niche sports competitions being held there - a remote-controlled auto race and an figure-skating competition at the ice-ring. The Busy Bee gave me a quick tour of the place and being the movie fanatic she always is, she tempted ourselves enough to buy movie tickets for Marley and Me at this independent movie theatre called Flimgarde and we went off to Starbucks Coffee to study before the movie began in an hour's time.
One hour at Starbucks Coffee brought some solace from walking and while The Busy Bee was reading and writing notes to prepare for her examinations for her finance course, I was browsing through my magazines, reading the theory of evolution as well as crusader maps because I was still trying to find some realistic settings for my medieval game design. I finally settled on a choice of five cities and the time was up for the movie.
The movie was very simple and touching because it was so realistically portrayed without any deliberate action or CGI - about the highs and lows of life and how a dog managed to interwine its life with chaos, mischief and loyalty until the final days of its live. The ending was less than satisfactory because it did not show that much about what happened to the family after the death of the dog but I loved the parts where the family had to struggle with their ideal lives, made incredible sacrifices and got all frayed up when the dog, Marley, started all its havoc in the house and out of the house again.
The movie ended around 5pm and we went off to the Cold Storage Supermarket, trying to complete ingredients for a cake the Busy Bee was trying to make and after a hour of running around the shopping aisles, we left Kallang Leisure Park with two plastic bags of food and ingredients. The Saturday outing ended at 7pm when I helped the Busy Bee lugg the stuff back near her place because she was already exhausted and still nursing an injuried hand.
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