It’s the wee early hours of the first day of 2010 and I’m pretty much spending it alone in this town house, playing Torchlight and chatting with a few folks on IRC. Its quiet, with little to no fanfare here apart from the distant burst of crackers somewhere in the city and the constant hum of my laptop and the cooling stand’s quite swish-swish-swish. It’s tempting to switch off the cooler and place the thing on my lap – heavens know I could use the warmth right about now given the weather outside and the lack of warmth inside. The cold is what gets to me though – not because of how it feels; but because it’s so familiar.
January 2009 also started cold for me as I sat back in our apartment back home in Ras Al Khaimah. The weather there was somewhat colder than the previous year – but thankfully not as wet. I can’t quite remember being alone back then. It probably wasn’t possible in such a cramped apartment filled with four people and fireworks out by the Corniche’. Those were the memories.
Ritual demands that I look back at 2009, to see all the follies, the pitfalls and the mistakes I made and to resolve not to make them again. It also demands that I look back and see what went right, trying to emulate that. I’m tempted to tell it to sod off and go wrap myself in a warm blanket and collapse into bed out of the sheer magnanimity of the task.
But the not-so-lazy half of me realizes that such a thing needs to be done, if only to chronicle the wild ride the past year has been. Thus I find myself curled up with a blanket on the sofa; last of my Klondike bars in hand as I type out what an amazing journey it’s been (at least for me) through 2009.
I can’t really remember much of how the year began; my memories are hazy of the first few days save that it was a holiday back then and that the weather in Ras Al Khaimah was nothing short of terrible and fluctuating. For the less geographically inclined, Ras Al Khaimah is a city a hundred kilometers or so north of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. I had been living there since 2007 and was studying at the George Mason University campus located there for around a year or so until then.
The beginning of the year was surprisingly quiet and busy. Between working as an IT assistant and lots of classes the days just seemed to roll by. As my birthday came and went, mistakes were made and awkward social situations needed to be dealt with – situations that I can safely say were low points in my life; saved from the lowest only because of the lessons learnt from them. Such an incident would only be a blip on the radar though, compared to what would come next.
It first came as rumors sometime around the middle of March – GMU was considering closing down the RAK Campus due to reasons related to the economic crisis. At the time we didn’t consider much of it – it was after all just a rumor; one amongst hundreds circulating within Dubai and RAK as the crisis hit businesses hard. Speculation was rife both in real life and even on the internet. For much of march it remained a rumor. Then the official confirmation came in April. The campus was shutting down. The real reasons I’ll leave out for the sake of confidentiality, but suffice it to GMU was pulling out of the venture in Ras al Khaimah.
There’s not many other news that is more disturbing than the fact that you may have wasted a year and a half of your life – which was very much what this was. It meant that all the money we had invested and poured into this had now gone down the drain. Fortunately, it didn’t quite end up that way. Long story short, we got an opportunity to come to the US Campus cheap instead.
The five months between April and August were in many ways one of the most tense of my lives. April and May flew by quickly to classes and exams – many of which faltered due to the news and poor grades. June, July and the first half of August were nothing short of…tensive. I All I can remember then was trying to write; trying to pass the time in some constructive manner. All that happened was that the time was whiled away playing many of the new video game releases around that time – whatever I could grab my hands on by whatever means necessary, in essence. The prospect of leaving one’s family was nothing new by any means – my experience in the Singapore army had taught me that much at least.
No, it was the prospect of coming to this incredibly strange and fantastical land across the Ocean that we had until then only seen through the TV or the internet – but never experienced it on our own. Amongst my immediate family I was the first one to be crossing that Ocean all the way here. There was apprehension and fear…but actually pinning down that fear is difficult. Was I – or am I still – afraid of whether going there would change me – whom I was, fundamentally? Or was I most afraid that it wouldn’t ? It was – and still is – a deep seated question bearing many complexities and issues that can’t be bothered with in this entry. Suffice it to say, I forced myself to waste away the summer to avoid facing it – much to the dismay of my mother, to whom the task of preparing for such a journey was almost sacrilegious. I can’t blame her for that – mothers are mothers after all, while her good planning ensured some degree of flexibility on arrival.
June and July vaporized into a blur, with August rolling around on time’s handy little conveyor belt. One gut wrenching goodbye later, I was on the plane to the west.
The first step was a brief 5-day stopover at London (which is being chronicled in a separate set of articles) that proved to be very enlightening. I got to visit my aunt and uncle after years, as well as explore a Victorian culture and architecture that until then had only been seen in television or on the internet. It was just after this I got another first experience: with that of airline incompetence. After some electrical failures an unplanned landing pretty much kept us in the Azores for a day or so.
While not an unpleasant experience thanks to the free hotel stay and nothing short of breathtaking beauty of the place, it was still an annoying stay due to it’s own reasons – one that British Airways have yet to reconcile with me. Other lessons were learnt; especially of how useful Skype on the PSP can be if you have an internet connection, as well as how expensive hotels are when it comes to phone calls. Still, it was an interesting experience as I landed with a slightly lighter wallet in the United States around 40 or so hours later than expected and so began another interesting experience. Immigration wasn’t an issue thanks to the Singapore passport (and the fact that we landed at the Dulles IAD).
University life is so…easy in a way. The classes weren’t an issue for me – simply paying attention to and understanding the material works for me most of the time, plus the professors were reasonable about assignments. The next few months flew as things changed both in real life and the internet. I got dug in with a few interesting folks on IRC – you know who you are – while getting involved in a few activities on campus – it’s not much; just an interest group in game design. I came up with a project to embark on for 2009…which unfortunately proved to be a bit too much than we could feasibly do. Still, lessons were learnt; especially when it comes to distractibility and deadlines.
This pretty much brings me to the end of the first day of 2010, where I now find myself still writing out this darn journal entry while distracting myself with even more games and other affairs. It’s saddening in a way, how ADD my mind seems to have become over the past few years; but that’s a topic of different consideration. Wandering back to 2009, basically there’s little more to be said on the matter. It was either spent being busy on campus, in the town house where I currently am or on the bus to somewhere – be it groceries or to my aunt’s.
One major highlight was seeing snow for the first time in my life when the winter storm hit around mid-late December. All I can say was that it was cold – but beautiful at the same time, though. I’ve never really seen snow before and it was a wondrous sight to behold. Although I did learn another valuable lesson: snow compacts into ice, which looks too darn similar to puddles of water and is slippery as hell.
The cold is so different than it was back in the UAE, though. RAK never goes into the single digits – yet here its luck nowadays if it ever goes into double digits. The lack of heat is amongst the things I miss most about the UAE before my mind skips to other things. Things like my family, to easily accessible vegetarian food, to the best damn vegetable Manchurian I used to have at Shalimar’s.
My stomach rumbles in the memory of such good food as I sit here and write this. Just closing my eyes brings forth those sweet, sweet memories of that spicy aroma and the indescribable taste of it. There are few restaurants that I know of that get Indo-Chinese food right; fewer still get it right and as well done as Shalimar did. It makes me a little regretful when I reflect back on my current situation and location. Indian food itself is so hard to find here – Indo-Chinese is even rarer. Hell, just finding decent Vegetarian food is hard.
Well, it could be worse. A lot worse. What matters is that 2009 is pretty much over and done with. 2010 is here – a promising new decade, far different than the one that preceded. Who knows where I’ll end up from here? Maybe the bottom of the Earth in Antarctica or at the bottom of a grave – only time will really tell. All I know is that it brings new opportunity – especially to write and to not waste it away like I did so much of 2009.
I can hear it knocking too; not just on the door by deep in my bones. There’s so much to write about, to do and finish – and yet so little time. The distractions are frustrating in a way – but at the end of the day they are just an obstacle; something that needs to be overcome by any means necessary – lest it keep me behind just as it did for the last decade.
Either way, here’s to hoping 2010′s more productive than 2009.
Regards,
Alternate22
Tags: 2009, 2010, end of year thoughts, journal, record, Summary
