I’ve been having a cough. It’s one of those super annoying ones where you lie down and are ready to go to sleep, and then your throat relaxes and you proceed to cough your brains out.

So I went to see the doctor, and picked up this set of antibiotics that I’m supposed to take before meals.

But wait! Not just before meals — that would be too simple — half an hour before meals.

This, naturally, drives me insane:

• I mean, what am I supposed to do if I forget, and eat first? Do I stop eating, take the medicine, and wait half an hour looking sadly at my food going cold?
• What if I don’t wait a full half hour before having my meal — does that render the medicine ineffective?
• Or, if I tried to plan it out, what if I take the medicine, expecting to have food in half an hour, but then I fail to procure anything edible? Can I snack on something, does that even count? But it’s not a meal, and the instructions say “before meals”!
• Also, when does the half hour countdown start? From when the pill enters my throat? But I have to take two — do I start timing from the first or second? Should I take both at the same time? What if they don’t reach my stomach at the sae time? Wait, that’s right, what if the timing’s not from the point of swallowing, and that’s just an estimate for when it reaches the stomach? WHAT IF MY OESOPHAGUS IS ABNORMALLY LONG??!

My life is now an endless tormented guessing game. Thanks a lot, doctor.

Had my last staff dinner last week, and didn’t win anything in the lucky draw for the third year. Hung out with colleagues afterward and the conversation steered itself in the exact same direction as after last year’s staff dinner. Full marks for consistency, everyone.

Met the new colleagues for the first time today. This might be interesting.

Going home more often to try and figure out how best to fit the giant TV (that I bought last year for the apartment) into the spare room when I move back home. I’ll need a sofa, a new table and maybe some way to soundproof the room so I can still hold Rock Band / Guitar Hero parties. And a new OS; the Ubuntu box is getting a bit long in the tooth (haven’t upgraded since 6.10). And a new TV. And a Mac Pro. Er, wait.

Done with having to go back to work on a regular basis, but need to resist the urge to play Fallout 3 until my eyes bleed. I still wonder if I should have planned a trip somewhere for the break.

Saw the ex for the first time in very, very long, and found out from a good friend (thank you) that she’s moved on and found someone new. Hey, it’s been nearly two years; I’m just the one who’s slow and useless like that. Felt sorry for myself for a day or so, but ran 30km in a week to not feel like crap (old post), and hey, it worked! Ignore the time dilation I did right there.

Been slowly seeing my boarders vacate their rooms to go home for the holidays. I doubt I’ll ever see most of them again, and I keep wondering if I ever got the pastoral care role of this job right. Last piece of advice I offered to them on my “Level 12 Blog” (er, post-its on the pantry wall) was to please, please use this break to do something they’d been putting off all year. Upon further thought, I think that was for me. 

I’m okay now.

I received my Fifth-Year Reunion book in the mail this week. I’d been getting (and ignoring) reminders over the last few months to fill up a personal-updates page online, which would then be printed and sent to everyone in the class of 2003.

The first thing I did when I got the book — after marvelling at how heavy it was, then attempting to kill a cockroach with it — was to check if my ex had submitted a page. She had, and after reading it (semi-disinterestedly, I’d like to claim), I turned to where my update page should be, as if to check if I’d submitted something and completely forgot about it.

(I hadn’t.)

Many of my best friends from college hadn’t submitted their pages, either. Maybe it’s because we know we don’t need to catch up in a book sent out five years after graduation; more likely, it’s because we’re all ridiculously lazy, and that’s why we got along so well in the first place. Anyway, I’ve been very lucky in having been able to see them pretty often, thanks to the work trips (three in just over a year!), and many have come to Singapore.

In hindsight, it would have been terribly amusing to send in a whole series of Chicken comics to put on my page. Maybe someday I’ll write a blog post answering the questions posed (“favourite Stanford memory”, “life after Stanford”, “current life motto”). Or maybe I’ll be too ridiculously lazy to do it.

I wonder why other people run. To get fit? To challenge themselves? To compete?

I run to not feel like crap. See this New York Times article:

Yes, Running Can Make You High

Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect.

I only started running at the beginning of last year. A few things happened, really — a friend recommended I do so to feel better about the breakup, and it sounded reasonable (I had no idea the endorphin thing wasn’t proven at the time); I realised I was, strangely enough, feeling very positive after each NS remedial training session; and, most of all, Akmal encouraged me to join him in volunteering with the Special Olympics running club, and that’s been making me run regularly ever since.

While I was busy feeling sorry for myself at the beginning of the year, I did resolve to not let the year go to waste. Thank goodness, then, for the amazing volunteers and athletes with Special Olympics. While I risk sounding like a terrible cliché, running with them really made me feel alive, and finishing the half-marathon in December with my athlete and friend Shaun truly made the entire year worthwhile. I don’t think any of the other volunteers knew why I started going (except maybe Akmal), but it still means a lot to me that they took me on — even when I was initially unable to keep up with their training — and let me have a chance to be part of what they do.

One comment from the article above:

Nothing quite compares to how I feel when I finish a run: everything becomes possible, I feel great exuberance and joy, and completely and totally energized. If that’s a “runner’s high” then I’m in, for life.

Yeah, that’s about right.

This year’s been awfully busy so far, so I’ve been running a lot less. My mood’s been suffering as a result, and even though that could also be attributed to any number of things (new responsibilities at work, living by myself, living at work), running has so far still succeeded in giving me that rare feel-good moment.

I hope the rain eases up soon. I need to go for a run.

(Aside: The Nike+ kit Hansen sent over (before it was available in Singapore) helped a lot, too. Having something track my distances every run, every week and every month (even if it was mildly inaccurate) did push me to run more. Seeing numbers stack up on the Nike+ website makes me unnecessarily happy — it’s like a RPG of some kind, and all they need to do now to complete the experience is to level us up after a certain numbers of miles. And add weapons and armour.)