It’s been 11 days since I last blogged, which is a pretty long time considering the frequency which I’ve blogged at in recent weeks. Somehow, I've just lost the impetus to blog. This is partly due to my insipid life here, where hardly anything of note happens, and so there’s really not much material for me to work with. I could go on writing about inane stuff like shaving my armpits (ref: a post quite long ago), but after awhile, there’s only just that much of crap you can spew forth. Even if something out of the ordinary happens – which I must emphasize hardly ever does – it is rarely on the same scale as being hit on by an Egyptian-looking gay African, but more of something like a major computer malfunction in the office, which incidentally occurred last week. I could of course dramatize the whole furore surrounding the computer malfunction, but that’s just plain silly and pretty pointless really, especially since I wasn’t even the least bit excited then.

Anyway, I’ve been reading to prevent my brain from being turned to mush by the stultifying environment I so unfortunately find myself in. In spite of that, I suspect parts of my mental faculty must be malfunctioning already because I’ve actually taken to reading, of all books, 1421 – The Year China Discovered America in between figuring out the notes my dad made on options trading. I must admit it wasn’t the brightest of ideas to alleviate my ennui by perusing a dictionary-thick history book interlaced with liberal doses of geography. I’ll just assume it was my cultural pride that overrode my better judgment. Nevertheless, it is a rather engaging book, if you were to disregard the frequent navigation and cartography lectures it imposes on you. It’s amazing how advanced the Chinese civilization was in the past, and also equally incredible how quickly it managed to sink to such dismal depths in succeeding centuries. China was the classic case of talented employees but poor management; otherwise, I’d probably be typing in Mandarin now. Oh well…at least it’s heartening to know that China has seen the error of its ways in recent decades, so maybe it isn’t too late for the Chinese glory of yore to be revived. Anyway, I’m only 1/3 through with the book after more than one week of sporadic reading, and I don’t think I’ll finish it anytime soon, because it’s been getting a little repetitive in recent chapters. At the risk of sounding dismissive, all I can say is that the book is basically just about a few eunuch admirals charting unknown waters, and we all know what all that leads to: China being the first to discover the New World. A book with its conclusion revealed too early (the title really didn’t help with the suspense) doesn’t exactly make for an interesting read. Ok, it’s not really the author’s fault. He’s not exactly aiming to writing a thriller a la the Da Vinci Code here, which brings me back to the point I made earlier: picking up this book was not the smartest move to stave off boredom.

Maybe I should have tried fiction. Or maybe, I should just be doing something I ought to be doing – learn French. Yes, I promised to learn French from my friend in the last 6 months of my stay in Brunei, so that at least I’ll be imbued with a practical skill after 19 months in exile. But as it stands now, I can only count from 1 to 29 and speak a few common phrases half the world knows just from watching TV. My vocabulary is still pretty much confined to vague memories of my primary school French lessons, and my grammar is pretty much non-existent. Not very good progress, I must say, or even – any – to speak of in the first place.

Then there’s my Mandarin, which after three years of disuse, has pretty much degenerated to an indescribably pathetic smorgasbord of incomplete cheng yus and disjointed sentence structures. I seriously need to retrieve my Mandarin from the outer reaches of oblivion and reclaim my glory days as a Chinese High mugger. Ken! Where are your VJ Chinese notes?

Grrr…so many things to do and so little time, I really need to get rid of this inertia.