But, when all’s said and done, one does need to be open to the Universe sending crap your way when it does. Because this is life after all.

Right now, though, despite a particularly bad week of panic attacks, I’ve got terrific news.

Team Gone Cyclin, a Singaporean team of mountain bikers will be racing the Tour de Timor in September. And they’ve invited yours truly to shoot for them while they’re in action.

They will be raising money for Timor Aid and the photos will go to a fundraising exhibition. I don’t need to tell you how excited I am at this opportunity. Despite tripling my currrently bad anxiety levels, I’m utterly thrilled with this chance to shoot a terrific mountain bike race and visit an awesome new place.

I’m blogging this on my Blackberry right now, I’ll put up links to everything when I get home.

I’m no longer capable of a coherent train of thought.

Everything hurts and I’ve got a tension headache and neckache that gets worse with every passing minute.

My room is an utter mess.

I may think I’m so over it but I still hate the feeling of talking to someone who isn’t listening even if it isn’t deliberate on their part or their fault at all. That is why I refuse to initiate contact, affection or anything at all.

I think I need to stop considering it a bad thing if I can’t always be happy sunshine about everything and anything that goes on in my life, even the shit.

I’ve also signed up for my first half Ironman today. More on that when I have the energy to freak out.

Also? Complaining that we’re too sensitive and you can’t even have a good rant without getting into trouble? Why not look at what you wrote in your FIRST note? When you told us that if we want the right to ride on the road, we should move to the west because we have no rights here. Let me hand your words back to you. You may think we don’t have the right to ride on the roads here. But guess what? You don’t really get to exercise the right to free speech that contains threatening and inflammatory content in here either. Don’t like it? MOVE WEST.

And for the record, what the hell are schools and parents teaching these days? Its not done to fantasize about killing people you deem as inferior or annoying to you. Its an indication that something is very wrong with you and the police and ISA need to start taking you very seriously and watching you very closely in case you really turn out to a nutter who has mass murder on his mind. Or worse, you start influencing young minds towards this brand of mass murdering nuttiness.

If it could have a monologue, it’d go like this:

“Oh hai, I’m a fever, mmm, actually, wait, I don’t think I AM a fever, I’m not sure what I am, maybe I am one after all, ooooh, maybe not, weeeeeell, then again, I am an elevated temperature which might technically qualify as a fever, no? Oh but I’m not beyond 37 degrees! So maybe I’m not one after all! But Ooooh, loooook, I CAN MAKE YOU SO MISERABLE!!!!”

F**k off, non-fever.

When my alarm rang at 6.30 this morning, my ears were itching like mad. Perfect, because the next place whatever it is will spread to is my sinuses. And in a few days’ time, my throat, ears and sinuses will be itching and burning like mad. Which will explain the crankiness. My sinuses are starting to feel a bit heavy and I’m constantly doing that “Am I running a fever? Am I RUNNING A FEVER??!” thing. And no, I’m not running a fever. Days like these, I curse that we don’t have shelves and shelves of cold/flu/allergy remedies like they do in the US. I could use some Tylenol Cold right now, that stuff burns its way down my throat like acid and even if it’s not a cold I’m having, the burning helps relieve the itchiness and stuffiness for a few seconds.

To make things even more fun, after washing up and putting my contact lenses in, I walked the back of my head into the sharp corner of my bathroom wall. Guess I should be thankful its the back of my head where no one can see the bruises, not on my forehead like I did with the bathroom door the last time. Maybe shaving my head again isn’t such a good idea, there’ll be nothing to hide the bruises when I keep getting into stupid accidents like these.

Anyway, once I find Amelie’s cable tomorrow morning, I’ll upload the post about what this little kettle saw and heard at the Skype booth at CommunicAsia. Also, will do a race write up of the mountain bike marathon. OH and catch up on Project 52. There you go.

Thankfully he had to drop his fare off a little away from me, so I recovered enough to chase him down and ask “what the ****?” And he started apologizing in the way that people usually do when they just want you to bugger off and get on with things.

I’m not proud that I lost my temper. I don’t think there’s any reason to lose my temper even when someone has nearly maimed me. But it makes me a little scared. Its only a week before the race, I’ve been training 5 months for it and have made a lot of progress physically. In a few seconds, someone very nearly wiped all that out because he was sleepy or distracted or something. There’s no excuse, there simply isn’t an excuse to put another human being at this kind of a risk. ‘Sorry’, however sincerely said, is not going to cut it. What’s ‘sorry’ going to mean to someone when you’ve taken away their ability to walk, be independent or taken away their life? I don’t care if there are drivers who think its ok to run cyclists on the road down because apparently, we don’t pay road tax so we don’t belong on the road. We’re human beings too, its a sad reflection on our society if people think a human life is worth less simply because we aren’t paying a certain tax. It shows us how far Singapore has degraded despite all the efforts to make us a better, more gracious society. From what I’m seeing, all these efforts have failed, not just because people are running other people down on roads, but look at the way we exploit other people, animals and the shitty way we treat others. Its not right, its utterly disgusting, even animals behave better than half the people in this country do at times. How wrong is that?

There’s nothing much fun going on, I have a major case of the wanderlust again and to make it even worse, I’m canceling my plans to go on the Thailand-Singapore ride in July because of certain factors like school, work and finances. Every morning I wake up fighting the urge to get on Electra with a few things and just go ride up north without saying a word to anyone. Its time to get my life sorted out so I can start planning on cycling the Santiago de Compostella pilgrimage next year…

Anyway, a few things are moving forward in my life. I might be getting back into the regular workforce soon. Nothing’s confirmed and I don’t want to jinx anything but I’m looking forward to it. But I also know I need to get this problem with tiredness and my blood pressure under control as well as certain tics that make working life a little difficult for me. And I’m really sure that this time round, I’m not letting my work life overshadow my life as I did the last time. Being knocked off the bike metaphorically because of work has done me no favors, made me completely miserable, lose a lot of fitness I took a long time to build and in the end, got me so fed up with the single track my life was taking, I decided to drop out of the full time workforce. Its not a matter of sucking it up and learning to accept reality. The reality is, if your life is so one tracked that it revolves around working, resting from being exhausted from work, dreaming about your work and obsessing about your work, its not going to do you any favors. So this time round, I’m sticking to my guns, when its time to train, its time to train, the world isn’t going to explode because I failed to pull an all-nighter at my laptop stressing endlessly over something. Someone should teach kids this in college, its amazing how easily we lose perspective and our love for fun when we leave.

Anyway, its been a good week and weekend. I desperately needed the extra mornings to sleep in and just consider the path forward and really rest. Its a bit scary when your body has been pushed to the point where every inhalation of cold air causes your lungs to rattle and your blood pressure is stupid low. The extra sleep did me a lot of good, I wish I had more but I’m also looking forward to heading back into my regular life again. If the tiredness and blood pressure problems continue, I might decide to take a full week off everything, work, school and volunteering included and just sleep and try to recover.

For now, can someone PLEASE tell me where I can find decent tasting ginger candy in Singapore? I really am desperate…