Thank God It's Friday (and I mean it!)

It's half past nine on a Friday morning and I am at home. Every muscle and joint in my body's screaming for some sleep, but my mind decides otherwise (blasted force of habit!). Instead what I do is look out the window, at the kids on their way to school, the buses, the parents on their way to work. In the half dazed lump of tissue that is my brain the thought that I'm lucky as hell to be where I am now flashes and is quickly replaced by another one saying 'there's still a long way to go'. And there is. But today (on leave), right now, I'm just happy to be alive.

The past week's gone by in a massive blur. It seems like only yesterday (sorry folks, HAD to use that one) I rushed over to the Crown Princess to await the first shipment of equipment for the symposium. From that point onwards, it's been rushing from point A to B to H and back again, with last minute plan changes, registering delegates (and ferrying them about), lifting things, putting them back down..you get the picture. Oh, and I was Master of Ceremonies throughout the whole shebang, which meant that the attendees had to endure my faux British accent for all of 3 days.

Heheh.

A lot of knowledge was passed around in those 3 days, and I missed quite a bit of it (scurrying around whispering on a two-way radio does not help an attention span). I WAS able to get close to some of the foreign delegates (thank God) since most of them joined the tour of Putrajaya and KL that I handled, during which I realised an interesting thing: Malaysian conferences rely too much on protocol. The opening ceremony was officiated by the Vice Chancellor of my uni, and as such we had to endure a huge mountain of protocol (who to mention first, next, last etc etc) as well as be careful not to step on any professor's little toe. What I found during the tour was that most of these researchers don't need such a formal atmosphere when they present their findings. They get enough of that in their own universities. And here they are, 5000 (or more) km from their homes, and we stick them with boring formalities and a speech that's more gilding the lily than anything else. I gleaned more knowledge (IMHO) talking to them in the bus, over lunch, and while walking than I think I did overseeing their parallel sessions (anyone don't know what one of THOSE is, don't worry). And best of all, I made some new friends.

There's Cristoph, the Swiss who's doing his doctorate in Hawaii. Carl, the big bad American with the PhD who has his own consulting firm and who I had loads of fun discussing comparative religion, knowledge dissemination and general geeky stuff with. Prof. Kargal Gurumurthy from Bangalore who kept me on my toes asking where the materials for building Putrajaya came from and oil prices, among other things..(not to mention he says we're lucky that Malaysians seem to be so rich),the funky guys from Pakistan, Dr Ponrudee from Thailand (her name's pronounced nowhere like how it's spelt).

You get the picture.

At the end of the day, I was sore, my feet were whole pillars of pain, but I felt good, for a number of reasons. For one thing, I received no end of compliments on how I handled the events and tour (hee heee). For another, it was good to see that all that hard work paid off, and I even managed to learn something. And finally, I'm slightly strengthened in my resolve to not stay with the uni. There's a whole wide world out there, and I'm not prepared to let someone else just trample all my hard earned work into dust. Risky, I know..but what's life without risks?

And what a beautiful life it is.