It has been a rather tiring Easter weekend over in Bangkok but pretty enjoyable nonetheless.

Lots of things to see and do but after a while it got a little tiring and everything seemed the same to me. Probably the novelty had worn off with the fact that it was my second trip there in less than a year.

Funny feeling going back to work on Tuesday after the trip.

Still stuck in the holiday mood.

Pretty normal, I suppose.

Had to take the MRT home back that day and as I stepped onto the platform at the station, I was overcome by a bizarre feeling, a memory of an incident which took place last Friday and whereby I was a part of it.

Of someone being run over by the MRT while supposedly trying to retrieve his shoe.

By a stroke of timing, I happened to be in that train, on my way to the airport to catch my flight to Bangkok.

Remembered looks of horror on the faces of people on the platform.

Remembered people, eyes closed, deep in prayer.

And most of all, remembered seeing the poor man's body, his fiancee over him, cradling his bloodied head.

All these images.

Stuck in my head.

I am still pretty shaken by what has happened.

Guess it will take a while for me to be back to normal again.

Tremors...

An earthquake struck quite close to my heart the other day.

Literally.

A place where I have been staying for a couple of years before experienced a major tremor which caught me by surprise.

Or rather a rude shock.

Emailed my friends who were still staying there.

Asked about their condition and whether they were alright. And thank goodness all of them replied, saying they were okay.

I guess I was lucky that an earthquake of this scale did not happen while I was there. And that my friends were even more fortunate that nothing untoward happened to them while it struck.

Thank God.

It's a strange feeling I am going through now.

Though it is something that I have experienced many times in the past, I feel weird going through this now.

I feel I am not lonely.

But yet I still feel a certain sense of being detached, of being all alone that it is causing me a certain amount of anguish.

I may appear happy, I may laugh heartily at the jokes you crack, I may even give you words of encouragement to never give up but deep down I feel like a lost soul sometimes.

I just wish for someone to be there for me.

To laugh with me, to cry with me, to spur each other on and to share whatever we want with each other.

So where are you?

Do you even exist in the first place-?

It's midweek time.

Time for a reflection of how the week started off and how best to spend the rest of it in a fruitful way.

I had a talk with my boss just yesterday about the coming months ahead.

About starting out.

About making mistakes.

And not repeating them.

And about having passion for what you do, about it being the motivator, that elixir which drives you and spurs you on despite being fraught with challenges that may dent your ego and make you feel like an insignificant entity.

I have to admire my boss for the passion he has.

And it really shows in his work and in the way he talks to us.

A great pity that he is leaving the force soon.

Inbox: 848

That was the amount of unread email messages I had the moment I logged into my work account this afternoon.

A result of being away for close to half a year on course.

Didn't matter that most of them were junk, it still took me a considerable amount of time trying to clear them.

You may have wondered why I didn't suspend my account temporarily while being away.

Fact was, I was still very new to the organisation prior to going for training and thought I could still assess the account at my training locations.

How wrong I was.

After a while, it dawned on me that it was impossible to check my mail and since being new, not many important mails would be shot at me during my training period so I left it as it was, deciding to brace myself for the onslaught of messages that would come my way once I was back.

Learnt the hard way to always suspend your account and send a reminder to all if you will be away for an extended period.

Welcome back, Melvin.

Somebody posed this question to me just the other day:

"So, which is worse? Meeting the right person at the wrong time, or meeting the wrong person at the right time?"

That question kind of caught me a little off-guard. It was something I didn't really expect to be coming from the person at such a setting.

After some deep thought, I thought of the former as a worse scenario.

Timing does really play a very crucial role in relationships. Some of us may say compatibility, and that includes common values, physical attributes and background etc is paramount to a good and lasting relationship but has anyone of us thought of this simple factor of timing?

About meeting the person at the right time when it kind of over-rides all other seemingly important factors?

Of course, meeting the wrong person at the right time can sound equally worse.

Many failed relationships, and even marriages can take their roots in that.

It's a sticky situation that even the most intelligent find difficulty in getting out of if they are caught in it.

It's the start of the weekend again.

Long live the 5-day work week.

No having to get up and leave the house before the sun rises, jostling with the crowd on the train and battling fatigue at work.

It's just nice knowing that you are able to sleep in on weekends and chill out, either with friends or at home with family and vegetate, watching mindless television or surfing the internet.

Or occupying oneself with books.

Going to start reading a book on the history of salsa that I stumbled upon the other day at the esplanade library.

The title looks promising.

Gosh, I miss my salsa buddies.

It's the start of yet another Monday again.

And an apt way to start it off by listening to "Manic Monday" on the way to work this morning.

Thankfully, the song did nothing to dampen my mood despite the lyrics. Its catchy tune perked me up in a way like no other.

How time really flies.

It's going to be 6 months on since I joined the force and payback time's approaching. All the learning and training for the past months are going to have to be put to some use.

And it takes considerable effort to know where and how to channel all that knowledge gained to the right places.

With not much room for error to top it all up.

It's going to be a hell of a ride for the next few months. But with its fair share of excitement.

Brace yourself, Melvin.

You will need more than just listening to "Manic Monday" to get by.

Something I saw the other day made me count my blessings to be living in a place like Singapore.

Something quite ordinary, maybe irrelevant. But it made me put things in perspective.

Happened to be on a bus and a party of 4 youths came on board, 3 girls and a guy. It didn't matter if the guy looked and behaved a little on the effeminate side.

What mattered was what 2 of the girls were.

And perhaps what the guy was.

He was just your average Chinese guy while 2 of the girls were Malays decked in tudungs, those head-scarves that was a subject of contention a couple of years back between a Malay-Muslim parent and the authorities of a primary school.

There was a lot of boisterous banter going on between the guy and the 2 girls, with one of the girls even playfully touching and slapping the guy on the arm from time to time whenever the guy made a funny or cheeky comment.

If the setting had been a traditional society, one wonders what others would have done or reacted on seeing something like that. Such behaviour perhaps might have been frowned upon or even condemned in those places.

The situation that day was one whereby no one else even batted an eyelid or cared less.

It made me think about racial tolerance and harmony.

How many of us have actually counted our blessings to be in a society where tolerance of other races or religions, barring exceptions, was the norm and practised ever so widely rather than a one-off occurrence?

How many of us have taken that for granted?

I confess to not having that many friends in other ethnic groups but I certainly try my best to know more about Malays and Indians.

Even about people from other cultures.

We hear of racial riots, hate crimes against certain ethnic groups taking place in other countries and perhaps we do not identify with that but have you ever entertained the prospect of that happening in our country one day?

I certainly hope something like that does not happen.

The price to pay is too high.

I am counting my blessings to be in a tolerant and pluralistic society.

Someone I know is out of sorts today.

Monday blues or otherwise, it seems to be something serious.

He is usually cheery and smiley, and even if he is a little upset over things, still manages to have that smile on his face.

But not today.

No smile.

No laughter.

Just kept to himself.

And when prodded, he just kept pretty quiet, saying it is a bad day without elaborating further.

Got a strong hunch it has something to do with relationship problems. Really serious ones.

My heart goes out to him.

Hope he gets over it soon. We are all waiting for his laughter.