We had a perfect 20 hours of sunshine here this weekend in Chicago. The beach was full of excited half naked women strutting their wares to the public; children are playing with the gentle waves of Lake Michigan; bikers were doing mad max style daring cruising at high speed among the walkers on the path of the beach.

That's all what I could tell from the 50 minutes total I spent on the beach.

You would have found me wired from copious amount of black tea at the new and shiny Argo Tea Cafe working furiously with Adam finishing proposals for the next half of the year. I pity my neurons because they got no break. Soon everybody in the cafe will know my first name, the weirdo with cool laptop that hang arounds during late nights and always drinking tea.

Welcome to my summer of 2005 Chicago. There's only one word to describe this. Work.

I read the adventures of nomadlife like a jealous kid stranded in the sunny summer days inside doing homework for summer school. But the atmosphere here is electric, full of possibilities. This is how a young mind and body should be used: dreaming possibilities and realizing them; push; play, before the old age catch up and slows me down. I'll be thirty in three years. I'll probably go in some desolate island in the pacific, marry a native girl and grow fat fishing all day; and just disconnect from all of these craziness.

And I'm proud of my good buddy Jim for getting into Brooklyn Law. I don't have any mental capacity to go back to school again; there are too many ideas in my head keeping me awake at night.

And nothing can make me feel like a kid than my somewhat erratic call back home; mom would ask me when I would settle down; where's the pretty doctor now; (and what happened to that cute Singaporean girl I told her about three years ago) and my response would be the standard "ehm, let me do my own things first". And we would repeat this ritual in almost every single of our phone call, mostly to her benefits. She's worried that I will end up with a Westerner that she had to learn English to communicate with her daugther in law;I never gave her my guarantee on that aspect. But mom is the best. Having grown up literally in the double canopy jungle of East Borneo, she fears nothing and fiercely independent. She gave me courage; Dad gave me common sense. I don't know how she handles having a sole son that she interacts only through phone and photographs for 14 years and counting. A parent's love can go distances. I hope to soon take both mom and dad around the world and show them the places that I've been and tell them the stories I know of these places so they can reclaim some part of the memories of their mostly missing son.

Yesterday was filled with mixed emotions alternating between rage, optimism, impatience and hope.

I found out about the drama currently unfolding in Ghana yesterday afternoon after someone passed me those "help raise money" emails. I received it one day late and it pissed me to no end because someone hadn't thought of using  paypal or other easier money transfer mechanism to lower the barrier of participation. International Money Transfer is so costly that even people that want to help cannot do so. And the information in the emails are inadequate for people to make a proper judgement whether the case is legit.

If you are asking for help, cover all the angles of questions that people might ask.

I grew impatience with the whole thing and called directly to Mexico City to find out what's going on and work with them to setup the financial mechanism and information package; opening up the whole process.

Open up, share the process with everybody, keep people informed and updated, answers questions, lower the barrier of participation, appreciate and acknowledged others' contributions. 

Humbug.

Anyway. Let's seek to it that she's safe. Aiesec doesn't leave Aiesecers behind.

dodyg says:
are you talking about overthrowing a government/
YG says:
not really overthrowing, even though it sounds interesting

Life is still a bitch. There is nothing new to report about except the unrelenting demand and pressure on my time and energy reaches the peak this week. I will either cracked or come out a diamond  :)

Anna said goodbye last weekend, going back to her base city after a long assignment in this city by the lake. I didn't promise her anything and she didn't ask me too. It was bittersweet. She is  deeply committted to become a surgeon, I need to complete what I set out to do. And nobody can get in our way, including each other (what a sad concept)

All good things must pass.

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