Sunday, February 24, 2008

choices on a weekend in Changzhou

Back in Changzhou again, almost 1 year since I first came to this town-city. With the crazy barrage of meetings over the past week, as well as the work piled up due to the "army vacation" and the chinese new year leaves, I am more stressed than ever.

Having arrived on Friday night, I knew that I had at least a day of "free" time, where I could rest and recover, and catch up on work. In such a situation, what would you choose as the activity to relax?
(A) Sleep
(B) Go to town and shop around a bit
(C) Go to the gym or the pool
(D) Go online and watch online shows and listen to music
Guess which I did not do.

Had my good friend call me last night, to catch up a little, and talked about her trip back to Singapore (and hope I can catch her by returning home earlier than planned), her upcoming wedding, etc. She revealed that her new and current job is like mine, where she would be flying around in a haphazard schedule. And all she would want to do when she returned home was to do nothing. Just like moi, as she rightly pointed out.

Lotsa work left to do, and my preference was to watch Kyle XY (caught at least 5 episodes this weekend), listen to 达尔文, swim. But what was more disturbing than the tonnes of work was the process of thinking about the Appraisal, Goal Setting and Individual Development elements of my job. "Disturbing"? How do you plan for your distant future in career when you seriously doubt that this would be the source of your happiness?

No comments: