If there's one thing I can take from getting into what is essentially a 9 to 5 routine without much room to vary your days, it's that you gotta take whatever form of non-work stuff you can sneak into those 9 to 5 hours (and the customary 1-2hrs daily commuting time before and after).

So here is my daily cup of tea: podcast. Tried to get into it the other day when every song in my music library didn't seem to be clicking, and reaaaaallly got into it! Seriously, I wondered how the hell did I just get into podcast stuff right now and never really cared about it before. But as the cheesy idiom so cheesily put it: better late than never, huh?

I am really still getting a hang of this stuff so I'm still pretty sure I've only just discovered the tip of the mountain. But so far, those are my subscriptions, my daily dose of audio comedy / news / design bits / linguistic bits. Looooove having those thrown in my day every now and then!

For the past couple of weeks, moving about the city on mornings and evenings has been interesting. You try to muscle your way past people, who are trying to muscle their way past other people. It's like there's a rope dangling around their neck, there's a ticking clock numbering their time left; they're moving as if their lives depend on it. And when their lives depend on something, humans are inherently a predator - a mightily feral one, too.

Each time I find myself in the crowd, pushed and bumped to no ends, I am wondering to myself: just what are we contesting anyway? Just what are we turning feral for? A space earned? Some time saved? The sense that you manage to escape just in time before the rope clings around your neck tighter it starts to suffocate you?

We know it is there, the invisible rope dangling around our neck. But sometimes I get the sense that the more we run to escape it, the tighter it held onto you. Some of us thought it is a race against time, maybe it is not; after all, when we're at our own pace, it is just a rope dangling around our neck. Perhaps, we only feel the stranglehold because we're stretching it to its limits. Perhaps, it is a threat us only because we let it be.